Bremen-class cruiser
Name Builder Laid down Launched Commissioned
Bremen AG Weser , Bremen 1902 9 July 1903 19 May 1904
Hamburg AG Vulcan , Stettin 1902 25 July 1903 8 March 1904
Berlin Kaiserliche Werft Danzig 1902 22 September 1903 4 April 1905
Lübeck AG Vulcan , Stettin 1903 26 March 1904 26 April 1906
München AG Weser , Bremen 1903 30 April 1904 10 January 1905
Leipzig AG Weser , Bremen 1904 21 March 1905 20 April 1906
Danzig Kaiserliche Werft Danzig 1904 23 September 1905 1 December 1907
Construction
Berlin after her modernization in 1921–1923 The seven ships of the Bremen class were built between 1902 and 1907 , at various German dockyards , including private firms and government shipyards . [ 8 ]
The Bremen class was a group of seven light cruisers built for the Imperial German Navy in the early 1900s. The seven ships, , , , , , , and , were an improvement upon the previous . They were significantly larger than the earlier class, and were faster and better armored. Like the Gazelles, they were armed with a main battery of ten 10.5 cm SK L/40 guns and a pair of torpedo tubes. The ships of the Bremen class served in a variety of roles, from overseas cruiser to fleet scout to training ship. Bremen and Leipzig were deployed to the American and Asian stations, respectively, while the other five ships remained in German waters with the High Seas Fleet. At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Leipzig was in the Pacific Ocean in the East Asia Squadron; she saw action at the Battle of Coronel in November and was sunk a month later at the Battle of the Falkland Islands. Bremen was sunk by a Russian mine in December 1915, but the other five ships of the class survived the war. Three of the surviving ships, Lübeck, München, and Danzig, were seized by Britain as war prizes after the end of the war and sold for scrapping. The other two ships, Hamburg and Berlin, were used as training cruisers through the 1920s. They were converted into barracks ships in the mid-1930s, a role they filled for a decade; in 1944, Hamburg was sunk by British bombers and later broken up for scrap, while Berlin was scuttled in deep water after the end of World War II to dispose of a load of chemical weapons.