Heavy cruiser Lützow. Her model, built in a scale of 1:100 by Georg Dürr, is display in our section dedicated to the navies of World War II on deck 5 of the museum.
The “Panzerkreuzer A” was the first project to build a modern capital warship in Germany after World War I. She started to be discussed in 1920 and specific plans were made in 1926, presented to the German parliament in 1927 and became a much discussed item in election campaign of 1928. After this lengthy process, the ship named Deutschland was launched from the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel in 1931 and commissioned on 1 April 1933.
She was renamed Lützow on November the 15th 1939 to avoid the morale hit that the possible sinking of a ship named after the country would have meant during World War II. After some attacks on merchant ships in the North Atlantic, Lützow participated in the operation Weserübung, the occupation of Norway. On the way back to Kiel for repairs after the operation, she received a torpedo hit on the stern by the submarine HMS Spearfish at the entrance to the Kattegat and had to be towed to Kiel. The repairs took almost a year. Recommissioned in March 1941, Se was sent to merchant raiding again but was hit by a British torpedo bomber near Egersund and had to return to Kiel. At the end of May 1942 she was transferred to Narvik. Attempting to attack the Allied convoy PQ17, she run aground in heavy fog at Tjeldsund and had to move to Kiel again for repairs. Further operations in Norwegian waters followed, including her participation in the unsuccessful Operation Regenbogen in the Arctic Sea. In February 1944 she was transferred to the Baltic Sea. Here, the she intervened in the defensive battles against the Red Army. On April the 16th 1945, she received a hit with a tall boy bomb from a Lancaster bomber which had her grounded in swallow waters of the Kaiserfahrt – today’s Piast Canal. She stayed in use as a stationary battery until all ammunition had been expended on May the 4th. Her crew scuttled her then. Her further fate had been unclear for a long time, but she appears to have been salvaged by the Soviet Union and destroyed as a target ship in 1947.
Her model, built in a scale of 1:100 by Georg Dürr, is display in our section dedicated to the navies of World War II on deck 5 of the museum.