SMS Zähringen

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SMS Zähringen was a Wittelsbach-class pre-dreadnought battleship of the German Imperial Navy. Built at Germaniawerft in Kiel, her keel was laid in 1899, she was launched in 1901, and commissioned in 1902. She was named after the former royal House of Zähringen.

Her main battery consisted of four 24 cm guns, with secondary arms of eighteen 15 cm guns and twelve 8.8 cm guns, plus six 45 cm torpedo tubes. The ship carried belt armor up to 225 mm and 250 mm on the main turrets, with a deck of 50 mm. She could reach 18 knots and had a range of about 5,000 nautical miles at 10 knots. The crew numbered around 33 officers and 650 enlisted men.

Zähringen spent much of her career in I Squadron, performing training and goodwill visits. She was decommissioned in 1910, briefly returned to service for training in 1912 (during which she accidentally rammed and sank a torpedo boat, G171), and was recommissioned for World War I. In the war she served in the Baltic and the North Sea but did not see major combat and was withdrawn from front-line work by late 1915 due to crew shortages and submarine threats. In 1917 she became a torpedo-training target ship.

After World War I, the ship was demilitarized under the Treaty of Versailles and stricken in March 1920. She served as a hulk at Wilhelmshaven until 1926, then began a nationwide conversion to a radio-controlled target ship. The 1928 refit replaced her triple-expansion engines with two new vertical triple expansion engines and two oil-fired boilers, and she was redesigned for wireless remote control. The ship’s speed dropped to about 13.5 knots, and she was rebuilt with a more compact superstructure and ballast cork for buoyancy.

Zähringen served as a target vessel for the Reichsmarine and later the Kriegsmarine until 1944. She was hit by bombs in 1944 at Gotenhafen, sank in shallow water, and was briefly refloated before being scuttled in March 1945 to block the port. The wreck was raised and broken up on-site between 1949 and 1950.