The
Bremen class was a group of seven
light cruisers built for the
Imperial German Navy in the early 1900s. The seven ships,
Bremen,
Hamburg,
Berlin,
Lübeck,
München,
Leipzig, and
Danzig, were an improvement upon the previous
Gazelle class. 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.