The Ersatz Yorck class was a group of three battlecruisers ordered but not completed for the German Kaiserliche Marine in 1916. The three ships had originally been ordered as additions to the Mackensen class, but developments abroad led to the navy re-designing the ships. The name derived from the fact that the lead ship was intended as a replacement for the armored cruiser Yorck, lost to mines in 1914. All three were armed with 38 cm guns and had a displacement of 34,000 to 38,000 t.
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The Ersatz Yorck class was a group of three battlecruisers ordered but not completed for the German Kaiserliche Marine in 1916. The three ships had originally been ordered as additions to the Mackensen class, but developments abroad led to the navy re-designing the ships. The name derived from the fact that the lead ship was intended as a replacement for the armored cruiser Yorck, lost to mines in 1914. As they were considered replacements for old ships, rather than as new additions, they were ordered under provisional names as \”ersatz \”. All three were armed with 38 cm guns and had a displacement of 34,000 to 38,000 t. This marked a significant increase over the Mackensens, which displaced 31,000 t as designed. This growth was accounted for by the heavier main battery, larger, powerful engines, and additional boilers that provided a speed increase of 1.5 to 2 knots. Some consideration was given to the idea that the new battlecruiser design should represent a merging of the battleship and battleship types. Kaiser Wilhelm II had been pushing for years to simplify the concept so that it could be called a ‘gross-kampf-kampfschiffschiff’ (gross-forschungschiff) instead of ‘gross battleship’ The last three of these new battle Cruisers were ordered to replace Yorck and the two Scharnhorst-class cruisers, the former having been sunk by German mines in November 1914 and the latter pair being sunk at the Battle of the Falkland Islands the following month.
The lead ship, Ersatz Yorck, was the only vessel of the three to have begun construction, though she was over two years from completion by the time work was abandoned. The ship was broken up on the slipway and machinery that had been assembled for Ersats Gneisenau was installed in the first four Type U 151 U-boats. The design staff began work on the ScharnHorst- class battleships in the 1930s, they used the plans for ERSatz Yorcks as a starting point. The fourth and final Naval Law, passed in 1912, governed the building program of the German Navy during World War I. The Reichsmarineamt decided that to meet the requirements set in the 1912 law, the Navy should construct one battleship every year between 1913 and 1917, with an additional unit of both types in 1913 and 1916. As a result, it made the decision to use the prescribed construction program to replace the five armored cruisers that had were sunk in thefirst six months of the war with new battleships. The ships were to have been members of the Mackenson class, and initial funding for the ships was allocated on 21 February 1915. The primary change was an increase of the main battery from eight 35-centimeter guns to eight 38-cm weapons. As with the Mackenens, the three ships were never completed due to shifting wartime construction priorities.
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