SMS Lothringen was the last of five pre-dreadnought battleships of the Braunschweig class, built for the German Kaiserliche Marine. The ship was armed with a battery of four 28 cm guns and had a top speed of 18 knots. She spent the first two years of the war primarily serving as a guard ship in the German Bight. After the war, she was retained by the re-formed Reichsmarine and converted into a depot ship for F-type minesweepers from 1919 to 1920.
About SMS Lothringen in brief
SMS Lothringen was the last of five pre-dreadnought battleships of the Braunschweig class, built for the German Kaiserliche Marine. The ship was armed with a battery of four 28 cm guns and had a top speed of 18 knots. She was quickly made obsolete by the launching of the revolutionary HMS Dreadnoughts in 1906. She spent the first two years of the war primarily serving as a guard ship in the German Bight. After the war, she was retained by the re-formed Reichsmarine and converted into a depot ship for F-type minesweepers from 1919 to 1920. She remained inactive for the next decade and was stricken from the naval register in March 1931 and sold to ship breakers later that year. She is named for the then-German province of Loth Ringen. She has been named after the city of Lothsringen in Germany, where she was built in the early 1900s. Loth ringen was also the name of one of Germany’s first submarines, the SS Loths ringen, which was launched in 1903. Loths Ringen is now a museum ship, having been restored to its original name in the 1970s and 1980s. It is now owned by the German National Maritime Museum in Düsseldorf, along with a number of other former German naval vessels, including the battleships Kriegsmarine, Kriegskrieg, and Kriegshafen. It was named after a German province of the same name, where it was built from 1902 to 1904.
It has also been called the “mother ship of the Baltic Sea” and the “Mother Ship of the North Sea” for her role in the Battle of the Danube River in the First World War. It also served as a training ship during the Second World War, and as a minesweeper in the aftermath of World War I. She remains the only German battleship to have been struck from the Naval Register by the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. Her name is still used as a tribute to the LothRingen-class battleships, which were built around the turn of the century and were the first German battleships to be armed with quick-firing, 28-centimeter guns. Her armament consisted of a main battery of 14 SK L40 guns in twin gun turrets, one fore and aft of the central superstructure. Her armor was 110 millimeters thick, with the central portion protected by the heavier portion of the Krupp Krupp belt. Her propulsion machinery was powered by three 3-cylinder vertical triple expansion engines that drove three screws, all of which burned coal. She could steam 5,200 nautical miles at a cruising speed of 10 knots. She was withdrawn from fleet service in February 1916, and thereafter patrolled the Danish straits until she was replaced by the battleship Hannover in September 1917.
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This page is based on the article SMS Lothringen published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
