This painting by the German artist Claus Bergen shows the recently built German ship ‘Admiral Scheer’ engaged in action during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). The vessel, named after Admiral Reinhard Scheer, who had commanded the German High Seas Fleet at the battle of Jutland, was a ‘Deutschland’-class heavy cruiser, usually known as a pocket battleship, launched in 1933 and commissioned the following year. The vessel’s first service was in July 1936 evacuating German civilians from the developing civil war in Spain. She had an ongoing involvement in that conflict, in protecting the delivery of German weapons to the Nationalist forces and reporting on Soviet ships supplying the Republicans. On 31 May 1937, in reprisal for an air attack on her sister ship the ‘Deutschland’, she bombarded the city of Almería in south-east Spain, killing and wounding civilians. Bergen's painting depicts this attack. The ‘Admiral Scheer’ is shown in the centre of the composition in starboard-quarter view, firing in flashes and great clouds of black smoke towards the coastline in the distance. Around her arise spumes of white spray from shells hitting the water. The painting is signed bottom right.

Records at the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) show that the painting was displayed at the Great German Art Exhibition (Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung [GDK]) in Munich in 1937. It was not included in the official catalogue for the exhibition, apparently because it was not hung until after the GDK had opened. The artist himself stated that it was rushed to the exhibition from his studio with the paint still wet. The pressure to get the painting on display may have come direct from the Nazi leadership, who attached great importance to this artwork. Hitler purchased the painting for the Reich Chancellery for 7,500 Reichsmark. It has been suggested that the Nazi leadership regarded the painting as a riposte to Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. Unveiled at the Paris International Exposition in late May 1937, Picasso’s depiction of violence and suffering responded to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy on 26 April 1937. Bergen’s painting, meanwhile, glorified the German naval bombardment of Almería in southern Spain the following month.

The artist was an official war artist during both World Wars and during the First World War, he undertook a commission to work aboard ‘U-53’ when it made its way across the Atlantic to Newport, see BHC1284. The resulting images were then used to illustrate the book ‘U-Boat Stories’. This painting was transferred to the Museum from the Naval War Trophies Committee in the mid-1940s, along with three other works by Bergen, ‘The Commander' (BHC1284), ‘Admiral Hipper’s battle-cruiser: battle of Jutland, 31 May 1916’ (BHC0661) and his ‘Nazi wreath in the North Sea in memory of the battle of Jutland’ (BHC2265). Coincidentally, Scheer, after whom the ship in the Almería painting was named, had been the commander of the German fleet at Jutland, and the action off the Spanish coast took place on the 21st anniversary of Jutland, 31 May. The Nazi wreath floating in the otherwise empty sea in BHC2265 implies a link between past and present German naval power, a continuity enshrined in the name of Admiral Scheer.