Scale: 1:100. A German shipbuilder’s model of the highest quality and recently reunited with its original baseboard and information plaque. This model was transferred to the Museum from the Naval War Trophies Committee in the mid-1940s.

The three pocket battleships ‘Deutschland’ (1931) ‘Admiral Scheer’ (1933) and ‘Graf Spee’ (1934) were the result of a highly successful attempt to extract the utmost from the limitation of 10,000 tons for any single warship imposed on Germany at the end of the First World War. The combined use of diesel engines with a welded hull, neither of which had previously been considered practical for such large vessels, drastically reduced their weight, thus allowing a proportionate increase in the armament carried. The result was a trio of ideal commerce raiders, vessels fast enough to outrun any battleship and powerful enough to destroy any cruiser.

‘Admiral Scheer’ herself had a displacement of 10,000 tons, was 609 feet in length, with a speed of 26 knots and a complement of 926. She had six 11-inch and eight 5.9-inch guns, six 4.1-inch and eight 3-pounder anti-aircraft guns and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes. At the end of October 1940, she successfully eluded Allied air and sea patrols and broke out into the Atlantic where, a few days later, she sank the ‘Jervis Bay’ and five of the 37 merchantman in convoy to which the armed merchant cruiser was the sole escort. ‘Admiral Scheer’ then sailed southward and spent some weeks in the Indian Ocean, returning to Germany on 1 April 1941, again avoiding British patrols.

Her tally of 16 merchantmen, totalling 99,000 tons, sunk in five months meant that her voyage was only moderately successful, although knowledge that she was at large disrupted the planning of Allied shipping movements. She remained a potential threat to Arctic convoys but she did not see action at sea again. She capsized and sank following an RAF bombing raid on Kiel on the night of the 9–10 April 1945.