She was launched on 27 November and commissioned into the fleet on 1 July The ship was equipped with twelve This included the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June , the largest naval battle of the war. The four Helgoland -class ships were allowed to remain in Germany and were therefore spared the destruction of the fleet in Scapa Flow. She was sunk off Gavres and broken up in situ in β, though some sections of the ship remain.
Many senior officers in the German Kaiserliche Marine Imperial Navy acknowledged that the Nassau -class battleships , armed with 28 cm 11 in guns, were inferior to their British counterparts that carried They sought to incorporate guns of the latter caliber in the next battleship design, though the significant increase in cost from the pre-dreadnought Deutschland -class battleships to the dreadnought Nassau class precluded another major qualitative increase until the budget year, two years after the first Nassau s were ordered.
The design staff experimented with a variety of gun turret arrangements, including superfiring layouts like the American South Carolina class , but they ultimately settled on the same hexagonal arrangement of the Nassau s. The ship was The ship was fitted with a pair of pole masts , which held spotting tops and positions for searchlights. She had a crew of 42 officers and 1, enlisted men.
Steam was provided by fifteen water-tube boilers , which were vented through three closely spaced funnels placed amidships. After , the boilers were modified to spray oil on the coal to increase its burn rate; the ship could carry up to metric tons long tons of fuel oil. For defense against torpedo boats , she carried fourteen 8. Her main armored belt was mm Her main battery gun turrets were protected by the same thickness of KCA on the sides and faces, as well as the barbettes that supported the turrets.
The contract for the ship was awarded to the AG Weser dockyard in Bremen under construction number Following her completion, six pontoon barges were attached to the new battleship to reduce her draft to allow her to be towed down the Weser River to the North Sea. As a result, the cruise only went into the Baltic. On 14 July , the annual summer cruise to Norway began. The following day the fleet began to steam back to Germany, as a result of Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia.
