![]() By some kind of miracle, she went through all of this and was able to reach Denmark at the end of April. She was then repeatedly attacked by Soviet aircraft and Allied submarines. With the Germans getting pushed back by the Soviets, the ship provided fire support for the retreating troops in 1945 and was moved to Hela with refugees on board. ![]() The ship was judged to be beyond repair but with the Germans needing as much firepower as possible at this point of the war, she was still quickly patched up to keep her afloat in the harbor.Ī reference to that event is actually present on board Prinz Eugen in the form of a funny Easter egg representing the damage Prinz Eugen suffered: On that foggy day, Leipzig collided with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen which nearly cut the ship in half. All was going well… until the 14th of October 1944. She would resume duty in the later part of 1940 and spent the rest of the war on escort duty and providing fire support for the Wehrmacht during Operation Barbarossa. Both ships, while on their way home for repairs were targeted by a squadron of twenty British bombers but they were intercepted by a Luftwaffe fighter group and failed to further damage the sisters.ĭuring repairs, the ship was reclassified as a training cruiser and had three of her boilers removed. Her sistership Nürnberg suffered the same fate. However, in December 1939, she was hit by a torpedo from HMS Salmon and nearly got hit by a second torpedo later on. When World War II started, the ship was assigned to escort duties for Kriegsmarine warships in the Baltic and North Seas. Leipzig’s first real “action” was during the Spanish Civil War as part of non-intervention patrols off Spain. The ship was laid down in April 1928, launched in October 1929, and commissioned in October 1931. Leipzig was the lead ship of a class of light cruisers built by the Reichsmarine.
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