The seven ships, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, Lübeck, München, Leipzig, and Danzig, were an improvement upon the previous Gazelle class.

Like the Gazelles, they were armed with a main battery of ten 10.5 cm SK L/40 guns and a pair of torpedo tubes.

Bremen and Leipzig were deployed to the American and Asian stations, respectively, while the other five ships remained in German waters with the High Seas Fleet.

They were converted into barracks ships in the mid-1930s, a role they filled for a decade; in 1944, Hamburg was sunk by British bombers and later broken up for scrap, while Berlin was scuttled in deep water after the end of World War II to dispose of a load of chemical weapons.

By this time, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz had become the head of the Reichsmarineamt (RMA—Imperial Naval Office), and he favored a strategy of concentrating the German fleet in home waters, rather than dispersing numerous vessels on foreign stations.

Toward the end of the year, Tirpitz instructed the construction department to study the possibility of fitting one of the new cruisers with turbines, since they promised to provide greater power for the same weight.

Kaiser Wilhelm II approved the decision to equip the fourth member of the new class, Lübeck, with the new engines on 20 January 1903.

[4] The Bremen class marked a change in German cruiser naming conventions; Kaiser Wilhelm II authorized the use of city names for the new ships, three of which were major ports from the old Hanseatic League, along with Danzig, two major cities in Bavaria and Saxony, along with the German capital.

[8] With the exception of Lübeck, the ships' propulsion system consisted of two triple-expansion steam engines, which drove a pair of screw propellers.

Lübeck was instead fitted with a pair of Parsons steam turbines manufactured by Brown, Boveri & Co. that drove four screws.

Sloped armor 50 mm (2 in) thick gave some measure of vertical protection, coupled with the coal bunkers.

Bremen and Leipzig served abroad from 1905 to 1914; the former returned to Germany shortly before the outbreak of World War I, and the latter remained with the East Asia Squadron.

Hamburg, Berlin, Lübeck, and Danzig served in the reconnaissance forces of the High Seas Fleet after they entered service.

[12] Only one ship, München, saw action at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916,[13] where she was hit by five medium-caliber shells and moderately damaged.

[14] Three of the ships, Bremen, Lübeck, and Danzig, saw action against Imperial Russian forces in the Baltic Sea during the war, including during the assault on Libau and the Battle of the Gulf of Riga in 1915 and during Operation Albion in 1917.

The remaining three, Lübeck, München, and Danzig, were surrendered as war prizes to the United Kingdom, which sold them for scrapping in the early 1920s.