The ship was then transferred to Norway where she participated in Operation Sportpalast (Sports Palace), an unsuccessful attempt to intercept Convoy QP 8 returning from Russia.

They found the cruiser and her escorting destroyers on 2 May; Edinburgh disabled Hermann Schoemann before she could fire any torpedoes and her captain was forced to scuttle her shortly afterwards.

[2] The division accompanied the heavy cruiser Admiral Graf Spee on her voyage to the Mediterranean in October where they visited Vigo, Tangiers, and Ceuta before returning home.

The ship attempted to lay a minefield off the British coast on the night of 12/13 November, with two of her sisters, but had to turn back after she and Z6 Theodor Riedel suffered machinery breakdowns.

[2] She made another attempt on the night of 18 December to mine the Humber estuary, together with two other destroyers, but the German ships had to abandon the sortie when they could not pinpoint their location.

Gebirgsjäger Regiment) of the 3rd Mountain Division to seize Trondheim together with Admiral Hipper, but her machinery broke down again before the troops were loaded and she was replaced by Friedrich Eckoldt.

In June the flotilla was tasked to escort the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, as well as the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper in Operation Juno, a planned attack on Harstad, Norway, to relieve pressure on the German garrison at Narvik.

[17] Later that afternoon, Vice Admiral (Vizeadmiral) Otto Ciliax, commander of the battleship flotilla, was transferred to the ship after his temporary flagship, the destroyer Z29, was disabled by a premature detonation in one of her guns that sent shrapnel into the machinery spaces.

[18] Shortly afterwards, Hermann Schoemann joined four other destroyers in escorting the heavy cruisers Prinz Eugen and Admiral Scheer to Trondheim.

Heavy weather forced three of the destroyers to return to port before reaching Trondheim and Prinz Eugen was torpedoed and badly damaged by the submarine HMS Trident on 23 February after their separation.

On 6 March, the battleship Tirpitz, escorted by Hermann Schoemann and three other destroyers, sortied from Trondheim to attack the returning Convoy QP 8 and the Russia-bound PQ 12 as part of Operation Sportpalast.

The following morning, Ciliax ordered the destroyers to search independently for Allied ships and they stumbled across the 2,815-gross register ton (GRT) Soviet freighter Ijora, a straggler from QP 8, later that afternoon and sank her.

[13] Together with the destroyers Z24 and Z25, Hermann Schoemann sortied to intercept Convoy QP 14 two days later, but failed to locate any Allied ships in heavy snow and low visibility.

The trio sortied again on 30 April to intercept the westbound Convoy QP 11 and the crippled light cruiser HMS Edinburgh, torpedoed earlier by the German submarine U-456.

Captain (Kapitän zur See) Alfred Schulze-Hinrichs, commander of the flotilla, broke off the battle in the late afternoon and decided to search for the cruiser, his original objective.

The damage was too severe to return to base and, as the crew prepared to abandon ship, Hermann Schoemann was attacked by the British destroyers who hit her at least three more times.