The Jade class comprised a pair of passenger ships intended to be converted into auxiliary aircraft carriers by Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine during World War II.

After the outbreak of war, the ships were requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine as transports, and in May 1942, plans were drawn up to convert them into aircraft carriers.

Elbe actually began the conversion process in December 1942, but only her passenger fittings were removed by the time work was halted in February 1943.

She was converted into a barracks ship in Gotenhafen and seized by the United Kingdom after the end of the war.

[1] Work on the purpose-built carrier Graf Zeppelin, which had been halted in April 1940, was resumed in March 1942.

Several passenger ships, including Gneisenau, Potsdam, and Europa were selected for conversion, along with the incomplete heavy cruiser Seydlitz.

[1] Gneisenau and Potsdam had been built in the mid-1930s and operated by Norddeutscher Lloyd on its East Asia Service until the outbreak of war, when they were requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine as troopships.

[3] This was due to the resignation of Admiral Erich Raeder, the commander in chief of the Kriegsmarine, the previous month.

[1] Raeder had resigned in protest of Adolf Hitler's order that all surface ships be decommissioned and scrapped in the aftermath of the Battle of the Barents Sea.

Following the German defeat, the ship was seized by the British on 20 June 1946 as a war prize, who commissioned her as a troop transport under the name Empire Fowey.

[3] A third ocean liner of the same class, Scharnhorst, was purchased by the Imperial Japanese Navy and converted into the escort carrier Shin'yō.

Shin'yō was torpedoed and sunk in the East China Sea by a United States Navy submarine.

The ships had steel-built, welded hulls with twelve watertight compartments and a double bottom.