At the end of the war, Moltke was interned with the majority of the High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow while the ships' fate was being discussed during peace treaty negotiations.

Goeben was stationed in the Mediterranean at the start of the war; she escaped from pursuing Royal Navy ships to Constantinople.

Strategically, Goeben played a very important role: she helped bring the Ottoman Empire into the war as a member of the Central Powers, and by acting as a fleet in being the ship prevented Anglo-French attempts to force the Bosporus, and similarly stymied a possible advance by the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

As the German naval command considered ideas for the next design for a battlecruiser to follow the preceding vessel Von der Tann, the question of armament came to the fore.

Von der Tann had been armed with 28 cm (11 in) guns, as had the contemporary dreadnought battleships of the Nassau class.

The Construction Office preferred keeping the caliber the same as Von der Tann, but increasing the number of guns from eight to ten.

The General Navy Department held that for the new design to fight in the battle line, 30.5 cm guns were necessary.

[2] With the caliber argument settled, the Construction Department mandated that the new ship have armor protection equal or superior to Von der Tann's and a top speed of at least 24.5 knots (45.4 km/h).

[5] The ship's namesake was Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of Staff of the Prussian Army in the mid 19th century.

[5] The ship was named for August Karl von Goeben, a Prussian general who served during the Franco-Prussian War.

They had a long forecastle deck that ran most of the length of the ship, terminating at the rear superfiring gun turret.

After 1916, the boilers were supplemented with tar-oil sprayers that were used to increase the burn rate of the low quality lignite coal available to Germany.

[8] The ships' power-plants delivered a rated 52,000 metric horsepower (51,289 shp) and a top speed of 25.5 knots (47.2 km/h; 29.3 mph).

On 19 April 1912, Moltke and light cruisers Stettin and Bremen departed Germany for a goodwill visit to the United States, and arrived on 30 May.

Once the ship returned, the commander of I Scouting Group made Moltke his flagship—a role in which she served until Rear Admiral Franz von Hipper transferred his flag to the newer battlecruiser Seydlitz on 23 June 1914.

Moltke was damaged several times during the war: the ship was hit by heavy-caliber gunfire at Jutland, and torpedoed twice by British submarines while on fleet advances.

The ship met her end when she was scuttled by her crew, along with the rest of the High Seas Fleet in 1919 to prevent them from being seized by the Royal Navy.

[15] Following the outbreak of the First Balkan War in October 1912, the German High Command decided to create a Mediterranean Division in an attempt to exert influence in the area.

[16] Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon recognized the imminent outbreak of war, and so immediately sailed to Pola for repair work for Goeben.

While en route, they were pursued by British forces, but Goeben and Breslau managed to evade them and reach Constantinople by 10 August 1914.

[17] By acting as a fleet in being, Goeben effectively blocked a Russian advance into the Bosporus, and defended against a similar incursion of British and French pre-dreadnoughts.

[18] More powerful British and French warships—which could have dealt with Goeben—could not be risked in the heavily mined and U-boat patrolled Turkish waters.

[19] In 1936 she was officially renamed Yavûz and remained the flagship of the Turkish Navy until 1950, although the ship was largely stationary in Izmit from 1948.