The two ships of the class, Roon and Yorck, closely resembled the earlier Prinz Adalbert-class cruisers upon which they were based.

By the early 1910s, the first German battlecruisers had begun to enter service and Roon was decommissioned in 1911 and placed in reserve; Yorck joined her in 1913.

They were assigned to III Scouting Group, with Roon as its flagship, and tasked with screening for the main body of the German fleet.

Yorck's commander decided that visibility had improved so he ordered his ship to get underway again, but she quickly struck two German mines and sank with heavy loss of life.

Plans to convert her into a seaplane tender late in the war came to nothing owing to Germany's defeat in 1918, and she was stricken from the naval register in 1920 and broken up the following year.

The previous armored cruiser design, the Prinz Adalbert class, provided the basis for the next pair of vessels to be built under the program.

The design for the new ships, completed in 1901, were slight improvements over the Prinz Adalberts, with the primary changes being the addition of two boilers, which necessitated a longer hull and provided an increase by about 2,028 metric horsepower (2,000 ihp).

[1][2] The Roon-class ships shared many of the same layout characteristics as the contemporary German pre-dreadnought battleships, including a smaller main armament but heavier secondary battery than their foreign equivalents.

"[5] Further, they suffered the same fate as many pre-dreadnought type vessels completed in the mid-1900s, having been rendered obsolescent by the advent of all-big-gun warships like the British battlecruiser Invincible, launched in 1907.

[6] Despite their drawbacks, the Roons provided the basis for the follow-on Scharnhorst class, which proved to be far better fighting ships, more than a match for their British counterparts.

The hulls contained twelve watertight compartments and a double bottom that ran for sixty percent of the length of the ship.

[2] Like the preceding Prinz Adalbert-class ships, Roon and Yorck were good sea boats; when the fuel bunkers were full they had a gentle motion.

[9] In 1918, the design staff prepared plans to convert Roon into a seaplane tender based on earlier conversions that included the light cruiser Stuttgart.

By this time, Roon had been disarmed; the proposal involved the installation of a hangar aft of the main superstructure, with equipment to handle four seaplanes.

Both vessels made long-distance cruises in the Atlantic in the late 1900s in company with I Scouting Group or the entire High Seas Fleet.

Both ships were present in the reconnaissance screen for the High Seas Fleet when it sailed to provide distant support to I Scouting Group during the raid on Yarmouth in November; on returning to Wilhelmshaven on the night of 3 November, the ships encountered heavy fog and were forced to anchor in the Schillig roadstead outside the port to avoid running into the defensive minefields laid outside the harbor.

Roon continued to operate with the main fleet, taking part in the raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby in December.

[21] By early 1915, it had become clear to the German naval command that older vessels like Roon were insufficiently armored to take part in an action with the powerful British Grand Fleet,[22] and so III Scouting Group was transferred to the Baltic Sea in April, where it was dissolved and its ships used to constitute the Reconnaissance Forces of the Baltic, with Roon serving as the deputy commander's flagship.

[23][24] Roon participated in the Battle of the Gulf of Riga in August 1915 and bombarded Russian positions at Zerel on the Sworbe Peninsula in company with the armored cruiser Prinz Heinrich.