SMS Berlin[a] was the second member of the seven-vessel Bremen class of light cruisers, built for the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) in the early 1900s.

Named for the German capital of Berlin, the ship was armed with a main battery of ten 10.5 cm (4.1 in) guns and had a top speed of 22 knots (41 km/h; 25 mph).

Berlin was decommissioned in March 1929 and kept in reserve until 1935, when she was converted into a barracks ship, a role the vessel filled through World War II.

The first tranche of vessels to fulfill this requirement, the Gazelle class, were designed to serve both as fleet scouts and as station ships in Germany's colonial empire.

Berlin carried up to 860 t (850 long tons) of coal, which gave her a range of 4,270 nautical miles (7,910 km; 4,910 mi) at 12 knots (22 km/h; 14 mph).

[5] Berlin was ordered under the contract name Ersatz Zieten[b] and was laid down at the Kaiserliche Werft (Imperial Shipyard) in Danzig in 1902.

Berlin then escorted Hohenzollern for a cruise into the Baltic Sea that culminated with a visit to the island of Björkö, off the coast of Finland; there, Wilhelm met his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia between 23 and 24 July.

The years 1906 and 1907 consisted of a similar routine of training exercises: unit exercises were held in the North Sea and the Skagerrak early in the year, followed by fleet maneuvers in May and June, summer cruises in July and August, and the annual large-scale fleet maneuvers held every August and September.

In 1910, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff replaced Heinrich as the fleet commander, and he ended the program of Atlantic cruises, instead preferring to focus on training exercises in the North and Baltic Seas.

On 27 June, Berlin's crew received orders to deploy to the coast of west Africa during the Agadir Crisis to replace the gunboat Panther there.

[11] Earlier that year, French troops had occupied Fez, the capital of then-independent Morocco, prompting German fears that France planned to annex the country in violation of the Algeciras Conference of 1906.

While they operated in Agadir, Berlin and Eber made alternating trips to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands to replenish their coal stocks.

Löhlein telegraphed the German command in Berlin to determine what course of action he should take in view of the French provocation, and he was instructed to avoid conflict.

[11] By October, the situation had calmed, and the planned change of command for Berlin was able to take place as scheduled on 3 November, with FK Wilhelm Tägert replacing Löhlein.

On 27 September, she arrived in Kiel where Tägert and part of the crew left the ship to prepare the new cruiser Strassburg to be commissioned on 1 October.

She was recommissioned on 17 August under the command of FK Friedrich von Bülow and conducted a short period of sea trials and individual training from 3 to 17 September.

The ships were temporarily allocated to the Coastal Defense Division of the Baltic Sea and were tasked with patrolling the area off Langeland in the Danish straits from 27 September to 2 October.

During this period, Berlin joined the ships of II Scouting Group to cover a minelaying operation in the area of the Swarte Bank from 17 to 18 April.

[14][16] The ship was detached from IV Scouting Group on 24 October and transferred to the Baltic Sea Naval Forces, being moved to Kiel that day.

[14] In late 1915 and early 1916, the Germans significantly reduced naval forces in the Baltic and Berlin was transferred back to IV Scouting Group.

She left the eastern Baltic on 6 January 1916 in company with the pre-dreadnoughts Braunschweig and Mecklenburg and X Torpedo-boat Flotilla and arrived in Kiel the next day.

In December, Berlin was transferred to II Scouting Group, but her stay there was short-lived, since on 14 January 1917 she was reassigned to coastal patrol duty in the North Sea.

She was disarmed and converted into a tender for the commander of coastal defense forces in the Baltic, serving in that role from 26 April 1918 to the end of the war in November.

She was initially used as a training hulk for boiler room crews; the ship was moved to Kiel on 16 December 1919 for this role, which she filled for the next year and a half.

She was recommissioned on 2 July 1922, under the command of Kapitän zur See (KzS—Captain at Sea) Wilfried von Loewenfeld, and was assigned to the Naval Training Inspectorate.

She traveled into the central Atlantic, visiting Ponta Delgada in the Azores, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, Funchal in Madeira, and Cartagena, Spain.

The ship took part in the annual fleet maneuvers held in August and September that year, during which she hosted Otto Gessler, the Minister of the Reichswehr.

Berlin stopped in Santa Cruz de Tenerife; Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands; Cartagena, Colombia; Veracruz, Mexico; Havana, Cuba; La Guaira, Venezuela; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Ponta Delgada during the voyage.

After returning to the Atlantic, she stopped in Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires, Argentina; Montevideo, Uruguay; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

She and the other vessels of the fleet conducted a long-range cruise to the central Atlantic between April and June 1927, which included visits to Santa Cruz de Tenerife, various ports in the Azores, and cities in Portugal and Spain.