They were the first battleships ordered under the Second Navy Law of 1898, part of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz's fleet expansion program.

Wittelsbach, Wettin, Mecklenburg, and Zähringen served in I Squadron for the duration of their peacetime careers, where they were primarily occupied with training exercises and cruises abroad.

By 1910, with the arrival of the first dreadnought battleships, the Wittelsbach-class ships were removed from front-line service and relegated to training duties or simply laid up in reserve.

By late 1915, the naval command had decided to decommission the five ships owing to a combination of crew shortages for more important vessels and the increased threat of British submarines operating in the Baltic.

Wittelsbach and Schwaben were converted into depot ships for minesweepers in the postwar effort to clear up the minefields that had been laid in the North Sea.

The ships of the Wittelsbach class were the first battleships built under the first Naval Law of 1898 that had been passed through the efforts of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the State Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt (Imperial Navy Office).

[4] The design staff considered a variety of other alterations from the basic Kaiser Friedrich III design, including replacing four of the secondary battery casemate guns with a pair of turret-mounted 21 cm (8.3 in) guns and reducing the scale of armor protection to increase the top speed by 0.75 knots (1.39 km/h; 0.86 mph).

Wittelsbach and her sisters carried a number of smaller vessels, including two picket boats, two launches, one pinnace, two cutters, two yawls, and two dinghies.

[9] The propulsion system was rated at 14,000 metric horsepower (13,808 ihp) and a top speed of 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph), but on trials, the five ships had significantly varied performances.

The primary armament consisted of a battery of four 24 cm (9.4 in) SK L/40 guns in twin-gun turrets,[a] one fore and one aft of the central superstructure.

The sloped section of the deck connected it to the lower edge of the main armored belt, which was 225 mm (8.9 in) in the central citadel where it protected the ships' ammunition magazines and the propulsion system.

Forward and aft of the main battery turrets, the belt was reduced to 100 mm (3.9 in); the bow and stern were not protected with any armor.

[5][8] Directly above the main belt, the 15 cm casemate guns were protected with a strake of 140 mm (5.5 in) thick steel plating.

[8] The ships' armor layout compared favorably to many foreign contemporaries; they were protected similarly to the British Formidable- and London-class battleships, and while their belts were thinner than those of the French République class or the Russian Tsesarevich, they did not suffer from the unarmored (and very vulnerable) hulls above the belt that characterized the French and Russian battleships.

The other ships' peacetime careers generally consisted of the routine fleet, squadron, and individual training throughout each year.

By 1910, the ships began to be withdrawn from front-line service, their place having been taken by the dreadnought battleships of the Nassau and Helgoland classes.

[24][25] Following the outbreak of World War I in July 1914, the five Wittelsbach-class ships were mobilized into IV Battle Squadron, under the command of Vice Admiral Ehrhard Schmidt.

[26] The squadron was based in Kiel,[27] and they conducted several sorties into the Baltic Sea to patrol for Russian warships but they saw no action.

The Wittelsbach class supported the Battle of the Gulf of Riga in August 1915, but did not take an active role in the attack before it broke down in the face of determined Russian resistance.

[29] Further operations took place in September and October, which included IV Squadron covering the laying of defensive minefields in the western Baltic.

By this time, manpower shortages began to affect the German fleet; combined with the increased threat of British submarines operating in the Baltic, the inability to man more important vessels convinced the naval command of the need to remove the Wittelsbachs from service.

[9][30][31] In 1919, Wittelsbach and Schwaben were converted into depot ships for F-type minesweepers,[9] since Germany was required by the Treaty of Versailles to clear the extensive minefields that had been laid in the North Sea during the war.

[33] Royal Air Force bombers sank the ship in Gotenhafen in 1944 during World War II, and the wreck was broken up in 1949–1950.