The German navy entered the Second World War without enough warships to cover its own coast, so it conscripted civilian boats. The Vorpostenboote - literally outpost boats - were the result. Fishing trawlers, whalers, and other sturdy steamers were requisitioned, armed with a deck gun or two, painted gray, and sent out to patrol harbor approaches and shipping lanes. V 1101 Preussen joined the 11th Vorpostenflottille under Kapitaenleutnant der Reserve Guenther Reisen, a reservist commander running a reservist boat. From January 1940 she worked the North Sea. The work was less glamorous than the U-boats' but no safer; auxiliary patrol craft were a favorite target for British coastal aircraft, and most of them eventually met one.

On 14 March 1940 Preussen recovered part of a torpedo from the German submarine U-54, which had been missing since 20 February. All 41 men on U-54 were already lost, most likely to a British mine in the North Sea. Three months later, on 5 June 1940, the German cargo ship Kvitsoey - a captured Norwegian vessel - struck a mine off Stavanger and was beached. Preussen was one of five auxiliaries that helped salvage her cargo. These are the small chores of an unglamorous war: pulling pieces of dead submarines out of the water, stripping cargo from broken ships. Reisen's crew did them month after month, in cold weather and bad light, for almost five years.

On 13 August 1944 V 1101 Preussen was working in convoy with the M1943-class minesweeper M 383, hugging the coast off the East Frisian island of Langeoog. The skies were getting bad for German shipping. The Allies controlled the air over the North Sea, and 254 Squadron of the Royal Air Force, flying Bristol Beaufighters armed with 60-pound rocket projectiles, had been making a steady living out of attacking just this kind of target. The Beaufighters came in low. The new rockets were fired in salvos of eight from underwing rails, accurate enough at close range to punch through the hull of a small ship. Both Preussen and her companion minesweeper went down within minutes of each other, just off the Langeoog beach where summer visitors had been swimming a few years earlier.

The wreck of V 1101 Preussen lies on the seabed off Langeoog, broken but identifiable, one of dozens of small Kriegsmarine auxiliaries lost in the last year of the war. Most of these ships had crews of around twenty or thirty men, a mix of conscripted fishermen who had once worked these same waters in peace and naval reservists who had drawn the short straw. Their names rarely appear in the standard histories. The Beaufighter pilots of 254 Squadron, themselves often shot down by flak in the same months, would have known their target only as a dark shape in a viewfinder. Both crews were doing what they had been ordered to do. The North Sea, indifferent, took both.