Wiesbaden was a light cruiser of the class that bore her name, built for the Imperial German Navy at the AG Vulcan shipyard in Stettin. Laid down on November 10, 1913, and launched without ceremony on January 30, 1915 -- wartime austerity having stripped away the usual pageantry -- she was commissioned on August 23, 1915. At 145 meters long and displacing 6,601 tons at full load, she carried eight 15-centimeter guns in single mounts and four torpedo tubes. Her turbines could push her to 27.5 knots. She was designed for scouting, screening, and fast raiding, and her armor reflected that mission: a waterline belt sufficient to deflect splinters and small-caliber fire, but nothing that could withstand the heavy shells of battlecruisers. Named for the city of Wiesbaden, she was assigned to the II Scouting Group.

Wiesbaden's active service lasted barely nine months. After working up in the Baltic, she joined sweeps through the Skagerrak and Kattegat, patrolled the North Sea, and sortied twice to rescue distressed zeppelins. Her most significant pre-Jutland action came during the bombardment of Yarmouth and Lowestoft on April 24-25, 1916, when she helped engage the British Harwich Force -- three light cruisers and eighteen destroyers. The engagement was brief, fought mostly at long range, and ended when German reports of submarines in the area prompted a withdrawal. It was an uneventful prelude to what was coming.

At Jutland, Wiesbaden screened for Hipper's battlecruisers as part of the II Scouting Group. Around 18:30 on May 31, the cruiser group encountered British forces, and in the exchange of fire Rear Admiral Horace Hood's flagship scored a hit on Wiesbaden that exploded in her engine room. The ship went dead in the water. What followed was nightmarish. Immobilized in the no-man's-land between the two battle fleets, Wiesbaden became an inadvertent focal point. German dreadnoughts maneuvered to cover her. British light cruisers, pressing forward for torpedo attacks on the German line, hammered her with their guns as they passed. A British destroyer closed to within 2,000 yards and put a torpedo directly under her conning tower. The ship absorbed the blow and stayed afloat. Even crippled, Wiesbaden's crew launched their own torpedoes, scoring a hit on a British battleship. In the chaos swirling around the stricken cruiser, two British armored cruisers were destroyed.

As evening drew on, the German III Flotilla of torpedo boats made two attempts to reach Wiesbaden and take off her crew. Both were driven back by heavy fire from the British battle line. The torpedo boat crews lost sight of the cruiser in the gathering darkness and could not find her again. Wiesbaden, battered beyond recognition, remained afloat through the night. She sank sometime between 01:45 and 02:45 on June 1. Among the dead was Gorch Fock -- the pen name of Johann Kinau -- a writer celebrated for his fiction and poetry about North Sea fishermen and sailors. Germany later honored him by naming two sailing training ships after him: the original Gorch Fock of the Kriegsmarine and its postwar successor in the German Navy. Wiesbaden's wreck was located in 1983 by German Navy divers, who found the ship resting upside down on the seabed. She was the last German cruiser sunk at Jutland to be found.