The deck of the Graf Spee. The crew is “holystoning” the the deck.

Admiral Graf Spee was a Deutschland-class "Panzerschiff" (armored ship), nicknamed a "pocket battleship" by the British, which served with the Kriegsmarine of Nazi Germany during World War II. The vessel was named after Admiral Maximilian von Spee, commander of the East Asia Squadron who fought the battles of Coronel and the Falkland Islands, where he was killed in action, in World War I. She was laid down at the Reichsmarinewerft shipyard in Wilhelmshaven in October 1932 and completed by January 1936.

Between September and December 1939, the warship sank nine vessels totaling 50,089 gross register tons (GRT), before being confronted by three British cruisers at the Battle of the River Plate on 13 December. Admiral Graf Spee inflicted heavy damage on the British ships, but she too was damaged, and was forced to put into port at Montevideo. Convinced by false reports of superior British naval forces approaching his ship, Hans Langsdorff, the commander of the ship, ordered the vessel to be scuttled. The ship was partially broken up in situ, though part of the ship remains visible above the surface of the water. (WIKI)

Graf Spee in European waters, mid-1939.

Admiral Graf Spee at Spithead for King George VI's coronation review, 1937.

Graf Spee underway in the English Channel in August 1939. After the declaration of war, Graf Spee amassed an impressive record of enemy merchant tonnage sunk before coming to grief in the waters off Montevideo.

Shortly after charges placed to scuttle the pocket battleship in the estuary of the River Plate were detonated, the Graf Spee burns and settles in relatively shallow water off the coast of Uruguay on December 18, 1939.

Admiral Graf Spee after her scuttling, 1939