Ancient Web: Michael Emmerich Built an Index of German Warships
Michael Emmerich's German Naval History site preserves a detailed online ship index, model references, photographs, and documentation on imperial and World War II German naval vessels.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
Some historical websites begin as a list of things an enthusiast wants to remember. German Naval History grew into an alphabetical map covering hundreds of ships, aircraft, and even projects that never reached the sea.
The site identifies itself as independent of the official German Navy and credits Michael Emmerich. Its footer spans 1997–2023, while visible news items from 2012 record individual updates to commanders, postcards, and small-scale ship models. It uses OpenCms yet keeps a remarkably older-web sense of navigation through huge linked inventories.
A catalogue where unfinished projects count too
The Ship Map is the essential entry point. Under each letter are references to battleships, cruisers, torpedo boats, auxiliaries, U-boats, mine warfare vessels, and naval aircraft.
A visitor can move from Bismarck and Tirpitz to lesser-known escort craft, individual Schnellboot classes, the experimental Flettner Fl 282 helicopter, and planned aircraft carriers or battleships. The latter entries are valuable precisely because a project cancelled on the drawing board is not the same thing as a ship that served.
The Bismarck section links technical data, pictures, history, and related modelling resources. The auxiliary cruiser Orion has a separate listing, avoiding the tendency to make a handful of famous capital ships stand for the entire fleet.
Navigation separates the imperial Hochseeflotte from the World War II Kriegsmarine and includes sections for scale modelling, naval games, and computer raytracing. It is at once a history reference and a record of the practical interests of its maintainer.
The website's ship data should be checked against specialist naval sources when precision matters; this is an independent enthusiast project, not an official maritime register. Wartime military technology is discussed as history, not as an endorsement of the regime that operated it.
Some links and images have naturally aged, and the front page's 2012 headlines are not evidence of present activity. The point is that the archive still makes the researcher's classifications, sources, and decades of accumulated material visible.
Browse the alphabetical ship index and historical sections.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
- Categories: Ancient Web
- Tags: #ancientweb, #navalhistory, #warships, #referencearchives, #models