Where Alaska, Kongo, and Deutschland fit

Should the Alaska, Kongo, and Deutschland classes count as battlecruisers?

Alaska and Kongo are arguable cases, but Deutschland is better understood as an unusually armed heavy cruiser.

Battlecruiser labels need to be tested against a ship's characteristics rather than accepted from popular shorthand. Alaska and Kongo are plausible cases because their scale and combat role resemble battlecruisers, even though this interpretation normally draws the boundary elsewhere. The Deutschland class falls outside that boundary and is treated instead as a group of unusually armed heavy cruisers. These disputed labels can obscure the design tradeoffs underneath them.