Two familiar labels distort how these ships are judged. The Deutschlands carried 11-inch guns, but they were heavy cruisers whose tonnage and mission should not be compared with true battleships. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, by contrast, were fast battleships rather than battlecruisers, built within the limits of German technology, infrastructure, and maritime industry. Getting the categories right matters because the Scharnhorst class then becomes a credible, if imperfect, baseline for the common-hull experiment.
Notable Point · 2:21-3:11
Why the Deutschlands are cruisers and the Scharnhorsts are battleships
Correcting the pocket-battleship and battlecruiser labels shows what the two German classes could - and could not - reasonably be expected to fight.