Designing a more coherent pocket battleship

What should Germany have built instead of the pocket battleships under Versailles restrictions?

Either accept a conventional 6- or 8-inch cruiser, or make an 11-inch raider more efficient by concentrating its main armament and magazine forward.

A constrained German design needed a clearer choice between a conventional cruiser and an 11-inch-gunned raider. If it retained the larger weapons, concentrating two turrets and their magazine forward could make the hull and protection arrangement more efficient. In the Baltic, where manoeuvre room is limited, the forward firing arrangement would also be less damaging tactically than it might be on the open ocean. Raising speed to about 30 knots would leave only a handful of British ships able to run the raider down, greatly widening its freedom of action. The proposal uses the treaty limit as a design discipline rather than trying to reproduce a balanced capital ship on cruiser displacement.