Rosa Luxemburg – The Last Raider of the Baltic

An Alternative History Chronicle of the Flottentorpedoboot 1939

When German naval architects abandoned the troubled Torpedoboot 1935 and Torpedoboot 1937 classes, a new vision for small combatants emerged — the Flottentorpedoboot 1939. No longer simple torpedo carriers, these ships evolved into true multirole escorts: fast enough for torpedo attacks, sturdy enough for North Sea storms, and armed well enough to fend off aircraft. In many ways, they were Germany’s first light destroyers, and the last torpedo boats ever built for the Kriegsmarine.

Though hampered by inherited engines from the canceled 1937 boats — costing them one and a half knots — the new class proved to be the best sea-keeping small ships Germany ever produced. Unfortunately, most were delivered far too late, entering service only in 1943 or 1944. They fought mainly in the Baltic Sea, though a handful of early completions saw action off the French coast during the Allied invasion.

Several survived the war. Most ended up in French or Soviet hands and served well into the 1950s.

T33: From Torpedo Boat to Revolutionary Warship

Among them was T33, laid down in 1942 at Schichau in Elbing, launched in September 1943, and commissioned in June 1944. She joined the 5th Torpedo Boat Flotilla and spent her brief wartime career escorting retreating German forces across the Baltic—one of the last Kriegsmarine surface combatants still able to carry out its mission.

Captured intact in May 1945, she was transferred to the Soviet Navy as Primernyy. She served until the mid-1950s, eventually reduced to a floating barracks named PKZ-63 and slated for scrapping in Tallinn.

That is the real history.

The What-If: The Birth of the “Flottenraketenboot”

When East Germany formally established the Volksmarine in March 1956, it needed more than patrol craft and motor torpedo boats. It needed a symbolic counterweight to the rapidly expanding West German Bundesmarine — a ship large enough to project presence, but cheap enough for a young socialist state to operate.

In this alternative history, fate intervened.

Instead of being scrapped, the Soviet Union—seeking to strengthen its new Warsaw Pact ally—transferred the still structurally sound Primernyy to East Germany. Former Kriegsmarine engineers, quietly recruited from the shipyards of Rostock and the docks of Stralsund, restored her high-pressure steam turbines to working order. Refitted, repainted, and armed with Soviet equipment, she was renamed:

T-33 “Rosa Luxemburg”

The first major modernization saw the installation of four 100 mm Soviet naval guns, transforming her from a stripped hulk into a credible gun escort.

But the real transformation came in 1959, when the Volksmarine sought to create a “showpiece” vessel of socialist naval capability. The ship received:

• Four twin SS-N-2 ‘Styx’ anti-ship missile launchers

The once-humble torpedo boat had now become one of the most heavily armed missile combatants in the Baltic, earning its new classification:

Flottenraketenboot (Fleet Missile Boat)

The only one of its kind.

A final modernization followed in 1983, replacing two of the Styx launchers with twin P-80 ‘Sunburn’ missiles — weapons vastly more advanced than anything the ship had been designed to carry.

By the mid-1980s, Rosa Luxemburg carried an astonishing mix of gun and missile weaponry:

• 2 × 76 mm AK-176

• 3–4 × 30 mm AK-630

• 2 × twin SS-N-2 Styx

• 2 × twin SS-N-22 Sunburn

She was old, but she was deadly — a strange fusion of 1940s steel and 1980s Soviet firepower.

End of a Survivor

After German reunification in 1990, the Rosa Luxemburg became an awkward artifact — too heavily modified for preservation, too obsolete for service, and too historically entangled for political display.

Despite efforts by naval historians to save her as the last surviving Flottentorpedoboot, the ship was quietly sold for scrap in the mid-1990s.

Nothing remains today except photographs, missile brackets rusting in museum warehouses, and the whispered memory of a ship that had lived three lives:

• A German torpedo boat of World War II

• A Soviet auxiliary barracks ship

• East Germany’s only fleet missile cruiser

A vessel reborn and repurposed again and again — until history finally caught up with her.

The model is mainly build from a 1/400 scale Heller Flottentorpedoboot kit, plus a Mirage Tarantul I and Tarantul III kits for the Soviet weapons and sensors. On the location of the former torpedo tubes, additional decks for the missle-launchers were added. The masts were build with modern sensors and the ship got a typical color scheme as it was used on Volksmarine ships in the 1980s.

The crew is a 1/350 scale Eduard Kriegsmarine set, but as the size difference is not that big, they can be used on 1:400 scale as well.