The Deutschland class was a group of five pre-dreadnought battleships built for the German Kaiserliche Marine, the last vessels of that type to be built in Germany. The class comprised Deutschland, the lead ship, Hannover, Pommern, Schlesien, and Schleswig-Holstein. The ships closely resembled those of the preceding Braunschweig class, but with stronger armor and a rearranged secondary battery. Built between 1903 and 1908, they were completed after the launch of the revolutionary British all-big-gun battleship HMS Dreadnought in 1906. As a result, they were obsolescent before entering service. The ships nevertheless saw extensive service in the High Seas Fleet, Germany's primary naval formation, through the late 1900s and early 1910s, when they were used for training, which included overseas cruises.

Pre-dreadnought battleships were sea-going battleships built from the mid- to late- 1880s to the early 1900s. Their designs were conceived before the appearance of HMS Dreadnought in 1906 and their classification as "pre-dreadnought" is retrospectively applied. In their day, they were simply known as "battleships" or else more rank-specific terms such as "first-class battleship" and so forth. The pre-dreadnought battleships were the pre-eminent warships of their time and replaced the ironclad battleships of the 1870s and 1880s.