Jaguar was the sixth and last Type 24 torpedo boat built for the German Navy during the 1920s. The boat made multiple non-intervention patrols during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. During World War II, she played a minor role in the Norwegian Campaign of 1940. Jaguar spent the next several months escorting minelayers as they laid minefields and damaged heavy ships back to Germany before she was transferred to France around September. She started laying minefields herself that month and continued to do so for the rest of the war. After a refit in early 1941, the boat was transferred to the Skaggerak where she was assigned escort duties. Jaguar returned to France in 1942 and was one of the escorts for the capital ships sailing from France to Germany through the English Channel in the Channel Dash. She helped to escort blockade runners, commerce raiders and submarines through the Channel and the Bay of Biscay, as well as Norwegian waters, for the next several years. The boat attacked Allied ships during the Invasion of Normandy in June 1944, but was sunk by British bombers that same month.

The Reichsmarine was the name of the German Navy during the Weimar Republic and first two years of Nazi Germany. It was the naval branch of the Reichswehr, existing from 1919 to 1935. In 1935, it became known as the Kriegsmarine, a branch of the Wehrmacht; a change implemented by Adolf Hitler. Many of the administrative and organizational tenets of the Reichsmarine were then carried over into the organization of the Kriegsmarine.