The Bismarck Class.- After the Anglo-German Naval Agreement was signed, the battleship "F" (later Bismarck) was officially ordered, and the building contract placed on 16 November 1935 with the shipbuilding firm Blohm & Voss, founded by Hermann Blohm and Ernst Voss in 1877. Designed by Dr. Hermann Burkhardt, the battleships "F" and "G" (Bismarck and Tirpitz) were basically improved versions of the battleships "D" and "E" (Scharnhorst and Gneisenau), and featured many of the details of their predecessors. The Bismarck looked like an enlarged Scharnhorst indeed. Officially listed as a 35,000-ton battleship to comply with the London Treaty, Bismarck's real displacement was actually some 7,000 tons higher. According to the 1937 escalator clause this was well within the 45,000-ton limit. Moreover, none of the other naval powers kept themselves inside the 35,000-ton limit either, and all the battleships that came out of the 1936 London Treaty (Vittorio Veneto, Richelieu, King George V, and North Carolina) exceeded this limit...

A lot of information: On-line Archive; Technical Data; History of the Bismarck; The Crew; Further Reading; Scale Models; Photo Gallery; Kriegsmarine, etc.