| abstract | - All eight of the ships were heavily modernized between 1898 and 1904; the reconstruction included lengthening the ships and equipping them with new boilers. All eight ships were mobilized briefly at the start of World War I in August 1914 as the VI Battle Squadron, though by August 1915, they had all been withdrawn from service and employed in secondary roles. All were stricken from the naval register in 1919 after the end of the war and subsequently discarded; three of the ships, Frithjof, Odin, and Ägir were converted into merchant ships and served in this capacity throughout the 1920s. The rest were broken up for scrap by the early 1920s. These coastal defense ships turned out to be a temporary diversion for the German fleet. In 1888, before any of the Siegfrieds or Odins had been laid down, Caprivi was selected to replace Otto von Bismarck, who had been forced out of the position by the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II; Caprivi in turn was replaced by Vice Admiral Alexander von Monts. Monts, a veteran naval officer, opposed Caprivi's policy on coastal defense, and instead proposed building four new Brandenburg-class battleships. These ships replaced what would have been the last two of the coastal defenders for which Caprivi had called. This set Germany on the trend of building large, ocean-going battleships for the next two decades. Indeed, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz characterized the period the Siegfried and Odin classes were built, up to the passage of the First Naval Law in 1898, as the "wasted decade". __TOC__
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