Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "The Drydock - Episode 030" video.
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The ships would've been divvied up among the allies as part of the war reparations, just like what was done with the ships that either were prevented from scuttling (like SMS Baden) or simply weren't among the ships interned at Scapa Flow.
Britain wanted the entire High Seas Fleet scrapped. They had no interest in incorporating ships with non-standard equipment and insufficient range for Pacific operations into their fleet, and they weren't keen on the diluting their naval dominance in Europe by letting France and Italy instantly add a bunch of modern battleships into their fleets. But that's exactly what France and Italy were keen on doing. As such, it's unlikely that Britain would've been able to secure an agreement from the rest of the Allies that the ships should be scrapped, and there would've been quite a lot of squabbling over who gets what ships.
In particular, everybody would want to get the two Bayern-class battleships, since those are the most modern and powerful ships in the German fleet. In all respects except speed, they were at least as good as the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships, and they were plainly superior to the Revenge-class. With ships like HMS Hood, the Colorado-class, and the Nagato-class not yet in service, they could be argued to be the most powerful ships in the world in 1918. In reality, only Baden survived, and the UK claimed her, using her as a gunnery test target after studying her systems. Beyond that the only surviving German capital ships were the Nassau-class and Helgoland-class battleships, all obsolete first-generation dreadnoughts whose only value was as scrap metal. But if the whole German fleet was available to be distributed, there'd be a lot more difficulty in reaching agreement on what constitutes a "fair" distribution of the ships.
It seems like there's a good chance that France would be able to get one of the Bayern-class. They'd be able to make some very strong arguments that the should get priority ahead of the US. France had been in the war from the very start and suffered the most casualties of all the western Allies, and three of their own battleships had been sunk by the Imperial German Navy (albeit those were pre-dreadnoughts). As such, France could say it's only fair that they get their losses replaced by German ships.
France receiving SMS Bayern would heavily tilt the balance of power in the Mediterranean, and as such Italy would desperately want to receive either SMS Baden. But Britain would obviously have first dibs, so Italy might instead of tried to get their about 3/4 complete sister ship SMS Sachsen. In reality, all of the incomplete capital ships in German shipyards were scrapped after WW1. But if "equal" distribution of the ships to the Allies had become a more pressing concern, that might not have been the case. And Saschen was probably far enough along that she could've been sailed to Italy and completed there.
And then the same arguments would've happened regarding the two surviving Derfflinger-class battlecruisers, the next strongest of the completed German warships. Again, France and Italy would be the main ones competing for the ships. The UK, US, and Japan probably wouldn't care all that much about which particular ships they get, because they'd just be turning around and selling them for scrap or sinking them as targets. Though another interesting factor is that there'd be enough battleships (19 of them, 20 if Sachsen is counted) being passed around that Serbia might be able to claim one of the older Kaiser-class.
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