Kriegsmarine Capitals ship usage

[PanzerMan7]

I've been reading about the KM's surface battles lately and I can't help but notice that German capital ships are rarely screened in combat. The Scharnhorst and Gneisanau seemed to roam together, but never with destroyers or light cruiser. When they stumbled upon the HMS Glorious, a destroyer got a torpedo on Scharnhorst. When Bismarck and Prinz Eugen set sail, again no escort. One has to wonder if Bismarck would've still been torpedoed had she been flanked by a pair of destroyers. At the battle of North Cape, Scharnhorst actually detached her escorts to hunt for the convoy despite having very poor visibility herself, and the predicted result of cruisers hitting her from close range happen. Again I gotta wonder what if she kept a pair of destroyers around.

So what gives? Why did the KM often choose to not screen their capitals?

 

[olm]

For missions like Berlin or Rheinübung destroyers didn't have sufficient operating range.

 

[Antediluvian Monster]

They also had a shortage of destroyers in the first place, particularly after losses from the Norwegian campaign.

 

[PanzerMan7]

What about light cruisers? I'd ask why they didn't design purpose built long range escorts, but that was probably part of Plan Z?

 

[Graf Zeppelin]

German destroyers been papertigers and in reality painfully slow.They also been not really able to handle the Atlantik and bad weather made them even slower. The batch of logn range destroyers for plan Z never been ordered.
German light cruisers had rather short legs for Atlantic operations.

 

[mork77]

So what gives? Why did the KM often choose to not screen their capitals?

1. Destroyers: as already said, german destroyers at the time had several flaws. They had very short range in comparison to British or US destroyer classes of the time and had very unreliable machinery that often broke down. Also, The Kriegsmarine only had 10 left after Norway, and was slow to build new ones, since subs took preference. The new classes were not really better and still had the same problems, or new ones, with their guns, for example. By the time they became active, the time of Atlantic raids was over too, the surface Kriegsmarine instead being busy hunting allied convoys in Norway and supporting german troops in russia by operating in the Baltic Sea.
2. light cruisers: Germany had 5 operational light cruisers at the beginning of the war, not counting Emden, which was even considered to be obsolete at the time. 2 of them sank during Norway, leaving 3. They were mostly used for training new crews in the Baltic Sea, and again for supporting the invasion of Russia. after 1942, they also occasionally showed up in Norway. But they also did not have the range to operate in the Atlantic extensively, and, as said, were busy otherwise during Operations Berlin and Rheinübung.