Marko - check out Warships1.com . Their site often discusses the Bismarck, and the discussion boards tend to split about whether she was the greatest battleship ever built - or whether she was the most over-rated battleship ever built.
Quick precis, if I may be so bold.
In her favour - she was fast, heavily armed, sank the Hood and tied up the Royal Navy for a week as they tried to catch her. She proved very diificult to sink - a great many shell hits, several torpedoes and, possibly, scuttling charges set off by her own crew.
Points against -
(1) She was actually an updated WW1 design ( the SMS Baden ), enlarged to achieve 30 knots. This is shown by her poor disposition of armour - the belt of armour around her waterline was too low, her armoured deck likewise. what effect did this have ? Well, it made her communications sytems and fire control systems very vulnerable to battle damage. It is notable that in her final battle, whilst it was difficult to sink her, she was put out of action rather too easily - her guns lost main fire control early in the action, and had to switch to local control ( ie from within the turret ) - with consequent loss of accuracy
(2) Her steerage system was easily disabled - that torpedo from Ark Royal's swordfish jammed the rudders hard over, which meant that over her last night she went round in one big circle, with the crew unable to disengage the rudders at all.
(3) Her build quality was debatable - her stern fell off, due to it being butt welded on to the rest of the ship. This was a common fault in WW2 German warships - Prinz Eugen's also fell off when she was torpedoed in 1942, and Lutzow nearly lost hers in 1940.
(4) Her anti aircraft armament was poorly laid out, and there were areas where the ship had no AA guns that could be brought to bear. She also wasted displacement with two separate systems for anti-ship and anti-aircraft secondary armament - when most other navies had moved to dual purpose AA/ AS armament ( cf Prince of Wales )
(5) Poor armour layout is also shown by the results of her first battle - she had to head for Brest when a shell from Prince Of Wales blew a hole below the waterline forward, reduced her speed and put her down by the head.
On the whole, she was a good first attempt by a German design team that had lost out on several years advances in battleship technology. She had her faults, and her good points - but all warship design is a compromise, and her designers made different compromises to those of other navies.
And she was a beauty.
