The 11” guns fall between a US battleship (14-16) and cruiser (6-8). I believe that they were sometimes called pocket battleships. Battlecruiser does seem to capture it, somewhere between battleship and cruiser, but the term was originally applied to a class of fast ships with big guns (~12-14”) but lightly armored that were intended to run down and destroy smaller, more lightly armed ships by shelling from beyond their enemies’ range.
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau came after the Pocket Battleships Graf Spee, Deutschland, and Admiral Scheer.
They were closer to true battleships, but undergunned.