Admiral Nakhimov (ship, 1925)
.jpg) The Berlin (later Admiral Nachimow )
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
.svg){kind=small}
The Admiral Nachimow ( Russian Адмирал Нахимов ) was an originally German , later a Soviet passenger ship .
The ship was put into service by Norddeutscher Lloyd in 1925 under the name Berlin and used on the North Atlantic and for cruises. It served as a hospital ship in World War II and sank off Swinoujscie in 1945 .
Restored in the GDR by 1957, the ship, now named Admiral Nakhimov and sailing under the Soviet flag, was used in the Black Sea . On August 31, 1986, the ship collided with a cargo ship off Novorossiysk in the Black Sea and sank within a few minutes, killing 423 of the 1234 people on board. This was the worst shipping accident on the Black Sea in peacetime.
story
The ship was built in 1924/1925 at the Vulkan shipyard in Bremen . Even during construction, Norddeutsche Lloyd tried unsuccessfully to resell the ship to the competing Hamburg-American Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG), as there was overcapacity due to low capacity utilization in South American traffic. On September 26, 1925 , the Berlin came into service for Norddeutscher Lloyd in liner service on the route between Bremen , Southampton , Cherbourg and New York . It was initially used next to the Columbus , the smaller post-war buildings in Munich , Stuttgart and Sierra Ventana as well as the pre-war buildings in Bremen , Lützow and Yorck . The planned construction of a sister ship was not carried out because the shipping company was able to buy the Ormuz originally ordered cheaply and then put Dresden into service. The utilization of the existing ships in the liner service was unsatisfactory, so that cruises were also offered. The Berlin carried out her first cruise from Bremerhaven on January 4, 1928 via southern Ireland to Madeira and the Canary Islands . However, a four-week polar trip offered in the same year was canceled.
.jpg)
One of her most famous captains was Leopold Ziegenbein in 1927 , who won the Blue Ribbon with the Bremen in 1929 .
On November 13, 1928, she rescued 23 passengers and crew members of the liner Vestris (10,494 GRT, 1912) of the shipping company Lamport & Holt , which sank the day before, off the coast of Virginia , whose coal bunkers were full of water in the storm. Together with the American Skipper of the United States Lines , the battleship Wyoming of the US Navy and the French passenger steamer Myriam , 213 castaways of the 325 people on board were rescued.
As early as 1929, the Berlin passenger facility was converted for the first time , which could continue to carry a little over 1000 passengers. Another conversion in 1932 then reduced the capacity to 879 in three classes (257 cabin, 261 tourist and 361 3rd class). The ship remained on the North Atlantic and for cruises in use, some of which also led from New York to the West Indies. From the end of 1933, their North Atlantic service departures usually started from Cuxhaven , as the Nazi government had meanwhile forced the two major German shipping companies to operate together. In 1937, on the occasion of its anniversary, the NDL used it again for an 18-day cruise to Madeira, covering 4440 nautical miles.
In addition, the Berlin was chartered to the Kraft-durch-Freude organization from 1934 onwards . The ship launched in the winter of 1938 made two last KdF cruises in May 1939.
Use in World War II
Then the Navy chartered the Berlin . On July 17, 1939, on the way to the handover near Swinoujscie, there was a boiler explosion that claimed 17 lives. After repairs and modifications by Blohm & Voss , the ship served as a hospital ship from August 23, 1939 during World War II . It had five specialist departments (internal, surgery, eyes, ENT, mouth and jaw) which were manned by specialists in the reservist stand. There were over 400 beds available. The ship immediately moved to Gdansk with the Stuttgart of the NDL, which had also been converted into a hospital ship . It was used for transporting the wounded in the Baltic Sea and as a floating hospital in Copenhagen (from July 1940) and from 1941 (attack on the Soviet Union) in the Neidenfjord near Kirkenes to care for the wounded on the Murmansk front .
On August 7, 1944, the hospital ship Berlin carried 1513 wounded from Riga to Swinoujscie when the Wehrmacht evacuated Estonia . From 1944 it served as a residential ship in Gotenhafen . At the end of January 1945 it was used for the transport of refugees . On January 31, the ship received two mines near Swinoujscie, but was able to call at the port and gave the wounded and refugees ashore. On February 1, 1945 it ran back to Pillau , suffered another hit by a mine at almost the same point and sank to the flat seabed. There should only have been one fatality.
In Soviet service
In 1948 the Berlin - like the passenger steamers Albert Ballin and Hamburg , which had sunk by Soviet torpedoing - was lifted at the behest of the Soviet occupying forces and towed to Rostock . In September 1951, the rebuilding of the steamer began in the Warnow shipyard in Warnemünde , which was not completed until 1957. The ship received new, slightly lower and wider chimneys, a hull now painted white and a closed upper promenade. Otherwise externally unchanged, the former Berlin was put back into service with the Soviet Baltijskoje Morskoje Parochodstwo (Балтийское морское пароходство; Ostseereederei ) under the name of Admiral Nachimow . The ship was named after the Russian naval officer Pavel Stepanowitsch Nakhimov .
The ship was handed over to the Soviet Union on May 2, 1957 and left for its new home port of Odessa . In the summer months it now ran liner services between Odessa, Crimea and Batumi , and in winter it made cruises in the Black Sea. With the ability to carry up to 1000 passengers, the Admiral Nakhimov was the largest passenger ship of the Soviet Black Sea shipping company in terms of passenger capacity. In 1978, the former Berlin - 40 years after their last Atlantic crossing - returned to the Atlantic when they took part in the XI. World Festival of Youth and Students from Odessa to Havana and back.
Downfall
On August 31, 1986, Admiral Nakhimov left the port of Novorossiysk for Sochi at around 10 p.m. Moscow time . There were 897 passengers and 346 crew members on board. The captain was Vadim Markow.
Shortly after sailing , the bridge crew noticed that the 18,604 GRT bulk carrier Pyotr Wassjow under Captain Viktor Tkachenko was on a collision course with Admiral Nakhimov . The Pyotr Wassjow was warned by radio and then announced a change of course. However, there was no evasive maneuver. Markov left the bridge in a false sense of security and left the wheel to the second officer, Alexander Tschudnowski. At around 11 p.m. Chudnovsky asked Pyotr Wassjow again to change course, which, however, did not take place, and decided to change course by 10 ° to port of his own. At 11:10 p.m. Chudnovsky ordered Pyotr Wassjow to return to full power immediately and ordered a hard change of course himself.
However, these measures came too late, so that at 11:12 p.m. the Pyotr Wassjow drove into the starboard side of the Admiral Nakhimov at around 5 knots (9 km / h) , which tore an 84 m² hole in the ship's side between the boiler and engine room. The Admiral Nakhimov was listed and sank in just seven minutes, leaving no time to launch lifeboats. In addition, many passengers below deck were disoriented due to a power failure as a result of the collision.
Ten minutes after the sinking met first emergency vehicles at the accident, 44 ° 35 '59 " N , 37 ° 52' 54" O , a. The not too badly damaged Pyotr Wassjow also provided help. A total of 836 people were dragged out of the water, some of whom later died from injuries. A total of 423 people, 64 crew members and 359 passengers were killed in the accident.
investigation
A commission of inquiry came to the conclusion that serious misconduct by the two captains Markov and Tkachenko had led to the accident. Tkachenko had not taken any measures to allow Admiral Nakhimov to pass safely. Markov was accused of being absent from the bridge. Both captains were sentenced to 15 years in prison, but pardoned in 1992.
The accident was first reported as " average " on September 1, 1986 by the state news agency TASS . However, after the alleged intervention of Mikhail Gorbachev , details about the sinking were announced on September 2nd. For the foreign correspondents of international agencies, a press conference was held that afternoon with the Deputy Minister of Maritime Affairs , Leonid Nedjak , which was also broadcast on Soviet television. Western observers interpreted this open approach to the disaster as a lesson from the Chernobyl reactor accident in April of that year.
The wreck of the Admiral Nakhimov is about 4 kilometers off the coast at a depth of 45 meters. The Pyotr Wassjow was repaired. The names of Pyotr Vasyov after the disaster are: 1986–1995 - Podolsk , 1995–2000 - Langeron , 2000–2003 - An an , 2003–2006 - Myroessa , 2006–2010 - Orbit , 2010–2012 - Jiajiaxin 1 . In 2012, the former Pyotr Wassjow was retired and dismantled.
literature
- Arnold Kludas : The history of German passenger shipping from 1850 to 1990. in 5 volumes, Ernst Kabel Verlag , 1986.
- Arnold Kludas: The ships of the North German Lloyd 1920 to 1970. Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft , 1992, ISBN 3-7822-0534-0 .
- Claus Rothe : German ocean passenger ships 1919 to 1985. Steiger Verlag , 1987, ISBN 3-921564-97-2 .
- Reinhart Schmelzkopf : The German Merchant Shipping 1919–1939. Verlag Gerhard Stalling , Oldenburg, ISBN 3-7979-1847-X .
Web links
- Comprehensive processing of the disaster (Russian)
- Everything sagged . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 1986, pp. 148-149 ( online ).
- Color photo of the Admiral Nakhimov
- Report on the radio system of the Berlin
Footnotes
- ↑ Kludas, Vol. IV, p. 139.
- ^ Kludas, Vol. IV, p. 218.
- ↑ Reinhold Thiel: The history of North German Lloyd 1857-1970. Volume 3, Hauschild Verlag , 2004, ISBN 3-89757-166-8 , p. 211.
- ↑ Kludas, Vol. V, p. 28
- ↑ Kludas, NDL, p. 26
- ↑ Rothe, pp. 106f