Caribia (ship)
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Caribia on the Scheldt (1938).
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The Caribia was a passenger ship of the Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG) put into service in 1933 , which was used in passenger traffic to Central America . It became the property of the Soviet Union in 1946 and was scrapped in 1984.
The ship
The Caribia was a 12,049 GRT motor ship that was built by Blohm & Voss in Hamburg for HAPAG's Central America service. The 151.70 meter long ship was launched on March 1, 1932 and was completed on February 5, 1933. She had an identical sister ship , the Cordillera (12,055 GRT) , which was also commissioned in 1933 . Both ships had two masts , a chimney, two propellers and could reach a speed of 17 knots. The Caribia could carry 234 passengers in first class, 103 in tourist class and 110 in third class. The crew consisted of 198 people.
The construction of the Caribia and Cordillera helped to save Blohm & Voss from ruin during the Great Depression in the early 1930s. The Reich government participated financially in the construction as a kind of job creation measure for the shipyard. In March 1933 the Caribia undertook her maiden voyage from Hamburg via the West Indies to Central America. At the beginning of 1939, the Caribia brought 85 German and Austrian Jews to Venezuela who were allowed to enter the country thanks to a special permit from President Eleazar López Contreras . The ship first called at the British colony of Trinidad , where the Jewish passengers were turned away.
With the outbreak of the Second World War , the civil use of the ocean liner ended. From 1940 the ship in Flensburg - Mürwik was used as a barge for the Navy . After Germany surrendered, the Caribia was taken over by the British in May 1945, who handed it over to the USA two months later . In 1946 the ship went to the Soviet Union as spoils of war . Under the name Ilitsch , the ship operated between the Russian port city of Vladivostok and the Kamchatka Peninsula . Decommissioned in 1983, the former Caribia was scrapped the following year.