Carin II
 As Prince Charles in 2017
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The Carin II (ex Theresia , ex Prince Charles , ex HMS Royal Albert ) is a German luxury yacht that was given to Hermann Göring , the representative for the four-year plan , in 1937 by the Reich Association of the Automotive Industry . From 1945 to circa 1960 she served in the Royal Navy and the British Rhine Flotilla. From 1973 to 1985 it was in the possession of the Stern reporter Gerd Heidemann , which resulted in the scandal surrounding the alleged Hitler diaries in 1983 . It was in Egypt from 1987 to 2009 and is being restored (as of 2015) in el-Guna and Safaga on the Red Sea .
history
As Carin II (1937-1946)
The ship was built from 1936 at the Hamburg shipyard Herrmann Heidtmann based on a design by Karl Schulte. The commissioning as Carin II took place on June 27, 1937 in Hamburg on the occasion of the presence of the married couple Emmy and Hermann Göring at the German Derby . The ship was named after Hermann Göring's first wife, Carin Göring , born in 1931 . Baron Fock. The yacht served both normal vacation trips and representative purposes. Göring used them for regular trips from Hamburg to Sylt . The first state guest on board was the Italian duce , Benito Mussolini , in 1937 .
A special feature of the service operations on the yacht was that the regular crew of four men on duty was supplemented by seafaring personnel from the Air Force . During trips in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea , the yacht was constantly accompanied by an Air Force air traffic control boat, as it was only seaworthy up to wind force 6 .
In July 1938 Göring stayed with the Carin II in the company of two warships of the Kriegsmarine in the Danish port city of Helsingør to visit the Hamlet Festival. The visit apparently served political and representative purposes. On August 22, 1938, Chancellor Adolf Hitler visited the yacht in Eckernförde on the occasion of a navy parade .
In July / August 1939 Göring made a 25-day trip along the North Sea coast and across West German rivers, which can be viewed as a propaganda trip for the four-year plan . A meeting with the air force command took place on July 25th in Westerland on Sylt. a. Ernst Udet , Erhard Milch and Hans Jeschonnek took part.
The yacht was no longer used in the Second World War . In March 1945 it was transferred from Spandau to Mölln , presumably to prevent confiscation by the advancing Red Army . It may already have been seized by units of the British Army there ; The only thing that is certain is that the Carin II was in Kiel on May 8, 1945, the day of the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht .
No detailed information is yet available on the use of the Carin II in British services. It is certain that Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery used it for a harbor tour in Kiel in August 1945.
At the end of 1945 the yacht was officially taken over by the Royal Navy and put into service as HMS Royal Albert (after Albert von Sachsen-Coburg and Gotha , the husband of Queen Victoria ) and temporarily used as a transport boat in Hamburg and Wilhelmshaven . The crew consisted of German personnel in British service. In 1948 she was used as a fishing protection boat against fishermen from Heligoland who, contrary to the regulations of the British military government, visited their old fishing grounds around Heligoland. In 1948 and 1950 it was overhauled and used by British officers for port tours in Hamburg.
At the end of 1950 the yacht was transferred to the Rhine . She was stationed in Krefeld- Uerdingen and now served as the Prince Charles motor yacht in principle for the British royal family , but also as a representative ship for the Royal Navy Rhine Flotilla . The regular crew now consisted of British naval personnel and German personnel. As guests, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip , and their son, Prince Charles, after whom the yacht was named, were occasionally on board as passengers.
In June 1954, the Prince Charles was used by Princess Margaret , the queen's younger sister, for representative purposes on the occasion of troop visits to the Federal Republic of Germany . In September 1954, the yacht was used by Herzog Philip on a representative trip to Basel . The Prince Charles also made a trip to London , with the German crew members being replaced by British.
Emmy Göring succeeded in returning the yacht from the British government at the end of the 1950s, as the Carin II had been Göring's private property and never served military purposes. After the return, Göring sold the yacht on October 20, 1960 for 33,000 DM to a Bonn entrepreneur, who renamed it Theresia after his wife and used it for vacation trips. At that time it was in the Oberwinter marina south of Bad Godesberg .
Renamed Carin II (since 1973)
On January 28, 1973 the Theresia was sold for 160,000 DM to the Hamburg journalist Gerd Heidemann , who at the time worked for Stern and was known for his reports mainly from crisis areas in the Third World ; In 1983 he caused a sensation with the forged Hitler diaries . Heidemann was also the partner of Edda Göring , the daughter of Hermann Göring, for a few years .
Heidemann renamed the Theresia back to Carin II and tried to restore it to its original state of construction at considerable expense while modernizing it at the same time. The restoration and renovation work was carried out by the Hamburg shipyards Hein Garbers and Günther Lütje. Heidemann invested a good one million DM by 1985; this also included buying back equipment, according to the on-board library .
Since Heidemann did not have a boat license, it was usually in the Billwerder Bay in Hamburg-Rothenburgsort . On it he received numerous prominent artists, politicians, personalities of contemporary history and journalists. The last guests on board were representatives of the Gruner + Jahr publishing house and the head of the Stern für Zeitgeschichte, Thomas Walde , at the beginning of April 1981 . The background to the meeting was the discovery of the alleged Hitler diaries and their planned publication. After his conviction in the criminal proceedings for the forgeries of the alleged diaries, Heidemann was no longer financially able to maintain the yacht. It was foreclosed by Deutsche Bank in August 1985 and sold to the Egyptian businessman Mustafa Karim for DM 270,000.
At the end of January 1987 the Carin II was to be transferred to Egypt. At the beginning of February she was allegedly in distress off the Libyan coast and called on Benghazi . The Libyan authorities put them on the chain; the crew, including Karim's wife, US citizen Sandra Simpson, was arrested and only released after several months of imprisonment or internment . Finally the yacht could be transferred to Egypt as planned, where it was first in Hurghada and later in the marina of El-Gouna north of Hurghada on the Red Sea .
Due to legal disputes in the Karims family, the Carin II was never put into operation. After Karim's death in 1993, his wife only succeeded in obtaining property rights in 2003. Simpson sold the yacht in 2009 to a Hamburg businessman who had it renovated (as of 2015).
Renamed Prince Charles (June 2017)
The yacht is still in the old El Gouna marina and is called Prince Charles again . Valletta is specified as the home port . At the time of the recordings, work was being carried out on board.
Trivia
- In Helmut Käutner's political thriller Epilog - The Secret of the Orplid from 1950, the Carin II serves as a model for the yacht Orplid .
- In Helmut Dietl's satire Schtonk! from 1991 a replica of the Carin II was used as a prop .
- A replica of the Carin II was also used in the British television series Hitler For Sale (1991) based on the novel by Robert Harris .
literature
- Jan Heitmann: floating meeting point for the world's greats. The yacht CARIN II was commissioned 75 years ago , in: Schiff und Zeit / Panorama maritim , vol. 74, autumn 2011, pp. 48–57. ISBN 978-3-7822-0968-7
- Valerie Langrish Warner: Carina. The yacht that refused to die , Brighton 2010. ISBN 978-1-84624-413-1 (Fictionalized History of Carin II )
Web links
- Thomas E. Schmidt : The dinghy of the story , in Die Zeit v. July 21, 2005 [1]
- Photos and a ship floor plan of the Carin II ; [2]
- Hunting seat on deck , in: Der Spiegel , no. 38 v. September 18, 1978 [3]
- Floating Arbor , in: Der Spiegel, No. 2 v. January 5, 2004, p. 104. [4]
- Goering goes to Denmark , in: The New York Times v. July 25, 1938, p. 7. [5]
Individual evidence
- ↑ Volker Knopf, Stefan Martens: Görings Reich: Self-productions in Carinhall . Ch. Links Verlag, 2006, ISBN 978-3-86153-392-4 ( google.de [accessed on May 9, 2018]).
- ↑ Ursula Pidun: SPREERAUSCHEN.net: Ex- "Stern" reporter Gerd Heidemann: Nazi research led to consequences (3/4). Retrieved February 19, 2017 .