Cordillera (ship)
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The Cordillera 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 was delivered to the Soviet Union in 1945 and scrapped in 1979.
The ship
The Cordillera was a 12,055 GRT motor ship that was built by Blohm & Voss in Hamburg-Steinwerder for HAPAG's Central America service. The 151.70 meter long ship was launched on March 4, 1933 and was completed on July 30, 1933. She had an identical sister ship , the recently completed Caribia (12,049 GRT). Both ships had two masts , a chimney, two propellers and could reach a speed of 17 knots. The construction of the Caribia and Cordillera helped to save Blohm & Voss from ruin during the Great Depression at the beginning of the 1930s (the Reich government contributed financially to the construction as a kind of job creation measure for the shipyard).
On August 8, 1933, the Cordillera left Hamburg on its maiden voyage to the Canary Islands . In the following month she drove for the first time on the route from Hamburg to the West Indies and to Central America.
In September 1939, the ship docked without passengers in Murmansk , Russia , after it had successfully passed the Denmark Strait from the Caribbean in the days from September 5th to 9th and escaped British blockade ships. On December 1, 1939, it moved to the Sapadnaya Liza Fjord northwest of Murmansk, where the German Navy intended to set up their so-called Base North on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 ; there the Cordillera was supposed to serve as a residential ship . On February 8, 1940, she was back in Hamburg. From then on, the former ocean liner initially served as a barracks ship in Wilhelmshaven and later in Swinoujscie for the Flak School 1 there.
During the heavy air raid on Swinoujscie at noon on March 12, 1945, the Cordillera was hit by a bomb and capsized to port . The starboard side still jutted out of the shallow water after the end of the war. The wreck was later recovered and went to the Soviet Union as spoils of war . On June 7, 1949, the ship reached Warnemünde in tow and on October 6, 1949 it was transferred to Antwerp for repairs . Then the Warnow shipyard in Warnemünde was commissioned with the necessary repair and modernization measures.
From April 1952 the ship sailed under the name Russ and under the Soviet flag with its home port Vladivostok in the Far East . It was decommissioned on December 30, 1977. On February 10, 1979, it arrived in Incheon (South Korea) for scrapping .