German shipbuilding and mechanical engineering corporation

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German shipbuilding and mechanical engineering corporation (Deschimag)
legal form Corporation
founding December 6, 1926
resolution 1945
Seat Bremen , Germany
Number of employees about 15,000 (late 1927)
Branch shipbuilding

The Deutsche Schiff- und Maschinenbau Aktiengesellschaft ( Deschimag ), based in Bremen, was an amalgamation of eight North German shipyards and the first major corporation in German shipbuilding .

It was created between 1926 and 1928 at the instigation of Bremen merchants, bankers and shipowners against the background of the shipyard crisis at the time . Johann Friedrich Schröder , co-owner of the Schröder, Heye and Weyhausen banking house in Bremen, chairman of the supervisory board and main shareholder of Werft Aktien-Gesellschaft “Weser” and the two Bremen shipping companies Norddeutscher Lloyd and DDG “Hansa” played a central role in the formation of Deschimag .

After the consolidation of the business following the merger , only Werft AG Weser in Bremen and the associated " Seebeck works " in Wesermünde were active in shipbuilding in the mid-1930s . In 1941 Friedrich Krupp AG took over the majority of Deschimag shares. The Deschimag group, which was also active in aircraft construction, was dissolved at the end of 1945 and the two shipyards were later operated independently under the umbrella of AG Weser.

history

founding

The critical situation in the shipbuilding industry in Germany in the mid-1920s inspired the Bremen banker Johann Friedrich Schröder to set up a supra-regional merger of the larger shipyards on the Baltic and North Sea under the leadership of Bremer AG Weser . He did not succeed in doing this, however, because other companies and other large shipyards such as the Bremer Vulkan and the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg showed little interest in view of their own strengths. A merger of shipyards of various sizes on the Lower Weser , in Hamburg and in the Baltic Sea region ( Rostock and Stettin ) was finally realized .

On December 6, 1926, the general meetings of AG Weser and Joh. C. Tecklenborg AG passed the resolution to merge the two companies to form Deutsche Schiff- und Maschinenbau Aktiengesellschaft , or Deschimag for short , which was then approved by the general meetings of both shipyards on December 28 .

Shortly afterwards, the Werft AG Vulkan Hamburg was taken over against massive opposition from the Hamburg Senate ; In December 1927, AG Vulkan Stettin merged with Deschimag. In January 1928, 75% of the capital of the Nüscke shipyard in Stettin, the AG Neptun in Rostock and, after the death of Georg Seebeck on February 27, 1928, the Seebeck shipyard in Wesermünde ( Geestemünde ) were taken over, followed by 97% in May 1928 Frerichswerft in Einswarden.

Thus, from 1928 the following eight shipyards were merged to form Deschimag and had thus lost their independence:

On May 24, 1927, the first ordinary general meeting of Deschimag took place in the building of Bank JF Schröder KGaA in Bremen. According to the management board report, a profit of 412,722.74 Reichsmarks had been achieved in the first financial year .

At that time, Franz Stapelfeldt was chairman of the board; Hans Wach and Georg Claussen (formerly Tecklenborg) as well as Gustav Bauer and H. Wallwitz (formerly Vulkan Werke) and the shipbuilding director Hermann Hein from AG Weser acted as further board members . The banker Johannes Friedrich Schröder was the chairman of the supervisory board; Siegmund Bodenheimer ( Danat Bank ), Ernst Glässel (“Globus” Reederei Bremen and Norddeutscher Lloyd ) and Paul Stahl (Vulkan-Werke) also sat on the supervisory board . Deschimag was thus predominantly dominated by merchants and shipowners from Bremen.

At the end of 1927, around 53,000 people were employed in German shipyards, of which around 15,000 were employed by Deschimag companies alone, which corresponded to a share of around 28%. This made the Bremen group the largest shipbuilding company in the Weimar Republic .

As before around 1907, a merger of the two large Bremen shipyards Bremer Vulkan and AG Weser was sought again in 1930/31 , but this failed due to the resistance of the financially well-off Bremer Vulkan in contrast to the ailing AG Weser.

Group strategy

The turbines - fast steamer " TS Bremen " before the launch of the AG Weser, 1928

After the merger , the business policy of the Deschimag management consisted mainly of procuring orders for the Bremer Stammwerft Actien-Gesellschaft “Weser” and reducing internal competition and overcapacities in the other Deschimag companies by selling or closing them.

The Szczecin shipyard Nüscke & Co. went bankrupt in 1928. In the same year AG Vulcan Stettin was closed, its locomotive construction division completely separated and sold to the Berlin Borsigwerke . The shipbuilding part of the Hamburg Vulkanwerft was taken over by Howaldtswerke in Kiel at the end of 1929 and continued as Howaldtswerke AG Kiel, department formerly Vulcan (from 1939 Howaldtswerke Hamburg ); the eastern part of the shipyard area was cleared from 1930–31. With the Stettiner and Hamburg volcanoes, two big names in German shipbuilding history disappeared.

The modern Joh. C. Tecklenborg shipyard in Wesermünde, which was well-utilized with orders and needed as a repair company for Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) , initially had a good chance of survival. However, there were conflicts of interest between her and AG Weser, as both had a similar construction program. Tecklenborg was then largely banned from independent activities such as advertising and the procurement of new construction contracts.

Under Schröder's influence, the NDL canceled six orders that had already been placed with Tecklenborg in 1927 and two more in 1928, which naturally led to financial problems there. Despite cheaper offers from Tecklenborg, orders from other shipping companies were also placed with AG Weser and the Bremen shipyard recorded an increase in orders of around 720 percent at that time.

There were now two Deschimag operations at the Wesermünde location, and the closure of one of the two was foreseeable. Against great protest, the end of the Tecklenborg shipyard came on September 24, 1928. It was shut down on the grounds that in the ongoing shipyard crisis for the Unterweser area, two operations were not required and the Seebeck shipyard to the needs of the Weser estuary, mainly for repair work the big shipping companies, more than enough. With these arguments, Deschimag managed to keep the protest in Wesermünde within limits.

2,300 Tecklenborg employees lost their jobs and an additional 300 suppliers were affected. Part of the workforce was taken over by Bremer Stammwerft AG Weser and Wesermünder Seebeckwerft. The two operations were modernized and expanded from the machine park of the Tecklenborg shipyard.

After the Deschimag merger, there were only a few lucrative orders for Rostock AG “Neptun” . At first, the shipyard survived with small orders. In 1931, however, the Schröder banking house in Bremen, which acted as Deschimag's house bank, collapsed . Although this was taken over by the Bremen Senate and continued to exist as Norddeutsche Kreditbank AG after the restructuring , the bankruptcy of the Neptun shipyard had become inevitable. Unexpected orders came from the Soviet Union and the Reich government supported the shipyard with scrapping orders , but only 90 people could be employed. In October 1932, Neptun had to file for bankruptcy, which was followed by a compulsory settlement before the Rostock District Court on July 16, 1934 . The Actien-Gesellschaft "Neptun", Schiffswerft und Maschinenfabrik , founded in 1890, was dissolved and the new independent Neptun-Werft GmbH was founded as a successor .

The Frerichswerft in Einswarden (district of Nordenham since 1933 ) stopped shipbuilding in 1935. Until shortly before the end of the war in 1945 , the Deschimag subsidiary Weser-Flugzeugbau GmbH produced Junkers aircraft there under license for the Air Force .

Thus, in the mid-1930s, Deschimag only operated shipbuilding at two shipyards: the AG Weser main shipyard in Bremen and the associated “Seebeck works” in Wesermünde.

1935-1945

Z 5 “Paul Jacobi” , a class 1934A destroyer , entered service with the Navy at the end of June 1937 .
The last submarine was launched on April 20, 1945 at Deschimag / AG Weser: U 3051 of type XXI (picture of the identical U 3008 in August 1946)

In the years 1931 to 1933 no new ships were built due to a lack of orders. It was not until 1934 that AG Weser received a new building contract from North German Lloyd. As part of the armament of the Wehrmacht , the Deschimag Group received extensive orders from 1935 to build ships for the navy (primarily destroyers and submarines), so that production was completely converted to warship construction by 1939.

The Bauer-Wach exhaust steam turbine developed by Gustav Bauer and Dipl.Ing Hans Wach and the Maier shape developed by the Austrian shipbuilding engineer Fritz Franz Maier , a hull shape of seagoing vessels with a wide fore and aft section with low water resistance and good sea characteristics , were successfully marketed through license agreements .

After the economy had stabilized, the Krupp Group took over the majority of the shares in 1941 . With the purchase, the offer of the F. Krupp Germania shipyard in Kiel was expanded to include ships and larger submarines.

At that time, Deschimag employed around 18,500 people, almost 20% of whom were prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates from Neuengamme . In 1942 the proportion of foreign workers in the workforce was 12.7%. Some of the forced laborers came from a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp set up in Bremen-Blumenthal in early 1944 .

The Deschimag Group was liquidated at the end of 1945. Its two shipyards continued to operate as AG “Weser”  - after the machinery was dismantled, Bremer Maschinenbau und Dockbetrieb GmbH was active there - or as AG “Weser”, Seebeck plant , which was less destroyed and spared from dismantling.

By the mid-1970s, AG Weser grew into the largest shipyard company in the Weser-Ems area. In the following shipyard crisis , many companies had to give up and after 111 years of shipbuilding, AG Weser was also closed at the end of 1983. Schichau Seebeck went bankrupt in 2009.

Submarine construction

During the Second World War , Deschimag's most important business area was submarine construction. Since the bombing of the shipyards by the Allies caused greater and greater damage and the submarine construction was severely impaired, bomb-proof shipyards were planned in bunkers. At the beginning of the 1940s, submarine bunkers in Hamburg ( Fink II at Deutsche Werft and Elbe II at Howaldtswerke AG ) and Kiel ( Kilian at the Kriegsmarinewerft Kiel ) were being planned or under construction. In mid-1944, the smaller Konrad bunker was built at Deutsche Werke Kiel AG . As early as 1942, the Navy decided to have corresponding bunkers built at the Bremen shipyards. This affected the Vegesacker Werft , a subsidiary of the Thyssen- owned Bremer Vulkan, and the Werft AG Weser der Deschimag, which was owned by the Krupp Group. From the spring of 1944 the submarine bunker Hornisse was built on the AG-Weser site for the section construction of the Type XXI submarines . The sections produced there were then to be assembled into Type XXI boats in the Valentin submarine bunker of the Thyssen Group . Other sections were to be produced in the " Wespe " bunker in Wilhelmshaven and then brought to the Valentin bunker by ship.

Aircraft construction

In connection with diversification efforts, Deschimag began manufacturing aircraft parts for the Dornier works in 1932/33 . In March 1933 Weser Flugzeugbau GmbH - called Weserflug for short - was founded in Bremen with the intention of entering the promising aircraft and air armaments business and creating jobs.

In addition to other locations, the Frerichswerft in Einswarden was also exclusively used for aircraft construction after shipbuilding there had been discontinued in 1935.

In March 1936, Weserflug was separated from the Deschimag Group and converted into an independent GmbH, which by 1945 had developed into one of the largest and most important German aircraft companies, which, however, did not create its own developments, but limited itself exclusively to licensed constructions.

Ships (selection; see also AG Weser)

Civil ships

  • 1929, express steamer Bremen for the North German Lloyd
  • 1935, cargo and passenger ships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau for Norddeutscher Lloyd
  • 1936, motor tanker Friedrich Breme
  • 1936/1937, whaling mother ships Terje Viken and Unitas

Warships

  • Destroyer 1934A (4 units at AG Weser)
  • Destroyer 1936/1936 A (18 units at AG Weser)
  • Destroyer 1936 B (5 units / of which 2 not completed by AG Weser)
  • Destroyer 1942 (1 unit - not completed; first destroyer with diesel engine system worldwide)
  • Destroyer 1944 (4 units - only construction preparation, canceled in July 1944; also destroyer with diesel drive)
  • 178 submarines of the types I , VII , IX and XXI , 162 of them various types at the AG Weser and 16 boats of the type IX at the Seebeck plant.

literature

  • Peter Kuckuk , Hartmut Roder ; From the steam launch to the container ship - shipyards and shipbuilding in Bremen and the Lower Weser region in the 20th century . University of Bremen, Bremen 1988, ISBN 3-926028-38-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ThyssenKrupp History: Third Reich (1933-1945) on thyssenkrupp.com
  2. ^ History of the working group "Weser". Retrieved June 11, 2014 .
  3. Archive link ( Memento of the original from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de
  4. ^ Aktien-Gesellschaft “Weser”, shipyard and machine factory
  5. Boats of the AG Weser and the Seebeck plant on uboat.net (English)