First German Whaling Society
The First German Whaling Society was founded in 1935 as an AG, converted into a GmbH based in Hamburg and began whaling in 1937 .
history
The First German Whaling Society was founded on December 10, 1935 by Henkel and Cie. Launched to get the raw materials you need with as little foreign currency as possible. The “ fat gap ”, meaning the lack of raw materials in fats and oils, should be closed. This was politically wanted, and whaling was given high priority in the Third Reich's second four-year plan . Until then, whale oil was imported for foreign exchange , mainly from Norway . Blubber and blubber were important raw materials for detergents , which later surfactants were replaced.
In 1936 Blohm & Voss converted the Hapag turbine freighter Württemberg into the whaling mother ship Jan Wellem . The fishing boats Treff I to Treff IV were made at HC Stülcken Sohn in Hamburg and Treff V to Treff VI at the Seebeck shipyard in Bremerhaven . The Jan Wellem only made three fishing trips. Then she was converted to a support ship of the Kriegsmarine , used as a supply tanker during the invasion of Norway in 1940 , badly damaged in the process and broken up in Great Britain in 1947 .
In 1949, the first German whaling company was founded by the Greek shipping company entrepreneur A. Onassis commissioned in Kiel Howaldtswerken directing the conversion of a tanker into a factory ship. In addition, the company should organize the conversion of 16 fishing boats and then manage the resulting whaling fleet. Whales were caught and processed until 1953, from 1954 to 1956 the fleet was managed by Onassis' shipping company Olympic Maritime in Hamburg and then sold to Japan . In 1956 the First German Whaling Society was dissolved.
literature
- Edmund Winterhoff: Whaling in the Antarctic. Stalling, Oldenburg 1974, ISBN 3-7979-1849-6 (= writings of the German Maritime Museum. 4).
- NN: First German Whaling Society mbH, 1935–1951 . In: Hansa. September 2010.
- Kurt Eisermann: You hunted the whale in Antarctica. Germany's participation in whaling in the 20th century . In: Men from Morgenstern , Heimatbund an Elbe and Weser estuary e. V. (Ed.): Niederdeutsches Heimatblatt . No. 799 . Nordsee-Zeitung GmbH, Bremerhaven July 2016, p. 2–3 ( digitized version [PDF; 2.4 MB ; accessed on July 27, 2019]).
Web links
- Newspaper articles for the first German whaling company in the press kit 20th century the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chronicle 130 years of Henkel. (PDF) Henkel KGaA, September 25, 2006, p. 48 , accessed on August 22, 2016 .
- ↑ Klaus Barthelmess: The opponents of the "Olympic Challenger". How American secret services, Norwegians and Germans ended Aristotle Onassis' whaling adventure. In: Polar Research. 79 (3), 2009, pp. 155-176.