Freiherr vom Stein (ship, 1939)

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The Freiherr vom Stein was a ship built as a customs cruiser for the Reich Ministry of Finance , which was then put into service as a submarine hunter for the Navy when it was completed.

Construction and technical data

The ship was on 10 March 1939 on the shipyard Nobiskrug in Rendsburg with the hull number 500 from the stack . It was 42.85 m long and 6.63 m wide and had a draft of 2.57 m . Two 10-cylinder diesel engines with a total of 3200 hp enabled a top speed of 23.8 knots .

history

Second World War

The new customs cruiser made its test drive on August 15, 1939 and was requisitioned by the Navy just three days later, appropriately armed and put into service with the designation UJ 172 as a submarine hunter in the 17th submarine hunting flotilla formed in Kiel at the end of July , to which the two sister ships Nettelbeck were assigned as UJ 171 and Yorck as UJ 174 . The boat initially operated in the Baltic Sea and then took part in the Association of Warship Group 9 in the Weser Exercise , the occupation of Denmark and Norway in April 1940 , with the aim of the association Middelfart and the local Lillebæltsbrücke over the Little Belt in southern Denmark.

As early as May 1, 1940, the ship was commanded as a test ship for the intelligence test command (NEK). On August 1, 1941, it switched to the intelligence test command (NVK). On July 29, 1943, the ship received a hit in a US air raid on Kiel and sank to the bottom, but was soon lifted and put back into service after the necessary repairs.

post war period

At the end of the war in May 1945, the ship was spoiled by the British. Renamed Royal Harald , it initially served as the station boat of the British Commanding Admiral in Germany in Hamburg , Admiral Sir Harold Martin Burrough . On June 1, 1946, under the new name Eileen , it became the flagship of the Controller General in the customs border patrol lake . In 1951 it was taken over by the Royal Navy and used under the name Royal Albert until 1956 as the lead ship of the British Naval Elbe Squadron stationed in Cuxhaven .

In 1956 the Royal Albert was sold to Belgium for civil use. In 1959 it was sold again to Greece , where it was converted into a passenger ship by the new owner J. Tripos in Piraeus , renamed Mahi and used in service between Piraeus and the Saronic Islands . Her final fate is (so far) not known.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/km/ujaeger/uj11-17.htm#17
  2. ↑ The renumbering of the boats of the 17th U-Fighter Flotilla into four-digit numbers in mid-1941 therefore no longer affected the ship. The designation UJ 1702 was initially given to the Mob fish steamer 62 sunk on February 1, 1944 in escort service in an attack by British bombers near the Norwegian peninsula Stadlandet and then to the war submarine which sank off the Norwegian coast on December 21, 1944 after being hit by mines. Hunter KUJ 16 .
  3. ^ British Naval Commander-in-Chief, Germany ( http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C1936 ).

Web links

literature

  • Hans Kohl: Fish steamers and whaling boats in the war. The 17th U-Fighter Flotilla off Norway. Mittler, Hamburg & Berlin, 2002
  • Werner Fox and Carl-Ludwig Hahmann: The water customs service on the German coasts, estuaries, rivers and inland waters. 2nd edition, self-published, Hamburg, self-published, 1986.