Iceland Fisheries Memorial Stone
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The Iceland fishery memorial stone in Vík í Mýrdal commemorates the German deep-sea fishermen who perished off Iceland . At the same time, he thanked the Icelanders who rescued shipwrecked people under often difficult conditions.
Emergence
Former fish steamer drivers and employees of the fish industry founded a working group under the direction of the fisheries and shipping historian Ingo Heidbrink in the mid-1990s, which worked on the history of German deep-sea fishing at the German Maritime Museum . The memorial initiated by the working group was supported by the German-Icelandic Society Bremerhaven / Bremen . It was financed by the Robert Bosch Foundation and private donations . The monument was inaugurated in September 2002.
background
The fish-rich waters around Iceland have always served as a source of food. In the prosperous German Empire , the demand grew with industrialization , which in turn made industrial deep-sea fishing possible. Frequent storms and hurricanes, open decks , inadequate telecommunications and few ports made the trips a dangerous undertaking. Unsafe landmarks , changing geomagnetic fields , unpredictable ocean currents and poor lighting on the coast made navigation difficult . Astronomical navigation was hardly possible. Cliffs in Vestmannaeyjar and Vestfirðir made man rescues from country often impossible. In Látrabjarg Icelanders saved in winter 1947, the crew of a British trawler. When this feat was to be filmed, another ship accident provided the real backdrop under the same conditions. The extremely impressive film has been preserved in Iceland.
The President Herwig , the first German steam trawler , ran aground in 1898 on the south coast of Iceland. This was followed by Bavaria and William Jurgens (1925), Meteor and West Bank (1933) and other vessels. 83 Herring loggers and trawlers went under or ran aground. 1,200 sailors drowned . The last victims were N. Ebeling II (1952) and Johannes Krüss (1967).
The sparsely populated hinterland , estuaries , glaciers and insurmountable fields of lava rocks made stranded people fail. After the fishing steamer Friedrich Albert from Geestemünde was stranded on the south coast of Iceland on January 19, 1903, the surviving crew, led by their captain Georg Büschen , wandered along the coast for eleven days in search of help. Three sailors died. The survivors were taken in and cared for by the Icelandic farmer Sigurdur Jönsson . As a result of these events, the German consul Thomsen initiated the construction of shelters, the first at his own expense. There were further beacons on the south coast and the Reichsmarineamt participated with leaflets for the ship's crews.
Safety at sea
Around 6000 fishermen from Kingston upon Hull (Hull) had died at sea over the years. When three fishing trawlers with 58 men sank from Hull within four weeks in the winter of 1968 , fishing widows joined forces. They achieved an improvement in working conditions and safety regulations. Because many trawlers drove into the North Atlantic without radio operators or medical care, the fishermen had to pay for their equipment themselves for the trips in temperatures down to minus 15 degrees. The women succeeded in having a catalog of requirements "of historic proportions" adopted with the representatives of the fishing industry. The requirements included full crews, safety lines on deck, weatherproof warm protective clothing, emergency signal systems, escort ship with doctor, modern aids against icing and no trips in winter to storm areas. A commission of inquiry later found in its report that there was a fatalistic attitude towards the danger at all hierarchical levels in the industry and that many believed the high accident rate to be more or less avoidable. On the other hand, the majority of the accidents could have been avoided.
See also
monument
The memorial stone is a seven tonnes of heavy granite rock from near Moorausmoor . It is 2.20 m high and 1.50 m wide. It is framed by basalt columns from Iceland. A bronze plaque bears the inscription in German and Icelandic :
A plaque shows a stranded fish steamer.
literature
- H. Frank: Travel report about the Iceland trip of the survey ship "Meteor" from October 1st. until November 2nd, 1934 . Publications of the Marine Observatory in Wilhelmshaven, NF H. 3 (1936), ZDB -ID 1183566-7 , separate count.
- Rudolf Höhn: Meteorological report on the Iceland-Greenland voyage of the survey ship “Meteor” in February – March 1935 . Publications of the marine observatory in Wilhelmshaven, NF H. 3, 1936, separate count.
- Ingo Heidbrink : Stranded under Iceland - ship losses and marine accidents in German deep-sea fisheries on the Icelandic coast = Strönd við Ísland . German Maritime Museum, Bremerhaven 2002.
- Ingo Heidbrink: German-Icelandic fisheries - history aspects of the development since 1945 . Proceedings [Offprint Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv 26]. German Maritime Museum, Bremerhaven 2003.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b 10 years in memory of the dead fishermen (Nordsee-Zeitung, September 7, 2012)
- ↑ Memorial stone in Vík on Iceland (2002)
- ↑ Christian Biedekarken: 90 minutes of hope and fear, with death in front of your eyes (private website) ( Memento from October 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Iceland in the past and present (archive.org)
- ↑ Martina Wimmer The heroines of Hessle Road , mare No. 137, p. 48 ff
Coordinates: 63 ° 24 ′ 51.1 ″ N , 19 ° 1 ′ 7.1 ″ W.