Gravenstein (ship, 1906)
 still as a tranquebar
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The Gravenstein was a cargo ship built in 1906 , which initially sailed under the Danish , then from 1923 under the German flag and was used by the Navy as a barge during the Second World War and was finally sunk in Gotenhafen as a harbor barrier in 1945 .
Construction and technical data
The ship ran in 1906 on the shipyard Burmeister & Wain Maskin- og Skibsbyggeri in Copenhagen with the hull number 249 and the name Tranquebar from the stack and was established in June 1906 by the Copenhagen shipping company East Asiatic Company put into service. It was 112.8 m long and 14.5 m wide and had a draft of 8.4 m . The Tranquebar was measured with 3,453 GRT and 2,227 NRT and its carrying capacity was 6,360 dwt . The machine system also manufactured by Burmeister & Wain, comprising three steam boilers and a triple expansion steam engine , delivered 1,700 PSi and enabled a service speed of 10.5 knots .
fate
The Tranquebar , named after the South Indian city of Tranquebar , which had been a Danish colony from 1620 to 1845, was a regular service to Southeast and East Asia . In October 1915 it was transferred to the subsidiary Dampskibsselskabet Orient (D / S Orient), also domiciled in Copenhagen , with which the Østasiatiske Kompagni started tramp shipping that year .
After the end of the First World War , when the German merchant navy had to rebuild their tonnage by buying old ships after the war and reparation losses, the Tranquebar was sold to the steamship company "Visurgis" , founded in November 1921, for 600,000 kroner in August 1923 had taken over the remaining assets of the liquidated Bremer Segelschiffs -Reederei Rhederei "Visurgis" AG and renamed the ship Hansa . The new “Visurgis” was neither financially strong nor very successful. Besides the Hansa, she owned only one other ship, the Brema (ex Granada ), built in 1899 as a cattle transporter and bought in 1922 , made losses every year and was on the way to liquidation after just a few years. The Brema was sold to Greece in February 1927 , the Hansa in 1928 to the Arnold Bernstein shipping company in Hamburg, where it was renamed Gravenstein .
After Bernstein had been charged with foreign currency offenses in 1937 and convicted in 1938 , probably because of his Jewish descent, and his company was then forcibly sold for the purpose of collecting his immensely high fine, Gravenstein was acquired by Horn-Linie in 1939 . Before that, in order to erase the name Bernstein from the public, all of his ships still sailing under his name had already been transferred to Red Star Linie GmbH in 1938, which he had bought in 1935. The owners of the Horn-Linie, Erich Müller-Stinnes and Heinz Horn, had founded Westindische Schiffahrtkontor GmbH as early as 1934 , which became a shareholder and correspondent owner of all the Horn-Linie ships in 1939 . The Gravenstein , too , first came to the Westindische Schiffahrtkontor in 1939, but then returned to the Horn-Linie in 1940.
The old ship was requisitioned by the Navy in 1941 and then used as a barge in Gotenhafen . In the first months of 1945 it took part in the evacuation of German troops and refugees from East Prussia ( company Hannibal ) and was finally used as a block ship on March 27, 1945 in front of the entrance to Bassin II (at position 54 ° 32 ′ N , 18 ° 34 ′ E ) sunk in Gotenhafen. The wreck was removed and scrapped after the end of the war.
literature
- Günther Steinweg: The German merchant fleet in World War II. Duties and fate. Otto Schwartz, Göttingen, 1954, p. 102.
Web links
- http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?146415
- http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/lines/bernstein.shtml
- List of ships of the shipping company "Det Østasiatiske Kompagni" (Danish)
Footnotes
- ↑ In 1927 she moved her place of business from Bremen to Hamburg.
- ↑ Heinz Schön: Ostsee '45: People, Ships, Fates. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart, 183, ISBN 3-87943-856-0 , pp. 76 & 657.