Gustav Schröder (captain)

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Gustav Schröder (1937)

Gustav Schröder (born September 27, 1885 in Hadersleben , North Schleswig , German Empire , † January 10, 1959 in Hamburg ) was a German captain . In 1939 he saved 906 German Jews from being attacked by the National Socialists on the St. Louis passenger ship under his command .

Schröder had been a member of the NSDAP since 1933 .

Life

In front of the St. Louis

Schröder came from an old, Danish-German, educated middle class family from North Schleswig , which fell to Prussia in 1864 and Denmark again in 1920 .

As a schoolboy he was interested in many things, but his passion was sailing and seafaring. In 1902 he left the German grammar school after the upper secondary school , because he was gripped by wanderlust. With the consent of his father, Professor Nis Ankjär Schröder, Gustav Schröder signed on to the Grand Duchess Elisabeth in Hamburg on the sailing training ship .

He left the ship with the license to become an ordinary seaman . Then he hired as a deckhand on the express steamer Deutschland and several circumnavigations followed.

After Sailboat time he went as a Second Officer for shipping companies from Hong Kong . When the First World War broke out in 1914, he was interned by the British colonial powers in Calcutta and was not released again until 1920.

In 1921 he was hired by HAPAG and earned his stripes for twelve years on the trampoline . In 1935 Gustav Schröder became an officer on the Hansa . In August 1936, at the age of 50, he received his captain's license and took over the motor ship Ozeana . Schröder led numerous KdF trips to the Mediterranean Sea and Scandinavia and took on vacation replacements on ships that sailed between Hamburg and New York , including the St. Louis .

Schröder was married and lived with his family in Hamburg.

The odyssey of St. Louis

Captain Schröder (center) is negotiating in the port of Antwerp with representatives of the Belgian authorities about a disembarkation permit for the passengers of the St. Louis

On May 13, 1939, Schröder drove as captain on the HAPAG passenger ship St. Louis (approx. 17,600 GRT) from the port of Hamburg to Cuba . Of the 937 almost without exception Jewish passengers who were on the run from persecution in Germany and who wanted to wait for entry into the USA in Cuba, only 29 were allowed to land in Havana despite the laboriously acquired landing papers, as Cuba had recently changed its visa regulations would have. All negotiations by Jewish organizations did not lead to success either.

The St. Louis then crossed Florida. Since the USA and Canada also rejected the ship, Captain Schröder received an order to start the return journey. Fearing deportation to concentration camps , the passengers panicked and threatened mass suicide and the hijacking of the ship. It was only shortly before arrival in Europe that Schröder's efforts made it possible to disembark the threatened passengers on June 17, 1939 in the Belgian port city of Antwerp .

The refugees were distributed roughly one quarter each to Great Britain , Belgium , France and the Netherlands . With the exception of England, these countries were occupied by German troops in 1940. As a result, 254 former passengers on the St. Louis fell again into the hands of the Nazis and were murdered in the Holocaust .

After the St. Louis

Schröder brought the St. Louis back to Hamburg without damage. The shipping company Hapag released him. Afterwards he worked at the German Seewarte in Hamburg. Schröder is buried in the Hamburg-Nienstedten cemetery.

Appreciation

Memorial plaque on the St. Pauli Landungsbrücken in Hamburg

In 1957, Captain Schröder was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon “for services to the people and the country in the rescue of emigrants” . In 1993 he was posthumously accepted by the State of Israel in Yad Vashem into the circle of the “ Righteous Among the Nations ”.

The Hanseatic City of Hamburg named the street Kapitän-Schröder-Weg in Hamburg-Langenhorn after him in 1989 or February 1990 , and there has been a detailed memorial plaque on the jetties since 2000. Since 2017, a green area between Kirchenstrasse and the St. Trinitatis Church in Altona had to be named Kapitän-Schröder-Park, which finally happened in May 2019.

Fonts

literature

  • Hans Herlin : The tragedy of the “St. Louis “: May 13 - June 17, 1939. With documents . Herbig, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7766-2242-3 . (= New edition of: No promised land. The tragedy of St. Louis . 1961)
  • Georg JE Mautner Markhof : The St. Louis drama. Background and riddle of a mysterious operation by the Third Reich. Leopold Stocker Verlag , Graz, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-7020-0931-0 .
  • Georg Reinfelder: MS "St. Louis “: the odyssey to Cuba - spring 1939. Captain Gustav Schröder rescues 906 German Jews from the Nazis . Hentrich and Hentrich, Teetz 2002, ISBN 3-933471-30-3 .
  • Bent Vedsted Rønne: Gustav Schröder - a North Schleswig native at the hot spots of the world . In: Grenzfriedenshefte, Vol. 66, 2019, Issue 1, pp. 37–50 ( online ).
  • Matthias Loeber: The last voyage of a Hapag steamer. The story of the St. Louis and its captain Gustav Schröder . In: Men from Morgenstern , Heimatbund an Elbe and Weser estuary e. V. (Ed.): Niederdeutsches Heimatblatt . No. 843 . Nordsee-Zeitung GmbH, Bremerhaven March 2020, p. 1–2 ( digitized version [PDF; 5.9 MB ; accessed on August 1, 2020]).

Movie

About Gustav Schroeder's trip with the St. Louis staged Stuart Rosenberg 1976 movie Voyage of the Damned ( Voyage of the Damned ) with Max von Sydow in the role of captain. The basis was the factual novel of the same name (German title Das Schiff der Verdammten - Die Irrfahrt der St. Luis , 1976) by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts (1974). The uncut version of the English film production comprises 182 minutes of material.

In the October 21, 2019 First broadcast docudrama The Unwanted plays Ulrich Noethen Captain Schröder (scenes, documentary and eyewitness).

Web links

Commons : Gustav Schröder  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Quoted from: Georg Reinfelder: MS "St. Louis". The odyssey to Cuba in spring 1939. Captain Gustav Schroeder saves 906 German Jews from being attacked by the Nazis . Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag Berlin 2002. ISBN 3-933471-30-3 , p. 214
  2. https://www.welt.de/geschichte/zweiter-weltkrieg/article202119188/Irrfahrt-der-St-Louis-Warum-ein-NSDAP-Mitglied-936-Juden-rettete.html
  3. Klaus Braeuer: The odyssey of a Hamburg ship. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , October 21, 2019, p. 19.
  4. Gustav Schröder at knerger.de
  5. Rita Bake : A Memory of the City. Streets, squares, bridges in Hamburg named after women and men , Volume 3, Hamburg, July 2017, p. 756
  6. Street names on Langehorn-archiv.de
  7. “In memory of a hero. A park at the fish market is to be named after Captain Schröder. ”In:“ Evangelische Zeitung für Hamburg ”, November 5, 2017, p. 18. Author abbreviation: cv / epd.
  8. the unwanted - the odyssey of St. Louis. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , October 21, 2019.