Hans-Joachim von Mellenthin

Hans-Joachim Wilhelm Ernst von Mellenthin (born March 25, 1887 in Schivelbein / Hinterpommern ; † June 12, 1971 in Kiel ) was a German naval officer and submarine commander who sank ship space of over 170,000 GRT during the First World War . After the war he was a cattle breeder and coffee grower.

Life

He came from the old Pomeranian officer family von Mellenthin . His father Anton von Mellenthin was a Prussian district judge who married Antonie Hackert on October 24, 1879. Hans-Joachim von Mellenthin himself married Sophie von Boddien , who brought a daughter, Gottliebe von Kalnein, into the marriage.

Hans-Joachim von Mellenthin appeared as on April 1, 1906 midshipman in the Imperial Navy one. At the beginning of the First World War he was a teacher in the I. Torpedo Division. He was then assigned to the Ottoman Navy in Constantinople on August 23, 1914 and was a torpedo officer on the torpedo cruiser Berk-i Satvet from September 6, 1914 . With this he participated on October 29, 1914 in the bombardment of the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk , which damaged several Russian ships and the British Friederike , and then in securing troop transports to Trabzon . After his ship ran into a Russian sea ​​mine on January 2, 1915 and had to be taken out of service for a long time for repair purposes, Mellenthin became the commander of a Turkish torpedo boat .

From August 1915 he received his command for submarine training in the submarine school on SM UB 11 and was promoted to lieutenant captain on July 13, 1916 . On August 29, 1916, he took over the new submarine SM UB 43 , with which he sank 19 ships in seven trips. He passed this command on to his successor on April 8, 1917 and took over the new and larger boat SM UB 49 on June 28, 1917 at the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg. With this boat he moved to the Mediterranean Sea and sank another 39 ships on seven enemy voyages. Mellenthin was awarded the order Pour le Mérite on February 25, 1918 . He gave up command of SM UB 49 on June 12, 1918, and took over the new mining U-cruiser SM U 120 on August 31, 1918 . However, he only put this boat into service and completed the usual test drives. The end of the war prevented further patrols.

On November 18, 1918, Mellenthin was placed at the disposal of the submarine inspection. After the revolution in February 1919, he joined the Loewenfeld Freikorps as a company commander in the Sturm Battalion . After it had been made available to the Kiel command office in mid-November 1919, it was accepted into the Provisional Reichsmarine on January 7, 1920 . He initially served as flag lieutenant and deputy semi-flotilla chief of the 1st Baltic Sea Minesweeping Flotilla. On October 16, 1920 he was transferred as an adjutant to inspect the naval education system. On May 10, 1922 Mellenthin was made available to the naval station of the Baltic Sea and retired from active service on July 31, 1922 with the character of a corvette captain .

After his military service he dealt with the trade with South America . In 1923 Mellenthin emigrated to Colombia , where he became a successful cattle breeder and coffee planter. He invested his wealth in platinum and returned to the German Empire after 16 years of emigration. Here he acquired the Wittenhagen estate in 1940 and shortly afterwards the nearby Conow domain .

As part of the preparations for World War II , Mellenthin was made available to the Navy on August 1, 1939 . On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg , he was given the character of a frigate captain on August 27, 1939 . After the outbreak of war he was briefly in command of the mining ship Hanseatic City of Danzig from September 14 to October 12, 1939 . He was then made available again and given leave of absence. Only after the end of the western campaign and the occupation of France was Mellenthin used again and from July 1, 1940 commissioned with the establishment of the outpost flotilla Atlantic. On July 26, 1940, he changed to the staff of the head of sea transport as a consultant and received the patent for his rank on August 20, 1940 . As such, Mellenthin was from January 1, 1941 to December 31, 1942 chief of staff at the Gotenhafen naval arsenal . Then his mobilization provision was lifted and Mellenthin was retired.

The husband of his stepdaughter Gottliebe, Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff , hid with his family in the woods of Conow in 1944 because he was threatened with arrest for his involvement in the Hitler assassination attempt . One of the foresters working there revealed his hiding place, whereupon Count von Lehndorff was arrested and later executed. It was not until April, shortly before the Red Army approached , that Hans-Joachim von Mellenthin and his wife fled, initially to Hamburg . In 1950 the family went back to Colombia for ten years, bought the Hacienda Tolu and started over with cattle breeding. In 1971 Hans-Joachim von Mellenthin died. He previously bequeathed the Conow domain and the Wittenhagen estate to his wife Sophie.

According to his wishes, he was buried near the Baltic Sea near Kiel . In the municipality of Heikendorf in the Plön district there is also the Möltenort submarine memorial , which was built at his instigation and commemorates the approximately 30,000 submarine drivers who remained at sea during both world wars.

literature

• Hanns Möller: History of the Knights of the Order Pour le Mérite in World War II , Volume II: M – L, Verlag Bernard & Graefe, Berlin 1935, pp. 37–29
• Karl-Friedrich Hildebrand, Christian Zweng: The knights of the order Pour le Mérite of the First World War , Volume 2: H – O, Biblio Verlag, Bissendorf 2003, ISBN 3-7648-2516-2 , pp. 432–434

Web links

• http://www.gut-conow.de
• http://uboat.net/wwi/men/commanders/199.html

Individual evidence

1. ^ Klaus Wolf: Gallipoli 1915. The German-Turkish military alliance in the First World War. Report, Sulzbach / Ts., Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-932385-29-2 , p. 257.