Hans Zitt

Hans Zitt (around 1905 - after 1937) was a German single-handed sailor and adventurer .

resume

Apart from his sailing boat trip to India described in his book, little is known of him. Since the journey lasted from 1928 to 1932 according to his descriptions and he was 26 years old on the way back, he was probably born in 1905 or 1906.

In an accident in the Swiss mountains in 1927, Hans Zitt suffered serious injuries and a permanent handicap, so that the enthusiastic athlete looked for a sport in which his lame leg would not hinder him.

Inspired by Captain Franz Romer's crossing of the Atlantic in a folding boat , he began to build a 6-meter-long boat near Munich , which he called " Bavaria " , following a rather vague handicraft instruction in rhyme form . The fact that his self-designed and built boat sank immediately when it was first launched did not dampen his enthusiasm in any way.

First with companions, then alone, he sailed down the Danube , through the Bosporus and via Greece to Port Said .

Life in the Balkans appears poor and harsh even by the standards of the time. In Turkey he tried himself as a mechanic and visited the battlefields of the First World War on the Dardanelles . A treasure hunt in Greece failed. In Egypt , because he had no money for the required deposit, he was only allowed to go ashore after a round trip on board a freighter through half the Aegean and earned the money for the passage through the Suez Canal in the circus as a prize boxer .

The Red Sea put him to the test. For days he lay without water, shaken by severe malaria , in the cabin of his boat, which was bobbing in the doldrums.

After the Horn of Africa , he initially stayed on the Arab coast, but after an attack by Bedouins in Oman , he set a direct course to India across the open sea. After an eleven-week voyage during which he capsized in a storm and lost all his drinking water, he finally reached India around three years after he started in Germany.

Hans Zitt was a staunch National Socialist who actively participated in Hitler's failed coup attempt in Munich in 1923 . In his book Ein Mann, ein Boot, ein Fernes Land , published in 1937, he made no secret of his political convictions, as they corresponded to the prevailing zeitgeist and earned him sympathy in the press.

Hans Zitt's trip may not seem particularly spectacular at first glance, but the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea are particularly difficult waters for sailing boats because of the wind conditions there, especially for such small boats and without an auxiliary engine. The proximity of the coast was, then as now, an additional risk instead of an aid because of the uncertain political conditions in most of the neighboring countries. In the Red Sea, the extensive coral reefs also make sailing close to the coast dangerous.

In 1961, the circumnavigator Rollo Gebhard had to give up trying to follow Zitt's route with a similarly sized boat in Yemen after he, like Hans Zitt, had capsized several times and was attacked by Bedouins while going ashore.

In the German Democratic Republic , Zitt's book Sturm auf den Annaberg: Mit dem Freikorps Oberland in Oberschlesien ( Bertelsmann , Gütersloh 1938) was placed on the list of literature to be sorted out.

literature

• Hans Zitt: A man, a boat, a distant land. Schwarzhäupter-Verl., Leipzig, Berlin 1937.
• Jean Merrien: You sailed alone. Delius, Klasing et al. Co., Bielefeld, Berlin, 3rd edition, 1972, ISBN 3-7688-0140-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Info on polunbi.de