Homeland (ship)

**Homeland** p1
Ship data
flag	German Democratic Republic
Ship type	Passenger ship
Owner	Erich Weise
Whereabouts	Burned out on July 5, 1951
Machine system
machine	Gasoline engine

The Heimatland was an inland passenger ship in Berlin under the flag of the GDR , which hit the headlines due to a serious shipwreck on July 5, 1951 in Alt-Treptow . It is the worst accident for Berlin passenger shipping and inland shipping in the GDR.

Treptower Hafen 2007 with a memorial stone in the foreground

The misfortune

The owner and captain of the motor ship was Erich Weise. On July 5, 1951, it was to take 127 children and their carers from Prenzlauer Berg from Alt-Treptow on a trip to Hessenwinkel (locality of Rahnsdorf ). After driving 300 meters, the home country's gasoline engine exploded due to a carburetor defect in the port area and set the entire ship on fire. All the children sitting on the lower deck died. Despite the rescue operation of the passenger ship Elfriede under Captain Bernhard Langwaldt and the help of numerous volunteers, 28 children between the ages of 6 and 12 and 2 carers, according to West Berlin estimates, died in the accident. Tristan Micke from Berlin-Treptow , who analyzed the accident for the Verkehrsgeschichtliche Blätter , considers the number of victims from West Berlin to be realistic. Thirty victims are named on memorial plaques on the communal grave in the Friedrichsfelde central cemetery ; this number of victims was also adopted for the memorial stone erected on July 5, 2005 on the 54th anniversary of the catastrophe at Treptower Harbor . According to Micke, however, not all victims were buried in Friedrichsfelde; he claims to have seen a communal grave in the cemetery on Roelckestrasse , which later no longer existed.

The official investigation into the cause of the accident revealed that Erich Weise had the ship's diesel engine replaced with an old gasoline engine without official approval. In a particularly serious case, Weise was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Berlin-Mitte district court for deliberate transport endangerment. The car mechanic Walter Krüger, who replaced the engines, was imprisoned for five years.

Memorial stone at Treptower Harbor

Grave complex and memorial at the Friedrichsfelde central cemetery

Memorial plaques with names of the victims

According to Tristan Micke, Erich Weise drove on behalf of the state-owned Deutsche Schiffs- und Umschlagzentrale (DSU), whose role has never been clarified - the engine may have been replaced at their instigation. After Karin and Till Ludwig, the producers of the documentary Death on the Spree. The accident on the MS “Heimatland” was an attempt by Weise initially to obtain a replacement diesel engine with the help of the DSU, but this failed. The gasoline engine was then installed with the approval of the DSU. Representatives of the DSU inspected the renovation work several times and convinced themselves of its progress. After the installation was done, Weise immediately received the order to drive the next day for the later unlucky trip. So he had no chance of having the prescribed technical inspection of the boat before the first trip after the repair.

After Erich Weise was released from prison as part of an amnesty, he moved with his family to West Berlin and worked there again as an inland boatman.

Representation in the media

Injured pioneer leader in Friedrichshain hospital

During the Cold War, the accident was instrumentalized by the Eastern and Western media and presented very differently. The GDR emphasized that rescue measures by the riot police , the fire brigade and the water police had been initiated immediately . The Ost-Berliner Berliner Zeitung claimed that ambulances had to take a detour because they were not allowed to drive through the American sector , and that West Berlin clinics had refused fire victims because they were "not insured by the West". The West-Berliner Zeitung Der Tagesspiegel, on the other hand, spread the version that as a rescue measure a boat of the People's Police had only arrived after half an hour , and that the People's Police had not taken sufficient care of the children floating in the water. Furthermore, boats were sent by the West Berlin police, but the People's Police refused to help.

The GDR, which, in the opinion of Kurt Groggert, author of the Berliner Verkehrsblätter , was extremely inconvenient in view of the upcoming World Youth Festival in East Berlin, emphasized the role of rescuers. The then East Berlin mayor Friedrich Ebert junior honored 34 lifesavers on July 14, 1951 with certificates and gifts in kind. The most important rescuer, Bernhard Langwaldt, was arrested by the people's police at the scene of the accident and taken in handcuffs to the Rummelsburg prison in Berlin-Stralau . Langwaldt: "You [the People's Police ] probably thought that I was the captain of the misfortune." He was later released.

Contemporary witnesses from East Berlin, who were questioned by Karin and Till Ludwig in their film, described that the People's Police only half-heartedly took part in the rescue operations from their boats. Help offered from the West was in fact turned down; People's police boats even prevented rescuers from the west from being able to approach the scene of the accident through active action. The next West Berlin fire station was much closer than the next East Berlin station, which is why there were delays in rescue. However, West Berlin hospitals also refused to admit injured people who were not insured with a Western health insurance company.