Heinz Schön

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Heinz Schön (born June 3, 1926 in Jauer , Lower Silesia ; † April 7, 2013 in Bad Salzuflen ) was a German archivist , theater director , non-fiction author and publicist. He survived the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945. He was a contemporary witness of this event and an archivist on the southern Baltic Sea. In 1986, Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker awarded him the Federal Cross of Merit .

Life

youth

Heinz Schön had been interested in seafaring since his early youth; in 1941 he acquired the Lakeside Sports badge A in Prieros , then 1942 nautical sports badge B in Seemoos on Lake Constance and in 1943 the lake Port badge C on the sail training ship Horst Wessel . Because of its increasing myopia he had from the training ship of the Navy to sign off to assist in the Merchant Marine recruit . He began his training as a paymaster in the autumn of 1943 in Hamburg in the central office of the Hamburg-South American Steamship Company . From February 1944 he was employed as a ship paymaster's assistant on the Wilhelm Gustloff , a former KdF holiday ship that had been converted into a hospital ship for the Navy and was moored in Gotenhafen- Oxhöft as a barge for the 2nd submarine training division.

Downfall of Wilhelm Gustloff

On January 21, the Hannibal operation began and the Wilhelm Gustloff was put back into operation for the purpose of evacuating refugees and soldiers across the southern Baltic Sea. On the first voyage from Gotenhafen to Kiel, with possibly over 10,000 people on board, the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk on January 30, 1945 by three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine S-13 . Presumably over 9,000 people died in the ship's sinking, only about 1,230 survived.

When the heel increased, Heinz Schön was washed overboard into the sea. A young sailor from the ship's crew, later the angiologist Werner Schoop , pulled him onto a raft and saved his life. The torpedo boat T 36 took the castaways from the raft on board and brought them to the port in Sassnitz . Heinz Schön arrived in Hamburg by train on February 3rd, was assigned to the steamer General San Martin on February 17th and took part in eleven rescue trips with refugees across the southern Baltic Sea.

Commitment as a contemporary witness and archivist

Heinz Schön was released from the merchant navy on June 16, 1945, traveled to the American zone of occupation and studied at the Administrative Academy in Göttingen . Then he built a community college there. He married in June 1947 and moved to Lockhausen with his family in 1953 . From 1953 to 1990 he was employed as an advertising manager, municipal tourism director and then as theater manager of the Herford City Theater . He founded the Hoekerfest in Herford in 1973 and made a big difference to the cultural and economic life of the city of Herford .

The sinking of the Gustloff never let go of him until the end of his life. As early as 1945 he was looking for other contemporary witnesses and survivors of the disaster and collected reports for his Gustloff archive and for his Baltic Sea archive . He made his debut in 1952 with the book Der Untergang der Wilhelm Gustloff . More books, lectures and press articles followed. He worked as a consultant and screenwriter for the film Nacht fell over Gotenhafen , which appeared in German cinemas in 1960.

In 1965, the federal government set up a "Baltic Sea Research Center" at the Ost-Akademie Lüneburg , whose task it was to compile documentation on the repatriation of refugees, wounded and soldiers with ships of the merchant and navy across the southern Baltic Sea in the spring of 1945. Heinz Schön took over the part about merchant shipping on a voluntary basis. After seven years of activity, the "Research Center Baltic Sea" was unexpectedly closed shortly before publication. The materials developed by Heinz Schön remained in his archive as agreed for copyright reasons. He continued his research and in 1983 published the 700-page standard work Ostsee '45 - Menschen, Ships, Schicksale , which was continuously supplemented, expanded and published several times. In 1984 the Landsmannschaft Westpreußen e. V. the Marienburg Prize .

In 1985 and 1986 he organized the meetings of the rescued and rescuers of the refugees in the Ostseebad Damp as a media officer in the board of trustees “ Albatros Memorial Site - Rescue by Sea ”. In 1987, Heinz Schön donated the "Baltic Sea Rescue Medal 1945", which was awarded to those who rescued in Damp. At a lecture in January 1997 in Freiburg , he met his lifesaver Werner Schoop (1924–2011), who pulled him onto a raft on January 30, 1945 from the Baltic Sea. In 2002 Günter Grass mentioned him by name in his novella Im Krebsgang as follows:

“But Heinz Schön alone did that in detail and from a temporal distance. He (...) evaluated the chaos of newspaper reports from back then. (...) Since he survived the sinking of the KdF passenger ship, then the hospital, then the barracks and finally the refugee transport ship, after the war he began to collect and write down everything that concerned the Gustloff in good and bad times. He only knew this one subject; or that was the only thing that had taken hold of him. (...) He had listed everything: the number of cabins, the vast amount of food for the trip, the size of the sun deck in square meters, the number of complete and ultimately missing lifeboats and finally (...) the number of dead and survivors. "

- Günter Grass : In the crab. A novella - in memoriam . Steidl Verlag , Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-88243-800-2 . Pp. 61-62.

When the television film Die Gustloff was shot, he was present as a "Gustloff Expert" in March 2007 at the shooting days in Stralsund and in May at Magic Media Company in Cologne.

Heinz Schön died in April 2013. According to his request, the urn and plaque were sunk on May 10, 2013 in the Baltic Sea on the wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff . After the death of Heinz Schön, part of the Gustloff archive fell victim to water damage, the rest went into the private property of the diver Matthias Schneider, who was a friend of Schön.

Publications (selection)

  • The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff - factual report by a survivor . Edited by Walter Böckmann, Karina-Goltze-Verlag, Göttingen 1952, DNB 454444680 .
  • Baltic Sea '45 - people, ships, fates . Motorbuch-Verlag , Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-87943-856-0 .
  • The KdF ships and their fate. A documentation . Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-613-01192-1 .
  • The Cap Arcona disaster. Documentation based on eyewitness reports . Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-613-01270-7 .
  • The last days of the war. Baltic ports 1945 . Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-613-01654-0 .
  • In enemy hands in the home country. Fate of East Prussian women among Russians and Poles 1945–1948 . Arndt Verlag , Kiel 1998, ISBN 978-3-88741-198-5 .
  • SOS Wilhelm Gustloff. The greatest shipping disaster in history . Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-613-01900-0 .
  • Hitler's dream ships. The “Kraft durch Freude” fleet 1934–1939 . Arndt Verlag, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-88741-031-9 .
  • Escape from East Prussia in 1945. The Red Army manhunt . Arndt Verlag, Kiel 2001, ISBN 3-88741-035-1 .
  • The secret of the amber room. The end of the legends about the Tsar's treasure that has disappeared in Königsberg . Paul Pietsch Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-613-50401-4 .
  • The tragedy of the refugee ships. Sunk in the Baltic Sea 1944−45 . Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 2004; ISBN 3-613-02424-1 .
  • Myth of New Swabia. For Hitler at the South Pole. The German Antarctic Expedition 1938–1939 . Bonus-Verlag , Selent 2004, ISBN 3-935962-05-3 .
  • Königsberg fateful years. The fall of the capital of East Prussia 1944–1948 . Arndt Verlag, Kiel 2012, ISBN 978-3887410537 .
  • with Armin Fuhrer : Erich Koch, Hitler's brown tsar. Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reich Commissioner of the Ukraine . Olzog Verlag , Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-7892-8305-5 .
  • ( posthumously ) with Jürgen Kleindienst (Hrsg.): Pommern auf der Flucht 1945. Rescue across the Baltic Sea from the Pomeranian ports of Rügenwalde, Kolberg, Stettin, Swinemünde, Greifswald, Stralsund and Saßnitz . Zeitgut Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86614-175-9 .

DVD video

  • with Karl Höffkes , speaker Andreas Meese: Triumph and tragedy of "Wilhelm Gustloff" . Just Entertainment, Hilversum 2009.

Filming (participation)

Awards / honors

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brita Heitmann: chronicler of the "Gustloff", contemporary witness and author Heinz Schön died in Bad Salzuflen. The Preussische Allgemeine Zeitung, April 24, 2013, accessed on October 6, 2013 .
  2. ↑ Hartmut Braun: Heinz Schön did a lot for Herford. Neue Westfälische, April 13, 2013, accessed October 7, 2013 .
  3. ^ Heinz Schön: Gustloff Archive <> Heinz Schön. Document collection on M / S "Wilhelm Gustloff". (PDF; 177 kB) (No longer available online.) August 30, 1988, archived from the original on October 17, 2013 ; Retrieved October 16, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.balticgold.com
  4. ^ "Albatros" memorial site - rescue by sea (closed). Federal Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, June 30, 2012, accessed on October 6, 2013 .
  5. ↑ Meiko Haselhorst: Herford. Last wish fulfilled. Neue Westfälische.de, May 22, 2013, accessed on October 6, 2013 .
  6. ↑ Meiko Haselhorst: A return to the "Gustloff" was his last wish. Die Welt, November 25, 2013, accessed January 14, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Nice, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German archivist and non-fiction author
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Jauer , Lower Silesia
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 2013
Place of death Bad Salzuflen