Hermann Ritter (officer)

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Hermann Ritter (born December 30, 1891 in Munich , † April 30, 1968 in Leoben ) was a German nautical officer , fur hunter and officer in the Navy in World War II , most recently as a lieutenant at sea .

Life

Hermann Ritter was born in Munich to a Finnish mother and an Austrian father and raised a Roman Catholic . Ritter went to the merchant navy and received his ship officer license in 1917 . Shortly afterwards he married the 20-year-old Christiane Knoll (1897–2000), who soon afterwards gave birth to his daughter Karin.

Hermann Ritter went hunting with his trawler in the North Sea and also spent several winters in the northern polar region. In the 1930s, Ritter traveled with his wife and the Norwegian Karl Nicolaisen from Tromsø to Spitsbergen , where he spent a year in a lonely hut far from civilization, sometimes alone with her and sometimes with three people. In the summer of 1934 they landed by ship in Ny-Ålesund and hiked to Gråhuken , the northernmost point of Andrée-Land , in the north of Spitsbergen between Woodfjorden and Wijdefjorden . Hermann Ritter was often out hunting for days, while Christiane stayed alone in the hut and wrote her later, much-noticed book A woman experiences the polar night . The couple stayed on Svalbard until the summer of 1935.

In the Second World War, Ritter was drafted as an officer in the Navy and in 1942, as a lieutenant at sea, he was in command of the weather observation ship 1 Hermann . The Secret State Police wanted to prevent his appointment at first because, as a devout Catholic, he only approved the killing of people in emergencies such as fighting, and he had also been seen in his cabin reading a book by a Jewish author. This led to doubts in his occupation about his loyalty to the Hitler government.

In July 1942 Weiss made a reconnaissance flight in which he identified the area of Greenland around the 75th parallel as the ideal location for a Wehrmacht weather station. The Hermann was in use from August 12, 1942 as part of the Holzauge company and ran from the port of Tromso towards Greenland on August 22, 1942 . Ritter reached Shannon on August 27, 1942 and landed with a Wehrmacht unit under his command and a group of meteorologists under the direction of Gottfried Weiss (1911-2000), a total of 17 men, in East Greenland . On site, Ritter then chose the Hansa Bay on the Sabine Island as a wintering place. The group remained undiscovered over the winter of 1942/1943 and reported its weather observations to Germany. The heavily damaged by ice Hermann was the March 17, 1943 in the Hansa Bay Sabine Island by its crew scuttled . On May 13, 1943, the Germans were discovered by the Danish Northeast Greenland Sled Patrol , whereupon a gun battle broke out. Danish corporal (NCO) Eli Knudsen was fatally wounded while two members of the patrol were captured. The headquarters of the Eskimonæs sledge patrol near the southern tip of the island of Clavering Ø around 95 kilometers to the southwest was partially destroyed. The two Danish prisoners were later able to flee and took Hermann Ritter as a prisoner to Scoresbysund (Ittoqqortoormiit). There he was taken into custody by US Army soldiers . Ritter spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war in the United States .

Ritter was a time inmate of the prison camp in Crossville ( Tennessee ). Since he spoke English very well, he talked a lot with the Americans. As a devout Catholic, he also had no inclination towards National Socialist ideology. The sea captain Jürgen Wattenberg (1900-1995) of U 162, who was influential among the prisoners in Crossville, suspected him of being a spy for the Americans. On March 3, 1944, the US Department of War designated Camp Papago Park in Arizona, in which until then almost exclusively submarine drivers had been held, as a prison camp for all German prisoners of war from the Navy. This is how Hermann Ritter came there and was a camp inmate when the young submarine driver Werner Drechsler of U 118 , who had been listening for the US naval authorities in the months before, was beaten up by seven fellow prisoners (from other submarines) and was hung up. In the interrogations that followed, Ritter raised serious accusations against the camp spokesman, the sea captain Juergen Wattenberg, who had also been transferred from Crossville, and who regarded any kind of cooperation with the Americans as high treason. According to Ritter's words, Wattenberg approved of Drechsler's murder; He also said that the anti-fascists in the camp should all be hanged. In Crossville, Wattenberg tried to hang a German prisoner who did not confess to Hitler. He also spread the rumor - also in Papago Park - that Ritter was a US informant. Ritter feared for his life because of this and tried - in vain - to be relocated from Papago Park.

After the Second World War, Hermann and Christiane Ritter moved to Leoben in Styria , where Hermann died in 1968 at the age of 76. Christiane survived him by more than 32 years and died in Vienna at the age of 103.

literature

  • Henner Reitmeier: A must without a toilet. Christiane Ritter's much published report from the polar night , in: Die Brücke , No. 167, Sept. – Dec. 2014, p. 122 ( online with a slightly different introduction)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Otto Zerlik: Christiane Ritter 80 years old. For the award of the Adalbert Stlfter Medal . Sudetenpost 1977, issue 12.
  2. ^ Lars Normann Sørensen, Henry Rudi: Isbjørnkonge , Oslo 2001.
  3. Jane Eppinga: Death at Papago Park POW Camp: A Tragic Murder and America's Last Mass Execution . The History Press, Cheltenham 2017. pp. 78f. ISBN 978-1-4396-6086-7 .