Otto Hersing

Otto Hersing (born November 30, 1885 in Mulhouse ; † July 5, 1960 in Angelmodde near Münster ) was a German naval officer and commandant of the submarine SM U 21 during the First World War . Kapitänleutnant Otto Hersing achieved fame because he was the first submarine commander to sank an enemy ship with a torpedo shot.

Otto Hersing

origin

Otto comes from a family of doctors. He was the son of the professor of ophthalmology in Strasbourg, Friedrich Wilhelm Hersing (1846-1926) and his wife Luise, née Eicher (1863-1927), a businessman's daughter from Speyer. His grandfather Friedrich Wilhelm Hersing was a doctor in Geistingen.

Otto Hersing married Klara Buscher (* 1894) in 1923, the marriage remained childless.

Life

Otto Hersing joined the Imperial Navy on April 11, 1903 and received his training on the cadet training ship Stosch , the torpedo training ship Blücher and the artillery training ship Mars . As an ensign he also drove on the ship of the line Kaiser Wilhelm II. In September 1906 he was promoted to lieutenant and served two years on the small cruiser Hamburg . Then Hersing was a year company officer in the I. Torpedo Division and then officer on watch on torpedo boats. In 1909 he was promoted to first lieutenant . From 1911 to 1913 he made trips to the West Indies and the Mediterranean as a watch officer on the Hertha . In March 1912 he was trained in submarine service and received his own command in October of the following year.

After the outbreak of World War II, he crossed on 5 September 1914 U 21 under his command off the east coast of Scotland and met the 8th  Destroyer - flotilla led by the light cruiser Pathfinder . Since the Pathfinder could only run at a maximum speed of 5 knots due to scarce coal supplies  , it became an easy target for the first torpedo shot. The torpedo hit the Pathfinder at an unarmored point near the ammunition chambers. It exploded instantly and sank in minutes. 259 seamen lost their lives, only eleven were saved. In mid-December 1914 he was promoted to lieutenant captain.

In May 1915, Hersing sank two British ships of the line , the Triumph and the Majestic, off the Dardanelles . After he had already received both classes of the Iron Cross , Wilhelm II awarded him the Order of Pour le Mérite , the highest honor for officers, on June 5, 1915 as the second submarine commander . His hometown Kreuznach honored him with the award of honorary citizenship . On February 8, 1916, the French armored cruiser Amiral Charner was also sunk . At the end of the war in 1918/19, Hersing transferred the German troops from Riga to the Reich.

After the war, Hersing was the commander of all floating naval forces during the Kapp Putsch . On July 31, 1924 he was retired from active service as a corvette captain . He then worked as a liaison officer in the Reichsmarine in military district  6 and as a farmer on his estate near Rastede until 1935 . On August 27, 1939, the so-called Tannenberg Day, he was given the character of a frigate captain .

Commemoration

Three streets are named after Otto Hersing:

• Hersingstrasse in Bremerhaven
• Otto-Hersing-Strasse in Bad Kreuznach
• Otto-Hersing-Weg in Münster

Fonts

• U21 saves the Dardanelles. Amalthea Verlag, Vienna 1932 (with portrait).

literature

• Bodo Herzog:  Hersing, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , p. 699 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Helmut Pemsel: Biographical lexicon on naval war history. Sea heroes from antiquity to the present. Bernard & Graefe, Koblenz 1985 (with picture).
• Karl-Friedrich Hildebrand, Christian Zweng: The knights of the order Pour le Mérite of the First World War. Volume 2: HO. Biblio Verlag, Bissendorf 2003, ISBN 3-7648-2516-2 , pp. 76-77.
• Hanns Möller: History of the knights of the order pour le mérite in the world war. Volume I: A-L. Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Berlin 1935, pp. 476–478.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Otto Weddigen : Our submarine war and our submarine heroes. Ernst'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Leipzig 1917, p. 44. ( Digitized collection of the Berlin State Library )