Indigirka (ship)
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The Indigirka ( Russian Индиги́рка ) was a steamship .
history
The ship was built in 1919 by the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company and was also launched in 1919 under the name Lake Galva . From the time it was put into service until it was sold to the Soviet Union in 1938 , it had several different names. When it was acquired by the USSR, it was renamed Indigirka . It drove in the service of Dalstroi , a warehouse-industrial complex of the Gulag , which was responsible for the exploitation of the far northeast of Russia, commonly known as Kolyma .
On December 8, 1939, the Indigirka left the port of Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk , heading towards Vladivostok . Captain Nikolai Lavrentievich Lapschin was in command. On board were 39 crew members, 249 fishermen and their families, 50 prisoners with guard and a further 835 prisoners.
On December 13, 1939 at 2:20 am local time, according to other sources on December 12, 1939, the ship ran aground in a snowstorm from the Japanese coast near the village of Sarufutsu in the Japanese sub-prefecture of Soya . The ship did not have any lifeboats. Foreign ships that were in the vicinity were not asked for help, because such prisoner transports were subject to the strictest secrecy.
The captain tried to enter La Pérouse Strait with his ship . The Japanese rescue workers were able to rescue the captain and most of the crew, guards and fishermen from the ship lying on its side in the shallow water.
On December 16, after the Japanese rescue team managed to open the hull with welding torches, they found only 28 survivors in the hull, one of whom later died. More than 700 or more than 1,000 prisoners were killed.
Later there was a ship of the same name that was involved in Operation Anadyr .
literature
- Anne Applebaum : The Gulag . Translated from the English by Frank Wolf. Siedler, Munich 2003, p. 197, ISBN 3-88680-642-1 .
- Martin J. Bollinger: Stalin's slave ships. Kolyma, the Gulag fleet, and the role of the West. Praeger, Westport CT et al. 2003, ISBN 0-275-98100-2 .
Web links
- The ship at www.wrecksite.eu (English) accessed on February 13, 2012
- Picture with the memorial accessed on February 14, 2012
- Entry at plimsollshipdata accessed on February 14, 2012