Karl-Adolf Schlitt

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Karl-Adolf Schlitt (born April 16, 1918 in Laboe ; † April 7, 2009 ) was a German officer in the Navy , most recently a lieutenant captain , and a submarine commander in World War II . He gained notoriety for the navy because in April 1945 he caused the loss of the U 1206 under his command on its first patrol off the coast of Scotland through incorrect use of the on- board toilet , whereby four crew members died and the remaining 46 were taken prisoner by the British. From 1964 to 1970 he was the last district administrator in the Oldenburg district in Schleswig-Holstein and later the publishing director of Kieler Nachrichten .

Life

After graduating from high school, Karl-Adolf Schlitt joined the Navy as an officer candidate on April 3, 1937 at the age of less than 19 and became part of Crew 37 a (also known as Crew IV / 37). By September 1939 he did his basic and board training, which he completed as a lieutenant at sea . After the beginning of the Second World War, he was posted to the Air Force in October 1939 , where he was responsible for the flight squadrons on the battleships Scharnhorst and Tirpitz and the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer . On September 1, 1941 he was promoted to lieutenant at sea . In August 1943 he switched to the submarine weapon, where he was trained until June 1944 and on March 1, 1944 was appointed captain lieutenant .

In July 1944, Kapitänleutnant Schlitt was given command of U 1206 as the successor to Oberleutnant zur See Günther Fritze . The submarine initially served as a training ship and was assigned to the 11th U-Flotilla . During this time, the submarine received a snorkel that was attached to the location of the on-board gun. On April 6, 1945, the submarine ran from Kristiansand in Norway on its first war voyage towards Scotland . For a few days the boat drove off the Scottish coast without encountering enemy ships. To protect against enemy attacks, the submarine drove to a depth of 60 m and was last 8 nautical miles from Peterhead .

On April 14, the submarine was lost due to a failure of the ultra-modern high-pressure on- board toilet . Schlitt stated in a report that when water broke in, he was in the engine room to help repair a failed diesel engine while a mechanic was trying to fix the front toilet. The reason for this was an incorrectly or not at all inserted external valve of the pressure toilet. Statements by other survivors showed, however, that after using the toilet, Schlitt overlooked an order that the toilet could only be flushed by a specially trained specialist. Seawater, mixed with Schlitt's excrement and urine, poured into the submarine through the open valves at high pressure. When the seawater reached the batteries under the toilet, toxic chlorine gas was formed . In this hopeless situation, Schlitt ordered the submarine to appear immediately. On the surface, however, the boat was immediately noticed by Royal Air Force aviators and came under fire, killing one crew member. Schlitt ordered the submarine to submerge itself and had the crew drive to the coast in lifeboats. While three men drowned when they tried to climb the steep slope from their rubber dinghy in stormy seas, six sailors managed to save themselves to the Scottish mainland. Other crew members of U 1206 were brought ashore by British ships. A total of 4 men from Schlitt's crew perished, while 46 men - including Schitt himself - were taken prisoner by the British. Schlitt was brought ashore with another 13 men from the submarine, who were in a large lifeboat and two small boats tied up with this, in the fishing boat Reaper by Alec John Stephen and his assistant John Smith. Stephen initially thought the castaways were survivors of a sinking Norwegian ship and only found out their identity on land. They were detained at Peterhead Police Station and taken to London by rail the next day . Schlitt was housed for a time in the Featherstone Park POW camp near Haltwhistle in Northumberland , where he began to be interested in legal studies.

Schlitt had to spend just under three years in Great Britain. He was one of the German submarine commanders who, during the Nuremberg Trial of the main war criminals, confirmed in a joint statement to the commandant of the Featherstone Park prison camp that the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, had not given orders to kill crews of sunk Allied ships. Schlitt was released from captivity on February 29, 1948.

Statue of the newsboy

After returning to Germany, Karl Adolf Schlitt studied law in Kiel and passed the second state examination in the 1950s. Schlitt was involved in local politics in Schleswig-Holstein and was elected district administrator of the Oldenburg district in Holstein on September 1, 1964 . In the five and a half years of his tenure, his main tasks were to strengthen tourism, dykes, coastal protection and landscape protection, but also to prepare for the regional reform, as a result of which, among other things, the districts of Oldenburg in Holstein and Eutin were merged to form the new Ostholstein district. This merger was completed on April 25, 1970, with which Schlitt retired. Karl-Adolf Schlitt later became the publishing director of Kieler Nachrichten . When he left in 1982, he set himself a monument by commissioning the Schwarzenbeck artist Frauke Wehberg to make a bronze statue of a newspaper boy, which has since stood in front of the publishing house on Asmus-Bremer-Platz in Kiel .

Military awards

literature

  • Jochen Brennecke: Hunters and Hunted - German U-Boats 1939-1945 . Koehler Verlag, Herford 1982. ISBN 3-7822-0262-7
  • Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The submarine war 1939-1945. Volume 1: The German submarine commanders. Preface by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rohwer, Member of the Presidium of the International Commission on Military History. ES Mittler and Son, Hamburg / Berlin / Boon 1996, p. 209. ISBN 3-8132-0490-1
  • Walter Lohmann, Hans H. Hildebrand: The German Navy 1939-1945, Volume 3 . Podzun-Pallas-Verlag, Bad Nauheim 1956, p. 186 (section 292).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Report of the commandant Karl-Adolf Schlitt , 1945. Buchan Shipwrecks
  2. ↑ Jak P. Mallman Showell: The U-Boat Century: German Submarine Warfare 1906-2006 . Chatham Publishing, 2006. p. 81. ISBN 978-1-86176-241-2
  3. ↑ Florian Stark: Operating errors in the toilet capsized the submarine. Die Welt , September 23, 2015.
  4. ↑ Norman Adams: The Reaper's Strangest Catch. The Scots Magazine, April 1990, pp. 41-44. Digitized on Buchan Shipwrecks, U 1206: pp. 41, 42, 43, 44,
  5. ^ To the Lord Camp Commandant of P.0.W.-Camp 18, Featherstone Park . In: Trial of the Major War Criminals. International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, November 14, 1945 - October 1, 1946. pp. 80–83.
  6. ↑ Meike Klüver: Obituary for Elisabeth Schwarz, Government Director i. R., Hamburg . Nomos 17 (3) , 2014, p. 131f.
  7. ^ Ostholstein district: Karl-Adolf Schlitt. Obituary, April 2009.
  8. ↑ Manfred Gothsch: Kiel 150 years of Kieler Nachrichten - The story of the newspaper boy. Kiel News , November 22, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Schlitt, Karl-Adolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German naval officer, submarine commander, district administrator of the Oldenburg in Holstein district
DATE OF BIRTH April 16, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Laboe
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 2009