Karl-Otto Dummer

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Karl-Otto Dummer (* December 8, 1932 ; † June 2009 ) was one of six survivors in the sinking of the sailing ship Pamir in 1957, in which eighty crew members of the Pamir died. He wrote two books about the misfortune.

When the ship went down in a hurricane , there were only three lifeboats in the water and few men could reach them. One of them was Karl-Otto Dummer, a trained baker and at that time cook's mate on the Pamir. At the age of 24 he was much older than his comrades in the lifeboat and therefore took over command. In the fight against insidious hallucinations, he was the only one who kept his nerve. He had the idea of ​​building an emergency sail and made sure that no panic broke out - although the water in the battered lifeboat was up to the shoulders of the castaways and sharks were circling around them. It wasn't until four days after the sinking that Dummer and four other men were rescued from the New York steamship Saxon.

Karl-Otto Dummer was the only one of the survivors to have checked his own memories and researched the experiences of others for decades. Just a few years after the accident, he began to write down what he had experienced. He described the downfall in detail in his two books Pamir - The Story of Downfall (1977 and 2007) and the four-masted barque Pamir (with Jochen Brennecke ).

Karl-Otto Dummer went to sea for another two years, then he studied business administration and took on leading positions at various department store groups. He lived in the Eifel, was married there for 18 years and has a son. Most recently he lived in Lütjenburg in Schleswig-Holstein.

He became particularly famous when the television film The Downfall of the Pamirs was broadcast in 2006 . He described it as "a work of the imagination that wrongly claims to be authentic". He criticized the script, e.g. B. the representation of boxing matches on board. “Lots of things that couldn't be. Our language was also very different. The prehistory completely made up. I said to the TV people: Great film, great actor, but damn it, leave out the name 'Pamir', none of this has anything to do with her! Is the truth so undramatic that you had to add such idiotic things? But what I miss most is awe - awe of those who went down with the 'Pamir'. "

Karl-Otto Dummer died in June 2009.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b SOS from PAMIR. Captain Deutschlandradio Kultur November 1, 2006
  2. ↑ a b c Sinking of the Pamir - prisoners of the ghost ship Spiegel online, September 21, 2007
  3. ↑ Internet forum with book review on "Pamir - The Story of Downfall" ( Memento from May 31, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Interview with Karl-Otto Dummer ( Memento from January 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (2006)
  5. ↑ Contemporary witnesses to the sinking of the Pamir ( Memento from August 4, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  6. ↑ SOS in the hurricane - 20 minutes later the "Pamir" was gone Hamburger Abendblatt November 17th, 2006
  7. ^ Obituary notice Karl-Otto Dummer Kieler Nachrichten June 18, 2009
personal data
SURNAME Stupid, Karl-Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German seaman and author
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1932
DATE OF DEATH June 2009