Karl Spindler (naval officer)

Karl Spindler (born May 29, 1887 in Königswinter , † November 29, 1951 in Bismarck , North Dakota ) was a German naval officer and author.

Before the First World War

Spindler grew up as the son of a wealthy quarry entrepreneur. He attended the municipal high school and grammar schools in Bonn and Cologne . He decided to work for the Navy and received his training at the Navy School in Bremen and the Navy Academy in Sønderborg . With the training ship Duchess Sophie Charlotte he sailed around the world from 1905 to 1907, including in Honolulu . Before the First World War , he was an officer on watch on a Lloyd express steamer. In 1913/14 he did a one-year voluntary service and became deputy helmsman dR

First World War

From August 1914 on, Spindler, who was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve sea ​​in 1915, commanded the outpost boat Polarstern . In March 1916 he took command of the auxiliary ship Libau . Disguised as a Norwegian merchant ship Aud , it was supposed to bring a shipment of weapons to the Irish west coast, where they would be used for the planned Easter Rising of the Irish against the British. The arms trade had previously been negotiated by the Irishman Roger Casement . The German government's aim was to bind British forces in Ireland. He managed to break through the British blockade and to be punctually at the agreed meeting point. The handover of the weapons failed because the uprising was postponed by one day. Spindler was meanwhile sought and provided by the British Navy. He succeeded in blowing up the Libau in the port entrance of Queenstown , Spindler and his crew became prisoners of war. According to his own statement, he claims to have sent information about the English blockade to his sister, who passed it on to Berlin and thus enabled Count von Luckner's breakthrough . In July 1917 he tried to escape. He wanted to reach an airport with an air officer, but was captured again beforehand. He fell seriously ill in the following years, so that he came to the Netherlands in April 1918 as part of the German-English prisoner of war exchange. In 1918/19 he was assigned to the German naval attaché at the German legation in The Hague , and from 1919 as a first lieutenant.

After the First World War

Probably because of his seafaring achievements, Spindler found further use in the reduced Imperial Navy. In 1920/21 he worked as the commander of the Reich water protection department in Kolberg. During this time his book The Mysterious Ship was published , in which he reports on his experiences in the First World War. From 1921 to 1927 he was promoted to captain of a department head of a naval command in Hamburg. In 1931 an English translation of his book was published. In the same year he went on a book tour to the United States, where he was celebrated enthusiastically by the people of Irish descent. This probably motivated him to emigrate to the USA. Since he did not have a residence permit, he was constantly struggling with the immigration authorities. In 1931, Captain Spindler and several of his crew received the highest honors, gold medals, from the Irish-Americans in New York for their unselfish help in helping a small state achieve independence from the British Empire.

In 1934/35 Spindler returned briefly to Germany. In the mid / late 1930s, he probably ran a hotel in Florida. When the USA entered the war in December 1941, he was interned as an enemy alien under the Enemy Alien Act proclaimed by President Roosevelt , initially in a camp in Orlando / Florida and later in Fort Lincoln / North Dakota. When he was released in 1945, his health was in poor health. In his last years he worked in a shop as a salesman.

Fonts

• The mysterious ship . Scherl, Berlin, 1921. (English parallel edition: Gun Running for Casement . Also translated into French, Spanish and Russian.)

literature

• Frieder Berres: Captain Karl Spindler. Memories of an extraordinary Königswinter citizen who went down in naval war history . In: Yearbook of the Rhein-Sieg-Kreis , 1998, pp. 98–114.
• Xander Clayton: AUD , Plymouth 2007.
• Cord Eberspächer, Gerhard Wiechmann: “Success revolution can decide war”. The use of SMH “Libau” in the Irish Easter Rising in 1916 . In: Schiff & Zeit / Panorama maritim , No. 67, spring 2008, pp. 2–16.

Web links

• Works by and about Karl Spindler (naval officer) at Open Library