Germania shipyard
The Fried. Krupp Germaniawerft in Kiel was the first German shipyard to manufacture submarines on a large scale. The shipbuilding company on the east bank of the Hörn in the Gaarden-Ost district of Kiel had been one of the most important contractors for the Imperial Navy since the end of the 19th century and, from 1935, the Navy .
The shipyards were dismantled after the end of World War II by order of the British occupying forces and the company was dissolved. A small part of the former shipyard site is occupied by ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS, formerly HDW ).
history
Bruhnsche Werft (prehistory, foundation)
The predecessor of the Germaniawerft is the Bruhnsche Werft, founded in Kiel in 1863 by the shipbuilder Christian Bruhn from Bornhöved under a Danish license . Its successor was the Norddeutsche Schiffbaugesellschaft when the city of Kiel gave it the site on Gaardener Strand free of charge on March 8, 1865. In 1867 the Norddeutsche Schiffbau-Actiengesellschaft emerged from it. The investment and working capital of 10 million thalers came from German investors around the Dukes of Ujest and Ratibor , as well as English investors, including Samson Lloyd Foster (1831–1879) from Wednesbury .
In the years shortly before the German Empire was founded in 1871, numerous shipyards were founded on the German coast. The background to this was the policy pursued by Minister of the Navy Albrecht von Roon to build a war fleet out of steam-powered iron ships and to promote the local shipbuilding industry, which, in contrast to more progressive, mainly British shipyards, has so far only been focused on the construction of wooden ships. Georg Howaldt , who studied mechanical engineering and the son of the industrialist August Howaldt , had already made it into iron shipbuilding in 1865 with the construction of the Vorwärts at the former Schleswig-Holstein naval shipyard in Ellerbek . After two years and seven ships, however, his lease expired in 1867. The Navy of the North German Confederation took over the site in Ellerbeck to build the Royal Shipyard in Kiel , from which the Imperial Shipyard Kiel emerged in 1871 . Georg Howald took over the management of the Norddeutsche Schiffbau-Actiengesellschaft , in which the family and the mechanical engineering company of his father, Schweffel & Howald in Kiel, participated financially.
North German shipyard (1867 to 1880)
A new shipyard for the construction of iron ships was immediately built on the site in Gaarden, which was able to start work as early as June 1867 and was soon known as the North German Shipyard . The first ship built there was the freight steamer Holsatia for Sartori & Berger in Kiel. By 1879, a total of 83 ships had been laid, including the Kaiserjacht Hohenzollern , whose completion was delayed until 1880. A year earlier, in 1879, the company had gone bankrupt.
Germania shipyard (until 1902)
Märkisch-Schlesische Maschinenbau und Hütten-Aktiengesellschaft , a manufacturer of steam engines from Berlin founded in 1822, became the new owner of the shipyard . This took over the remaining stock under construction from the bankruptcy estate and continued to operate as Germania shipyard. The first new building of the Germania shipyard was the Aviso Blitz from 1881. However, the financial difficulties persisted even among the new owners. In November 1882 Shipyard and Machine Works were in with a registered capital of three million Goldmark equipped shipbuilding and mechanical engineering corporation Germania merged.
Fried. Krupp Germaniawerft (until World War I)
From 1896 the shipyard was initially leased by Friedrich Krupp AG , then taken over from 1902 and its name changed to Friedrich Krupp Germaniawerft . The Germania shipyard built the coastal armored ship SMS Siegfried (launched in 1889), the armored ship SMS Wörth (1892), the ships of the line SMS Kaiser Wilhelm der Große (1899), SMS Zähringen (1901), SMS Braunschweig (1902) SMS Hessen ( 1903), SMS Deutschland (1904) and SMS Schleswig-Holstein (1906), the battleships SMS Prinzregent Luitpold (1912) and SMS Kronprinz (1914); the SMS Sachsen (1916) was no longer completed. For the Imperial Navy, the Germania shipyard also built the large cruiser SMS Kaiserin Augusta (1892) and the small cruisers SMS Gazelle (1898), SMS Nymphe (1899), SMS Amazone (1900), SMS Cöln (1909), SMS Magdeburg (1911) and SMS Karlsruhe (1912).
In 1902 one of the first submarines was built in Germany with the trout , which was later bought by the Russian Empire . In 1905 the U 1 was also the first submarine to be handed over to the Imperial Navy . In 1907 a series of three submarines was completed for Russia, and further submarines were also manufactured for Norway, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Navy , which were delivered disassembled by rail to the naval port of Pola and assembled there.
With the schooner yacht Germania , completed in 1908 and designed by Max Oertz for Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach , a racing yacht of this size was built for the first time in Germany.
From the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War
After the First World War, as a result of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, there were no major orders from the Reichsmarine , so the company ran into serious economic difficulties at the beginning of the 1920s. The company looked around for new fields of activity. After two tankers were built in 1921 from four unsupported submarine hulls , the shipyard later switched to the construction of luxury yachts. Together with two other large German shipyards, the establishment of the cover organization Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw in the Netherlands undermined the prohibition on the construction of submarines set out in the Versailles Treaty. During the years of the Weimar Republic , numerous larger and smaller steam and sailing yachts were launched at the Germania shipyard, which were mainly delivered to American millionaires. For example, the shipbuilding company manufactured the four-masted barque Hussar II (1931) - today's Sea Cloud - and the motor yacht Orion (1929), which operated as the cruise ship Regina Maris in the Mediterranean and Red Sea until the beginning of the 21st century .
After the seizure of power by the Nazis in early 1933, the Germaniawerft the course has been upgrading the armed forces into a major contractor of imperial or Navy . The first six class II B submarines were ordered as early as July 1934 ; In the summer of 1938 the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen was launched. The order for aircraft carrier B also went to the Kiel shipyard, but after the beginning of the Second World War the unfinished hull was still scrapped on the slipway , as the submarine construction had priority. The Germania shipyard delivered a total of 131 submarines of classes II B, VII , X B , XIV , XVII and XXIII to the navy; another 240 had been ordered. In 1944 the shipyard had over 10,000 employees, 11% of whom were slave labor .
With the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht , the Second World War ended in Europe. Together with the neighboring Deutsche Werke shipyard , the Germania shipyard , which was partially destroyed in the air raids on Kiel, was scheduled for dismantling . This resulted in angry protests from the population of the bombed city. A demonstration against the dismantling, co-organized by Mayor Andreas Gayk , was unsuccessful; the company was dissolved and not revived.
Later use of the former shipyard area
On the former area of the Helgen is now the Norway quay . At the end of the 1960s, Howaldtswerke (HDW) acquired most of the rest of the old shipyard on the banks of the Hörn and used the property as a storage and scrap yard, among other things. From 1968, the HDW's submarine construction was also located there in the Kiel-Süd plant, which was closed in 1989. Since the 1990s, attempts have been made to revive the fallow area close to the city center as part of the Kai-City Kiel project ; u. a. with the high-rise center at Germaniahafen and the Hörnbrücke for pedestrians and cyclists.
A hall built in 1939, in which there was a coppersmith / tin mill and a workshop for ship engines and compressors of the Germania shipyard, is an event center as Halle400 . North of Halle400, the Germaniahafen for guest sailors and traditional ships was laid out in 1998 as part of the redesign of the site as Kai-City Kiel .
Received ships
- U 1 (1906), submarine of the Imperial Navy, now in the Deutsches Museum in Munich
- Nusret (1912), mine-layer, Mersin, Turkey
- Sedov (1921), sail training ship of the Russian Navy, ex Magdalene Vinnen II , ex Commodore Johnson
- Sea Cloud (built in 1931 as Hussar II ), four-masted barque
- Évora (1931), first ferry, today excursion boat in Lisbon
- City of Kiel (1934), passenger ship in Kiel
The sailing ship Carthaginian II , built by the Germania shipyard in 1920 , which was on display for several years as a museum in Lahaina , Maui Island, Hawaii, was sunk off the coast in 2005 and has been a popular destination for divers ever since.
See also
Web links
- Documents and newspaper articles on Germaniawerft in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
- 1934–45 built submarines of the Germania shipyard on uboat.net
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Kiel, Krupps shipyard . On: Museumsportal Museen Nord , Museum Association Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg e. V. , accessed on October 13, 2016
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↑ Bernhard Graser: Northern Germany's Maritime Power: Their Organization, Their Ships, Their Ports and Their Manning , Verlag Friedrich Wilhelm Grunow, Leipzig 1870, p. 327
( full text in the Google book search) - ^ The Money Market Review. A Weekly Commercial and Financial Journal. Vol. 10, No. 259 (May 20, 1865), p. 660 ( Google book search ).
- ↑ cf. Sampson Lloyd Foster on gracesguide.co.uk
- ^ A b Paul Heinsius: The transition to machine drive and from wooden to iron shipbuilding on the German East and North Sea coasts in the 19th century , In: Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv , 1st edition 1975, p. 115 ( PDF file (p. 105– 122): 1.4 MB )