Lillie Matthiessen (ship)
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The Lillie Matthiessen was a cargo steamer that u. a. 1945 was used as a hospital ship to rescue concentration camp prisoners.
Ship description
The steamer belonged to the so-called "Mosquito fleet" of the Scandinavian shipowners and was used for around 30 years in the Caribbean to transport bananas . It was built in 1905 in Stavanger by the Stavanger Støberi & Dok shipyard. The fruit steamer was measured at 985 GRT and had a load capacity of 1400 tdw. Two steam boilers with 12 bar supplied the triple expansion engine and gave the ship a speed of 10 knots with a drive power of 125 hp .
The cargo hold capacity important for fruit ships was 60,000 cubic feet. The four hatches were mechanically ventilated and the cargo was handled with four cargo booms and four winches. The isolation of the cargo hold and the installation of a cargo cooling system probably did not take place until 1933.
resume
The ship was launched in 1905 under the name Imperator for the Norwegian shipping company Holdt & Isachsen, Starvanger and was chartered to United Fruit Company on a long-term basis . In 1920, the ship owner Halfdan Bucher Isachsen, also from Stavanger, took over the ship. It remained in the charter , which only ended in 1933. This year the ship was sold to the Swedish shipping company A / B Westindia in Stockholm, which renamed the ship Lillie Matthiessen .
The ship was scrapped in Belgium in 1952.
As a hospital ship
To liberate concentration camp prisoners, a Swedish expedition started on March 8th from Malmö, consisting of:
- 308 employees (including 20 doctors and nurses, the rest were volunteers from supply regiments)
- 36 ambulance buses
- 19 trucks
- 7 cars
- 7 motorcycles
- Rescue and workshop vehicles, a field kitchen and all necessary equipment, food and spare parts
Much of it was loaded on the Lillie Matthiessen (including 350 tons of gasoline, 6,000 food parcels for the inmates in Neuengamme concentration camp, and buses and vehicles, some as deck cargo) and transported to Lübeck.
On April 30, 1945, around 1,500 French, Belgian and Dutch concentration camp prisoners were brought back from the Athens to Neustadt in Holstein from the Cap Arcona, which was overcrowded with around 7,500 . Some of these prisoners were driven that night on the white buses of the Swedish Red Cross to the Swedish steamers Lillie Matthiessen and sister ship Magdalena in Lübeck , which transported them to Trelleborg . There were 225 female concentration camp prisoners on the Lillie Matthiessen and 223 male concentration camp prisoners on the Magdalena .
background
Many Norwegians and Danes were in German concentration camps and the Norwegian diplomat Niels Christian Ditleff got involved at the end of 1944 to initiate a rescue operation by the Swedish Red Cross. Count Folke Bernadotte , nephew of King Gustaf V Adolf and Vice Chairman of the Swedish Red Cross, was entrusted with the negotiations and implementation. In February 1945 he met Heinrich Himmler in Hohenlychen in the Uckermark and managed to have the Scandinavian political prisoners concentrated in secrecy in the Neuengamme concentration camp and transported from here to Sweden. The transports were organized by Bernadotte and began in March 1945. Friedrichsruh served as a base in Germany . Around 4,200 prisoners were transported to Denmark at the end of March. With the support of the international Red Cross, around 7,000 women were rescued from the Ravensbrück concentration camp by freight train. In total, around 21,000 foreign concentration camp prisoners, around a third of whom were women, were rescued in the last days of the war with the “Bernadotte” campaign.
Sources and literature
- Photo of the ship and data sheet: DS Lillie Matthiessen
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Bernhard Strebel : The Ravensbrück concentration camp. History of a camp complex , with a foreword by Germaine Tillion, at the same time dissertation 2001 at the University of Hanover under the title The camp complex of the Ravensbrück concentration camp , Paderborn; Munich; Vienna; Zurich: Schöningh, 2003, ISBN 3-506-70123-1 ; Table of contents can be downloaded as a PDF document
- in French translation: Ravensbrück. Un complexe concentrationnaire (in the series Pour une histoire du XXe siècle ), Traduction de l'allemand par Odile Demange. Préface de Germaine Tillion, [Paris]: Fayard, 2005, ISBN 2-213-62423-2
- Wilhelm Lange: Cap Arcona. Neustadt in Holstein 2014.
- Christoph Ernst, Ulrike Jensen: Hope was the last to die. Rasch and Röhring Verlag, Hamburg 1989.
- Katharina Hertz-Eichenrode (ed.): A concentration camp is being cleared. Edition Temmen , ISBN 3-86108-764-2 .
Footnotes
- ↑ Katharina Hertz-Eichenrode (ed.): A concentration camp is cleared. Edition Temmen , ISBN 3-86108-764-2 , p. 264
- ^ Wilhelm Lange: Cap Arcona. Neustadt in Holstein 2014. Berlin 2002, p. 75.
- ^ Wrong letter , Der Spiegel 40/1970, September 28, 1970.