Llandovery Castle (ship, 1914)
 As a hospital ship in the First World War
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The RMS Llandovery Castle (I) was a passenger steamer put into service in 1914 , which was used by the British shipping company Union-Castle Line in passenger and mail traffic between Great Britain and South Africa .
During the First World War , the ship served as HMHS Llandovery Castle as a hospital ship until it was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on June 27, 1918 . After the torpedoing, the castaways, a total of 234 people, mainly crew members and medical personnel, were shot in the rescue boats or floating in the water; only 24 people survived. The sinking and the subsequent "deliberate killing" of the ship's occupants is considered a serious war crime by the Imperial Navy in the naval war of the First World War .
Before the war
In April 1912 the British shipping company Union-Castle Line was bought by the businessman and politician Owen Philipps, 1st Baron Kylsant (1853–1937) and integrated into the Royal Mail Empire. With Philipps as the new chairman of the Union-Castle Line, a new ten-year postal contract was signed and two new ships were ordered to be used in the Royal East African Service from London to East Africa via the Suez Canal . This was intended to compete with Adolph Woermann's German East Africa Line. Both ships were named after Welsh castle ruins (→ Llandovery Castle ).
The first ship, the Llanstephan Castle (11,348 GRT), was ordered from Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering in Govan and was launched on August 29, 1913. The identical sister ship , the Llandovery Castle (11,423 GRT), was built at the Barclay, Curle and Company shipyard in the Whiteinch district of Glasgow and was launched on September 3, 1913. The 152.4 meter long and 19.29 meter wide ship had a chimney, two masts and two propellers. The quadruple expansion steam engines from Barclay, Curle & Company developed 1,135 nominal horsepower (5,800 PSi ) and allowed an average cruising speed of 14 knots (25.9 km / h) and a top speed of 15 knots (27.8 km / h). The passenger accommodations were designed for 234 passengers in the first class, 116 in the second class and 100 in the third class.
Completion took place in January 1914 and on March 6th the Llandovery Castle arrived in Durban for the first time . Due to the shortage of ships after the outbreak of World War I, the ship was used in the mail service from Southampton to South Africa in August 1914 . Her career as a passenger ship was very short: in December 1915, the steamer was drafted by the Royal Navy and converted into a troop transport . In March they brought the 11th Battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment, known as the Accrington Pals , from Port Said to France. Almost the entire battalion fell shortly afterwards in the Battle of the Somme .
In the summer of 1916, the ship was equipped as a hospital ship with 622 beds and began this new service on July 27, 1916. It was used to transport wounded Canadian soldiers from Europe to Nova Scotia . On June 7, 1918, Llandovery Castle arrived in Halifax for the last time with 644 wounded .
Sinking
On Thursday June 20, 1918, the Llandovery Castle ran under the command of Captain Edward A. Sylvester in Halifax for the return trip to Liverpool . On board were 258 people, all of them non-combatants , including the crew, 80 military doctors and medical ranks of the Canadian Army, and 14 nurses from the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS). The nurses were under the direction of Head Nurse Margaret Marjory Fraser, 34, daughter of Duncan Cameron Fraser , the eighth lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia . Military patients and passengers were not on board.
At around 9:30 p.m. Irish time on June 27, the illuminated Llandovery Castle, marked as a hospital ship, was torpedoed 116 nautical miles southwest of the Fastnet rock in the North Atlantic by the German submarine U 86 . U 86 was a submarine of the Imperial Navy , which was under the command of First Lieutenant Helmut Patzig .
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Patzig suspected military material on board and attacked the ship without warning outside the zone that was closed to unrestricted submarine warfare . The torpedo hit the rear of the engine room. The lights on board went out. The radio had been destroyed by the explosion, so that no emergency call could be made. The order to stop the engines could not be carried out because the crew members in the engine room were dead or wounded. Disembarking turned out to be difficult because of the increasing inclination and the forward movement of the ship. At least two lifeboats overturned during the evacuation; three could be deployed.
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The Llandovery Castle sank in just ten minutes. Shipwrecked people swam between boats and rubble. After his suspicion that there were military equipment or troops on board the ship was not confirmed when questioning castaways in the lifeboats, Patzig initially turned away. He later apparently decided to dispose of the witnesses to his crime and returned. With the exception of two officers and a master boatsman's mate , he sent the crew below deck, opened fire on the castaways and sank two lifeboats. He then forged the logbook entries and recorded a course far from the site of the sinking. Only one lifeboat, in which the captain of Llandovery Castle was, escaped the attack at dusk. The 24 people in the boat were the only survivors of the sinking. They rowed towards the Irish coast for two days and were picked up on June 29 by the destroyer Lysander (Commander Francis WD Twigg, OBE ). All other 234 people were killed by Patzig's attack. The British sloop Snowdrop (Commander George Ponsonby Sherston) and four American destroyers searched the area, but found no more survivors.
Reception and legal aftermath
The sinking of Llandovery Castle was immediately criticized as a war crime by the British. On the German side, the incidents were initially ignored. Not until a week later was a press release in which the naval war command denied the sinking by a German submarine and stated that Llandovery Castle must have run into a British mine. To date, the incident can be found in a few German publications.
Under pressure from the Allies, Helmut Patzig and his subordinate watch officers, Ludwig Dithmar and Johann Boldt, who had been on deck with him during the shootings, were to be brought to justice after the war (the NCO involved had already died). The captain Patzig was on the run and could not be located despite the arrest warrant (because of the accusation of murder). Charges were only brought against the subordinates. The trial and sentencing of Dithmar and Boldt was accompanied by protests from the right-wing German press and parties. The two were sentenced in 1921 by the Reichsgericht in Leipzig to four years in prison for aiding and abetting manslaughter. However, they were both able to escape from custody abroad. Dithmar was freed from prison in Naumburg by members of the Frankfurt department of the Consul organization , which was headed by Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz . Involved were u. a. Ernst von Salomon , Karl Tillessen and Erwin Kern . In 1928 the officers on the watch were acquitted in a retrial by the Reichsgericht after Helmut Patzig surrendered and declared his "sole guilt". However, the arrest warrant against him was canceled and the further proceedings were delayed until Patzig was amnestied by the Reich Minister of Justice in 1930 . A law on impunity of 1928 for political offenses and violations of the military law served as the basis, which in 1930 was extended to include homicides.
During the First World War, Patzig sank 24 ships, of which Llandovery Castle was the largest. In World War II he was again a submarine commander and also served on the staff of the submarine commander . He retired in 1945 and died in 1984 at the age of 94.
literature
Gerd Hankel: The Leipzig trials. German war crimes and their prosecution after the First World War . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-930908-85-9 .
See also
- HMHS Anglia : British hospital ship; ran into a German sea mine on November 17, 1915 and sank (134 dead)
- HMHS Britannic : British hospital ship; ran into a German sea mine on November 21, 1916 and sank (30 dead)
- HMHS Dover Castle : British hospital ship; sunk by a German submarine on May 26, 1917 (7 dead)
- HMHS Salta : British hospital ship; ran into a German sea mine on April 10, 1917 and sank (130 dead)
- HMHS Glenart Castle : British hospital ship; sunk by a German submarine on February 26, 1918 (153 dead)
- HMHS Rewa : British hospital ship; sunk by a German submarine ( U 55 ) on January 4, 1918 (4 dead)
Web links
- Gerd Hankel: Patzig, Helmut, Ludwig Dithmar and John Boldt , in: Kurt Groenewold , Alexander Ignor, Arnd Koch (ed.): Lexicon of Political Criminal Trials , online, as of October 2017.
- Short description of the ship in The Ships List (lower third)
- Tabular overview of technical and historical data
- The sister ships Llanstephan Castle and Llandovery Castle
- Website about the sinking of the ship with further links
- Lists of names
- The captain of Llandovery Castle , RA Sylvester
Footnotes
- ^ Gerd Hankel: The Leipzig trials. German war crimes and their prosecution after the First World War . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-930908-85-9 , p. 452.
- ↑ Hankel at historisches-centrum.de ( Memento from August 10, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (found April 19, 2010)
- ↑ Report on the course of events with a nautical chart at the Unioncastle shipping company section on the homepage ( Memento from March 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (English; accessed March 13, 2016)
- ^ A b Frank Neubacher: Criminological foundations of an international criminal jurisdiction , Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-16-148477-0 , p. 310 f. (found here April 18, 2010)
- ↑ a b Harald Wiggenhorn, Zeit online June 16, 1996: A debt almost without atonement ( accessed March 12, 2016)
- ^ Ingo von Münch : The Llandovery Castle case . In Hans-Jürgen Schlochauer ; Herbert Krüger ; Hermann Mosler ; Ulrich Scheuner : Dictionary of International Law Volume II -> Ibero-Americanism - Quirin Case <. In cooperation with the German Society for International Law, De Gruyter, Berlin 1961, ISBN 978-3110010312S. 420 f. (found here December 2nd, 2014)
- ↑ Martin Sabrow : The suppressed conspiracy. The Rathenau murder and the German counter-revolution . Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 1999, ISBN 3-596-14302-0 , pp. 175ff.