Olympic Crew 1936 (Navy)

Olympic rings as hat badges and submarine coats of arms

Under the Olympic crew , naval officers of the Navy with the year of entry in 1936 were summarized.

Crew history

The name of the crew was chosen with reference to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin . It consisted of approx. 370 candidate naval officers. In addition there were 66 candidate engineer officers, 36 candidates from weapons officers and about 50 other officers. Over 140 of them later became submarine commanders.

The crew took part in three part-crews from 1936 for about a year on various foreign training trips, which were recorded in three travel reports. The crew's training ships were the Emden , SMS Schlesien and SMS Schleswig-Holstein . Most of them were then promoted to ensigns . The total period of service in training lasted 30 months. Some of the naval officers were then assigned to the Air Force and later reassigned to the Navy, such as Georg Paul von Rabenau and Ralf Thomsen .

The members of the crew wore the Olympic rings as hat badges. Many of the members of this crew later adopted this symbol as a tower emblem as submarine commanders . Examples are U 97 , U 306 , U 344 , U 505 , U 802 , U 869 or U 995 . A total of 55 submarines of the Kriegsmarine carried the Olympic rings as a tower coat of arms.

Of the almost 500 candidate officers in the crew, around 460 survived the war.

Known crew members (selection)

• Thilo Bode (1918–2014), journalist
• Hans-Jürgen Hellriegel (1917–1944), naval officer
• Otto Ites (1918–1982), naval officer
• Gustav Poel (1917–2009), submarine commander in World War II, steel manager and management consultant
• Victor Graf von Reventlow-Criminil (1916–1992), politician
• Rolf Steinhaus (1916–2004), Vice Admiral in the German Navy
• Rolf Thomsen (1915–2003), Flotilla Admiral in the German Navy

literature

• 300 days high armored ship . 1936.
• A high-board armored ship visits America. Crew 1936 liner "Schleswig-Holstein" . 1936.
• Olympic crew sees Asia. Between Berlin and Tokyo . Ehlers, 1937.
• Georg Högel: Emblems, coats of arms, Maling's German submarines 1939–1945 . Koehlers , 1987.
• Rudolf Hoffmann: 50 years of the Olympic crew in 1936. A log from April 3rd, 1936 to May 2nd, 1986 . Self-published , Hamburg , 1986.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Houlihan: War language . Lulu.com, 2009, ISBN 978-0-578-01849-2 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).
2. ^ Olympic Review . International Olympic Committee,., 1977, pp. 661 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).
3. ^ Hans Meier-Welcker: Handbook on German Military History, 1648-1939 . Bernard & Graefe, 1979, p. 433 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).
4. ^ Hans Meier-Welcker: Handbook on German Military History, 1648-1939 . Bernard & Graefe, 1979, p. 434 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).
5. ^ Hans Meier-Welcker: Handbook on German Military History, 1648-1939 . Bernard & Graefe, 1979, p. 435 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).
6. ^ Sean E. Livingston: Oakville's Flower: The History of the HMCS Oakville . Dundurn, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4597-2843-1 , pp. 50 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).
7. ^ ^{A b} Jak P. Mallmann Showell: U-Boat Command and the Battle of the Atlantic . Conway Maritime Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-85177-487-9 , pp. 145 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).
8. ↑ Death on the high seas: Kassel's short sponsorship with submarine 306. August 14, 2017, accessed on December 14, 2019 . 
9. ^ Hans Herlin: Damned Atlantic: Fates of German submarine drivers; Factual report . Europ. Education Community, 1976, p. 88 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).
10. ↑ Bert-Oliver Manig: The politics of honor: the rehabilitation of professional soldiers in the early Federal Republic . Wallstein Verlag, 2004, ISBN 978-3-89244-658-3 , pp. 80 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).