Peter Deilmann

Peter Deilmann (born May 11, 1935 in Travemünde ; † November 2, 2003 in London ) was a German shipowner . He was the founder and long-time director of the Peter Deilmann shipping company .

Life

Peter Deilmann was the son of a mechanical engineer and a Lübeck clerk. As a child he was interested in ships and began to sail. After an apprenticeship at a shipping company, he worked for various companies in Europe. After a short period of unemployment in the 1960s, he took jobs as a port worker before finding employment again as a shipping clerk. In 1968 he founded his own company in Lübeck : he loaded and chartered ships. The first ships of his own were fishing cutters, with which he offered day trips for anglers. A short time later, he took over the ownership of two small cargo ships, initially in part and later entirely. In 1973 Deilmann moved the headquarters of his shipping company from Lübeck to Neustadt in Holstein , where in the same year he began operating a car ferry , the new Nordlicht building he had ordered , to Bornholm . This ferry connection was not a success, in 1976 it was discontinued; the ship was sold to AG Ems and then served the route Emden - Borkum .

In the freight business, however, Deilmann makes good profits. With this money he bought the first passenger ships and offered so-called " butter trips " to Denmark , which enjoyed increasing popularity. The Nordbrise , a converted Norwegian mail ship , marked the beginning of the cruise business on the Baltic Sea. For the first time, ports of Eastern Bloc countries could also be called at. The first cruises to Greenland took place with the north breeze . Other ships were bought and converted into small cruise ships.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Deilmann withdrew completely from the freight business and gradually sold all ten freighters. Coastal passenger shipping was also given up. Deilmann saw the future in the area of ​​cruises and in 1979 awarded Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft AG (HDW) in Kiel the order for a 60 million  DM cruise ship for 330 passengers. The Berlin was named "1986 Love Boat " of the same ZDF known television series and made cruises popular in Germany.

In 1984 Peter Deilmann commissioned the first newly built river cruise ship, the Danube Princess . This ship also became known through the ZDF series of the same name. In 1996 Deilmann again commissioned a ship from HDW: The Deutschland was to become the most modern and luxurious cruise ship under the German flag. Peter Deilmann experienced a severe blow of fate with the crash of the Concorde he chartered on July 25, 2000 . 113 people were killed in the accident, most of them passengers on the way to New York for a Caribbean cruise with Germany .

After Deilmann's death, the shipping company was taken over by his daughters Gisa and Hedda Deilmann. On September 1, 2009, insolvency proceedings were opened against the shipping company's assets .

literature

• Arno Surminski, Hilde Hudemann (illustration): A river trip on the Elbe into the European heart with the "Princess of Prussia" . Peter-Deilmann-Reederei, Neustadt in Holstein 1991
• Peter Bachér, Ingrid M. Schmeck (illustration): And another beautiful day will come: twelve cruise stories from Germany . Peter-Deilmann-Reederei, Neustadt in Holstein 1999
• Peter Deilmann . In: Hansa - International Maritime Journal . December 2003, p. 6-7 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ spiegel.de