Potsdam (ship, 1935)
 Potsdam
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
.svg){kind=small}
The Schnelldampfer Potsdam was a passenger ship of the North German Lloyd . When she was first commissioned in 1935, which was Potsdam the first ship in the world merchant fleet with once-through boilers of the type Benson in combination with a turbo-electric drive . The Potsdam , built by Blohm & Voss in Hamburg, was demolished in Pakistan in the mid-1970s after more than forty years of service .
Blohm & Voss shipyard
The Hamburg shipping company HAPAG was the client for the new building . The launch took place after the baptism by the Lord Mayor of Potsdam , Major General a. D. Hans Friedrichs , on January 16, 1935. Before it was commissioned, the ship was sold to Norddeutscher Lloyd in Bremen. The first test run took place on June 22, 1935. The equipment was finished on June 28 and on July 5, 1935, the Potsdam left Bremerhaven for her maiden voyage towards East Asia.
Special
The Potsdam was provided with a bulbous bow that was progressive for the time . The four Benson high-pressure boilers fed two steam turbines , which drove the two three-phase generators to supply the two traction motors. Siemens-Schuckert (SSW) had acquired the patent for the boiler design from the inventor Mark Benson . In 1930, SSW signed a license agreement with the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg to introduce ultra-high pressure boilers into shipping. The new type was then tested for the first time with supercritical pressure (over 225 bar ) in one of a total of four boilers on the freighter Uckermark .
The Potsdam Benson boilers generated steam at 90 bar (subcritical), which was superheated to 470 ° C and entered the turbines at around 80 bar. This superheated steam generated the necessary three-phase current for the two electric motors in two SSW steam turbine generators at a speed of 3200 min −1, which drove two four-bladed fixed propellers with a maximum speed of 168 min −1 . A daily consumption of 150 tons of oil was calculated at full speed. For a round trip from Germany to East Asia calling at 27 ports, she only needed 66 days and for the route from Bremerhaven to Singapore only 19 days. From 1938 the route to Shanghai developed into one of the main escape routes for German and Austrian Jews to Shanghai , since no emigration visas were required there.
In addition to the propulsion system, many auxiliary machines on board were also operated electrically . Particularly noteworthy in this context were the six electric slewing jib cranes for cargo handling, which were present alongside the usual loading gear . For operation in the port, the ship had two power generation units with diesel engines .
The construction was partly riveted, partly by arc welding . During construction, around 70 kilometers of steel connections were welded, which led to a reduction in the weight of the steel structure by around 600 tons. The hull had a steel structure weight of about 7,000 tons when it was launched.
The time during the Second World War
With the outbreak of the Second World War , the Potsdam was first stationed in Hamburg and then in Gotenhafen as a residential ship for the Navy . In 1942 there was a plan, Projekt Elbe , to convert the ship into an aircraft carrier. Eventually it was to be converted into a school aircraft carrier because of its slow speed for a warship, but with the end of the aircraft carrier construction program in January 1943, that plan did not materialize either. From April 17, 1944, the Potsdam houseboat was in Gotenhafen for the “coastal fortification of the Middle Baltic Sea”. At the beginning of 1945 the passenger ship was involved in the evacuation of the people who fled from East and West Prussia to the Hela peninsula (→ Hannibal company ). About 50,000 people were killed in several trips from Hela from the Potsdam transported to the West.
After 1945
On June 20, 1945 the ship was delivered to Great Britain . The Ministry of War Transport was the new owner . It was converted into a troop transport under the new name Empire Jewel . Bereedert the ship from then on was Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company in London. In November 1946, the ship, renamed Empire Fowey , was in the Firth of Forth . In the period from 1947 to 1950, the Empire Fowey in Glasgow was rebuilt at the Stephen & Sons shipyard and fitted with new boilers and turbines. In early 1960 the ship was decommissioned. The shipping company Pan Islamic SS Co., based in Karachi (Pakistan), bought it in May of the same year and put it back into service as a pilgrim ship under the name Safina-E-Hujjaj . It mainly operated on the route between Karachi and Jeddah , the gateway to Mecca . In addition to pilgrimages, it also went to the Pakistan-Hong Kong service and to East Africa.
After more than forty years of service, the ship was finally decommissioned in 1976. On October 22nd, Gadani (Pakistan) began scrapping.
literature
- Claus Rothe: German ocean passenger ships. 1919 to 1985. transpress, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-344-00164-7 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Astrid Freyeisen: Shanghai and the politics of the Third Reich . Königshausen & Neumann, 2000, ISBN 978-3-8260-1690-5 , p. 398.
- ↑ Potsdam (german-navy.de)