SMS Victoria Louise
 SMS Victoria Louise after her renovation
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The SMS Victoria Louise was the type ship of the class of five cruisers 2nd class ( armored deck cruiser ) of the Imperial Navy named after her . In 1899 the ship was reclassified as a large cruiser . Both the ship and the class were named in honor of the Emperor's daughter Viktoria Luise of Prussia .
construction
For the new construction of the cruiser II. Class L - it was reclassified as a large cruiser in 1899 - the keel was stretched on April 9, 1896 by Bremer Werft AG Weser . This was the shipyard's first order to build a large ship from the Imperial Navy. The ship was ready for launch on March 29, 1897, 16 days before Hertha, which had been laid down in Kiel a good six months earlier . The Hereditary Grand Duke Friedrich August von Oldenburg gave the baptismal address . He also christened the cruiser in the name of Princess Viktoria Luise of Prussia , although the spelling of the ship differed from that of its namesake.
Fleet service
The Victoria Louise was first put into service on February 20, 1899 for test drives. On September 11th this had to be interrupted because the Kaiserliche Werft Wilhelmshaven had to make some improvements. It was not until August 22, 1900 that the ship could be put into service again and the test drives could be continued. They lasted until December 21st and indicated the need for further improvements.
From January 28 to February 7, 1901, the Victoria Louise was one of the units that were sent to a fleet mourning parade for the late British Queen Victoria . From April 20, 1901, the cruiser belonged to the 1st Squadron, with which it took part in various maneuvers. In October 1901 and March 1902 the ship was briefly assigned to the artillery inspection and formed the 1st reconnaissance group together with the small cruisers SMS Amazone and SMS Hela during the autumn maneuvers in 1902 . From November 23 to December 14, 1902, the Victoria Louise was temporarily the flagship of the second admiral of the squadron, Rear Admiral Ludwig Borckenhagen .
From March 1, 1903, the Victoria Louise belonged to the newly formed association of reconnaissance ships, the flagship of which was the SMS Prinz Heinrich . In May 1903 the ship took part in a trip to Spain and visited Vigo . From October 26th to 30th, it was assigned to the 2nd Squadron to temporarily replace the SMS Hildebrand in the shipyard as the flagship. After fleet maneuvers in the Baltic and North Sea from November 30 to December 5, in which the Victoria Louise once again participated in the association of reconnaissance ships, the ship was decommissioned on December 12, 1903 in Wilhelmshaven .
Use as a training ship
Due to the obsolescence of the Bismarck- class cruiser frigates used as training ships , the Imperial Navy needed a replacement for them. As the financial means for the construction of special ships were lacking, the Victoria Louise class ships were only a few years old, but had already been overhauled by military developments . The type ship was rebuilt from 1906 to 1908 by the Kaiserliche Werft Wilhelmshaven for 2,552,000 marks , including changes to the armament and the replacement of the previously used boilers with eight marine boilers, an in-house development of the Reichsmarinamt . As a result of the modifications to the boiler system, one of the chimneys could be omitted, which together with the elimination of the heavy battle mast - which was replaced by a pole mast - led to a significant change in the silhouette of the ship.
The Victoria Louise was put back into service on April 2, 1908 and replaced the SMS Stein as a training ship. Although the ship was under the inspection of the educational system, it was not used as a training ship, but continued to be a large cruiser. In the same month, the first cabin boys and midshipmen came on board, who remained on the ship until the end of the long training voyage in March of the following year.
In July 1908 Victoria Louise began her first trip abroad . Since the ship was supposed to take part in an international balloon series ascent , a scientific commission was on board. The cruiser reached the Kalmen via Madeira and Tenerife , where the balloon ascents took place and a Victoria Louise balloon was able to set an altitude record of 21,800 m. On August 5, the scientists left the ship, which continued on its way to the Mediterranean. There it participated together with Hertha in early January 1909 in an aid campaign for Messina, which was badly damaged by an earthquake . The cruiser's first voyage ended on March 10, 1909 in Kiel .
With a new class of ship boys and midshipmen on board, the Victoria Louise first undertook a training voyage in the Baltic Sea in the summer of 1909 and set out on her second voyage abroad in August. The ship reached Newport via the Azores , where Hertha and the small cruisers SMS Bremen and SMS Dresden also arrived in September . The four ships took part in the Hudson-Fulton celebrations in New York from September 26 to October 9, 1909 , during which the official German representative, Grand Admiral Hans von Koester, was on board the Victoria Louise . The occasion for these celebrations were 300 years of first sailing on the Hudson and the start of regular service between New York and Albany with the steamship Clermont designed by Robert Fulton in 1807. Fulton patented the Clermont's propulsion concept in 1809 . The Victoria Louise crossed following the stay in New York through West Indian waters and was back in Kiel on March 10, 1910th
The third trip abroad began on August 11, 1910 and led to the Mediterranean. It ended on March 7, 1911. After a short lay in the shipyard, the Victoria Louise took sea cadets from the local naval school on board for the first time in Flensburg - Mürwik . This was followed by the usual summer voyage, which in 1911 led first to the Baltic Sea and then to Norwegian waters. After Kaiser Wilhelm II had visited the ship in Balestrand , it started out from Bergen to Iceland , North America and the West Indies. The school cruiser returned from this fourth voyage on March 4, 1912 in Kiel.
Stockholm was visited during the usual summer trip in 1912 . The big overseas voyage for this training year began on August 10th in Wilhelmshaven and led first to Antwerp , where the Belgian King Albert I visited the Victoria Louise . The ship then continued its voyage to North America and the West Indies. From October 31 to November 8, Veracruz was called, as political turmoil in Mexico made it necessary to protect German citizens. On March 10, 1913, this fifth voyage was finished in Kiel.
After the usual overhaul and the summer voyage, the last major training voyage began on August 11, 1913, the destination of which was the Mediterranean. The Greek King Constantine I and his family took part in the Christmas party on board the Victoria Louise in the port of Piraeus . On March 5, 1914, the ship reached Kiel again. The last summer voyage began on June 1st and led into the Baltic Sea and Norwegian waters and ended on July 27th in Wilhelmshaven.
Use in the First World War
With the outbreak of World War I , the Victoria Louise was assigned to the newly formed V Reconnaissance Group, in which the school cruisers with the exception of the Freya were combined. The ship was initially used for the outpost service in the western Baltic Sea, where it was attacked by a British submarine . However, the torpedo could be evaded. Since the ships of the Victoria Louise class had insufficient armor protection and were of low combat value, their decommissioning was ordered on October 28, 1914. The Victoria Louise went to Gdansk , was disarmed there from November 1st to 7th and then decommissioned.
Whereabouts
During the war , the Victoria Louise remained in Danzig as a mine dump and barge . On October 1, 1919, the cruiser was removed from the list of warships and subsequently acquired by the North German Civil Engineering Company in Berlin. This sold the ship to Danziger Hoch- und Tiefbau GmbH, which had it converted into a freight steamer in Danzig and gave it the new name Flora Sommerfeld . The ship was used until 1922 and was scrapped in Gdansk the following year.
The battle cruiser SMS Mackensen , which was commissioned on August 14, 1914 and launched on April 24, 1917, was built to replace the Victoria Louise . Due to the terms of the Versailles Treaty , however, it was no longer completed and was scrapped in 1922.
Commanders
| February 20 to September 11, 1899 | Sea captain Hugo Westphal |
| August 22 to September 1900 | Sea captain Hans Meyer |
| September to November 1900 | Captain Georg Schur |
| November 1900 to April 1901 | Sea captain Hans Meyer |
| April to September 1901 | Sea captain Raimund Winkler |
| September 1901 to September 1902 | Frigate captain / sea captain Adolf Poschmann |
| September 1902 to December 12, 1903 | Frigate captain / sea captain Johannes Merten |
| April 2, 1908 to March 1910 | Frigate captain / sea captain Franz Mauve |
| April 1910 to April 1912 | Sea captain Horst von Hippel |
| April 1912 to April 1914 | Sea captain Theodor Frey |
| April 7th to November 7th 1914 | Frigate Captain Hugo Dominik |
Known crew members
- Hellmuth Heye (1895–1970), was from 1961 to 1964 the second defense commissioner of the German Bundestag
- Karl Palmgren (1891–1970), German frigate captain and knight's cross bearer
literature
- Erich Gröner , Dieter Jung, Martin Maass: The German warships 1815-1945 . tape 1 : Armored ships, ships of the line, battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, gunboats . Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-7637-4800-8 , p. 73-75 .
- Hans H. Hildebrand, Albert Röhr, Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships . Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present . tape 8 : Ship biographies from Undine to Zieten . Mundus Verlag, Ratingen, S. 31-34 .
