Schichau works

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
F. Schichau, machine and locomotive factory, shipyard and iron foundry GmbH
legal form GmbH
founding 1837
resolution January 1945
Seat Elblag
Number of employees Last about 7800
Branch Mechanical engineering
Shipbuilding
Locomotive construction

The F. Schichau, machine and locomotive factory, shipyard and an iron foundry GmbH , shortly Schichau works , was a mechanical engineering company in Elbing ( West Prussia ), which existed from 1837 to 1945. The company founded by Ferdinand Schichau began with the construction of steam engines for various purposes and built its own shipyard in 1852 .

The torpedo boats built from 1877 onwards were exported to many countries and made Schichau internationally known. The shipyard was expanded in 1899 to include a large dock with equipment and repair yard in Pillau and in 1891 to include a new shipyard in Gdansk for the construction of larger ships. By 1914, the Schichau-Werke had built around 1,000 ships and boats. The Elbingen plant started building steam locomotives from 1860, mainly for the Prussian State Railways , and the 2000th locomotive was delivered as early as 1912.

The company almost went bankrupt during the Great Depression in the late 1920s . Only the intervention of the state saved the company, one of the few large industrial companies in the East Prussian exclave of the German Empire of the Weimar Republic .

As part of the armament of the Wehrmacht , Schichau built submarines, torpedo and fleet torpedo boats ("Schichau destroyers ") for the Navy . From 1944 Schichau was involved in the construction of the Type XXI submarines .

After the battle for East Prussia , the end came for the Schichau works. The area around Elbing was annexed by Poland in 1945 (see German Eastern Areas ). The original German shareholders of the company were expropriated by the Polish state without compensation. The factories, which are now owned by the Polish state, were transferred to specialized state-owned large-scale enterprises as part of the new communist economic system. In Germany , the tradition of successor companies ended in 2008.

history

Factory plate for locomotive 41 1150

Foundation and early years

Ferdinand Schichau founded a mechanical engineering company in Elbing on October 4, 1837, which later became F. Schichau GmbH . After studying engineering in Berlin and studying in the Rhineland and Great Britain , he initially produced steam engines , hydraulic machines and excavators . In 1841 the first dredger produced in Germany was built in his company . Finally, in 1852, a separate shipbuilding site was set up in Elbing. In 1855, Borussia was launched there, the first steel sea steamers made in Prussia with screw propulsion .

First compound locomotive of the T 0 series .

In 1859 Schichau started building locomotives in his machine factory. In 1869 his locomotive factory with boilers and hammer mills was completed in Elbing. Three years later the plant was connected to the railway network. From 1880 the first composite locomotives in Germany were built near Schichau , small two-cylinder tank locomotives for the Royal Railway Directorate in Hanover , which resulted in fuel savings of up to 16%. In the years that followed, locomotive construction became a stable production area, with which the company regularly achieved annual sales of 100 locomotives. Above all, freight locomotives of almost all series of the Prussian State Railways, such as the series G 3 , G 4 , G 5.1 , G 5.2 and G 7.1 , as well as tank locomotives of the series T 3 and T 9.3 were built . In 1891 the 500th locomotive left the factory. The 1000th locomotive was completed just eight years later. After the turn of the century, the G 8 and G 9 types followed . In 1912 the 2000th locomotive was delivered. Even before the war, the construction of G 8.1 machines (until 1918: 490 machines built) and P 8 began and machines of the G 12 series were still being completed before the end of the war .

In 1883, the owner of the competitors decided Wöhlert its liquidation . The Schichau-Werke took over the wagon factory in Elbing from this property, which until 1875 as the Elbinger Actien-Gesellschaft for the manufacture of railway material had been the second largest mechanical engineering company in Elbing (after Schichau). Schichau used the facilities to build locomotives, machines and turbines .

As a socially minded employer, Ferdinand Schichau had workers' settlements built and founded a health and pension fund for his workers.

In the empire

Due to the narrow fairway conditions, Schichau was only able to manufacture relatively small watercraft in Elbing. Therefore Ferdinand Schichau decided to expand. First, a ship repair workshop was built in Pillau near Königsberg in 1889. A year later, a large shipyard was built in Gdansk, where numerous larger warships as well as cargo ships and luxury passenger ships were built in the following years. Ferdinand Schichau died in 1896. His son-in-law Carl Heinrich Ziese continued the company. Under his leadership, the Schichau-Werke became the largest industrial company in East Germany during the imperial era.

In 1913, Ziese founded the Ziese Mühlgraben shipyard in Riga as a subsidiary of Schichauwerke. He hoped that this would give him easier access to the Russian armaments market. From 1914 there were nine major destroyer of Gogland class under construction, but have not completed the front line since 1915 due to the proximity of Riga. The shipyard was placed under Russian state supervision in 1915 and thus de facto expropriated.

In the First World War, the Schichau works were an armaments factory. When the war began, a total of 8,500 people were working at the Elbing, Danzig and Pillau sites. At the end of the war there were 11,600 employees. Mainly large torpedo boats , A-boats and freight locomotives were built. Two submarines of the type Project 43 and other boats of the UF type remained unfinished and were scrapped after 1918.

Equipment basin for torpedo boats in Elblag

Warship building

The entry into warship construction took place in 1877, when the shipyard built the pirate hunter SMS Otter and Carl H. Ziese constructed torpedo boats for the first time on behalf of the Imperial Russian Navy . In 1884 the Imperial Navy of the German Empire ordered the first series of small torpedo boats from the Elbinger Werft. In 1899, the company manufactured the S 90, the first German deep sea torpedo boat.

Schichau soon became a leader in torpedo boat construction and exported worldwide. Customers included the Imperial Russian Navy, the navies of China (1885), the Ottoman Empire (1886), Italy (1886), Austria-Hungary (1886), Japan (1892), Brazil (1893), Romania (1895), Norway ( 1895), Sweden (1896), Denmark (1911) and Argentina (1911). In 1897, a single torpedo boat was even sold to the United States . By 1918, 483 torpedo boats and destroyers were built near Schichau, 333 of them for the Imperial Navy.

Some countries built boats according to Schichau plans. Some of the boats delivered by Schichau were at times considered to be the fastest in the world, for example the Russian deep-sea torpedo boat Adler (Russian Адлер) with 28.4 knots in 1888 or the four Chinese "torpedo hunters" of the Hai Jung class with 36.7 knots in 1897 .

In addition to building torpedo boats, Schichau supplied the Imperial Navy with larger warships, such as the cruiser Gefion (launched in 1893), the cannon boats Iltis and Jaguar (1898), the small cruiser Kolberg (1908), the ships of the line Kaiser Barbarossa (1900), Wettin (1901), Alsace (1903), Lorraine (1904) and Silesia (1906), the large-line ships Oldenburg (1910), King Albert (1912) and Baden (1915) and the battle cruiser Lützow (1913).

The first export order for a larger warship came from Russia with the order for the protected cruiser Nowik , which after its completion was considered the fastest cruiser in the world and remained the only larger warship that Schichau exported. Russian shipyards built two sister ships of the Novik with the Isumrud class . Nowik , stationed in the Far East during the Russo-Japanese War , was lost, lifted by Japan and used for a while.

When war broke out in 1914, two cruisers, the Muravjev Amurskij and the Admiral Nevelskoi , were under construction for the Russian Navy. Both ships were confiscated and, after completion, put into service by the Imperial Navy as SMS Pillau and SMS Elbing .

Passenger ships

In addition to building warships, the company focused on building merchant ships. In 1894 the Reichspost steamers Prinzregent Luitpold and Prinz Heinrich, built for North German Lloyd (NDL), were launched near Schichau . By the First World War, the company then built seven more ships for the Reichspostdampferlinien with the Bremen (10,822 GRT), Grosser Kurfürst (13,183 GRT) and the five mail steamers of the Feldherren-class ( Zieten , Seydlitz , Yorck , Kleist ) for “Lloyd” alone , Derfflinger ) with 7,942 to 9,060 GRT. This construction activity for the NDL continued despite a legal dispute that lasted from 1898 to 1908.

The Kaiser Friedrich

There were considerable problems with the express steamer Kaiser Friedrich of 12,481 GRT, which was also built for the NDL . The ship was to be used on the North Atlantic route alongside the Kaiser Wilhelm the Great, built near the Szczecin Vulcan . However, the three-chimney high-speed steamer did not reach the required speed of 22 knots and was only accepted by the NDL with reservations. The maiden voyage to New York, which began in Bremerhaven on June 7, 1898, took two days longer than required and the return journey even two days more. Despite considerable modifications, two further phases of operation at the NDL brought only slightly better results, so that the NDL refused to accept the ship in June 1899.

The competing Hapag , which had sold some of its old express steamers to Spain because of the American-Spanish War , chartered the Kaiser Friedrich in order to bridge the time until the use of their new express steamers in Germany . After ten round trips to the USA, Hapag decided not to use the ship again. Schichau tried to force the NDL to take legal action to accept the ship, but failed in 1908 before the Imperial Court . The ship lying in Hamburg since 1900 could not be sold to the French shipping company Compagnie de Navigation Sud-Atlantique until 1912 . In 1916 the steamer sank under its new name Burdigala after a mine hit in the Aegean Sea.

The shipyard's largest passenger ship completed by 1914 was the 16,339 GRT Cincinnati, which entered service for Hapag in 1909 . The 15.5 kn fast ship should not only serve the emigrant traffic, but with a large III. Appeal to a wider tourist audience. It was the first order from the major German shipping company to Schichau, which was only followed by the order for the combined ship Black Forest (4,892 GRT) until 1918. The NDL ordered even larger ships with two Columbus- type ships over 30,000 GRT , the first of which was launched on December 17, 1913. Due to the war, these ships were not completed until the 1920s.

From 1883 to 1926 16 ferries were built near Schichau for German and foreign railway directors, including the Friedrich Franz IV. , The Mecklenburg and the Prinsesse Alexandrine , which were used on the Warnemünde – Gedser trajectory , which opened in 1903 . They were an example of the special ships that were built near Schichau. A large number of dredgers were built and sold around the world. In addition to the navies, authorities were one of the shipyard's main customers. The NDL was the only major shipping company with a regular contract award to Schichau.

1918-1945

After Ziese's death in 1917, the Swede Carl Carlson , husband of Ziese's only daughter Hildegard, took over the management of the Schichau works. After his death in 1924, his widow ran the company alone. She died in 1927.

The Schichau shipyard initially played an outstanding role in the reconstruction of the German merchant fleet after the First World War. The Columbus of North German Lloyd (NDL), launched in Danzig on December 17, 1913, was almost finished in Danzig. The unfinished ship had been awarded to Great Britain as reparation and in 1920 it was sold to the White Star Line by the British state. The shipping company had a great need for tonnage to compensate for the war losses. However, the further construction of the Columbus at the German shipyard was very slow in 1919, as the company and the workers did not show any great enthusiasm to complete the ship for the former enemy. Finally, in 1921, the so-called “Columbus Agreement” between the Germans and the British came about: The German government and Norddeutsche Lloyd (NDL) promised to use their influence for the speedy completion of the ship and not to raise any legal concerns. Because, as a free city under the sovereignty of the League of Nations, Danzig no longer belonged to the German Empire. In return for these commitments, the British decided not to deliver six ships from the NDL that had spent the war in South America. These six ships were more important for the reconstruction of the NDL in 1921 than the 34351-BRT giant steamer, which was delivered as Homeric on January 21, 1922 and made its maiden voyage to New York under the British flag on February 15 . She remained the largest merchant ship manufactured by Schichau.

The Columbus of North German Lloyd, 1926
Locomotive 24 009, built in 1928

The sister ship Hindenburg was still in such an early stage of construction that it was out of the question as spoils of war. It was therefore completed for the NDL. Construction was slow due to the scarcity of materials. The ship, renamed Columbus , was launched on August 12, 1922 and began its maiden voyage to New York on April 22, 1924 in Bremerhaven. With 32,345 GRT, she was the largest German merchant ship until the express steamer Bremen was commissioned .

Further orders came in slowly. From 1925 the company was facing bankruptcy; this was only prevented by state loans from the German Empire and the State of Prussia. In Elbing, for example, the Schwerin , the most modern German railway ferry for the Baltic Sea, was built for the Deutsche Reichsbahn . Since the government of the Weimar Republic did not want to give up the largest shipbuilding company in the east, the Schichau works were refurbished by the state through a resolution by the Reichstag. Carlson's heirs received severance pay. From 1929 the new F. Schichau GmbH was able to continue operations under the direction of Hermann Noé . Hermann Noé was the brother of Ludwig Noé , the director of the neighboring " Danziger Werft und Eisenbahnwerkstätten AG" (formerly Kaiserliche Werft Danzig ).

Schichau was involved in the construction of the standard locomotives of the Deutsche Reichsbahn . It started with class 24 passenger locomotives , of which 67 were built (20 more were canceled due to the war ). This was followed by tank locomotives of the class 64 (12 machines) and the DR class 86 (106 machines, 14 canceled). It was not until 1938 that larger locomotives were built again. This was followed by 37 class 41 units (14 canceled), 136 class 44 locomotives and 190 class 50 locomotives . Schichau developed a new class 23 passenger locomotive from the class 50 freight locomotive and in 1941 delivered two prototypes. The estimated need for 800 such machines was not ordered because of the war.

In 1930, the Union foundry in Königsberg, which had also gone bankrupt, was incorporated into the Schichau works . The company was supported by the Ostlandhilfe in locomotive construction. In May 1932 the Elbinger Werft temporarily stopped shipbuilding completely after the completion of a suction dredger for a foreign client due to the global economic crisis. The excavator was not delivered due to the customer's insolvency and did not find a buyer until 1937.

In 1937 the shipyard in Danzig had 2,700 employees, in 1939 there were 3,700. On November 16, 1935, the shipyard in Elbing received the first order from the Navy for four type 35 torpedo boats , which were followed by others. The newly built shipyard in Königsberg received orders from the Kriegsmarine for small tankers of the Norderney type , tugs and minesweepers of the 1943 class . And the operation in the still independent Danzig received orders for large supply ships of the Dithmarschen class and icebreakers of the Castor type even before the war . In the course of the armament of the Wehrmacht operated by the Nazi government and the war that began in 1939, the number of orders and employees rose rapidly. In 1941 the Schichau company was reorganized into a stock corporation, F. Schichau AG. Hermann Noé remained general director of the works with headquarters in Elbing, where the entire shipbuilding production was centrally managed. F. Schichau GmbH Königsberg, independently managed by Woldemar Rodin, emerged from the Königsberg operation.

In September 1944, 7,763 people were working at the Danzig Schichau shipyard, 2,870 of them foreigners (“foreign workers”) or forced laborers (“ eastern workers ”) who were recruited from the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. The “Schichau Werft Elbing external labor camp” and the “Schichau external labor camp Danzig” existed for the shipyards. At the end of 1944, Schichau employed a total of 44,000 people - 18,000 in Elbing, 12,000 in Danzig and 14,000 in Königsberg.

Before and during the Second World War, the main factory in Elbing built, among other things, the fleet torpedo boats 1939 ( called Elbing destroyers by the Allies ), two minesweepers , diesel engines and small seal- type submarines for the Navy . In addition, the locomotive construction was continued. After the orders for the types developed in peacetime ran out, the class 52 (587) and class 42 (200) locomotives were manufactured. The Schichau shipyard GmbH built in Danzig until 1944 a total of 62 U-boats of the type VII C and two of the type VII C / 41 to the production on the type  Type XXI submarine was changed. By the end of the war, 30 boats of the new Type XXI had been completed in Danzig. Schichau Danzig delivered a total of 94 submarines to the Navy.

During the Second World War, Borsig awarded its own orders (55 BR50, 87 BR52, 12 BR42) to the Schichau-Werke in Elbing, which produced until January 1945. By the end of the war in 1945, Schichau supplied weapons and ships of all kinds, around 4,300 locomotives of various types to the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the PKP, among others .

As the front approached, unfinished ships and some of the floating equipment used at the shipyard were removed at the beginning of 1945. A floating dock was used by the Lübeck Flender works until the 1980s . The floating crane Langer Heinrich (built in 1905), which had been used at the Danzig Schichau shipyard until then , came to Rostock and was in use at the local Neptun shipyard for several decades . Today it is owned by the shipbuilding and shipping museum of the Hanseatic city of Rostock .

The floating crane Langer Heinrich was in use for the Schichau works in Danzig from 1905 to 1945

1945 until today

Poland

The locomotive works were dismantled by the Soviet occupation after the end of the war. The Elbinger Maschinenfabrik had belonged to Poland since the end of the war and, as a state-owned company, manufactured ZAMECH, Mechanical Works in Elbląg, turbines, gears and equipment for shipbuilding. In 1992, the factory premises were transferred to the real estate company ELZAM, which still largely owns it today. The production of power plants was taken over by the Swedish-Swiss group ABB at the same time and was sold in 2000 to the French group Alstom Power, a manufacturer of power plants, turbines, generators and boilers for electricity generation, and since 2015 they have been part of GE . In addition, several smaller companies settled on the site of the former Schichau works.

Shipbuilding in Elbing was discontinued. The shipyard in Königsberg became the Jantar shipyard . The Schichau shipyard in Gdansk was merged with the Gdansk shipyard to form the Lenin shipyard in 1950 , which specialized in the construction of cargo and container ships. The Lenin Shipyard became world-famous in 1980 with the establishment of the Polish trade union Solidarność.

Germany

The company was re-established as F. Schichau AG in Bremerhaven in 1950 by former employees of the Schichau shipyard. It developed into a leading company in the construction of tugs, especially salvage tugs . In 1972 the company merged to form Schichau Unterweser AG (SUAG), which concentrated on special ships , especially ferries. In 1984 the shipyard became part of the Vulkan-Verbund and in 1988 was merged with the Seebeck shipyard to form Schichau Seebeck AG, which also went bankrupt in 1996 as a result of the bankruptcy of Bremer Vulkan . The successor company, SSW Schichau Seebeck Shipyard GmbH , went bankrupt in 2008.

Preserved locomotives

  • 24 083 Dampfzug-Betriebs-Gemeinschaft Nettetal eV
  • 38 1772 Bw Siegen , last P 8 of the Deutsche Bundesbahn, memorial that can be rolled
  • 41 1144 IGE Werrabahn Eisenach eV
  • 41 1150 Bavarian Railway Museum (Nördlingen)
  • 44 1681 Railway Company Railway Adventure World (Horb am Neckar)
  • 50 3610 Wedler Franz Logistik GmbH & Co. KG
  • 50 3616 Association of Saxon Railway Friends / Railway Museum Schwarzenberg
  • 86 240 as Tkt3-16 in Poland (Chabówka)
  • 91 406 Bavarian Railway Museum (Nördlingen)

Received ships

  • Stralsund (year of construction 1890), railway ferry, Wolgast
  • Jacob Langeberg , ex. von Bötticher (built in 1902), tugboat and icebreaker, originally in use on today's Kiel Canal, Wormerveer, Netherlands

Web links

literature

  • Adolf Bihl: 100 years of Schichau 1837–1937. published on the occasion of the centenary of the Schichau-Werke. Elbing 1937, DNB 579200949 .
  • Josef Feuder: Seventy-five years of Schichau works. With six illustrations based on original photos. In: Reclams Universum 28.2 (1912), pp. 1301-1304.
  • Alfred B. Gottwaldt: Catalog of the Reichsbahn standard locomotives. Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-440-05011-4
  • Arnold Kludas : The history of the German passenger shipping 1850 to 1990. Ernst Kabel Verlag, 1986.
  • Eike Lehmann: 100 Years of the Shipbuilding Society. 3 volumes. Springer, Berlin et al. 1999.
  • Wolfgang Messerschmidt: Paperback German locomotive factories. Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-440-04462-9
  • Horst J. Obermayer: Paperback German steam locomotives , Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-440-03643-X
  • Victor von Röll: Encyclopedia of the Railway System. Urban & Schwarzenberg, Berlin et al. 1912-1923, DNB 560453477 .
  • Schichau-Werke (Ed.): The Schichau-Werke in Elbing, Danzig and Pillau. Meisenbach Riffarth, Berlin 1912.
  • Reinhardt Schmelzkopf: German merchant shipping 1919–1939. Verlag Gerhard Stalling, Oldenburg, ISBN 3 7979 1847 X .
  • Hermann Schöler: Heroes of Work: Life pictures of great men in German economic life. Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1925, DNB 577956930 .
  • Hans-Jürgen Schuch: Elbing: From 750 years of history of the religious, Hanseatic and industrial city. Westkreuz-Verlag, Berlin / Bonn, Bad Münstereifel 1989, ISBN 3-922131-65-4 .
  • Hans-Jürgen Schuch: An East German industrial pioneer: Ferdinand Schichau u. his work. Münster 1960, DNB 750819812 .
  • Helga Tödt: The Krupps of the East. Schichau and his heirs: an industrial dynasty on the Baltic Sea. Pro Business, Berlin, 2012, ISBN 978-3-86386-345-6 .
  • Eberhard Westphal: Ferdinand Schichau. In: Elbinger Hefte. 19/20, Essen 1957.
  • 125 years of Schichau. In: Hansa - magazine for shipping, shipbuilding and port. 99 (1962), pp. 1866-1868.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ View of the factory from January 1, 1911 , from: Contemporary Railways.
  2. ↑ 125 years of Schichau. In: Hansa - magazine for shipping, shipbuilding and port. 99 (1962), pp. 1866-1868.
  3. ↑ Schichau-Werke (Ed.): The Schichau-Werke in Elbing, Danzig and Pillau. P. 43 ff.
  4. ↑ Messerschmidt, p. 179.
  5. ↑ hwph.de: Elbinger Actien- Society for Fabrication of railway material
  6. ↑ His name is definitely Carl Heinrich or Carl H., but not Carl Heinz.
  7. ↑ Brockhaus' Konversations-Lexikon, 14th edition, 1908: Schichau, Friedrich .
  8. ↑ Kludas, p. 150 ff.
  9. ^ Ocean Liner S / S Burdigala Project
  10. ↑ Princess Alexandrine
  11. ↑ melt head, p. 155.
  12. ↑ Helga Tödt: The Krupps of the East. Schichau and his heirs - an industrial dynasty on the Baltic Sea. 2012, ISBN 978-3-86386-345-6 , p. 237 ( online )
  13. ^ Hans-Jürgen Schuch: Elbing: From 750 years of history of the order, Hanseatic and industrial city. Münster, p. 112 ff.
  14. ^ Zamech in Elbląg, Poland - propellers and another marine equipment. www.zamech.com, accessed January 9, 2013