Schwabenland (ship, 1925)
 The Swabian lands on their return from Antarctica
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The Schwabenland was a former cargo ship that had been converted into a catapult ship by Deutsche Lufthansa for its airmail route across the South Atlantic . The Schwabenland gained greater fame through its role in the demonstration flights for airmail traffic over the North Atlantic from 1936 and through its use as a research ship for the German Antarctic Expedition in 1938/39 .
The Schwabenland was sunk in 1946 by the British Royal Navy loaded with 1400 tons of poison gas ammunition in the Skagerrak .
freighter
The ship was built in 1925 under the name Schwarzenfels at the Deutsche Werke AG shipyard in Kiel with hull number 180 as a cargo ship for the DDG "Hansa" . It ran on 14 March in 1925 by stack , was delivered on 16 July 1925, initially in line service used the DDG Hansa. The ship was 148.8 m long and 18.4 m wide, had a draft of 8.49 m and was measured at 7,894 GRT . It was the first cargo ship to be equipped with a gyro compass . The two propellers were each driven by a six-cylinder, 4- stroke diesel engine with 3600 hp ; so the Schwarzenfels could run 12 knots . The crew numbered 45 men. The loading gear consisted of a 30 t boom and 16 5 t booms. In addition to freight, up to 10 passengers could be carried.
The Schwarzenfels was the first ship in her class to enter service and had two twin-screw sister ships ( Neuenfels and Weissenfels ) and three single-screw sister ships ( Braunfels , Rotenfels and Altenfels ), which came into service between 1925 and 1927.
Catapult ship
On February 28, 1934 Lufthansa bought the ship and left it at the AG Weser in Bremen to catapult ship with a Heinkel K-7 Catapult , converted to make it for flying boats of its trains running between South America, Africa and Europe Airmail service of a floating airbase next at the same shipyard converted Westphalia to use. After the conversion, the ship had 8,188 GRT. Lufthansa hoped that the two-screw motor ship it had bought would be ready for action more quickly and require less fuel during lay times. The purchased Schwarzenfels was also built as a mission ship for the tropics, which did not make some modifications necessary. The steam catapult on the aft ship accelerated a 10-ton flying boat of the Dornier Wal type , loaded with up to 4 tons of fuel, to 150 km / h within fractions of a second. Since Lufthansa was able to forego a stopover in the Atlantic with the introduction of the 10-tonne whale, the space for the flying boats was limited to the ship behind the bridge structure. The rear end of the catapult track was designed as a turntable and the machines could also be pushed onto two parking tracks from there.
A ramp was installed at the stern, over which a canvas stiffened by struts could be deployed as a towing sail and then brought in again. The flying boat floated onto the towing sail after it was in the water and was lifted from there onto deck with a 12-ton crane from Kampnagel . The crane was folded down when the catapult was launched. After the conversion was completed, the ship was put into service on July 25, 1934 for Deutsche Lufthansa AG, with DDG Hansa now managing the ship as a contractual partner of Lufthansa. In 1938 the management went to Norddeutscher Lloyd in Bremen.
Postal service
The Schwabenland was then used as the second catapult ship of Lufthansa alongside the Westfalen . The ships were now stationed on both sides of the South Atlantic. They took the flying boats on board in Bathurst or Fernando de Noronha or Natal (Brazil) after crossing the Atlantic, they waited and ran out into the Atlantic on the next postal flight with a Dornier Wal on board and started the flying boats from one for the rest safe position of the overflight. On September 12, 1934, the Dornier Wal D-AKER Taifun started for the first time with mail from the Swabian region at sea to Natal. At the start she had only 2185 km to go instead of 3040 km, which she covered in 13 hours and 05 minutes. On November 7, 1934, the Dornier Wal D-AFAR Samum took off for the first time at night from the Schwabenland in Bathurst to Natal and covered 2,874 km in 15 hours and 36 minutes. Flights of this type were occasionally repeated when time was lost on the approach from Europe. In May 1935 the base ships exchanged positions. When on June 29, 1935 the D-ADYS Tornado had an engine failure after taking off from the Schwabenland off Fernando de Noronha and had to make an emergency landing in the Atlantic, both catapult ships ran to the assumed position of the flying boat. The Westfalen reached the flying boat and took it on board. This mission was also used to swap the positions of the ships again. In September the positions were swapped again. From mid-October to mid-December, the Schwabenland was operational on its own and ran back and forth while the Westphalia was overtaken.
In 1936 Lufthansa received the new Ostmark , and Schwabenland was able to carry out tests for a planned North Atlantic postal service of Lufthansa with two new, twin-engine Dornier Do 18s , which it took on board in Travemünde and arrived with them on August 31, 1936 in Lisbon. The D-ABYM Aeolus was set down there and the journey with the second flying boat on board continued on September 3 to the Azores , where it arrived on the 6th. The Aeolus had already arrived in Ponta Delgada the day before after the water launch in Lisbon . After a test flight, the expedition management decided to move to Horta as the launch site. Aeolus' first Atlantic flight from there was canceled after 6 hours due to loss of cooling water and strong headwind, and the machine returned to Horta after a 10 hour flight. On 10/11 September the D-ARUN Zephir flew after catapult launch from the Schwabenland in front of Horta under Joachim Blankenburg and Lufthansa Director Freiherr Carl August von Gablenz in 22 hours and 18 minutes to New York . On September 11th, D-ABYM Aeolus followed under Hans-Werner von Engel and Friedrich von Buddenbrock on a more southern route to Hamilton (Bermuda) , from where the Aeolus continued the flight to New York with a water start on the following day. Since the machines needed the catapult launch from the Schwabenland for the flight over the North Atlantic, the latter marched first to New York and then to Bermuda for the return flights . For the second series from September 22nd, she marched back to Horta and after the catapult launch of both machines in the direction of New York on October 5th and 6th, this time to Sydney (Nova Scotia) , from where the two Thu 18 on the 17th and 18th respectively October 18th back to Horta.
In December, the Schwabenland was back in service with Fernando de Noronha on the post line.
In 1937 and 1938 Lufthansa repeated its test flights on the North Atlantic with four-engine Blohm & Voss Ha 139 , whose higher take-off weight of 17.5 tons required a reinforcement of the catapult system designed for 10-ton aircraft. The Schwabenland mostly occupied the position near the Azores , its counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic was the Friesenland , Lufthansa's fourth catapult ship. However, since the USA did not issue a mail transport license to Lufthansa, there were 50 successful test flights between 1936 and 1938.
The Schwabenland was also used again and again in alternation with the other ships on the mail route to South America. The last start of a mail machine from the Schwabenland took place on July 14, 1939 in Bathurst by the four-engine Dornier Do 26 , which overcame the 3,040 km to Natal in 11 hours and 10 minutes.
Antarctic expedition 1938/39
In autumn 1938 the German Antarctic Expedition 1938/39 chartered the Schwabenland with the two former post whales D-AGAT Boreas and D-ALOX Passat and had the ship converted for their purposes. The hull was ice reinforced and an additional auxiliary diesel was installed. The changes in the transfer track, which had been shortened and reinforced in order to also be able to start heavier machines of the Blohm & Voss Ha 139 and Dornier Do 26 types , had already been made for the Lufthansa test series on the North Atlantic.
The South Pole Expedition 1938/39 under Captain Alfred Ritscher was supposed to find a base for German whaling ships in the Antarctic . In addition to the state flag, the Swabian country hoisted a house flag specially designed for the DFG instead of a shipping company flag in order to underline its status as a state ship for research purposes under international maritime law. The expedition left Hamburg on December 17, 1938 and reached the work area on the Princess Martha Coast on January 19, 1939. The Schwabenland , equipped as a research ship , launched its two flying boats and they discovered previously unknown ice-free mountains and were able to photogrammetrically record an area of approx. 350,000 km² in seven survey flights between January 20 and February 5, 1939 with serial cameras. At the turning points of the flight polygons they dropped metal arrows with German national emblems. The area, which was not claimed by any nation at the time of the departure of the Schwabenland , was called Neuschwabenland and was to be taken over by the German Empire. However, Norway had declared the area to be Norwegian territory as Dronning Maud Land when the expedition arrived in Antarctica . During another eight flights, in which the expedition leader Alfred Ritscher also took part, particularly interesting regions were filmed and taken with color photos. The captain of the Boreas , Richard Heinrich Schirmacher , discovered the Schirmacher Oasis and the Wohlthat Massif named after him from an airplane on February 3, 1939 . Ship and flying boats returned to Hamburg on April 11, 1939. Some of the aerial photos were lost in the war. The evaluation of the remaining images, films, measurement results, etc. lasted until the 1950s.
War effort and end
After the start of the war, the ship was confiscated by the Air Force on October 12, 1939 and initially used on the French Atlantic coast to support seaplanes. After an extensive return through the canal on August 7, 1942 , the Schwabenland was used in Norway as a catapult ship for long-range reconnaissance aircraft of the Blohm & Voss BV 138 type from September 1942 . On June 6, 1943, the Dornier Do 26 V6 P5 + FH was catapulted from Swabia to the Holzauge weather station in East Greenland in order to evacuate the station's crew, which had already been discovered and attacked by the Allies. With this and another flight on June 16, flight captain Wolfgang Blume and his crew of three succeeded in evacuating all 22 station members and a few sled dogs .
On March 24, 1944, the ship was torpedoed off Egersund by the British submarine HMS Terrapin , but could still be beached in the Flekkefjord and made a makeshift buoyancy in May / June 1944 and towed to Bergen . (The tanker Wörth , which was also torpedoed by the Terrapin during the same attack , was towed to Egersund.) On October 4, 1944, the ship, which was only poorly repaired, was damaged again in an air raid by the British Air Force on the German submarine base in Bergen. The Schwabenland was no longer completely repaired and from February 1945 only served as a material store for the naval equipment center (MAST) in the Oslofjord .
After the end of the war, the ship was taken over by the British Navy , which used it as a residential hulk in Sandvika in the Oslofjord from January 1946 and then loaded it with 1,400 tons of poison gas ammunition on December 31, 1946 in Skagerrak Coordinates: 58 ° 10 ′ 22 ″ N , 10 ° 45 '24 ″ O sunk.
literature
- Friedrich Frhr. v. Buddenbrock: "Atlantico" "Pacifico", years of apprenticeship in overseas air traffic. GFW-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1965.
- Fischer von Poturzyn: Südatlantikflug , Verlag Franz Eher Nachf. , Munich 1934
- Ernst Herrmann : German researchers in the Southern Ocean , Safari-Verlag, Berlin 1941
- Jörg-M. Hormann: Flight log Atlantic, German catapult flights 1927-1939. Delius Klasing Verlag, Bielefeld 2007, ISBN 978-3-7688-1973-2 .
- Simon Mitterhuber: The German catapult planes and slingshots. Bernard & Graefe, Bonn 2003, ISBN 3-7637-6244-2 .
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the Naval War 1939-1945 , Manfred Pawlak VerlagsGmbH (Herrsching 1968), ISBN 3-88199-009-7
Web links
- Brief history of the Swabian region
- Photos of the Schwabenland (ex Schwarzenfels )
- Photos of the Schwabenland and Schwarzenfels
- Swabia in the Historical MarineArchive
Individual evidence
- ↑ von Buddenbrock, p. 151.
- ↑ von Buddenbrock, pp. 117ff.
- ↑ von Buddenbrock, p. 121.
- ↑ Fischer von Poturzyn, p. 231f.
- ↑ Hormann, p. 70.
- ↑ Hormann, p. 72.
- ↑ Hormann, p. 82.
- ↑ Hormann, p. 92.
- ↑ Hormann, p. 103ff.
- ↑ Hormann, pp. 120ff.
- ↑ Hormann, p. 164.
- ^ Hitler's shadow at the south pole , Kulke, U. in Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung of December 7, 2008, p. 8
- ^ Rohwer, p. 431.
- ↑ TØRNES John Aa, VOIE Øyvind A, LJØNES Marita, OPSTAD Aase M, BJERKESETH Leif Haldor, HUSSAIN Fatima: Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt Norway - Investigation and Risk Assessment of Ships Loaded with Chemical Ammunition Scuttled in Skagerrak. (PDF; 2.2 MB) In: Ammunition pollution in German marine waters - inventory and recommendations (as of 2011), Appendix 10.4.2.2. December 5, 2011, p. 50 , accessed on September 25, 2016 (contains the sinking location of the Schwabenland).