Schwerin (ship, 1926)
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The Schwerin was a German railway ferry that ran on the Warnemünde – Gedser route from 1926 . During the Second World War she was requisitioned by the navy and used as a troop transport and mine ship.
Construction and technical data
The Schwerin was built in 1926 by the Schichau works in Elbing for the Deutsche Reichsbahn . The ship was 106.8 m long and 18.5 m wide, had a draft of 4.4 m and was measured at 3,133 GRT . The drive consisted of two oil-fired steam turbines, each with 2100 hp and two screws . The maximum speed was 15.5 knots . The Schwerin was a double-ended railway ferry, with both a bow and a tailgate. The double track system on the railway deck had a total of 164.40 m track length. The Schwerin made it possible to transport cars by axle for the first time ; Up until that point in time, this was only possible by rail loading. The ship had space for 800 passengers .
Ferry service
The Schwerin was on the track Warnemünde - Gedser between Mecklenburg and Denmark used and replaced where the old single-track paddle wheel ferry Friedrich Franz IV. Together with the 1922-built Danmark (2915 GRT) of the Danish State Railways (DSB) that the single-track Schaufelradfähre Prinsesse Alexandrine replaced , she provided the express train , car and passenger ferry service. The two old two-track screw ships Mecklenburg (1810 BRT) and Prins Christian (DSB, 1900 BRT) were still used for freight transport and reduced operation in the winter months.
In the icy winter of 1928/29, was Schwerin in the Baltic Sea by ice and had, like many other ships also, of aircraft of the Pilot School in New York City on March 8 with parachutes proviantiert be. It was not until March 10th that it was freed by the two Soviet icebreakers Jermak and Truvor , chartered by the Reich Ministry of Transport . Two days later, the two icebreakers took the Mecklenburg out of the pack ice . Both ferries were damaged and had to go to the shipyard .
In 1937 Schwerin was shown on one of a total of nine stamps issued by the Deutsche Reichspost in favor of the Winter Relief Organization.
Second World War
When the attack on Poland began , the Schwerin was requisitioned by the Navy and used as a troop transport, but soon returned to its ferry service. During the occupation of Denmark by the Wehrmacht on April 9, 1940, the Schwerin and Mecklenburg brought German invasion troops to Gedser in the early hours of the morning, where the routine arrival of the ferries, but not the troop transports, was expected. Then the two ships and the two Danish ferries, Danmark and Prins Christian, which were confiscated in Gedser, brought further troops from Warnemünde to Gedser.
In preparation for the planned invasion of Great Britain ( Operation Sea Lion ), the Schwerin was again requisitioned by the Navy in the summer of 1940, equipped as an auxiliary mine-layer and assigned to the so-called western group of mine ships. On September 8, the mine ships Schiff 23 , Queen Luise , Prussia , Schwerin , Hanseatic City of Danzig and Grille , accompanied by four torpedo boats , ran from German North Sea ports to Rotterdam , where on September 9 the mine ships Tannenberg , Cobra , Kaiser , Roland and Togo and two other torpedo boats joined the formation. While the ships of the Eastern Group went to Antwerp and Ostend , those of the Western Group - Ship 23 , Tannenberg , Cobra , Togo and Schwerin - continued to Calais and on September 10th, accompanied by five destroyers , went to Cherbourg . September reached. The Schwerin was stationed in Cherbourg together with the Tannenberg , the Cobra , the Togo and Schiff 23 ; the other two ships in the western group, Stralsund and Skagerrak , were in Le Havre . When the date for the planned invasion of September 15 was postponed, the five ships of the Western Group stationed in Cherbourg moved on 19/20. September to Saint-Nazaire .
Since the invasion of England was finally postponed indefinitely and then canceled entirely, the Schwerin was dismissed from the service of the Navy and returned to the railway ferry service in the Baltic Sea, where she again took the Warnemünde - Gedser route and, in some cases, the Saßnitz - Trelleborg route served.
The End
In 1944 the Schwerin was in the Neptun shipyard in Rostock for a boiler repair . During an air raid on the city on February 20, it was badly damaged by a bomb , burned out and sank. It was lifted, but no longer repaired. The ship was scrapped in 1949.
literature
- Inauguration of the deep sea ferry "Schwerin". In: Newspaper of the Association of German Railway Administrations, Volume 66, No. 49 (December 9, 1926), pp. 1287–1289.
- Höfinghoff, Stuhr: “Schwerin” deep sea ferry . In: Journal of the Association of German Engineers , Volume 71, No. 31 (July 30, 1927), pp. 1077-1080.
- Arnulf Hader, Günther Meier: Railway ferries in the world. From the traject to the three-deck ferry. Koehler, Herford 1986, ISBN 3-7822-0393-3 .
- Karl von Kutzleben, Wilhelm Schroeder, Jochen Brennecke : Mine ships 1939–1945. The mysterious missions of the “midnight squadron”. Köhler, Herford 1974, ISBN 3-7822-0098-5 .
- Kai Ortel, Horst-Dieter Förster: Ferry shipping in the world. Koehler, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-7822-0720-3 .
Web links
Footnotes
- ↑ http://www.wetterzentrale.de/cgi-bin/webbbs/wzconfig1.pl?noframes;read=56
- ↑ The stamps showed the lifeboat Bremen , the lightship Elbe 1 , fishing boats, the KdF ship Wilhelm Gustloff , the four-masted barque Padua , the passenger and car ferry Tannenberg , the Schwerin ferry , the express steamer Hamburg , and the express steamer Europa .
- ^ Scandinavian Campaign, Gedser Sealift. Retrieved March 2, 2019 .
- ↑ The Eastern group consisted of Grille , Roland , Prussia and Queen Luise in Ostend as well as Brummer , Hanseatic City of Danzig and Kaiser in Antwerp. The Stralsund , Skagerrak and Brummer did not go to Le Havre or Antwerp until September 12-14. ( Sea War, September 1940 )