Struma (ship)

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Goiter
RealStrumaSinceMalioglou.jpg
Ship data
flag Bulgaria 1878Bulgaria Bulgaria
other ship names
  • Cornelia (from 1880)
  • Macedonia (1913-1925)
  • Ioannina (1925-1934)
  • Esperos (1934-1940)
Ship type Motor ship
home port Piraeus (from 1925)
Varna (from 1935)
Constanța (from 1941)
Owner Struma AG (from December 1940)
Shipyard Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company , Newcastle upon Tyne
Launch 1880
Whereabouts sunk by a Soviet submarine on February 24, 1942 (791 dead)
Ship dimensions and crew
length
57.1 m ( Lüa )
width 7.7 m
measurement 469 GRT
 
crew 9
Machine system
machine 1 diesel engine
Machine
performance 		250 PS (184 kW)
Top
speed 		6.5 kn (12 km / h)
propeller 1

The Struma ( Bulgarian Струма ) was a 469 GRT motor ship built in 1880, last Bulgarian , which was sunk in February 1942. The ship should have brought over 760 Jewish refugees to the League of Nations mandate for Palestine , which was then under British administration . It was sunk by a torpedo on February 24, 1942 by the Soviet submarine Shch-213 ( Щ-213 ), which was used against neutral shipping in the Black Sea . Almost all of the passengers died.

prehistory

The Struma was already in 1880 at the shipyard of Palmers Shipbuilding & Iron Co. Ltd. yacht built in Newcastle upon Tyne , England , which was launched under the name Cornelia . The steel-built ship was 57.1  m long, 7.7 m wide and measured at 469 GRT . A two-cylinder expansion steam engine and three masts served as drive (condition after completion, later one mast was completely removed and the other two shortened). Between 1880 and 1911 the yacht was owned by various wealthy private individuals in England.

In 1911 the ship was sold to Austria-Hungary and was registered in Split with Papaic & Novak until 1913 . During this time the ship went under the original name of Cornelia . In 1913 the yacht was sold to a Greek company and renamed Makedonia . Under this name the ship was probably used until the mid-1920s before it in 1925 from the in Piraeus de resident company SA Ionienne Navigation & Vap. Ioanulato was taken over and renamed Ioannina . In 1930 the yacht was taken over by the Hellenic Coast Lines, also based in Piraeus, and used by them, also under the name Ioannina , on coastal routes until 1934. In the same year the ship was finally sold on to Bulgaria . From this point in time (1934) the whereabouts of the yacht are not exactly known. Presumably she is identical to the ship Esperos , described as a yacht-like, which had been lying in the Bulgarian Varna from the mid-1930s . When the possible renaming from Ioannina to Esperos is not exactly certain, but it probably happened around 1934/35. Parts of the ship, including one of the masts and pieces of interior fittings, were dismantled from this time on in order to be able to use the ship better for freight transport. In 1939 the engine threatened with collapse was finally removed.

As a result, between 1939 and 1940 the Esperos lay in Varna without a drive and only served as a barge for freight transport. In December 1940, the run-down ship was bought by the Bulgarian Struma AG, which renamed the former yacht Struma and had a new engine installed as part of a major overhaul.

Refugee transporter for Jews

At this time, the Jewish ophthalmologist Baruch Konfino, who lives in Varna and works for various Zionist organizations, who had helped initiate the expeditions of the small and decrepit refugee ships Rudnitchar and Bopha (with a total of 368 people on board) to Palestine , became aware of the goiter in 1939. Konfino acquired the ship on December 15, 1940 from Struma AG, kept its name and had it prepared for the transport of a large number of refugees. For example, multi-storey wooden platforms were built into the holds and water tanks and latrines were installed in the hull. The renovation took several months. Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact on March 1, 1941 , which one day later led to the agreed entry of German troops into Bulgaria. Against this background, Konfino and the Zionist groups involved in the transport (including Betar ) had to exercise great caution. The still inadequately equipped ship was moved from Varna to the Romanian Constan .a.

Due to delays, the Struma was not able to leave Constanța until December 12, 1941. On board the ship, which was under the command of the Bulgarian captain GT Gorbatenko and sailed under the Panamanian flag, there were 791 Jewish refugees, most of them from Bukovina and Bessarabia . There were no large supplies on board, as only 14 hours had been planned for the crossing to Istanbul . Life-saving appliances were also not available.

Crossing and location in Istanbul

Shortly after leaving Constanța, the goiter's engine kept cutting out. As a result, Istanbul was only reached after four days, on December 16, 1941. Shortly before arrival, the machine completely failed and the ship had to be pulled into port by a tug.

The British and Turkish governments conducted secret negotiations with the Jewish Agency for Israel in Jerusalem over the fate of the passengers over the next ten weeks . The British government did not want to allow them to enter Palestine because of the lack of visas, and the Turkish government wanted to prevent them from going ashore and staying in Turkey. Meanwhile, the supply situation and the hygienic conditions on the already overcrowded ship deteriorated. As early as December 24, 1941, Captain Gorbatenko had informed the Turkish port authorities about the catastrophic conditions on board and also pointed out that he would not be able to take responsibility in the event of the ship continuing to voyage because of the poor seaworthiness. On January 10, 1942, Gorbatenko again presented to the Turkish port authorities and again pointed out the inhumane conditions on board; in the meantime there had been the first cases of dysentery on the goiter .

Exceptions were made for only nine passengers in January and February 1942, so that in mid-February 1942 there were still 782 Jewish refugees on board. While the negotiations were in progress about the onward journey of at least under 11-year-olds to Palestine, the Turkish authorities finally had the ship towed out to the open sea (Black Sea) on February 23, 1942, following intervention by the English government; Outside the Turkish territorial waters, the tug finally turned away and left the goiter to its fate.

Sinking

Struma (Turkey)
Goiter
Goiter
Place of sinking in the Black Sea
Map of the Bosphorus .
Position 1 shows the lying position of the goiter in the port of Istanbul,
position 2 shows the location of the sinking in the Black Sea (not in the Bosporus).

The incapacitated Struma was sighted between 3 and 4 a.m. on the morning of February 24, 1942, about 14 nautical miles north-northeast of the Bosphorus , by the Soviet submarine Shch-213 under the command of Lieutenant DM Deneschko and from a distance of around 1,200 m by one Torpedo sunk. The hit brought the ship, which is over 60 years old, to sink within a few minutes. 781 refugees and 10 crew members died in the sinking. Only the 19-year-old Romanian Jew David Stoliar was rescued the next day by arriving Turkish rescue workers. He and three crew members had been able to cling to a piece of wreckage when the ship went down. While they gradually drowned from hypothermia, Stoliar survived in the ice-cold water; however, out of desperation, he attempted suicide in the water. Stoliar last lived in the United States, where he died on May 1, 2014 at the age of 91.

In July 2004, a Turkish diving team found a shipwreck around the point where the goiter had sunk. However, the identity of the ship could not be conclusively clarified. On September 3, 2004, relatives of the Struma passengers, representatives of the Turkish Jewish community, delegates from Great Britain and the USA as well as the Israeli ambassador met at the site of the event for a memorial service.

Different documentation

In a book by Götz Aly published in 1987, the history of the sinking of the goiter is presented differently. There it is said that the ship was sunk by a German speedboat on February 25, 1942. Aly relies on an assertion from the East German publication From the diary of a Jewish murderer from 1956.

Some chroniclers sometimes give contradicting numbers of passengers and victims, but they would not stand up to verification. In addition to Holon , a memorial for the victims of the goiter disaster was also erected in Ashdod , the inscription of which does not match the facts that are now known and thus misrepresents the number of victims, causes and history.

See also

reception

literature

  • Ralf Balke: Goiter. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 601-604.
  • Jürgen Rohwer : The sinking of the Jewish refugee transporters Struma and Mefkure in the Black Sea (February 1942, August 1944). Historical investigation . Bernard & Graefe, Frankfurt am Main 1965

Web links

Commons : Struma  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/david-stoliar-der-einzige-ueberlebender-des-untergangs-der-struma-fotostrecke-110325.html
  2. ↑ http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/holocaust/0140_Struma_list.html
  3. ↑ Jürgen Rohwer : "Jewish Refugee Ships in the Black Sea (1934-1944)"
  4. ↑ a b Marc Pitzke : "Why did the others die and I didn't?" In: einestages.spiegel.de , May 16, 2013.
  5. ↑ http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/holocaust/0140_Struma_list.html
  6. ↑ HD Heilmann, From the war diary of the diplomat Otto Bräutigam . In: Götz Aly u. a. (Ed.): Biedermann and desk clerk . Materials on the German biography of the perpetrators, Institute for Social Research in Hamburg: Contributions to National Socialist Health and Social Policy 4, Berlin 1987, p. 165, note 9.
  7. ^ Committee for German Unity (Ed.): From the diary of a murderer of Jews. Berlin-Ost 1956, p. 35 The whole assertion gets by without source evidence and reports nebulously about "an informant inspecting Turkish files"