Tubantia
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The Tubantia was a passenger steamer of the Royal Dutch Lloyd and was used on the Amsterdam - Buenos Aires route. It was torpedoed by a German submarine on March 16, 1916 and is located at 51 ° 49 ′ 0 ″ N , 2 ° 49 ′ 0 ″ E ( around 50 km west of the Dutch peninsula Walcheren and 65 km north of Ostend ) in the English Channel in a maximum water depth of 34 m.
The 13,911 GRT Tubantia was the largest neutral ship that was sunk in the First World War .
history
The Tubantia was the largest ship of the five passenger steamers of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd (KHL). For its time, she was considered a very modern passenger ship with continuous electrification. The name comes from the Tubanten , a Germanic tribe that lived in the east of what is now the Netherlands towards the end of the Great Migration . It was built by Alexander Stephen and Sons in Linthouse near Glasgow on the River Clyde, was launched in 1913 and entered the service of the KHL in March 1914. She had a sister ship, the Gelria, with the same shipping company, which also had the Hollandia , Frisia and Zeelandia and four cargo ships whose names ended in -land and which were initially also used to transport emigrants.
In August 1914, the Tubantia was caught by surprise on the return voyage from South America from the beginning of the First World War. On board were 500,000 pounds in gold , intended for London banks (including gold from German possession) and 150 German reservists who wanted to volunteer for the war. After a stopover in Portugal 's ship was high flyer of the Royal Navy to Plymouth escorted captured German reservists and the gold and other load items (rubber, wool, Post) confiscated. The ship then continued its voyage.
The downfall
The Tubantia , although neutral, was torpedoed in the English Channel on the voyage from Amsterdam (departure on the night of March 14th to 15th) to Buenos Aires at 2:30 a.m. on March 16, 1916 by the German submarine UB 13 , while she was anchored four nautical miles from the light ship Nord Hinder , fully illuminated, since 2 a.m. The aim was to counter the risk of an accidental submarine attack. All 80 passengers and the crew members (294) were able to save themselves and were picked up by ships called by radio. The fact that a torpedo was the cause of the sinking was clearly confirmed by testimony of the ship's crew and the origin of the torpedo soon became known, as remains of it were found in one of the lifeboats .
The sinking, which the German government initially tried to deny, led to a diplomatic conflict between the Netherlands and the German Empire . The German and British press initially accused each other and even when the evidence against Germany was overwhelming, the German government tried to use a forged logbook of the suspected submarine to make it credible that the torpedo had been fired ten days earlier and had wandered around in the meantime. The Dutch public was outraged and to create confusion, the German embassy launched rumors of an impending British invasion of the Netherlands, which at times led to panic and the declaration of a state of emergency in the Netherlands. Since there was clear evidence, the German government initially offered to reimburse the production cost of £ 300,000, which the Dutch rejected. An agreement was reached on proceedings before the international court of justice in The Hague after the war, which also passed a judgment on February 27, 1922, in which Germany was ordered to pay 7.3 million guilders .
UB 13 (under Kapitänleutnant Metz) sank on April 24, 1916, caught in a mine net, off the Belgian coast not far from the Tubantia (see list of German submarines (1906-1919) ). There were no survivors.
Recovery attempts and rumors about gold
Gold was suspected in the ship's hull, which the German government secretly wanted to create to pay for imports to South America. There were also rescue attempts from the French and English sides from 1921 to 1923 (and thereafter), with two rescue companies getting in each other's way, which led to a lawsuit in London in 1923 . The French company had already been looking for gold at great expense on the wreck for three years before an English company showed up at the site of the salvage and tried to prevent further work. The process was exemplary and ended with a victory for the French, represented in London by the former " Royal Flying Corps " pilot of the First World War and war hero Sydney Vincent Sippe (1889–1968). The judge Maurice Hill saw himself unable to issue an order prohibiting the English company (which had offered to hand over all gold found to the British government during the trial) to work on the wreck, but sees their further work on site with displeasure. There were concerns about the jurisdiction of the court as the wreck was in international waters and no known precedent was known.
It is not known exactly whether gold was recovered from the ship and how much. During the trial, it was stated that gold coins worth £ 2 million at the time were in the wreck.
Léonce Peillard wrote a book about the Tubantia , which partly has novel-like features, but is based on facts researched by Peillard. Some documents are also printed in the book, including from an on-board diary of UB 13 . Peillard suggests that the ship was sunk by the Germans in order to prevent the gold (hidden in cheese wheels) from being confiscated by the British, who had ordered an English port ( Falmouth ) to be called. There were also rumors that assets (gold and jewels) of the German emperor would be brought to safety on the ship. At that time, however, according to Peillard, the British also loaded gold (and passengers) in Falmouth onto neutral Dutch ships such as the Tubantia to pay for deliveries in South America and had probably also loaded gold onto the Tubantia in Amsterdam before the sinking . The Tubantia other hand, was already several times by the British for the transport of counter gangs been suspected and was escorted for example, in December 1915, a French port and (unsuccessfully) searched.
According to Peillard, the Paris- based shipping company Societé Maritime Nationale was involved in the rescue attempt and operated with two tugs and divers from Dunkirk / Ostend from 1921 under the direction of Captain Paul Truck. She got her information from an expatriate Irish living in Hamburg who, according to his own statement, was accompanying the gold shipment on the Tubantia at the time . On the British side, a salvage company took part under the former officer of the Italian Navy and naturalized British Count Zenardi Landi, who had been working on wrecks for the British Navy since 1917. The Societé Maritime officially gave up further rescue attempts shortly after the trial.
Further rescue attempts by other companies lasted until the mid-1930s, after which it became quiet around the wreck and it was not found again until 1991 by Belgian recreational divers after a long search.
literature
- Leonce Peillard Affair Tubantia - The hunt for German gold in the Dutch wreck , Paul Neff Verlag 1978 (Original: Le Trésor du "Tubantia", Paris, R. Laffont 1978).
- Edward P. de Groot Op weg naar Zuid-Amerika: de torpedering van de Tubantia en de helden van de Alhena , de Alk, Alkmaar 1987.
Web links
- Wreck database, Tubantia , Dutch
- Tubantia on the Dutch website The Great War
- The Tubantia in the Clydebuilt Ships Database (with photo)
Footnotes
- ↑ According to the Dutch website wrakkdatenbank, see web links. According to Peillard (p. 110) at 51 degrees 48 north, 2 degrees 50 east
- ^ History of the shipyard Alexander Stephen and Sons
- ↑ Gelria is the Latin name for the Dutch province of Gelderland
- ↑ Around 16 km away
- ↑ He attacked the Zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen
- ↑ According to today's (2011) value eighty times as much
- ^ Peillard Affair Tubantia , p. 206 and p. 114
- ^ Peillard Affair Tubantia , p. 208
- ↑ Peillard, p. 235. The salvage company was financed by the Maltese millionaire Vincent Grech