Übigau shipyard
| Dresden machine factory and shipyard Übigau AG
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| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1873 |
| resolution | 1930 ( 1958 ) |
| Reason for dissolution | insolvency |
| Seat | Dresden - Übigau , Germany |
| Number of employees | 1,500 |
| Branch | shipbuilding |
The Übigau shipyard was a shipyard in the Übigau district of Dresden . It was the location of the first German shipbuilding research institute and was considered one of the largest inland shipyards in Europe in the 1920s.
Location
The Übigau shipyard was located on the right bank of the Elbe at river kilometer 60.3. It was in the southeast of Übigau, which was incorporated into Dresden in 1903 . The former company premises extend from Übigau Castle around 200 meters to the southwest in the direction of the Flügelweg Bridge . It can be reached via Werftstraße, named after the company, or via Rethelstraße; the address is Rethelstrasse 49 or 51. The site is part of the Dresden Elbe Valley cultural landscape , which was UNESCO World Heritage from 2004 to 2009 .
history
1873–1905: Shipyard in service for chain towing
The "Freight Shipping Company in Dresden" (FSG), a predecessor of the Saxon Steamship Company founded in 1871 , set up a shipbuilding shop in Übigau in 1873, where they had repairs carried out on their wooden ships. The facility was built at an industrial site that was already steeped in tradition: in the immediate vicinity, the mechanical engineering company Übigau under Johann Andreas Schubert had built the first functional steam locomotive built in Germany with the Saxonia and the first Saxon passenger steamship with the Queen Maria .
In 1877/78 the shipyard and its then 40 employees became the property of the " Kettenschleppschiffahrt der Oberelbe " (KSO) founded in 1868 . It was upgraded for steel ship, boiler and mechanical engineering and then began to build new ships. Initially the shipyard built barges, from 1881 with Queen Carola also wheeled tugs . The " Chain - Deutsche Elbschiffahrts-Gesellschaft ", which emerged from the KSO on September 13, 1881, took over the ships and the shipyard. The "chain" talked of Bohemia to Hamburg the chain cruise on the Elbe . Its initiator, engineer Ewald Bellingrath (1838–1903), had a defining influence on the Übigau shipbuilding site, which is therefore also known as a chain shipyard , and the entire company . He let both expand constantly. In 1885 the construction of the 60 meter long, 32 meter wide and almost 11 meter high machine hall began. The construction costs amounted to 137,000 marks. The hall went into operation in April 1886. In 1886, the "chain" extended their property to the neighboring Übigau Castle. The workshops, which were only 584 square meters in size in 1893, were expanded considerably, some based on designs by Otto Intze .
At the beginning of 1903, Bellingrath's successor as general director of the "chain" became his long-term companion and deputy Carl Philippi . In 1904, under the management of Berthold Masing , who ran the business from 1890 to 1906, 60 civil servants, 20 foremen and 700 workers were employed in the shipyard. A pulsometer was used for the water supply. The energy supply was done via a steam center with three boilers; the coal was procured by its own coal boat. In order to be able to take ships on land and launch them into the water, there was a slipway with a capacity of around 500 tons. Part of the in-house material testing system was a tearing machine with almost 50 tons of pulling force. The company fire brigade was one of the few in Saxony able to fight possible fires from the water. The factory also had its own iron and metal foundry.
For the time, the close cooperation between the Übigau shipyard and the Technical University (TH) Dresden was exceptional . Encouraged by Hubert Engels , the TH professor for hydraulic engineering, an "institute for testing ship resistance and hydrometric instruments" was set up on the shipyard site in 1892, and it went down in history as the first shipbuilding research institute in Germany. With its specially built water basin, the system was used under the direction of Bellingrath for practical testing of technical innovations in shipbuilding. I.a. let Gustav Zeuner is testing its turbine propeller contractor in an attempt ship hydrokinetic. Bellingrath achieved his goal of using model tests in this shipbuilding research institute to find a cheaper form of inland navigation for the German canal network. The scientific collaboration between the university and the shipyard did not end until it was closed in 1930.
1905–1930: Development into the leading German inland shipyard and closure
In 1905, the Übigau shipyard merged with the Saxon Steamship and Engineering Company founded in 1863 . The latter then gave up its location at Neustädter Hafen in the Leipzig suburb of Dresden and relocated completely to Übigau a few kilometers downstream, as there was more space there for the construction of larger ships. The new name of the company was Dresdner Maschinenfabrik und Schiffswerft Uebigau AG .
As a result, many new buildings and production halls as well as a more modern slipway were built. Also in 1905, a branch was established on the Danube in Regensburg . Around 500 ships had been built by then and showed the high productivity of the shipyard. In 1910 the company had around 1200 employees. This number grew to 1,500 workers by 1921. In the 1920s, the Übigau shipyard was one of the largest European inland shipyards for cargo and passenger ships, which also fulfilled orders from other parts of the world. After the First World War , the shipyard set up its administration rooms in Castle Übigau.
Waggon- und Maschinenbau AG Görlitz (WUMAG), which was established in 1849, took over the shipyard by resolution of the general meeting on March 22, 1923, which from then on operated under Waggon- und Maschinenbau AG Görlitz, Shipyard Übigau . Around 1926 the company changed into an independent stock corporation with the name Übigau AG, Schiffswerft, Maschinen- und Kesselfabrik . WUMAG took over the shares. However, the poor order situation due to the economic crisis led to bankruptcy in 1930 and ultimately to the complete closure of the shipyard. Up until then, 1393 ships were built including the launching in the Saxon Steamship and Mechanical Engineering Institute. In 1931 the remnants of Übigau AG became the company Übigau for Baggerbau, Maschinenbau und Schiffbau mbH .
1935–1958: Armaments company, VEB and final closure
Three former engineers of the shipyard decided in 1935 to take over part of the old shipyard site and founded the Übigau-AG shipyard, machine and boiler factory there , which manufactured engines, excavators and ships until the end of the Second World War . On April 11, 1935, the company celebrated its new start under the direction of the shipbuilding engineer Wilhelm Schmidt, initially with 100 employees. On that day, Saxony's Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann and Dresden's Lord Mayor Ernst Zörner named the first two ten-belt cutters that the shipyard had built for the Naval Storm Banner II / 2 with the names “Königsberg” and “Dresden”. Independently of this, the Übigau steam boiler factory was built on the remaining land . On the area of the two war-important armaments factories, thick-walled pressure hull sections were also produced for the construction of the Type XXI submarines , which were transported to the equipment yards floating on the Elbe. The previously used riveting technology was then increasingly being replaced by welding technology. The air raids on Dresden on January 16 and March 2, 1945 caused great damage on the site. The warehouse building was totally destroyed, the western engineering hall partially destroyed. On January 13, 2004, an excavator lifted a 250-kilogram American-style bomb from the mud of the Elbe in front of the former shipyard.
Due to the arms production in the Third Reich , the shipyard was dismantled by the Soviet occupying power in 1945 as a reparation payment for the Soviet Union, but it was soon busy repairing ships. Soon after, both companies were expropriated. VEB Dampfkesselbau emerged from the steam boiler factory, and Übigau-AG became VEB shipyard. The shipyard was now again a manufacturer of ships. It acted as the sponsoring company of BSG Motor Schiffswerft Übigau, a predecessor of SC Borea Dresden . In 1958, shipbuilding came to an end, which was relocated from Übigau to the Laubegast shipyard and the Boizenburg shipyard on the Elbe . Then VEB TuR Dresden took over the yard. He ran it as his Plant II and from then on produced containers for large transformers there.
Products
The Übigau shipyard built a wide variety of ship types, including steamships , motor boats , barges , barges and barges with wheel or screw drives. She also made all sorts of ship parts and equipment, including pontoons , ship engines, and boilers. They were not only intended for inland shipping, but also for maritime shipping. The technical equipment of many Elbe steamers, which were built into the hulls built there at the Laubegaster shipyard, also come from Übigau . Another focus of production were machines for factories. The shipyard also produced dredgers and dredgers, steam winches, cranes and mechanical equipment for mountain and cable cars. The engineering works and shipyard Übigau also supplied the drive technology for the Dresden funicular railway - a chain towing drive that had already been tried and tested on chain towers on the Elbe.
The Gustav Zeuner , the only relic of chain shipping on the Elbe that has remained almost completely intact, was launched in Übigau in 1894 as the first second-generation chain tugboat. In 1903 the Teltow , a catenary boat, was built in the Übigau shipyard . The Thalia , the flagship of the Wörthersee shipping, one of the last real steamships in Austria and at the same time the only screw steamer in the country, was built in Übigau (completed in 1909). The Kaiser Wilhelm , one of the last still moving paddle steamers in Germany to be fired with coal, was extended to its present size in 1909/10 in Übigau.
As early as 1904, the yard's capacity was considerable. In July there were u. a. a screw boat and sea barrels for the Imperial Navy, a tugboat, eight brick transport barges and several larger ship engines in work at the same time. During the last phase of Übigau's shipbuilding in the early GDR period from 1950, the shipyard built, among other things, large motor cargo ships for Soviet inland navigation, floating rams , floating cranes and pontoons, as well as the first icebreaker built in the GDR , the Hohensaaten , the type ship of the Oder class . Also dredger and numerous floating pumping stations were designed and built. They were created in cooperation with the VEB Roßlauer shipyard . Many of these ships were reparations for the USSR, including the 16 SU 276 motor cargo ships built in 1956 and 1957.
traces
Several old factory halls have been preserved from the shipyard's building stock. Today they are under monument protection and can be found in the list of cultural monuments in Übigau . Specifically, this concerns the former boiler and machine house, the machine building hall and the former boiler forge ("Hildebrandt Hall"). In addition, the remains of the slipway on the banks of the Elbe and, since 1982, the neighboring iron slewing crane have also been listed as historical monuments.
The 18-meter-high crane, which was built on a sandstone base by Eisenwerke Hamburg in 1891, is based on the system developed by the British mechanical engineer William Fairbairn. It was used to assemble heavy machines. At first it was operated by hand, then electrically from 1904. With its 14 meter long boom, it could lift loads of up to 30 tons, according to other information even up to 50 tons. Due to the lack of a drive, the crane is no longer functional today, but was restored in 2005.
While some former shipyard buildings are falling into disrepair, others serve as headquarters for several medium-sized and small businesses. The technical historical significance and the architectural potential of the site led to unrealized plans in 2010 for a display depot for the Dresden Transport Museum at this location.
literature
- B. Kurz, H. Düntzsch: Werften in Dresden 1855-1945 . Sax-Verlag, Beucha 2006.
- E. Müller, R. Schlott, K. Wietasch: Technical innovations in inland shipping. In: 100 Years of the Shipbuilding Society . Springer, Berlin 2001.
- J. Naumann: A historical walk between Alt-Mickten and Übigau . Sutton-Verlag, 2010. ISBN 978-3-86680-703-7 .
- R. Schönknecht, A. Gewiese: Inland shipping between Elbe and Oder. Hamburg 1996.
Web links
- Shipyard Übigau on dresden-uebigau.de (Übigau Online)
- Shipyard Übigau on dresdner-stadtteile.de
Individual evidence
- ^ Streets and squares in Übigau. dresdner-stadtteile.de; Retrieved November 30, 2012.
- ↑ Jana Mundus: From the small workshop to the large shipyard . In: Saxon newspaper . April 16, 2016 (for a fee [accessed April 22, 2016]).
- ^ The shipyard in Dresden-Übigau . In: Dresdner Anzeiger , July 3, 1904. Ddresden-uebigau.de accessed on November 30, 2012.
- ↑ Dresdener Maschinenfabrik und Schiffswerft Uebigau AG. albert-gieseler.de
- ^ Jürgen Richter: Dresden in the 30s. Dresdeners open their photo albums. edition Sächsische Zeitung , Dresden 2004, p. 73.
- ↑ Christoph Springer: Air bomb recovered from the Elbe. River and road closures until defusing was successful. In: Dresdner Latest News , January 14, 2004, p. 11.
- ↑ Motor cargo ship type SU-276. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ddr-binnenschifffahrt.de; Retrieved November 30, 2012.
- ^ Kerstin Boden: Schaulager Transport Museum Dresden. Historic Übigau shipyard. In-depth work, professorship for monument preservation and design, Dresden University of Technology , Dresden 2010.
Coordinates: 51 ° 4 ′ 5 ″ N , 13 ° 41 ′ 55 ″ E