Victor Nawatzki

Launched the Lloyd steamer Zeppelin on June 9, 1914 (from left to right) Dr. Philipp Heineken, President of North German Lloyd , Ferdinand Graf Zeppelin and Director Nawatzki

Victor Stanislaus Nawatzki (born June 8, 1855 in Oppeln , † February 16, 1940 in Eisenach ) was a shipbuilder in Vegesack and co-founder of the Bremer Vulkan .

biography

Nawatzki urged the sea from his youth. At the age of sixteen he left high school and became a cabin boy. After his only sea voyage, he was dismissed as unfit because he was plagued by an eye and hearing disease. He made up his Abitur at a secondary school and studied mechanical engineering and shipbuilding at the Technical University in Berlin-Charlottenburg from 1877 to 1880.

From 1881 on, he worked as an engineer for a few years at Blohm + Voss in Hamburg and then at the Meyer shipyard in Papenburg. In November 1887 he began his work in Vegesack, where the then very famous Johann Lange shipyard existed, but who had since passed away. Since his heirs showed no interest in the legacy, Nawatzki felt compelled to take over the shipyard. It seemed to him that Vegesack was going to have another great shipbuilding time. In the same year, Nawatzki began to rebuild the once well-known shipyard and established relationships with the then most important Bremen merchant Franz Ernst Schütte . In this way, on October 23, 1893, the Bremer Vulkan Aktiengesellschaft Schiffbau und Maschinenfabrik shipyard was founded. Nawatzki became director and always tried to gain more space for the ever expanding value. For this reason he moved together with the shipyard to Fähr-Lobbendorf in 1895 and merged with the Ulrichs shipyard .

As early as 1910, the Bremer Vulkan was almost at the top of the ten largest German shipyards. Nawatzki had never participated in warship construction, apart from the war years, in which he had to build submarines under pressure from the state. When he resigned from his post in April 1922, he had just initiated the new branch of diesel engine production. However, he remained connected as chairman of the company's board of directors even in his retirement. In a letter of congratulations on the 25th anniversary of the Bremer Vulkan it was said: "If you want to write the history of the Bremer Vulkan, you will have to write the biography of Nawatzki."

From 1927 Nawatzki was a member of the supervisory board of the Bremer Tauwerk-Fabrik AG.

Nawatzki lived in the Ulrichsvilla at Weserstraße 65 in Vegesack, which was built in 1840 by the shipyard owner Hermann Friedrich Ulrichs .

literature

• Lars U. Scholl:  Nawatzki, Viktor. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 3 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Newspaper article about Victor Nawatzki in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .