NIEMIECKI STATEK PASAŻERSKI WILHELM GUSTLOFF, TORPEDOWIEC LÖWE HOLOWNIK ALBERT FORSTER

MS Wilhelm Gustloff was a German passenger ship from the interwar period and World War II. The ship was launched in May 1937, and the unit was put into operation in 1938. The overall length was 208.9 meters and a width of 23.5 meters. The maximum speed was around 15-16 knots, and the crew was up to 590 people. MS Wilhelm Gustloff was built at the Blohm und Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany. The unit was named after a member of the NSDAP who was murdered in 1936, and the widow of this Nazi activist and Adolf Hitler were present at the launching ceremony. In the period 1938-1939, the unit played primarily the role of a cruise ship, sailing both in the North Sea and the Mediterranean. At that time, the ship's user was the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude (KdF). After the outbreak of World War II, MS Wilhelm Gustloff was incorporated into the Kriegsmarine, where it initially acted as a hospital ship, and later was transformed into an auxiliary unit and a transport ship for the army. It was then that it received anti-aircraft weapons and depth charge launchers. In October 1943, MS Wilhelm Gustloff was damaged as a result of an Allied air raid on Gdynia. Due to these damages, it moored in Gdynia until 1945. The unit was sunk on January 30, 1945 by the Soviet submarine S-13. The sunken ship has become a grave for several thousand people. The most probable estimate is about 6,600 dead. For comparison - about 1,500 people died in the RMS Titanic disaster.The Löwe (original name: Gyller) was a German torpedo boat of Norwegian production that entered service at the Kriegsmarine in 1940. The length of the ship at the time of launching was 74.3 meters, width was 7.75 meters, and the draft was 2.1 meters. Full displacement reached about 700 tons, while the maximum speed was around 32 knots. In the Norwegian service, the main weapons were: 3 100 mm guns, a single 40 mm cannon, and 2 533 mm torpedo tubes. The torpedo boat Löwe (originally: Gyller) belonged to the Sleipner class of torpedo boats, which consisted of a total of six units and was built for the needs of the Norwegian Navy, which in the early 1930s was keenly interested in acquiring vessels that would replace them in the line old Draug destroyers. At the same time, the very difficult economic situation in Norway at that time had a great influence on the Sleipner design. And it was for economic reasons that the right to build new units was decided, but they were designed as small ships and as cheap as possible to build and operate. Finally, a series of units was created, which in Norway were classified as destroyers, but in essence they were torpedo boats. It is worth adding that a representative of this class - the Gyller presented here - took an active part in the battles against the German invasion in 1940, but after the campaign fell into the hands of the occupiers. After renovation and retooling (among others: three 100 mm guns were removed in favor of a single 105 mm gun) and until the end of the war, he served in the Kriegsmarine, performing various auxiliary functions, including (at the end of World War II) he carried out escort tasks to The Baltic Sea.Albert Forster was a German tugboat from World War II and the post-war period. The order for the vessel was placed in 1937, and shortly after its launch took place. The ship was 36 meters long and 8.2 meters wide. The maximum speed did not exceed 16 knots. Shortly after the launch, it was one of the tugboats introduced by the battleship Schleswig-Holstein to the Gdansk port in August 1939. A year later (1940), Albert Forster was taken over by the Kriegsmarine and, as a supply unit, it happily survived the end of the war. In 1945 it was taken over by the British, but shortly afterwards it was handed over to Poland. After renovation, in 1948, the unit entered service under the white and red flag - under the name Hercules. During its service in our navy, the ship performed tasks as part of rescue and mining missions, including the recovery of the wreckage of the battleship Gneisenau. The unit was decommissioned in 1960, and two years later it was scrapped.