Few world powers have been quite so fond of insane megaprojects as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi
party. Through the 1930s, Nazi Germany embarked on engineering projects on a massive scale, drawing
up plans for thousands of weird and wonderful machinations from the total re-design and
development of the capital Berlin into some kind of totalitarian super-monument to the ridiculous
P1000 Monster Land-tank. But at sea Nazi Germany had a vested interest in combating the might of
British shipbuilding both naval and merchant; but despite being in power for 12 years Nazi Germany
never built an ocean liner to answer Britain’s Queen Mary or France’s Normandie. Why - when
ocean liners were such a key symbol of national power on the world stage - did Hitler fail to
introduce a Nazi ocean liner? Well believe it or not there were two fully-fledged plans for a super
liner to carry the mantle for the German state but they were never completed. And here’s why.
When Hitler and his fascist party assumed power over Germany in 1933 they assumed
control of a nation with advanced engineering capabilities and technological advancement. This
was most evident at sea; Germany’s ocean liner were some of the best in the world.
Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Bremen and Europa had directly threatened Britain’s dominance
on the transatlantic trade and really introduced a new era of transatlantic liner.
They’d been introduced in 1929 and 1930, a product of Weimar Germany nad 3 or 4 years before the
nazis rose to power. The two sister ships were Germany’s premiere offering at sea; they were
over 900 feet long, displaced about 55,000 tons and were very fast. The pair one the coveted
Blue Riband each - the award for the fastest passenger ship crossing across the Atlantic.
They were pretty forward-thinking too; both ships carried a catapult and a Heinkel He-12 mail-plane
to be launched when close to the US so mail could get a head start before the ship docked.
While Bremen and Europa were absolutely dominating the transatlantic trade,
smaller German liners were operating less famous routes. Hamburg Amerika Line had invested in three
huge superliner sisters; Imperator, Vaterland and Bismarck; but these had been confiscated at
the end of the first world war and sold off to British shipping lines instead. Hamburg
Amerika line didn’t try to build a world-class super liner after that; instead they focused on
building smaller, more economic ships carrying both cargo and passengers to south America.
They did build some dedicated ocean liners though like the SS St Louis here; a modest
16,000 ton transatlantic workhorse. She was pretty
and functional but a far cry from the gargantuan splendour of the Imperator.
It was probably the Hamburg South-America Line that was building the most impressive German
liners of the 20s aside from NDL’s Bremen and Europa of course - the Cap Arcona was
a great example of these. Completed in 1927 the ship was a real beauty;
and at 27,000 tons she wasn’t small either!
So that’s a rough assessment of the German passenger merchant lineup at around the time
Hitler came to power. By then, in 1933, Bremen and Europa had been unseated from
their place as fastest ocean liners in the world by Normandie and then Queen
Mary. Germany would have to answer the British and European challenge and if there’s one thing
Hitler and his lackeys loved most of all, it was showing off. Ocean liners were grand
and always in the spotlight; and Nazi Germany needed a response to Queen Mary and Normandie.
The Nazi government invited Germany’s shipping companies to submit design proposals for
superliners to catapult German shipbuilding back into the world focus and Norddeutscher Lloyd and
Hamburg America Line’s designers set to work on creating a true superliner for Nazi Germany.
The first off the mark was Norddeutscher Lloyd. In 1937 NDL representatives took a train to Berlin to
present their design to the Reich ministry. They’d worked with the shipbuilder AG Weser
in Bremen before on the SS Bremen and the design they showed off that day in 1937 was very much in
the tradition of the older ship. The design called for a liner over 1,075 feet long and in excess of
80,000 tons. This would make the new ship the largest liner in the world;
but she would also be the fastest. The ship’s long hull and clean lines would be the perfect
form for carving through the water at great speed; and to power it the ship
would receive an enormous powerplant; turbines driving no fewer than 5 propellers at 300,000
horsepower. This immense power output would propel the new liner through the ocean at
an average of 35 knots, meaning the Blue Riband prize would fall to Nazi Germany. The fuel costs
would have been enormous; but the government intended to subsidise the liner’s operations.
Crucially though the new liner’s decks would be
even more uncluttered and clean than those of Normandie or the Queen Mary.
To enhance their profile and balance them out, many ocean liners from the era used dummy funnels;
smoke stacks not connected to the boilers and constructed purely for cosmetic purposes.
But NDL would have none of that; the new liner would feature only one enormous funnel towards
the front of the ship which gave the ship a strange, imposing appearance.
If completed, the monstrous ocean liner would surely achieve the brief; deposing Queen Mary
and reigning as the largest and fastest ship at sea for the foreseeable future.
In a curious twist for a narcissistic regime the new liner would be named Amerika;
maybe in a move to court American public opinion and sway them towards more friendly relations
with Germany in the case of a war with Europe. In any case the design was largely approved and
work continued on refining the details but by the outbreak of the Second World War in
1939 no keel plates had yet been laid and the Amerika existed only on paper.
But by 1941 things had changed a bit; Hitler’s armies were at their most victorious, having
crushed Europe’s armies and implementing a sweeping invasion of the Soviet Union
which - until then - had been going exactly as planned, resulting in local success after success.
Relationships with the United States had soured though and in December 1941 the US sided with
the Allies after being attacked at Pearl Harbour; NDL’s superliner project would need
a new name so Viktoria - Victory - was chosen as a suitably bold and self-congratulatory moniker.
Viktoria though stayed on paper - the ship was never built because by the time NDL was
at the final stages of preparation Hitler’s armies began to suffer at the hands of the Allied powers;
by 1945 it was all over. Hitler’s dream of a great totalitarian state was dead,
he was dead - and the ocean liner Viktoria was dead.
NDL lost basically all of its ships and its days as a major transatlantic player were done.
Viktoria’s drawings were archived away and the plan was forgotten about.
But while NDL had been kind of sitting on their
hands through the late 1930s not-building Viktoria, their competitors at Hamburg
America actually managed to get a Nazi ocean liner off of paper and into reality.
Hamburg America - also known as HAPAG - had spent the 20s and 30s building modest,
smaller ships and had stayed mostly out of the race for transatlantic dominance. But by the
mid 30s it became clear that if the company was to compete with its international rivals
they’d have to do better than just offer passage on small cargo-passenger ships.
The plan called for a trio of superliners whose construction would be subsidised by
the Nazi government. HAPAG decided to not follow in NDL’s footsteps;
the trio of ships would not compete with Normandie or Queen Mary for supremacy in
either size or speed, but they would be some of the largest German ships afloat.
The first ship was planned through 1936 and 37 and the final design was curious to say
the least. It would be 824 feet in length and about 41,000 GRT - considerably smaller than
the Queen Mary and more in the size category of transatlantic liners that had been built
and launched about twenty years earlier in the days of Titanic. She’d be a little
slow too with a turbo-electric setup driving two propellers to give the ship a speed of 24 knots;
11 knots lower than the proposed speed of Viktoria. The design team clearly took great
inspiration from the French liner Normandie with this one; the bow curvature and breakwater
are almost identical to those found on the French liner. I’ve even seen some people credit Valdimir
Yourkevitch, Normandie’s chief architect, with Vaterland’s design. The addition of two,
squat funnels made the ship look a little stout. She’d have had capacity for 354 first class, 435
tourist and 533 third class passengers. In 1938 the keel was laid at Blohm und Voss in Hamburg,
alongside the likes of the German battleship Bismarck. HAPAG chose to recycle a favourite
old name; in the wake of the second world war the SS Vaterland - or father land - had been taken
off the company’s hands and sold to United States Lines. That had been a huge blow to morale for the
German people - so HAPAG hoped this new Vaterland would carry the torch. Except - it never would.
By 1940 the war was raging but Germany was doing quite well and work on Vaterland continued until
the ship’s hull was complete and ready for launch. She rumbled down the slipway at Hamburg
before being led into the fitting-out wharf; but then disaster struck. German’y military
fortunes were reversed and work on Vaterland was diverted to more pressing matters. For years the
ship’s incomplete hulk sat with work halted or continuing at a crawl but then in July 1943,
Vaterland’s day of destiny arrived. Operation Gomorroah was a combined Royal Air Force and US
Army Air Force initative to destroy the city of Hamburg and for 8 days and 7 nights the city was
bombed mercilessly by Avro Lancasters and B-17s. The effect was tremendous and the raid left about
35,000 people dead, and 61% of the city’s housing destroyed. When the smoke cleared it became clear
that Blohm und Voss had received horrible damage and the Vaterland itself had taken two direct bomb
hits. One of these detonated within the ship with such force that the ship’s forecastle
deck at the front blew out and peeled up over the bridge. The ship was now a write-off as far
as HAPAG were concerned because things just got worse from there; as their armies suffered more
defeats and the war decisively turned against Nazi Germany, no attempt to salvage or repair
Vaterland was ever made. In 1945 the war was over and cleanup could begin; but Vaterland
sat forlorn and abandoned for another 3 years until 1948 when the hulk was broken up for scrap.