On this July afternoon in 1933, Willy Vogel's cries from the New Harbor are carried over to the first dwellings barely a hundred yards away. They had already stepped down the steps into the interior of the ship, where four men in SA uniforms waited and asked if he was a Communist. Vogel said yes. They called him Lump, a criminal and a pig. Afterwards Vogel did not answer a question - two hours later his face was smashed, he could hardly walk anymore.
Vogel, then 26 years old, KPD member, was arrested on July 6, 1933 by a squadron and abused on a ship of the Marine SA in Bremerhaven. "Three men kept beating me with rubber truncheons," he said in a 1946 statement after the war. On the chest, face, back, head, buttocks and legs. They pulled him by the hair through the room. When he was unconscious, they doused him with harbor water, and the ordeal went on.
Twice Bird was on the rusty barge, which the vernacular baptized because of the eerie screams "ghost ship". Here political opponents of the Nazis were beaten with copper cables, clubs, steel rods and slats. After that they suffered from kidney bleeding or ruptured eardrums, women did not recognize their men again. At least three of the victims tried to commit suicide. Alone 54 cases from the year 1933 were negotiated starting from the end of September 1948 before the jury court Bremen in the "ghost ship process".
Residents only disturbed the screams
The then Wesermünde was renamed after the Second World War in Bremerhaven. Vogel was just one of many who were mistreated by the Nazis. This happened mainly because of a decree by Hermann Göring. Shortly after the NSDAP came into power, the Reich Minister ordered political prisoners to be handed over first to the SA and SS. "They were commissioned to prepare confessions," says Manfred Ernst. "And that did not go off without a noise, because people cried miserably."
The lawyer and regional historian wrote in the eighties "The upright gait", a book about resistance and refusal. "Resistance, as we know it later, did not exist in Bremerhaven," explains Ernst. The Social Democrats had disappeared into their allotments, the population had not opposed. "Those who resisted with posters and leaflets were communists, and they suffered the most."
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"Ghost Ship" in Bremerhaven: The floating torture chamber of the NazisLike Willy Vogel. "The jailer in the Bremen office cried when he saw me later, my wife was not allowed to come to me for three weeks because of the injuries," he says in Ernst's book. It was also mistreated in police jails. But the ship had a special meaning, because here was not tortured in any cellar, not behind thick walls.
When Willy Vogel was to be taken back to the police prison, he had to cover his face so that the dockworkers could not see the wounds. Another witness testified that a human grape had formed on a nearby bridge during a torture. After a while, the SA moved the ship to the west side of the harbor. "The residents complained," says Ernst. "But not because people were tortured, but because they felt disturbed by the screams."
The ship itself was a relic of the First World War, built in 1918 as a river minesweeper, then converted to "Peilboot III". From a shipyard in Cuxhaven, the Marine-SA bought the now derelict Kahn in the spring of 1933 and hauled it up the Weser. According to eyewitnesses, there was an interrogation room aft, in which often the only 23-year-old SA-man Karl Finger sat. If he did not receive the desired answers, the political prisoners came to the forecastle, where they were brutally beaten.
Finger, after his time in Bremerhaven as Teilkommandoführer an Einsatzkommando involved in shootings, denied in the interrogations after the war everything. The maltreatment he pushed to another main suspect: Anton Weikenstorfer, later chief defendant.
An investigator clarifies
According to Manfred Ernst, torture continued on the ship until 1939, albeit less frequently because of the broken resistance of the KPD. Later it sank after a bombing on October 24, 1944 - and disappeared from public perception.
It was the Americans who urged to solve the Nazi crimes. And a crime assistant. Despite the headwind in post-war Germany, Karl Müller bit into the case. He heard witnesses, tracked down suspects, arrested potential perpetrators. "It was an exhausting and not necessarily benevolent work," says author Ernst.
Müller was considered a tough investigator - and he had a personal motivation: Before the war, he had been a member of the KPD, 1938 arrested, later to the concentration camp. Only a month after entering service in Bremerhaven Müller began in July 1946 with the investigations that should lead to the process. Earlier, he targeted Anton Weikenstorfer, who lived undisturbed after the war in the nearby 600-strong village of Heerstedt.
Weikenstorfer denied any responsibility. "I myself did not know what kind of ship it was," he said during his interrogation. He had only joined the SS in the summer of 1932 in order to get to work - not a year later, the Rollkommando bore his name, which had to answer for the atrocities on the "ghost ship". In several statements he is described as the head of the interrogations, often equipped with a "thong with twelve belts". "Weikenstorfer struck me like a lunatic," said KPD member Martin Lang in 1946. He also lost a few teeth.
Mild judgments for the SA men
Similar to Weikenstorfer almost all suspects said: The SA allegedly knew nothing, the police pushed everything on the roll command, all just wanted to have obeyed orders. Investigator Müller did not believe them. "His statements on the matter are as stupid as untrue," he noted after the interrogation of an SA man who had lived on the ghost ship for weeks. "The crimes that happened there were talk of the town, and he does not even want to know about these things." Also Weikenstorfers statements commented Müller: "It's downright cowardly to deny these crimes."
Of the 49 culprits that made up Müller, eleven were charged in the "ghost ship trial". For them, on 15 November 1948 prison sentences of 43 years and six months were imposed for crimes in office. Two defendants were acquitted, one detective escaped his punishment by taking his own life on the day the verdict was pronounced.
Weikenstorfer received the highest sentence at the age of twelve, but was released early in December 1955 - as were almost all of his co-defendants. Only Karl Finger, who got five and a half years, later had to go to prison a second time for the murders of his Einsatzkommando 1942 in Stavropol.
It is the notorious leniency of German post-war justice in dealing with Nazi criminals. Manfred Ernst calls the judgments "ridiculous" today. He even talked to some of the victims and in the early 1980s also visited Willy Vogel, now 79. "He and his wife Anna lived in extremely modest circumstances," says Ernst. "Nobody could lead a beautiful life, which resisted here."
Today, the martyrdom of Willy Vogel and his fellow sufferers is reminiscent of a small chalkboard in the shadow of the Climate and Emigration Center - 26 words in dark marble on the bridge between the Old and New Harbors. Manfred Ernst says: "Hardly anyone perceives them there."
