Die vier Leben eines Dampfschleppers

Abstract

In June 2005 the Hanseatic city of Rostock was informed by the "Landesamt zur Regelung offener Vermögensfragen Mecklenburg-Vorpommern" (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Regional Office for Settling Open Questions of Inheritance) in Greifswald that the steam-tug SATURN, which had been in a shipping museum for over 25 years, had been promised to the Munich-based heir of the person entitled to it because the latter had since died. This occurrence presented an occasion to examine the previous history of the vessel. The tug was built in 1907 at the Hamburg Schiffswerft und Maschinenfabrik AG for the local shipping company of the Gebrüder Wulff, and was given the name GEBR. WULFF IV. It was a typical small tug of the type frequently used in harbours at that time. Before World War II the tug was sold to Stettin. A ship-owner by the name of Herbert Tibow had purchased the vessel. In January 1945 the ships from the Tibow company were loaded with army cargo and sent off in a convoy to Lübeck. In Peenestrom, the ships were confiscated by Soviet troops. The owner, Herbert Tibow, was subjected to severe political persecution after the war and fled to the Federal Republic in 1953. The tugboat, left behind in the German Democratic Republic, was expropriated without compensation. In Stralsund the vessel belonged to the few operational units available to the newly founded GDR in its establishment of a technical fleet, and performed numerous tug rescue operations over several years in the Stralsund region. From 1955 the state-owned Warnow shipyard in Warnemünde was legally in charge of the tugboat. The vessel spent several years there before being taken out of service in 1979, mostly as a support tug for the floating crane GREIF on the Lower Warnow and in the Warnemünde region. The tug was one of the last fully riveted, steam-driven vessels in the GDR. As a result, preservation of the tug for posterity and its inclusion in the exhibits of the Rostock Maritime Museum was almost an inevitable result of its decommissioning. In its early years at the museum, the tug was kept alongside the traditional ship TYP FRIEDEN as a floating technological monument. In 1987 it had to be put on land for conservational purposes. Today, the steam-tug SATURN is still an impressive exhibit in the open-air section of the Rostock Maritime Museum.