The Fuhrer’s Yacht
After World War II, Bob Rodney of Ottawa was a teenage dropout from Westboro’s Churchill Public School on his first visit to New York. Hitler’s yacht was pointed out to him in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. He literally shot from the hip when he photographed the 86-foot wooden tall ship with a cheap plastic Brownie camera. The navy shore patrol was hard on his heels. “Military brass were not anxious for the public to see the yacht they ‘liberated’ and generals used as their plaything.”
Adolf Hitler’s yacht, the Ostwind, went to join the Valkyries in 42 fathoms of water off Miami 44 years after the war ended. At least, that’s what the game plan called for. But Hitler must have enjoyed the last laugh. Because of human error and rough one-metre seas, the clapped-out hull was dropped off a barge onto a six-metre high healthy reef of coral and sponges in only six fathoms of water.
Miami Commissioner Abe Resnick, a Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, had organized the event to mark the 50th anniversary of the June 5, 1939, “voyage of the damned.” A plane flew overhead trailing a banner that read: “NEVER AGAIN.”
The Voyage of the Damned was the saga of the passenger ship St. Louis, which sailed from Hamburg on May 15, 1939, with 907 German Jews on board. The entire ship’s complement had been given Cuban entrance visas before leaving Hamburg, but when the St. Louis docked in Havana, her passengers learned that their visas had been revoked. One after another, South American nations Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Panama denied them entry. The United States not only refused them entry, but also sent a Coast Guard cutter to ensure the captain did not run the ship aground to allow refugees to swim ashore. Canada’s King government also turned the St. Louis away.
Canada’s Immigration Branch was a minor agency attached to the Ministry of Mines and Resources. The minister, Tom Crerar, was a 32-year Commons veteran awaiting a summons to the Senate. He left the day-to-day responsibility for immigration to a public servant, Frederick Charles Blair. Blair was a one-man band. He considered immigration his personal fiefdom. Blair’s anti-Semitism was in the open. He was on the record stating the term “refugee” was a code word for Jew and warned his minister that, unless safeguards were adopted, Canada was in danger of being “flooded with Jewish people.” Crerar relied totally on Blair, whose personal immigration policy was that immigrants should be kept out. Referring to Jewish immigrants, Blair wrote in a letter: “None is too many.” The phrase later became the title of a best-selling book by Toronto university professor, Irving Abella.
Blair had an ally in nationally known social worker and future mayor of Ottawa Charlotte Whitton. Dr. Whitton repeatedly admonished members of the National Refugee Committee to focus on non-Jewish refugees. She sent a memo to all welfare councils warning of large numbers of non-British refugee children.
Oscar Cohen, prominent Jewish activist, almost broke up the inaugural meeting of the National Refugee Committee when he charged that Charlotte Whitton was carrying on “guerrilla warfare against the Canadian Jewish Council by trying to block the refugee children project.”
Charlotte Whitton was not alone in adopting an anti-Jewish stance. Mackenzie King’s Liberal government turned laissez-faire blind eyes and deaf ears to Frederick Blair’s blatant discrimination. In 1926, King purchased Shady Hill cottage and a lot of land at Kingsmere for $1,400. His diary entry recorded the only reason he bought the property was to prevent “a sale to Jews who have a desire to get in at Kingsmere & would ruin the whole place.”
The St. Louis had no alternative but to return to Hamburg with its human cargo. Half of the 907 Jews died in the gas chambers and crematoria of Nazi death camps. Twenty-six surviving members of the St. Louis were on hand to watch the Ostwind being scuttled. Rabbi Barry Konovitch told the 300 assembled, including 60 journalists from around the world: “it will become an artificial reef. It’s nice to think that some good will come of it — at last.”
Describing the Ostwind as “Hitler’s yacht” may have been a misnomer. Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, spent some time on a number of yachts on the Rhine, but very little time on any of them. He preferred his Alpine mountain retreat, Berchtesgaden. Disappointed with Germany’s showing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitler ordered a series of racing vessels built. The Ostwind may have been one of them, but some marine historians believe the Ostwind started out as the Grille (German for “cricket”) and was renamed when it was taken by the United States as a prize of war. The Horst Wessel was another of the wooden racing yachts Hitler had built. It was renamed Eagle and is now a training ship in the U.S. Coast Guard.
Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler’s personal photographer, took photographs of Hitler and Eva Braun cruising the Rhine on board the Grille/Ostwind, but he knew the pictures were for the Fuhrer’s personal album only and not for public consumption. Hitler did not wish to be seen swanning around on a luxury yacht, nor did he wish to be seen with Eva Braun.
Eva Braun had started out as Heinrich Hoffman’s office assistant and became Hitler’s mistress in 1932. He bought her a villa in Munich near his home and provided her with a chauffeured Mercedes. In 1936, she moved to Berchtesgaden and served as his chatelaine, out of sight of all but Hitler’s intimates. The couple never appeared in public together and few Germans knew she existed. They were married in the Fuhrerbunker in 1945, a few hours before they committed suicide.
Hitler’s favourite yacht was a steel-hulled tall ship owned by the Krupp munitions family. He used it for ceremonial occasions when presenting gallantry awards to German naval officers. Years later, the Krupp yacht turned up in St. Lucia re-named the Yankee.
West End resident, Don Miller, recalls taking a two-week “Barefoot Cruise” out of St. Lucia on the Yankee in the 1970s. “Barefoot cruises were intended for people who enjoyed sailing. I worked four hours on and eight off pulling ropes — putting sails up and taking them down. Our sleeping quarters were not luxurious; they were very basic, very Spartan. The food was exceptionally good. The captain was ex-British Navy. The majority of working passengers were couples. Our fares were on a par with or a little lower than conventional cruises.”
With so many name changes to contend with, tracing Hitler’s wooden windjammer racing yachts is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. None of the vessels turned up in searches of Jane’s Ships or Lloyd’s Shipping Register. To avoid paying port fees, some yachts mounted a gun on their fore deck to qualify as warships. Jane’s Fighting Ships provides thumbnail information on these “armed yachts,” but none of Hitler’s tall ships are listed.
Bob Rodney worked as an office boy for J.A.D. McCurdy in aircraft supply and production during the war. When he took his holiday bus trip to New York, the Brooklyn navy yard was jammed with ships of all sizes and shapes — mothballed PT-Boats, landing craft, and gunboats. The Queen Mary rode at anchor. The Grille was dwarfed alongside her, and someone pointed out to Bob that it was Hitler’s yacht.
He “had to photograph” the yacht. He was spotted by armed military police and chased away. Undeterred, he plotted a commando-type approach, over gangplanks and across the decks of acres of warships. The shore police gave chase again, but Bob managed a camera shot at a dead run.
Obviously, the U.S. Navy didn’t want photos taken of “Hitler’s yacht.” Too many embarrassing questions might have been asked. General Dwight Eisenhower had appropriated the luxury yacht for his personal use and often entertained high-ranking military officers on Rhine cruises.
Marion Beasley has a photograph of her mother and aunt sailing on the Rhine “on Hitler’s yacht.” Her grandfather was the late Major General Robert John Fleming, Jr. who served as a colonel with the 1,140th Combat Engineer Group in Rhineland Province and the Ruhr Valley with the army of occupation.
“Hitler’s yacht” was taken over by the U.S. Navy and then sold to a series of investors who hoped to turn it into a museum. The vessel ended up in storage for seven years at a Jacksonville, Florida, shipyard. When word got around it was “Hitler’s yacht,” vandals stripped her — including planking — for souvenirs. Others came to set the evil trophy of war on fire and destroy her. Pieces of the yacht’s appointments, a mahogany art deco-style chair with original upholstery and a teakwood picture frame, turned up in a Virginia auction and were presented to Harrison Colket of the North American Smelting Co., Newark, Delaware. Mr. Colket took part in the salvage operation of the yacht just after the war ended.
J. J. Nelson, owner of the Florida shipyard, had to hire round the clock guards to ward off the thieving and the vengeful. The American Nazi Party tried to buy the tall ship and restore her, but Mr. Nelson decided it would be “more principled” to give her away to a Jewish group. Miami Commissioner Abe Resnick obtained permission from Dade County to scuttle the yacht 2.5 kilometres off shore. The derelict hull was transported from Jacksonville by a barge pulled by a tug captained by A. M. Daly, Jr.
Resnick was crammed, along with the 300 others, on the tiny Florida Princess. He was looking forward to wielding the sledgehammer that would free the wooden chocks and send “Hitler’s yacht” to the bottom, 42 fathoms down. He was horrified when he saw Captain Daly swing the sledge and the hull went down at the wrong site — almost in the backyard of the famous Fontainebleau Hilton Hotel. Abe took the crossed signals in stride: “Hitler’s soul is still somewhere there. I’m just kidding. It was truly an incredible, incredible historic event and suddenly … BOOM! … mistake,” he added.
The miscue touched off a furious round of finger-pointing and name-calling. Abe Resnick blamed Captain Daly. The tugboat skipper blamed the master of the Florida Princess, Captain Chris Cadley. Abe Resnick said he would not pay to have the hull towed off the reef and sunk in deeper water. Nevertheless the Army Corps of Engineers gave the squabbling factions two weeks to get the job done or they would do it and bill Abe Resnick. He estimated the job would cost between $5,000 and $10,000. In the end, the Fontainebleau Hotel paid for the hull to be raised and resunk in deeper water. A hotel spokesman said: “the really sad thing was that in the two weeks the yacht was in shallow water divers defaced the wreck with anti-Semitic graffiti.”