Thread by @cocteautriplets

Sometimes I go looking for interesting rabbit holes to go down and tweet a thread about.
Sometimes people send me the strand that will lead me to a thread.
And sometimes unique and unusual inspiration just drops itself straight into my inbox, begging to be looked into. 🧵👇

You see way back whenever I set up alerts for online auction houses with the words "Edinburgh" or "Leith" and whenever something is listed with one of those words, I'll get an email. Mainly it's Edinburgh Crystal or Prince Philip memorabilia, or a job lot of Pru Leith cookbooks

But sometimes it's something very interesting indeed. Something you never knew you were looking for until it arrived in your inbox at 3:3AM one morning. And today's #AuctionHouseArtefact is one of those.

Because todays #AuctionHouseArtefact is the original "Writ of Summons" from the seizing of the German merchant ship "Alster" in Leith in June 1940, the prize rules dictating that the officer who served it had to nail it to the mast of said ship!

The "Alster" was an 12,000 deadweight ton cargo ship of the German Norddeutscher Lloyd line (NDL), which had been built in Hamburg in 1927.

She was built to sail between Bremen and Australia and far east, but was taken over by the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) in 1940 in advance of the German invasion of Norway.

Alster departed for Norway on 3rd April 1940, destination Narvik, loaded up with supplies for the invasion force, including guns, ammunition, 80 lorries, thousands of tons of coke fuel, food, hay for horses and even toys to distribute to children in a "hearts and minds" effort

She arrived under cover, 4 days before the invasion proper, to be in position and ready to supply the German forces once they had started fighting. The old Norwegian gunboat "Trygg" even escorted her in to anchor

"Alster" worked her way to Bodø, passing a number of Norwegian Navy inspections who decided there was nothing odd about this heavily laden German merchant ship and let her pass.

When war officially broke out between Germany and Norway on April 10th, the Norwegian gunboat "Syrian", which had passed her 2 days previously caught up, but was unwilling to try boarding her as she now suspected "Alster" was armed and carrying troops.

"Alster" plodded off at her leisurely top speed of 14 knots, and "Syrian" called the Royal Navy to send reinforcements to capture her.

The Navy realised her value to the invaders, and sent a strong force to capture her. The cruiser HMS "Penelope" and four destroyers led by HMS "Icarus".

"Penelope" unfortunately ran into a few navigational difficulties, which caused her to run into the Island of Fleinvær on April 11th. The destroyer HMS "Eskimo" managed to pull the damaged cruiser free and to Vestfjord, where temporary repairs could be made.

(The next day, it was "Eskimo" that needed help, the German destroyer "Georg Thiele" hitting her with a torpedo in the 2nd Battle of Narvik, causing a significant rearrangement and truncation of her bows.

Amazingly, "Eskimo" survived, was patched up at Skjelfjorden and sent back to Vickers-Armstrongs on the Tyne to get a new front end and was back in action within 5 months, going on to survive the war.

It was left to HMS "Icarus" to round up the "Alster", a very one-sided encounter which was only ever going to go the Royal Navy's way.

The crew of the "Alster" tried, and failed, to set of a scuttling charge, and the ship and its crew were captured. The Navy found the captain was none other than Oskar Sharf, the NDL's most senior seagoing officer.

Scharf was - or had been - the captain of the NDL transatlantic liner "Europa", pride of the fleet. He found himself on the "Alster" as a demotion, having found himself unable to work under the Nazi party supervisor Robert Ley who had been installed to oversee him.,

Scharf was adamant to the end of his days that he was no Nazi - he had joined the party for a year from 1934-35 in order to keep his job in his words. His later actions lent some credence to that position. An old fashioned captain, he was not used to taking orders on his own ship

Robert Ley was a Nazi fanatic, close to Hitler, and in charge of the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF). As architect of the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF) programme, Ley was political overseer to NDL's liners and therefore to Captain Scharf

But Scharf was also a German officer and wasn't about to hand over his ship to the Royal Navy without a struggle. Six of his men would die resisting the boarding parties.

"Alster" was moved to Skjelfjord and all the supplies in her were turned over to the Norwegians, who quickly turned them against the invaders. The Royal Navy used her as a temporary base for repairing ships, and ironically she would help repair the "Eskimo" a few days later

But before this, Scharf and his crew made one last attempt to scuttle her by opening seawater valves to try and flood her. They failed, and found themselves taken off for their trouble and locked up on other Royal Navy ships.

Many of the crew of the cruiser "Penelope" did not have much to do now their ship was out of action, so they were put on "Alster" as a prize crew. The Germans now made desperate attempts to sink her by aerial bombing, but somehow the she survived them all.

On April 24th, "Alster" was sent to Tromsø to unload the last of her supplies for the Norwegian forces defending that port. 3 days later she departed in a convoy for the UK, evacuating amongst other things 209 British and 46 Norwegian military personnel...

...72 German prisoners of war (her crew, minus the officers who made their way separately) and the surviving forward gun turret from the HMS "Eskimo", which currently had little use for it in her new configuration.

British newspapers reported these events in great detail, as there wasn't much else good news to report at the time, and Captain Scharf was a high-status prisoner of war, a name not unfamiliar in British merchant marine circles.

"Alster" unloaded her passengers at Scapa Flow on 31st May, arriving at the naval base in Rosyth on June 4th. Three days later she was sent to Leith, still crewed by men of the "Penelope", to conclude the legal formalities of making her a British prize.

Robert Robertson, a Customs & Excise Officer from Morningside, went aboard on the 13th of the month and nailed the official writ to the mast. At a stroke she officially became the property of the British Admiralty.

The "Alster" was passed to the Ministry of War Transport, who made her an "Empire Ship", ships owned by the Government and allocated to merchant shipping companies to make good their wartime losses. "Alster" went to Alfred Booth & Co. of Liverpool.

She was refitted to bring her to a British merchant standard and renamed "Empire Endurance", before leaving Southend in Convoy FN255 and starting a new career in the Battle of the Atlantic.

She now plyed the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic between Methil, Liverpool, Swansea, Milford Haven and other British ports to Canada. On the 19th April 1941, after 6 months in the Atlantic, she was sent to Alexandria, Egypt, via Cape Town.

Early the next morning, at 332AM German time, she was hit by a torpedo from the U-boat U73 southwest of Rockall. A second torpedo 25 minutes later broke her in two and sent her to the bottom, with the loss of 66 souls from the 95 on board.

The Canadian warship HMCS "Trillium" found and picked up 24 of the survivors the following day, landing them at Greenock 4 days later. The last 5 survivors were picked up by the cargo ship "Highland Brigade" on 9th May, after 19 days adrift.

David Selwyn Davies, the Chief Officer of the "Empire Endurance" had taken over the survivors after the explosion of the 2nd torpedo blew the Captain, William Willis R.D. Torkington, overboard. For his efforts, Davies would receive the MBE.

Davies was able to pull his injured captain aboard, thus saving his life, and it was his boat that spent 19 days adrift in the Atlantic.

As a measure of the horrors of this voyage, 28 of Davies men got into the lifeboat alive. Only 8 would be rescued, and of those 3 more died not long afterwards.

Despite Davies efforts, Captain Torkington would never recover from his injuries and exposure in the lifeboat, and was one of those who died a few days after being picked up by the "Highland Brigade"

Oskar Scharf found himself sent to Canada for Internment. Because of his seniority and because he was neither a military or political man, he was put in charge of the internees in "Camp R" in the pleasant lakeside township of Red Rock, Ontario.

The camp had around 1,100 inmates, mainly merchant and naval seamen. Some were ardent Nazis, others Communists, many were politically apathetic. There were also 78 Jews, including 11 of school age.

Scharf is credited in a number of sources as going out of his way to protect the Jews in his charge from the Nazis within his ranks, before the authorities came to their senses and released them back to Britain in January 1941.

The Nazis in turn made life difficult for Scharf, who had an awkward balancing act to maintain between those he was in charge of and his Canadian captors. They heckled and humiliated him for refusing to give a "Sieg Heil" after official announcements.

The Canadian authorities eventually decided that Scharf posed no threat and somewhat surprisingly released him in April 1944 and allowed him to return to Germany as a civilian, which he did on a Swedish ship via New York, Algiers, Barcelona and Marseille.

Scharf was reunited with his family, but would be interrogated by the Gestapo on-and-off until the end of the war. Nevertheless, he as given back his job and rank with NDL and put back in charge of the liner Europa laid up in Bremen.

He was in charge of "Europa" in May 1945 when first the British and then the Americans entered Bremerhaven and captured the port and the ship. By August, the Americans had completely taken the ship over as a prize, taking her over in a formal ceremony from Scharf and his officers

Scharf found himself in the unusual position of having not one but two ships he was in charge of boarded and taken off his hands by the Allies in the war. He was allowed to remain with her though and was in charge of sailing her to New York as a prize in October 1945

The US Navy now commissioned the "Europa" and used her to repatriate American servicemen from Europe, which she could do 4,500 at a time. In 1946 she was allocated to France as a war reparation, and given to the CGT line who renamed her Liberté and refitted her for service.

Scharf resigned from the NDL and took up the job of port captain of Bremerhaven. The post-war de-nazification process classified him as Level II (Follower), the 2nd lowest level of classification, incurring a nearly worthless fine of 18,000 Reichsmarks. He died in 1953 age 67

I would really like to know what came of Chief Officer Selwyn Davies MBE. But besides finding he was from Moreton in Cheshire and that he also received the Lloyd's Medal, I have turned up nothing more yet. 🔚