Internment of Prinz Eitel Friedrich

On 8 April 1915 the commander of the German auxiliary cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich, Lieutenant Commander Max Thierichens, informed the American authorities that his ship would not put to sea and would be interned. For nearly a month she had lain in the port of Newport News in Virginia, and at midnight the previous day the deadline set for her had expired. Sources give different dates for the internment itself, from 7 to 9 April. So ended a raid that had begun in August 1914 in Tsingtao.

Seven months at sea

Prinz Eitel Friedrich was a passenger liner of the Norddeutscher Lloyd company, armed in Tsingtao with guns taken from old gunboats. After parting from the squadron of Admiral Maximilian von Spee she waged commerce warfare in the Pacific and then in the South Atlantic. She sank 11 ships, mostly sailing vessels, totalling about 33,000 gross register tons. Among them was the American barque William P. Frye, sunk at the end of January 1915.

She had nowhere to land the crews of the ships she sank, so she carried them with her. When her coal was running out and her worn engines needed repair, Thierichens headed for the neutral United States. On 10 March 1915 the ship entered Newport News, on the waters of Hampton Roads. There were several hundred prisoners on board. The captain of the William P. Frye told the American authorities how his ship had been sunk, and Washington soon demanded compensation from Berlin.

The deadline

A neutral state could allow a warship of a belligerent to stay in port longer than 24 hours only for the time needed for the repairs essential for her to put to sea safely. She could also take on only as much fuel as she needed to reach the nearest port of her own country. If she did not sail when the time allowed had expired, the neutral government was to detain her until the end of the war and intern her crew. This was laid down by the Hague Convention XIII of 1907. The Americans examined the ship and concluded that the repairs would take a dozen or so working days. The deadline for putting to sea was set at midnight on 7 April.

For a long time Thierichens did not reveal whether he would try to break out into the Atlantic. Just beyond the limit of territorial waters, at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, British cruisers were waiting, however. The slow and worn-out liner stood no chance against them. When the deadline had passed, Thierichens therefore agreed to internment, as the commanders of the Cormoran at Guam and of the gunboat Geier at Honolulu had done before him.

In an American navy yard

The interned ship was taken to the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia. Soon another German auxiliary cruiser, Kronprinz Wilhelm, arrived at Newport News with empty coal bunkers and also ended up at Norfolk. The sailors of the two ships, about a thousand men in all, spent more than a year and a half in Virginia. In the grounds of the yard they built from scrap a miniature German village, which Americans visited in crowds. In the autumn of 1916 the ships were moved to the navy yard in Philadelphia.

After the United States entered the war in April 1917 the Americans seized the ship, and the German sailors were placed in camps. The former Prinz Eitel Friedrich, as the transport USS DeKalb, carried American soldiers to France. After the war she sailed for a time as a passenger ship and was scrapped in 1934.