Internment of the Kronprinz Wilhelm

On 26 April 1915 at Newport News in Virginia the American authorities interned the German auxiliary cruiser Kronprinz Wilhelm. The ship, which since August 1914 had been hunting Entente merchant ships in the Atlantic, had entered the neutral port two weeks earlier, out of coal and with a sick crew. The British chronology calls her the last German raider on the oceans. Indeed, after her internment no German warship waged commerce war far from Europe any longer. The next raiders, such as the Möwe, put to sea only at the end of 1915, and from German ports.

A liner with the guns of the Karlsruhe

The Kronprinz Wilhelm was a large, fast liner of the Norddeutscher Lloyd company, built in 1901 at the Vulcan yard in Stettin. In 1902 she won the Blue Riband for the fastest eastbound crossing. The outbreak of war found her in New York, from where she slipped out to sea at the beginning of August. On 6 August she met the cruiser Karlsruhe in the Atlantic, which handed over two guns, part of her crew and a new commander, her navigating officer Paul Thierfelder. The transfer was interrupted by the appearance of British cruisers, so the ship was armed in haste.

From then on the Kronprinz Wilhelm cruised the Atlantic, mainly on the routes off the coast of South America. From September 1914 to the end of March 1915 she captured more than a dozen ships, mostly British and French, with a total tonnage, depending on the source, of 56,000 to 58,000 gross register tons. She sank most of them. From one of them she took two extra guns. She took coal and food from captured ships and from supply ships, kept the crews on board and later transferred them to other vessels. By all accounts no one from the captured ships was killed during the cruise. The cruise lasted 251 days, during which the ship covered more than 37,000 nautical miles.

Escape to a neutral port

By the spring of 1915 the ship was at the end of her strength. Her sides were dented and leaking from the constant coaling at sea, her engines needed repair and her ammunition was running out. For lack of fresh vegetables and fruit more and more sailors were falling ill with beriberi. There were no German cruisers left on the oceans, as the last of them, the Dresden, had been sunk in March off the coast of Chile. Thierfelder headed for the United States. During the night of 10–11 April he slipped past the British cruisers guarding the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, and on the morning of 11 April dropped anchor off Newport News. According to accounts, less than 25 tons of coal were left in her bunkers.

Another German raider, the Prinz Eitel Friedrich, had been lying in the same port since March, and a few days earlier her commander, after the deadline set for him had expired, had agreed to internment. The Kronprinz Wilhelm was in a similar position. The Hague Convention of 1907 allowed her to stay in a neutral port only for the time needed for repairs essential to put to sea. The British were waiting outside, and many sailors needed treatment ashore. After two weeks Thierfelder gave up further fighting, and on 26 April the ship was interned.

A village in the dockyard

The Kronprinz Wilhelm, like the Prinz Eitel Friedrich, was taken to the Norfolk Navy Yard at Portsmouth, Virginia. The crews of the two ships, about a thousand men in all, built there out of scrap a miniature German village, named Eitel Wilhelm after the two ships, with a church and a school. Thousands of Americans visited it, and the proceeds from the tickets went to the German Red Cross. In the autumn of 1916 the ships were moved to Philadelphia.

After the United States entered the war in April 1917 the Americans seized the ship, and the German sailors were sent to camps. As the transport USS Von Steuben the former raider carried American soldiers to France. She was scrapped in 1923.