Shipyard labour in occupied France, Belgium, and Netherlands

[Carl Schwamberger]

No I have not encountered such information. My first guess you would be best looking for Dutch sources on this.

[Viktor.S]

Ah alright. When you said yes to my question about resistance connections in the shipbuilding industry I thought maybe you knew some details. I can not speak Dutch so Dutch sources are unfortunately off-limits to me.

[Sid Guttridge]

It might be an idea to look at the German Hansa ship building programme - the nearest equivalent to the Liberty Ship programme.

It was intended to include Danish and Dutch yards, amongst others.

Sid.

[magicdragon]

I know very little about this subject but when I looked at the https://www.german-navy.de/kriegsmarine ... ndex.html/ website a few weeks ago it struck how many half completed warships the German's had captured in Dutch, French and Norwegian yards. They had attempted to complete these projects with varying degrees of success. A couple of things they struggled to complete the larger cruiser and destroyer builds but seemed to finished the smaller ships, with regard to the cruisers and destroyers they seemed to have persisted with them for far longer that was practical given their worsening strategic position moving any spare specialist staff and equipment to German yards must have been an option?

Regarding sabotage, the Germans captured two incomplete Torpedo boats of the improved Norwegian Sleipner class at the Marines Hovedverft Horten shipyard in April 1940. The Germans tried to complete them as the ZN4 and ZN5 but work was very slow and on 27 April 1944 the ZN4 was sunk by sabotage, a bomb being detonated in its turbine section.

[Viktor.S]

Thank you for sharing that story, I'd like to learn more about these sorts of incidents. Wikipedia on "Organization of the Kriegsmarine" claims:

"Most German ports also maintained a large contingent of civilian dock workers and frequently employed senior civilian engineers to oversee shipbuilding and repair. In France, the French resistance made extensive use of dock workers to gather intelligence about German naval activity, in particular the comings and goings of German u-boats from port. Sabotage was also a constant problem for the Germans in occupied ports, leading to the creation of a special SS unit, the SS-Hafensicherungstruppen, which consisted of Allgemeine-SS reservists who performed port security and night watch duties."

[EwenS]

There is a comment in Jordan & Moulin's "French Cruisers 1922-1956" about the work on the cruiser De Grasse building at Lorient. Work was suspended on her on 10 June 1940 when she was 28% complete and had yet to have her machinery fitted. Work was restarted on several occasions under the Germans but there were delays in the delivery of eqpt and little enthusiasm or urgency displayed by the workforce. When Lorient was liberated on 9 May 1945 it was found that a large quantity of material had been concealed by the workforce in the ship's double bottom. She was completed postwar to a different design.

[TheMarcksPlan]

I know very little about this subject but when I looked at the https://www.german-navy.de/kriegsmarine ... ndex.html/

Link doesn't work. Would be interested to peruse this index though.

[magicdragon]

Sorry I completely missed your request you may well have found it already

https://www.german-navy.de/kriegsmarine/index.html

Use the drop down menu on the left-hand side of the screen Captured Ships.