Shipload of Memories

I'M always a bit wary about stories that claim to be reporting "Jewish outrage" about something or other.  Not that Jews haven't the right to be outraged about anything. But too often the stories look like they've started in the news office, the "spokesperson" quoted was not leading an angry protest deputation, they were 'phoned for a quote; and the supposed anger over something trivial is pointed the wrong way.

l paid more attention to this story in Sunday's Observer, because it looked interesting, because Ed Vuliamy is a serious journalist whose work and integrity I've respected since the war in Bosnia; and anyway, I'm a sucker for pictures of ships! 

Jewish outrage as ship named after SS war criminal arrives in Europe

As Holocaust day nears, anger erupts at arrival in Rotterdam of the Pieter Schelte, the world’s largest vessel

The Pieter Schelte, seen entering the port of Rotterdam, is more than 120 metres wide. Photograph: Bram Van De Biezen/EPA

Leaders of Jewish communities and Holocaust memorial groups in Britain and the Netherlands have reacted with rage and despair at the arrival in Rotterdam of the world’s biggest ship, the Pieter Schelte, named after a Dutch officer in the Waffen-SS.

The vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jonathan Arkush, said: “Naming such a ship after an SS officer who was convicted of war crimes is an insult to the millions who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis. We urge the ship’s owners to reconsider and rename the ship after someone more appropriate.”

Ruth Barnett, a tireless campaigner who arrived from Nazi Germany as part of the Kindertransport, said: “I am outraged by the intensity and extent of denial and indifference that fails to challenge things like this ship, and allows the impunity for perpetrators to think they can get away with it.”

The London-based Lloyd’s Register dug in to defend its role in the ship’s building and development, while the shipbuilder said it had been named in honour of the owner’s father for his “great achievements in the offshore oil and gas industry


Allseas is owned by a Dutchman, Edward Heerema, who is the son of Pieter Schelte Heerema. The ship bearing his father’s name arrived in Rotterdam from the Korean Daewoo shipyards two days before the killing of four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris and three weeks before the Auschwitz anniversary.


John Donovan, a former Shell contractor who is completing a book on the history of the company’s relations with the Third Reich. His petition reads: “Please change the ship’s name so that it no longer sails under the name of a former Waffen-SS officer jailed for war crimes.”

Donovan told the Observer: “This public homage by Edward Heerema as the wealthy son of a Nazi war criminal is an affront to the relatives of tens of millions of souls who perished at the hands of Nazi Germany. The name is unacceptable.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/24/pieter-schelte-worlds-biggest-ship-ss-officer

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27595922/ns/world_news-europe/t/nazi-name-giant-dutch-ship-draws-outcry/#.VMchOy6E1Nk

It turns out that untimely though the ship's arrival was this week, the row about its name has been going for some time.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/70022/Nazi-name-row-torpedoes-ship-launch

Nevertheless, I'm thankful to Ed Vuliamy for bringing the issue to our attention,and the story up to date.

Lloyd’s Register, which has been closely involved in bringing the Pieter Schelte to launch and featured the ship in glowing terms on the cover of its magazine, stuck by its position. “It’s not our role to take a view on the name of a single ship,” said a spokesman, Mark Stokes.

Allseas refrained from comment, but its communications office sent “general information”, including an interview with Edward Heerema in the Telegraaf newspaper, and a summary of his father’s career. This stated that he “became a member of a national socialist organisation in the early stages of the second world war. From November 1942 to June 1943 he was a director of a company under the SS.”

It continues: “Heerema lost his sympathy for the Nazi regime, and defected in June 1943. At the end of the war he was arrested. His trial in 1946 led to conviction for the period of his detention awaiting trial.”

After living in Venezuela, according to his official biography, Pieter Schelte Heerema returned to Holland in 1963, becoming “a civil engineer with great technical creativity, and an entrepreneur … The choice of the [ship’s] name Pieter Schelte is [his son] Edward’s acknowledgement of his father’s great achievements in the oil and gas industry.”

 The Telegraaf article – reported from the ship’s “majestic bridge” and headlined “Unparalleled Dutch glory” – said the vessel was “set to revolutionise the offshore world”. Heerema tells the paper that his father “hardly ever talked about that time with his family … He turned his back on the Netherlands in 1947. Which also was a way to break away from the past.” But Donovan has unearthed an extraordinary case in the high court in London last summer, brought after Allseas fell victim to a fraud scam.

The judge, Mr Justice Peter Smith, asked a witness about Pieter Schelte Heerema: “He was in the Dutch SS, was he?” “No, he was in the German SS,” came the reply. Counsel then asked: “And then he left the SS, you say, in the middle of the war?” Whereupon the judge remarked: “I didn’t know you could leave the SS. I thought it was a job for life.”

THE CASE AGAINST PIETER SCHELTE

■ Before the Pieter Schelte was built, the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies was compiling information on its namesake. Its main researcher, David Barnouw, said Schelte was “a member of a small fascist party before the war, but was in Venezuela when the Germans invaded. Schelte saw it as a reason to return”.
■ Having joined the SS, “Schelte fought on the Russian front for the Wehrmacht, but was recalled to be part of the ‘East Company’, working for the SS in the occupied East. The job was to provide labour, and Schelte promised 2,000 Dutch volunteers. But they were not forthcoming, so he commandeered 4,000 for forced labour”.
■ As the war began to “go badly for Germany, he joined a resistance party, then went to Switzerland. He was interned after the war, tried and I think the judges found him one of their own – a good businessman, well educated”.
■ Schelte returned to Venezuela where, says Barnouw, “any suggestions that he helped Nazis to escape to South America are untrue”. But, he asks: “Why does his son, who is … not a Nazi, give this ship a name that people will inevitably discuss?”
■ Among Schelte’s remarks was his verdict that “the German race is model. The Jewish race, by comparison, is parasitic … Therefore the Jewish question must be resolved in every Aryan country”.

The Schelte story brings to mind a bigger fish.







PIETER SCHELTE HEREEMA (left) and SIR HENRI DETERDING


Although Marcus Samuel, who started the British side of Royal Dutch Shell, was Jewish (the Shell part of the name, and symbol, came from his unlikely business beginnings importing and selling painted sea shells), the Dutchman Henri Deterding who became chair of the joint company from 1930-6  was a Nazi sympathiser.  Indeed, he gave the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler more than sympathy, helping to finance the party's rise, and in 1936 offering Germany the sale of a year's oil reserve on credit.  Ousted from the board that year, he retired to  Krakow am See, in Germany.  

Evidently his was an active retirement:
Deterding was an honored friend and supporter of Hitler and a personal friend of Field Marshall Göring. They lived near each other in Germany and went shooting together. Deterding had also met Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi ideologue and leader of the party department for foreign affairs. In September 1935, the German Foreign Office seconded one of its staff to Deterding as a personal assistant for political matters.
http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2010/11/06/royal-dutch-shell-nazi-secrets-part-2-financier-of-the-third-reich/

Deterding's connections  with the Nazis went back to early days. With them he dreamed of destroying the detested Bolshevism. In 1911 he had bought the  Azerbaijan oilfields from the Rothschilds,only to see these fall under Soviet rule after the revolution. With the Nazis he could plot revenge and war to get the oilfields back.

In England, Deterding had an honorary knighthood and a country estate, Buckhurst Park,Ascot, not far from Windsor, or Cliveden. When Alfred Rosenberg visited England in May 1933 he made for Buckhurst for talks with Deterding.
http://www.shellnews.net/wikipedia/WhoFinancedHitler.pdf#page=5&zoom=auto,-147,312


In Germany, Shell's subsidiary had already taken steps to make itself  Judenrein ,without waiting for Nazi legislation, or worrying what happened to those removed to make room for 'Aryans'.


Deterding maintained liaison with Dutch Nazis like Schelte Hereema from Germany.And some say Schelte's "resistance" group was nothing  of the sort,and his contacts with Nazis continued in his Latin American "exile"

http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2015/01/27/nazi-rat-lines-and-pieter-schelte-heerema/

Post-script:

http://www.unitetheunion.org/news/unite-demands-action-to-stop-ship-honouring-nazi-war-criminal-operating-in-british-waters/