Banished to paradise

Countless German cargo ships were at the beginning of the Second World War II abroad, the way back to their homeland was denied them. In Indonesia, the crew of the Sophie Rickmers for better times.

Numerous German merchant ships were confiscated by the Dutch authorities after the occupation of the Netherlands by the German Wehrmacht in 1940. One of them was the 7033BRT freighter Sophie Rickmers. The largest ship of the Rickmers shipping company in Hamburg when it was launched in 1920, it was deployed on its Siberia line and in the East Asia trade, which was to be its undoing when the Second World War broke out. Pursued for weeks by a British destroyer,