The history of the ultra-modern fascist battleship Scharnhorst for its time recalls the eerie legends of the Viking Age. There are too many coincidences to consider what happened as a simple series of failures. While still only half completed, the ship mysteriously capsized in dry dock. At the same time, more than a hundred workers were crushed and about two hundred more were seriously injured.
The Scharnhorst was returned to its original position, chained and reinforced with beams. Every detail of it was checked by experts in shipbuilding, but the troubles continued: frames bent, beams and rigging tore off and cripple people.
On the day the battleship was launched, Adolf Hitler himself arrived in the harbor. In his presence, a symbolic bottle of champagne was broken on the board of the Scharnhorst, the orchestra played a bravura march, the chief engineer was already preparing to receive congratulations from the Fuhrer.
And then, unexpectedly, a seven-inch cable burst, and the Scharnhorst collapsed on two coastal barges, one of which, together with the crew, immediately went to the bottom, and on the other, almost the entire crew who had gathered on the deck and watched the descent of the battleship died.
Hitler, who immensely believed in all kinds of signs, after this horrific tragedy wanted to immediately give the order to send the ill-fated ship for scrap. However, the less superstitious generals dissuaded him from such a hasty, in their opinion, decision.
There were no ships like the Scharnhorst in the German navy. It was he who was supposed to become the head of the flotilla, which was supposed to, falling upon the port cities of England, lead the proud country to submission. But everything turned out differently.
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Firstly, despite its excellent sailing characteristics and the latest weapons, the Scharnhorst managed to sink only two auxiliary British ships during all the years of its short service. And secondly, he was disastrously unlucky - misfortunes continued to haunt him literally with devilish constancy.
So, during shelling from the sea of Danzig, in the bow tower of the battleship it is not clear why an explosion occurred, which killed and injured twenty people. Not ordinary sailors were killed, but experienced artillerymen, as luck would have gathered near the ill-fated cannon. The next day, the air supply system in the turret of another bow gun was out of order. Twelve people died from suffocation.
A year later, the misfortunes continued. During the shelling of Oslo, a Norwegian torpedo hit the engine compartment of the battleship. The engine exploded and the ship became a target for the enemy. At the mouth of the Elbe, the Scharnhorst was delivered with severe damage and a completely disabled turbine compartment. Expensive, first-class equipment failed for no reason, taking the lives of craftsmen trying to fix the problem.
While parked at the mouth of the Elbe, the battleship collided with the Bremen passenger liner, which, as a result, was stuck tightly aground. The tugs could not pull it off, and a day later the British bombers destroyed the defenseless liner, killing the entire crew, as well as the passengers who were not evacuated in time.
The ship's "career" became so ominous that the Reichstag even made public the question of transferring the ship to another area. For some reason, the command sinned on the polluted waters of the North Sea, because of which the ship's engine clogs up and, along the chain, disables all the components of the mechanism.
A clear tendency was traced behind the obvious facts: the ship destroyed its creators and servants, and the enemies did not suffer from it. A participant in dozens of battles and skirmishes with the enemy, he did not sink a single foreign ship.
The Scharnhorst became one of the most expensive ships in the fleet - the amount spent on it increased almost every week. On the ship, something was breaking or failing all the time. As for minor troubles, they happened every day.
They stopped whispering about the damned ship and started talking aloud when the radar on the Scharnhorst failed, and it could not be restored by any means - the breakdown turned out to be so serious and ridiculous.
The worst, however, lay ahead of the ship. A few months later, when the battleship returned to combat service, its locators somehow "overlooked" the helpless boat of the British Coast Guard. Under cover of darkness, the boat passed almost under the very side of the German heavyweight. A few hours later, a whole squadron, raised on alert, surrounded the unsuspecting Scharnhorst.
Seeing the English flotilla, the captain of the battleship immediately decided to flee, although the firepower of the Nazi ship could frighten anyone with even one shot.
Toward morning, the Scharnhorst was overtaken by a single torpedo fired almost at random. The hole was below the waterline, the ship got a leak, lost speed. The hole, meanwhile, began to grow mysteriously, water poured into the holds, and the Scharnhorst collapsed. After that, the battleship became completely defenseless, and a whole group of torpedoes, launched in hot pursuit, hit the target - right in the central part of the hold.
A fire broke out in the artillery cellar, then an explosion thundered. The huge ship almost took off into the sky, scattering hundreds of meters of devilish fireworks. By the morning of December 26, 1943, one of the most powerful ships of the Nazi fleet disappeared into the waves northeast of the North Cape.
Of the nearly two thousand crew, only 36 people were saved, and those, except for two, were captured by the English and died in captivity.
The two “lucky ones” managed to swim to the Norwegian coast. Feeling solid ground under their feet, people offered prayers and only then did they feel safe from the curse of the monstrous ship. But no matter how it is.
Deciding to make themselves lunch, they lit a primus from the emergency kit, but the device exploded, pouring gasoline on both sailors, and they burned alive. It was only after these last victims that the Scharnhorst curse lost its power.
