Karl August Nerger

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Karl August Theodor Julius Nerger (25 February 1875 – 12 January 1947) was a naval officer of the

On 15 August 1945, Nerger was interned by the Soviet Union at the Sachsenhausen NKVD camp where he died two years later.

Decorations and awards

For his exploits, Nerger was awarded the highest military decorations of the five main states of the German Empire, a feat achieved only by

Nerger received

Nerger was named an honorary citizen of Rostock in 1919 and received an honorary degree in medicine from the University of Rostock.

Nerger resigned the German Navy almost immediately after the war and did not share the fame that other German commerce raiders enjoyed. Only with the rise of the Nazis to power was Nerger celebrated as a war hero in Germany again. In 1920 he began working for Siemens-Schuckert, were he rose to be in charge of factory security. Nerger benefited from the regime and its persecution of Jews, purchasing a Jewish-owned villa in Potsdam in 1936 for a discount price after the owners were forced to flee. Whether he was involved with the supervision of slave labour used at Siemens during World War II in his role as head of security is unknown but, given his role in the company, historians think it likely.^[1]

At the end of World War II, Nerger was arrested by the Soviets and incarcerated at the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which had become the NKVD special camp Nr. 7, where he died in January 1947. The official cause of death was reported as cachexia,^[2] but, according to former inmate Heinz Masuch, Nerger was actually beaten to death by another inmate, Wilhelm Wagner, who ran a protection racket at the camp. Wagner was found not guilty for the crime, which he denied, in 1967 but sentenced to five years imprisonment for other assaults on inmates.^[3]

References

Literature

• Peter Hohnen & Richard Guilliatt, THE WOLF - The true story of an epic voyage of destruction in World War One, 2009, Bantam Press,
  ISBN 0-593-06075-X
• Edwin P. Hoyt, Raider Wolf, The Voyage of Captain Nerger, 1916–1918, New York 1974,
  ISBN 0-8397-7067-7
  .
• Roy Alexander: The Cruise of the Raider Wolf, Yale University Press, 1939.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Karl-August Nerger.

• Report on the voyage of the Wolf
• Five Months on a German Raider by Frederic George Trayes at Project Gutenberg
• Bio on Karl August Nerger