[ad_1]
The notorious Ostwind was finally sunk off Miami Beach 34 years ago
On June 4, 1989, about 100 Holocaust survivors watched, applauding and crying, as the ramshackle remains of the boat known as “Hitler’s yacht” slipped under the warm waters off Miami Beach, heading for the bottom for what a Jacksonville rabbi called its “watery grave.”
But not so fast: The yacht had been declared dead and gone numerous times in its life, and there was still one twist left in its twisting story that saw the once luxurious vessel spend its last 18 years or so in various states of decrepitude in Jacksonville.
That’s where it was when vandals snuck off with its sad remains and where it was when American Nazis dreamed of making it a shrine. It was also where an idealistic family gave up so much trying to restore it and where a burly boatyard owner later tried to figure out just how he could get rid of the damn thing.
The story behind Adolf Hitler’s yacht: Trying to save the Ostwind became family affair in Jacksonville
First, though: The vessel almost certainly wasn’t Adolf Hitler’s personal yacht, though there were stories of him cavorting on it with mistress Eva Braun and tales of Nazi bigwigs taking it out for sailing parties.
Those were probably just stories. And the talk of the boat being cursed? Stories too, most likely.
But what is for certain is that the Ostwind, German for East Wind, was launched in 1939 from a Bremen boatyard three days after Hitler’s army invaded Poland. The Ostwind and its sister ship, the Nordwind, were commissioned by the German government and designed by Hans Gruber, “Germany’s genius of yacht design,” as one article dubbed him.
In Jacksonville Beach: Monument honors 19 killed in U-boat attack
Camp Blanding: The forgotten Germans of Stockade No. 2
It was 85 feet in length, sleek and fast and plush, with no expense spared. After the war, the U.S. seized it and used it as a Naval Academy training ship. It was later sold and ended up in South Florida where by 1969 it was a looted hulk and a nuisance.
That’s when the Ostwind, still bearing swastikas, first showed up in the pages of The Florida Times-Union and Jacksonville Journal — the first in 20 years of stories in the Jacksonville newspapers.
Here are some excerpts:
An Oct. 5, 1969, UPI story from Miami told of the yacht’s sorry state
“A sleek racing yacht built for Adolph Hitler’s Nazi navy and adorned with swastikas is partially blocking traffic in the busy Miami River.
“The East Wind, an 85-foot yawl built in the 1930s for the pleasure of Nazi bigwigs, sank in the river last Sunday at the spot it had been berthed for at least a decade. It succumbed to dry rot and old age.”
The Coast Guard was saying it needed to be moved. That’s where a North Florida connection pops up: “A spokesman for the corporation that owns the boat said arrangements would be made to move the East Wind to Jacksonville for repairs.”
On Oct. 3, 1971, the Jacksonville Journal’s Joe Caldwell caught up with the boat 5 miles north of Flagler Beach at the southern tip of Hog Island
“The proud racing yawl Ost Wind … has finally met a miserable end — stripped of its finery and its sails, looted by river pirates, sunk in Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway and moored to a palm tree to keep it from blocking the channel.”
Its owner, Merritt Powell of Daytona Beach, bought it at a foreclosure sale and was moving it from St. Augustine to Daytona Beach when it began to sink. He said it ended up in Miami in 1965 where a Daytona Beach attorney, Nick Masters, bought it. After it was stripped and sunk in Miami, Masters had it raised and taken to a St. Augustine boatyard.
Bad vibes seemed to surround the boat. “Nick Masters dropped dead while worrying about it,” the new owner told Caldwell, who went on to note: “Powell said one of the vessel’s former owners is reported to have lost an eye as the result of running into a winch handle aboard it, and his wife later went insane, although no connection has been made with that misfortune and the ill-fated yacht.”
On Oct. 11, 1971, Caldwell had a Journal follow-up
Lt. John Cockram from Naval Station Mayport had reached out to the reporter and told him he’d made repairs on the yacht while it was at the Naval Academy. “It was one of the most beautiful boats I’ve ever seen,” Cockram said.
He added that the Naval Academy sold the vessel “after its 12-foot draft proved too deep for Chesapeake Bay, and maintenance of such an elaborate, expensive vessel proved too costly.”
On Dec. 5, 1971, Tom Longhurst of the Times-Union introduced readers to the Glass family of Jacksonville
“Most people looking for the boat of their dreams would head for the nearest marinas to go window-shopping, but Jody and Horace Glass had to get into a scuba outfit to get a look at theirs,” he wrote.
Most of their “dreamboat,” which they had bought for $5,000, was lying on its side at the bottom of the Intracoastal with just part of its bow above water. It had been vandalized and stripped, but several other buyers were also apparently interested in it.
Hoping to beat them to it, Horace Glass proved to be intrepid. “He borrowed a scuba outfit, hurriedly read a book on diving, then with Jody along to ‘watch the bubbles,’ dived to seal all the hull openings before pumping her out.”
A wrecker truck hauled the boat upright, and the Glasses, fighting off mosquitoes, pumped all night until it finally floated free. Glass got a tug to get the vessel to Jacksonville, “but before he could get her there, Ostwind was to suffer another indignity” — the tug skipper misjudged the height of the mizzen mast, which lost its top 12 feet when it hit the Main Street bridge.
Horace Glass said he figured it would be a 10-year project to restore the yacht. It would be expensive, too, but with help from others, “the Glass family is confident it can be done,” Longhurst wrote.
If that doesn’t work out fully, Glass figured they could retrofit it to make it easier for a small crew to sail, then install an auxiliary engine “and live aboard her until the day when they can point her slender bow toward the islands of the South Pacific.”
By April 22, 1972, Longhurst met the Glass family again
“You know there are all kinds of stories about this yacht,” Horace Glass told him. “She has had an incredibly hectic past and almost everyone who ever knew her has a yarn to tell about her — and I’m sure they’re not all true.”
The story said he’d changed his mind about living aboard it. Too expensive. Instead, Glass, a history buff, wanted to convert it into a floating museum.
On Aug. 27, 1972, the Times-Union’s Bill Middleton found a work party aboard the Ostwind
The Glass parents, five of their seven children and several friends, were busy scraping and cleaning the yacht, which was anchored off the city’s Mandarin area.
He noted that the work involved “seems almost insurmountable, at least to the untrained eye. Not to Glass and his wife. The boat has become a large part of their lives, and they’re not about to scuttle it or any idea of getting rid of it.”
Cynthia Parks of the Times-Union met the Glass family in 1975
She observed how the Ostwind “now has become such a full-time occupation that the Glasses have practically given up their commercial art studio to work on the boat.”
Jody Glass told her it’s a passion project for the blended family. “Horace and I found each other kind of late in life, and we decided that whatever we did, it would be together.”
Horace Glass, meanwhile, noted some unsavory interest in the yacht. “The American Nazi party has a file on the Ostwind, but we have never answered their overtures,” he told Parks. “I would open her sea cocks rather than sell her to them.”
On April 15, 1981, Horace Glass showed up in an unrelated Jacksonville Journal story
He had found a cross burning at 2 a.m. outside the office of the Mandarin Weekly Advertiser where he was editor. He said he saw two men in white robes and hoods fleeing the scene.
The cross-burning was apparently in retaliation for two stories unfavorable to the Ku Klux Klan. The paper had recently published a profile of activist Stetson Kennedy of nearby Switzerland, who had infiltrated the Klan, along with a companion piece dealing with “lawful ways the average citizen could use to fight the Klan.”
March 22, 1982, the Journal’s Celeste Brown showed how the project, over the course of 11 years, had ‘eventually turned into an obsession’ for the Glasses
“Neither sailors nor historians by trade, the Glasses learned all they could about both professions,” she wrote. “They gave up a commercial art and advertising business and eventually sold three houses, two from previous marriages, to pour everything into restoring the yacht.”
The family ended up living aboard for three years, the story said, and the five Glass daughters did much of the renovation work.
Brown wrote that “Shrouds of superstition, rumor and mystery have surrounded the yacht for three decades,” noting that Horace Glass took two trips to Germany, many trips to the National Archives in Washington and wrote hundreds of letters to find out more of its history.
On April 26, 1982, Journal correspondent Virginia Barrett caught up with the Ostwind, which had just been moved
It had been moored at the old Mandarin Dock, built in 1855 by Calvin Read, Glass’s great-great-grandfather, but was now at a boatyard on the Northside, between Trout River and Heckscher Drive.
Glass said he had to build a museum around it after he takes it out of the river, with blueprints, photographs, historical documents, Nazi art and memorabilia. He had no desire to glorify Nazism, he said, but “failure to deal adequately with the past leaves young people dangerously susceptible to the myths of neo-Nazism.”
‘Ill winds blow for Hitler’s yacht’ was the headline on a Jan. 20, 1985, Bob Phelps story for the Times-Union
The boat was unwanted and decaying at its Trout River dock, and Glass — who by now was living in New Hampshire — was hoping to give it to a nautical museum in Plymouth, Mass., “if the museum will have it.”
‘So it won’t be forgotten:’ Children of Jacksonville-area Holocaust survivors tell their families’ stories
“J.J. Nelson, then owner and now operations manager of A-1 Dock Storage on the Trout River, gave his friend Glass permission in 1982 to dock the yacht free, in exchange for the tourist business it might attract to Jackie’s Seafood Kitchen,” Phelps wrote.
But a holding company was now in control of the dock, and they wanted the Ostwind removed.
On March 20, 1985, Phelps wrote of a big snag in the plan
The Glasses had sold the boat for $1 to a Massachusetts man for his planned museum, but officials in Plymouth came out against having the Ostwind anywhere in their city. Selectman Georg Butters told Phelps: “I think it’s an affront to the Jewish community of Plymouth. I think we have the Mayflower, the symbol of religious freedom in this country, and to have the boat that belonged to Adolf Hitler would not be appropriate.”
Meanwhile, the owners of the dock where the Ostwind lay in disrepair in Jacksonville said they just wanted it out of there.
Oct. 18, 1985, the Journal had another update that Charles Sanderson, the Massachusetts man who bought the Ostwind for $1, was in town with an eye to getting it to the Bay State
All their efforts trying to attach floatation tanks to the partially sunken boat failed. The yacht stayed in Jacksonville.
On Dec. 23, 1988, an Associated Press story from Miami gave a look at a new plan with promise
J.J. Nelson, who took the boat after it had been abandoned at his property, said it had been “nothing but a pain” to him over the last seven years, and he was sick of American Nazis trying to buy it. But now there was a plan: Miami Beach Vice Mayor Abe Resnick wanted to take the Ostwind south and then sink the yacht to “benefit marine life off Miami Beach and mark the 50th anniversary next year of the Voyage of the Damned.”
That name was given to the 1939 voyage of the St. Louis, which sailed to Miami from Germany with more than 900 Jews aboard seeking refuge. They were, however, turned away from Cuba and from the U.S. in Miami, and had to return to Europe where as many as 700 were believed to have been killed by the Nazis.
“We want to apply the same solution to the Ostwind that Hitler was trying to apply to the Jews,” said Resnick, himself a concentration camp survivor.
Nelson, meanwhile, told the Miami News: “It looks like we’re finally reaching the end of this … ‘Hitler-boat’ business once and for all … I wish it good riddance myself.”
Henri Landwirth: Holocaust survivor, philanthropist built legacy of giving
He said the boat’s presence at his boatyard had been nothing but trouble. Vandals set it on fire, snatched boards for souvenirs and painted swastikas on it. But there was pathos as well, Nelson said: “Another man kept visiting the boat and he said that he could only see his dead wife, who died in a concentration camp, when he was on the Ostwind.”
Progress, as noted May 31, 1989, by David Hosansky of the Times-Union
After fears that it might be too expensive to get the ship to Miami, the Ostwind was moved from a field near the Trout River to the Intracoastal Waterway, heading south. “It is scheduled to begin its final voyage today,” Hosansky wrote.
The story quoted Rabbi Gary Perras of Beth Shalom Congregation in Mandarin, who had notified Holocuast survivors in Miami that the yacht was available: “Really, it’s important — the symbolism that good triumphs over evil … Hitler’s yacht is getting what it deserves: A watery grave.”
A June 5 New York Times News Service story told of the sinking of the Ostwind the day before, which was witnessed by survivors of the Voyage of the Damned
“Never mind that the rumors are exaggerated and that the Ostwind was not really Adolph Hitler’s personal yacht,” the Times wrote.
“He ordered it built and was aboard it a few times. And that was enough for the 100 Holocaust survivors” who witnessed its sinking off Miami Beach as an airplane flew overhead pulling a sign that said, “Never again.”
The story continued: “Survivors of the 1939 voyage of the liner St. Louis, also known as the Voyage of the Damned, looked on from a nearby boat and applauded and cried.”
“Please don’t call this revenge,” Rabbi Barry Konovitch of Miami Beach said in the story. “We prefer to dwell on the positive. The boat will form a reef, a home to marine life … I think for some this symbolizes the ultimate destruction of the Third Reich.”
But the Ostwind was not yet gone for good, as a June 14, 1989, AP story told
Blame was being spread around because it turns out the Ostwind “was mistakenly dropped on a delicate coral reef in a shallow shipping lane” — and would have to be raised and then sunk yet again.
A story the next day said the owner and manager of the Fountainbleau Hilton Hotel in Miami Beach had offered to pay an estimated $10,000 to move the one-time Nazi yacht. Resnick said it will be towed to the site originally intended, not far from where the Coast Guard turned away the St. Louis in 1939.
Finally, the end of the Ostwind, as conclude June 30, 1989, by the AP
Without any fanfare, the remains of the yacht — which was by this time basically just a skeleton — were refloated and towed to a deeper resting place off Miami Beach on June 29.
“A tugboat spent more than three hours yesterday pulling the 85-foot yacht underwater to a 250-foot-deep spot 2 miles offshore, where the steel cable was cut with a blowtorch and the ship sank to the rocky bottom.”
The story let marina worker Linda Arter have the last word. “We’ve said all along that ship had bad vibes,” she said. “It just doesn’t seem to want to go away quietly.”
[ad_2]
Source link