1917: SMS Wolf Raids NZ

November 30, 2019

By AHNZ

The SMS Wolf, Imperial German Navy, visited New Zealand but not for a holiday. For War! Her mission (30 November 1916 – 24 February 1918) was to gather resources for Germany and mess things up for the the like of us. This she did this brilliantly.

Captain Karl Nerger’s secret weapon on The Wolf was a two-seater seaplane called Little Wolf. Being an Old School coal-powered ship, Wolf depended on raiding the enemy for fuel and supplies to keep her going. Little Wolf could easily spot prey, the mother Wolf raiding and robbing and sinking the enemy.

For good measure the Wolf left sea mines in a couple of basic and obvious shipping lanes for New Zealand traffic to find in future and have a really bad day. One mine was put at the tip of Farewell Spit at the top of the South Island, another at Cape Maria van Diemen at the tip of the North Island. The first mine sunk cargo ship SS Port Kembla on 18 September 1917* while the second sunk passenger ship SS Wimmera on 26 June 1918.

Capt. Nerger was rewarded for his Great War success but later in life he had a bad end. As an old man (70,) the NKVD held him in one of their Soviet gulags where he held out for two years as a political prisoner before dying there in 1947. (Wonder if he met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?)

According to Wikipedia, Karl was probably captured by we Western Allies but then handed over to the Soviet monsters along with other elderly persons of rank. In the 1990s, when communist East Germany fell, Germans discovered the mass graves where the gulag once stood: “…bodies of 12,500 victims were found, most were children, adolescents and elderly people.” So, in an indirect way, New Zealand had her cold revenge on the courageous captain.

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Wolf raided New Zealand waters in May and June 1917

* Great TV3 2007 news item about this wreck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG43XrARcwg

Image ref.
http://www.pourlemerite.org/wwi/navy/nerger.html

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