The End of the SMS Königsberg
Last Known Photograph of the SMS Königsberg above water in 1965
"Stories circulated for years of other guns seen in remote areas of the bush."
Kevin Patience, "Königsberg- A German East African Raider"

End of the Ship
After the guns, radios, medical supplies and any other equipment useful to the Schutztruppe were salvaged from the wreck of SMS Königsberg it was left to rust and gather weeds. During the war, Nis Kock a stoker from the SS Kronberg noted that already "Farther downstream the Königsberg lay shattered and burnt, her deck overgrown with creeping plants and her side plastered with the slimy river weeds"
(Quotation from P168 "Blockade and Jungle" by Nis Kock, edited by Christen P Christensen, Battery Press 2003)

Sailors from the Royal Navy and other trophy hunters later salvaged more small parts over the following years which have ended up in private or museum collections. Ironically as a salvage dealer in East Africa in 1923 John Ingles, the former captain of the HMS Pegasus bought the rights to the SMS Königsberg for £200 along with the wrecks of the Hedwig, Rovuma and Tomondo. That must have given him some form of personal satisfaction in that he now owned the ship that had so infamously sunk his own back in 1914.

But it was not a profitable venture for Ingles and finding himself unable to salvage the wreck from its watery grave he later resold its scrap rights. Nobody ever fully salvaged the vessel and the SMS Königsberg gradually keeled over onto her starboard side and slowly sank deeper into the mud of the river Rufiji over the decades. It was last seen above water in the mid 1960s.

Remaining Relics of the SMS Königsberg
Not all traces of the ship have completely disappeared beneath the waves. As we have already seen on this website, three of the guns are still on display in Pretoria, Mombasa and Jinja. Another three were on display after the First World War, those in Dar Es Salaam and England were removed in the 1930s and the other in the former Belgian Congo was removed in the 1970s.

The former SS Goetzen Gun that was on display in Stanleyville in the Belgian Congo is now now probably scrapped or dumped somewhere in modern Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The gun captured at Bagamoyo is now either scrapped or buried under a car park in Hove, England. The car park is due for redevelopment later this year but as yet appeals to the local council to conduct a search for the gun before building begins have proven unsuccessful.

The other four are most probably rusting away near where they were last seen in the former German East Africa. The Kondoa-Irangi Gun is most likely still buried near the old railways workshop in Dar Es Salaam. The Mkuyuni River Crossing Gun was also probably scrapped or dumped in Dar Es Salaam as was the remains of the Kahe Railway Gun after its display at the Governors residence. Apel's gun was seemingly never recovered from where it was captured near Mount Kibata. It is probably corroding there to this day.

The Imperial War Museum, London has several parts of the Königsberg in their collection: the ship's steam whistle, a ships navigational device, a shell case and a torpedo aiming device. The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London has several items including an ensign flag which is claimed to be from the SMS Königsberg. The officers' table furniture from the ship is now at the Kenya Railway Museum (having been taken off the ship in 1914 as she set sail on her brief raiding career). Many other small parts salvaged from the ship are in collections around the world.

There is a twisted sight arm and aiming quadrant from one of the 10.5cm Königsberg guns with the serial number 368 on display at the South African National Museum of Military History in Johannesburg and a sight arc from one of the guns with the serial number 369) recently turned up at the Antiques Storehouse in Portsmouth, England.

I have seen a couple of shell casings from the Königsberg guns in private collections in South Africa and there are probably many more out there somewhere. There is a Königsberg 10.5cm Shell captured at Bagamoyo in August 1916 at the Simons Town Museum in South Africa and there is a cordite shell container from the Königsberg in the Zanzibar Museum, Tanzania.

There was also a story that the Germans put the used brass Königsberg shell cases to further use in East Africa by punching them out as small discs and stamping them into Ersatz coins for wartime currency, though I have yet to find proof of this.

Torpedo Aiming Device from the SMS Königsberg
Photo © Imperial War Museum

Veterans of the SMS Königsberg
During the Königsberg's final battle in the Rufiji in 1915, thirty three of the crew were killed and many more severely wounded. The surviving crew served on land as part of the Schutztruppe for the duration of the war. Some served with the now land based Königsberg guns deployed around East Africa, fifty served on Lake Tanganyika in the West while most formed a new Schutztruppe unit as the Abteilung Königsberg under the ships former commander Max Looff. As such they protected the Rufiji Delta and successfully defeated an attempted Portuguese invasion in October-November 1916.

The Abteilung Königsberg remained based in the malarial swamps of the Rufiji for two years and suffered the obvious consequences in high casualty rates from sickness until the British and South Africans advanced into the area in 1917 and the Schutztruppe prepared to invade Portuguese East Africa.

Some histories say that only fifteen of the original crew of 322 survived the war to make it back to Germany. Even by the standards of the First World War a 95% casualty rate in a land based unit is severely high and the figure needed further clarification.

In fact fourteen crew of the SMS Königsberg remained in active service with the Schutztruppe up until their final surrender along with von Lettow-Vorbeck at Abercrombe in British Rhodesia on 25 November 1918, exactly two weeks after the European Armistice. Among them were two of the gun commanders, Hans Apel and Richard Wenig. A full list of the last 155 Germans to surrender and identification of these officers can be found at Traditionsverband.de.

When Looff  was re-joined with the last fourteen survivors for their return to Germany, they became known as the last fifteen.

But they were not the only crew of the Königsberg to have survived the war. Some had been captured by the British earlier in campaign, the largest number along with Max Looff had surrendered to the British when the Schutztruppe slimmed down its force and invaded Portuguese East Africa. At that point the wounded, those stricken by malaria or considered unfit for the final campaign simply remained in camp in the south of the colony near Lindi and awaited British capture. Those prisoners of war that lived through their sickness and injuries were usually transferred to camps in Egypt (Sidi-Bishr near Alexandria for officers and Toura near Cairo for other ranks) before being gradually returned to Germany in early 1919.

In 'In Monsun und Pori Safari', Richard Wenig gives the figure of thirty-two Königsberg veterans returning home. If this figure is accurate it is still a very grim statistic with the crew suffering an overall 90% casualty rate over the course of the war.

East African Veterans' Parade, Pariser Platz, Berlin 1919
Von Lettow-Vorbeck is mounted in the right side foreground. Max Looff is waving, mounted on a white horse in the left background.
Photo from Bundesarchiv / Wikimedia

On 2 March 1919, von Lettow-Vorbeck, Governor Schnee and Max Looff along with other German survivors of the East African campaign made a triumphant march through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin as the only undefeated German army of the First World War.

The remaining Königsberg veterans then mostly retired into private life, several wrote their memoirs, (which have been used extensively in this website) but few remained in active naval up to the Second World War

Kevin Patience, an East African resident at the time, reported that in the 1960s "There was a story of an elderly German gentleman who visited the site (of the Königsberg's wreck) every two years and apparently always bought a one way ticket to Dar Es Salaam. He had been a crew member of the ship and his last wish was that he could be buried in the area. Whether he achieved his ambition is not known"
(Quotation from P184 "Königsberg- A German East African Raider" by Kevin Patience, Zanzibar Publications, Bahrain 1997)

Effects of the East African Campaign of the First World War
From a purely military perspective the Schutztruppe under von Lettow-Vorbeck kept up an incredible tactical defence of their colony for over four years against an almost complete blockade and over whelming allied military superiority. It is estimated that the total number of British, South African, Belgian and Portuguese forces in East Africa during course the war numbered as many as 250,000 while the German force including their African askaris never totalled more than 18,000 and was usually much less.

Although von Lettow-Vorbeck remained undefeated and did tie down a small part of the allied war effort with his campaign, the amount was never great enough to have any decisive effect on the war in Europe and Germany was ultimately defeated in 1918 with or without the efforts of the Schutztruppe of East Africa.

Casualties in East Africa were however massive, especially among the African population who made up the bulk of the fighting strength of both the German and allied armies and of course suffered by far the most civilian losses. The Schutztruppe are estimated to have lost around 2,000 men and the allies over 10,000. Many more died from their wounds, malaria or the following influenza epidemic shortly after the war.

At least 100,000 African porters died working on the allied side in the First World War. German figures do not record their numbers. The total number of African men, women and children who lost their lives as a result of the campaign and its following famines and epidemics will never be accurately known but easily numbered into the hundreds of thousands.

The First World War marked the beginning of the end for European colonial power in Africa. The suffering of the local population in what was seen as a white man's war encouraged increasing senses of African nationalism. The African people had also now seen that their soldiers could be victorious over Europeans on the battlefield and that even the iron clad warships of their colonial masters were not indestructible.

SMS Königsberg, Scuttled and Wrecked in 1915
Photo by Walter Dobbertin  © Bundesarchiv from WikiCommons