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Captured German Ships of the Kama River Shipping Company Operating in Berezniki
Authors: Vladislav V. Zhdanov

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During the Great Patriotic War, the river fleet of the USSR suffered heavy losses, for their replenishment by the Main Trophy Directorate of the Red Army and representatives of the People's Commissariat of the River Fleet in 1945 on the territory of East Germany, the entire discovered river fleet was described to determine the composition and number of ships expected to transfer to the Soviet Union. Representatives of the Kama Shipping Company in Leningrad and Kaliningrad, received ships, and with their crews ferried them to the Kama for four years. Upon arrival at the shipping company, the ships received new names instead of an index. As a result, in 1950, out of 526 vessels of all types in the Kama River Shipping Company, 156 were ex-German. An attempt is made in this work to reconstruct the biographies of the captured ships that worked in Berezniki. Self-propelled and non-self-propelled vessels served the lines Berezniki – Tikhie Gory, Berezniki – Pozhva, Berezniki – Kambarka, as well as at the ferry and the Berezniki pier. The ex-German ships received on reparations made a great contribution to the post-war development of the national economy of the Molotov (Perm) region. They were mostly decommissioned in the 1960-s and 70-s, and some of the barges served until the mid-1980-s.