German nobleman, naval officer, author, and sailor, sometimes called Count Luckner in English, who earned the epithet Der Seeteufel (the Sea Devil), and his crew that of Die Piraten des Kaisers (the Emperor’s Pirates), for his exploits in command of the sailing commerce raider SMS Seeadler (Sea Eagle) during the First World War. After the war, Luckner became a war hero in Germany and was renowned around the world for his seamanship and chivalrous conduct during the war, which resulted in a minimal loss of life on both sides.
In his youth he sailed to Fremantle, Western Australia, where he jumped ship and for seven years worked in a bewildering array of occupations: he was a seller of the Salvation Army’s The War Cry; an assistant lighthouse keeper at the Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse in Augusta, Western Australia, a job he abandoned when he was discovered with the lighthouse keeper’s daughter by her father; a kangaroo hunter; a circus worker; a professional boxer (due to his exceptional strength); a fisherman; and a seaman. In Latin America he was a guard in the Mexican Army for President Díaz, a railway construction worker, a barman, and a tavern keeper. He was incarcerated for a short time in a Chilean jail accused of stealing pigs, he twice suffered broken legs, and he was thrown out of a hospital in Jamaica for lack of money.
In February 1912 thirty-year-old Luckner was called up by the Navy and served on the gunboat SMS Panther. He saw action at the Battle of Heligoland Bight (1914). At the Battle of Jutland (1916) he commanded a gun turret on board the battleship Kronprinz Wilhelm.
Hoping to revive commerce raiding, the Imperial Navy equipped the impounded three-masted sailing ship Pass of Balmaha (1,571 tons) with two 105 mm guns hidden behind hinged gunwales, several machine guns, and two carefully hidden 500 HP auxiliary engines. She was commissioned as the auxiliary cruiser Seeadler (“Sea Eagle”). As he was almost the only officer in the German Navy with extensive experience of large sailing ships, Luckner was appointed to command her.
Seeadler left port on 21 December 1916 and managed to slip through the British blockade disguised as a Norwegian ship. On 9 January 1917, Seeadler came upon a single-funneled steamer, the 3,268 ton Gladys Royle, carrying coal from Cardiff to Buenos Aires. Her crew was taken off unharmed, and she was scuttled. Luckner eventually sank various ships and took 300 prisoners.
He arrived at the Fijian Wakaya Island after a voyage of 3,700 km (2,300 mi) in an open boat. Most people on Wakaya accepted the Germans’ story of being shipwrecked Norwegians, but one sceptic called a party of police from the old Fijian capital of Levuka. On 21 September, the police threatened that a non-existent gun on the inter-island ferry Amra would blow Luckner out of the water. Not wishing to cause bloodshed, and not realizing the police were unarmed, Luckner and his party surrendered and were confined in a prisoner-of-war camp on Motuihe Island, off Auckland, New Zealand.
He spent the remainder of the war in various prisoner of war camps in New Zealand, including Ripapa Island in Lyttelton Harbour, before being repatriated to Germany in 1919.
Luckner became a Freemason of the Lodge in Hamburg. He wrote a book about his wartime adventures which became a bestseller in Germany, and a book about him by Lowell Thomas spread his fame more widely.
In 1926 Luckner raised funds to buy a sailing ship which he called the Vaterland and he set out on a goodwill mission around the world, leaving Bremen on 19 September and arriving in New York on 22 October 1926. An entertaining speaker, he was widely admired for his seamanship and for having fought his war at sea with such a minimal loss of life. He arrived back in Germany on 19 April 1928.
In 1937-1938, Luckner and his wife undertook a round-the-world voyage in his yacht Seeteufel. During their visit to Queensland, Australia, the Luckners were feted by the press and public. Yet the Brisbane office of the Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB), maintained a surveillance of the Luckners during their visit. The CIB kept detailed records of all of their contacts, and when Australia declared war on Germany many of these contacts were rounded up and interned.
During the Second World War, Adolf Hitler tried to use Luckner for propaganda purposes, although as a Freemason Luckner was not in one of the Nazis’ favoured groups of people. Luckner refused to renounce his membership of the Freemasons and the various honorary citizenships granted in the US, and consequently he suffered by having his bank account frozen.
Luckner had great physical strength and was noted for his ability to bend coins between the thumb, index, and middle finger of his right hand and to tear up telephone directories (the thickest being that of New York City), with his bare hands.
Luckner was married twice and had a daughter, Inge-Maria, born in 1913 by his first wife. After the Second World War, Luckner moved to Sweden, where he lived in Malmö with his Swedish second wife Ingeborg Engeström until his death in Malmö on 13 April 1966 at age 84.
Link to Wikipedia biography