Die Affäre Patzig.

German naval officer Helmut Patzig, commander of the submarine U 86, gained worldwide attention in 1918 when he sank the British hospital ship Llandovery Castle and then pursued its surviving civilian sailors and Canadian medical personnel, destroying all but one of the lifeboats into which they rescued themselves – a war crime whose legal prosecution was demanded by the Allies in the Treaty of Versailles.

However, Patzig escaped conviction at the Leipzig trials and was even granted amnesty a few years later. The war crime itself and the failed legal processing and punishment of the perpetrator have been dealt with in German naval and legal history already, even if some facts remained unknown.

More than a hundred years later, the evaluation of previously unknown eyewitness accounts now allows a deeper examination of the events, the person Patzig and his officer career in the Third Reich, embedded in the historical context between the two world wars.

With a foreword by Dieter Hartwig.