The Orion was built in 1930 by Blohm & Voss in Hamburg as a freighter for HAPAG, the Hamburg-America Line. To save money, the engines of the linerNew York were reused. That proved a poor decision, since the Orion was plagued for her entire life by engine problems. After the war broke out the German Seekriegsleitung was ill-prepared for raider warfare. The operations of the German auxiliary cruisers of World War I were evaluated and considered a great success, having disrupted British merchant shipping around the world. However the overall effect on the war was evaluated as having been rather minor and so only a small program of converting merchant vessels into auxiliary cruisers was initiated on 5 September 1939. The first two ships being requisitioned were the Kurmark and the Neumark, and conversion started immediately.
Raider voyage
One of the first auxiliary cruisers operated byGermany in World War II, Orion left Germany on 6 April 1940, under the command of Korvettenkapitän Kurt Weyher. She passed south through the Atlantic disguised as a neutral vessel, where she attacked and sank, a 5,207-ton freighter. In May 1940 Orion rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific. She entered New Zealand waters in June 1940 and laid mines off Auckland during the night of 13/14 June 1940, one of which sank the liner five days later. Two other ships were caught by mines from Orion, as well as two trawlers and an auxiliary minesweeper. This done, Orion raided across the Indian and Pacific Oceans attacking four more ships. One she sent to occupied France as a prize; the others were sunk. On 20 October 1940 she made rendezvous with the raider, and the supply ship Kulmerland; operating together they accounted for a further seven ships, including the liner and five ships off Nauru, before going their separate ways in the new year. One Nakajima E8N float plane was purchased in early 1941 by the German naval attaché to Japan, Vice-Admiral Paul Wenneker, and dispatched on board the supply ship Münsterland to rendezvous with the Orion at the Maug Islands in the Northern Marianas. The meeting occurred on 1 February 1941, and Orion thus became the only German naval vessel of World War II to employ a Japanese float plane. A further six months passed cruising in the Indian Ocean yielded nothing, though she did encounter and capture her final victim, the, in July 1941, in the SouthAtlantic when Orion was on her way home. Orion returned to Bordeaux in occupied France on 23 August 1941. After 510 days and at sea she had sunk ten ships with a combined tonnage of, plus two more in cooperation with Komet. The German freighter Anneliese Essberger, disguised as the Norwegian freighter Herstein, was supposed to meet the Orion on 30 Aug. 1941. The planned rendezvous was Point Corona at 28 degrees N, 43 degrees W. Failing to see the Orion, the freighter continued north.
Later history
De-commissioned as a commerce raider, the ship was renamed Hektor in 1944 and was used as artillery training ship. In January 1945 she was again renamed Orion and was used to transport refugees from Germany's eastern provinces across the Baltic Sea to ports in northern Germany and occupied Denmark. On her way to Copenhagen on 4 May 1945, after she had picked up the crew of the old battleship Schlesien, the ship was hit by two bombs dropped by aircraft of the Soviet 51st Mine-Torpedo Aviation Regiment off Swinemünde. Although the crew managed to beach the fiercely burning ship on a sandbank, over 150 passengers and crew lost their lives. The hulk was scrapped in 1952.
