Howaldtswerke

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View on HDW-shipyard at Kiel

The Brandtaucher in the museum in Dresden

Howaldtswerke is a German shipyard founded October 1838 in Kiel at the Bay of Kiel of the Baltic Sea by the engineer August Howaldt and the Kiel entrepreneur Johann Schweffel under the name "Maschinenbauanstalt und Eisengießerei Schweffel & Howaldt", initially building boilers. It is run by Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft AG (HDW).

The first steam engine for naval purposes was built in 1849 for the Von der Tann, a gunboat for the small navy of Schleswig-Holstein.

In 1850, the company built the world's first submarine, Brandtaucher, designed by Wilhelm Bauer. This was somewhat of an accident: during the First Schleswig War (1848-50), Danish forces had advanced too close to Rendsburg where construction of the boat had been intended, and so the task was shifted to Kiel.

The first ship built under the company's new name "Howaldt" was a small steamer, named Vorwärts, built in 1865. Business expanded rapidly as Germany rose to a maritime power, and by the turn of the century some 390 ships had been completed.

In 1892 Howaldtswerke started a subsidiary in Austrian-Hungarian Fiume on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. The activity was closed down by Howaldt in 1902. The yard still exists, today under the firm 3. Maj.

With Kiel being one of the two main bases of the Imperial Navy, the shipyard also benefited much from navy maintenance, repair and construction contracts. During World War I Howaldt also built a number of submarines for the Imperial Navy.

In 1937 the company, by then having yards in Kiel and in Hamburg, was taken over by the Kriegsmarine, the German navy. During World War II, Howaldtswerke Hamburg built 33 submarines and Howaldtswerke Kiel 31 submarines.

After the end of WWII, Howaldtswerke was the only major shipyard in Kiel that was not dismantled. The yard flourished during the post-war "economic miracle" of the 1960s, with the construction of freighters and tankers, and again expanded by opening a yard in Hamburg. In 1968 Howaldt merged with Deutsche Werft AG in Hamburg, and the company took the new name Howaldtswerke-Deutsche-Werft AG, or HDW for short. After falling on hard times under the pressure of cheaper competition from Japan and Korea, the Hamburg operations were closed down in 1985.

Today HDW is a subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, a group of European yards, including Kockums of Malmö and Hellenic Shipyards Co. of Skaramangas, Greece. The HDW Group employs about 6,600 staff in Germany, Sweden and Greece.

Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft AG (HDW) worked with Kockums AB and Northrop Grumman and to offer a Visby class corvette derivative in the American Focused Mission Vessel Study, a precursor to the Littoral Combat Ship program.