1 Husumer Schiffswerft Yacht for Sale

Updated 7 October 2026 · By Hulls.io Editorial

About Husumer Schiffswerft

The Husumer Schiffswerft — HSW for short — was a commercial shipyard in Husum, on Germany's North Sea coast in North Frisia. It was not a yacht builder in the usual sense: German Wikipedia's account of the company says its newbuilding was concentrated on coasters, alongside numerous passenger ships and ferries of all kinds, and that it built yachts only "at times". Buyers will most often meet the name in a yacht's builder field, sometimes as "Husumer Schiffswerft Inh. Gebr. Kröger" — "Inh." standing for Inhaber, or proprietors.

Shipbuilding on the yard's original site in Husum's inner harbour can be traced back to 1606. Records show the yard in continuous operation under a succession of master shipbuilders from 1796, building mainly wooden cargo sailing vessels and fishing boats until the Second World War, with the repair of iron ships added around 1900.

The yard's modern era began on 1 January 1947. The brothers Karl Kröger (1902–1963) and Hans Kröger (1905–1971), both shipbuilding engineers, together with their partner Walter Brauer, took over the Husum yard. In 1928 the three had founded a yacht and boat yard, the Yacht- und Bootswerft Gebr. Kröger, in Warnemünde. In Husum they started with a workforce of six, carrying out repairs and conversions for the British military government. The first newbuild followed in 1949, the customs cruiser Eiderstedt for the regional finance directorate in Kiel, and in 1950–51 the yard delivered nine vessels, four of them pilot boats for Turkey. Large series of coasters were among its mainstays in the first two decades, and by 1968 the yard had completed 250 newbuildings and employed around 300 people.

Having run out of room in the inner harbour, the yard developed a new, larger site at the outer harbour between 1968 and 1971. The day-passenger ship Malmö was the first ship launched there, on 18 January 1969. After Hans Kröger's death in 1971 the business was run by his son-in-law, Uwe Niemann. The 1970s were boom years: as well as cargo ships the yard took on offshore supply vessels, dock ships, hotel ships, ferries and heavy-lift ships, and after a 130-metre dry dock came into service in 1977 the workforce briefly reached 800. The shipbuilding crisis of the early 1980s cut it to 485.

From the late 1980s HSW developed and built wind turbines as a second line of business, which in its last years made up 10 to 15 per cent of turnover. It was not enough. Die Welt reported on 1 December 1999 that the management, led by Uwe Niemann, had filed for insolvency at the Husum district court, with around 240 employees, 30 of them apprentices; proceedings were opened that December. In January 2000 Jacobs Energie of Heide took over the wind-energy division with 30 staff, and in 2001 Jacobs became part of REpower Systems. The ship-repair operation, with 30 employees, was taken over by the Kröger-Werft of Rendsburg and continues today as Husumer Dock und Reparatur GmbH & Co. KG.

The yard's largest newbuild was the 131-metre container ship Tian Guang, launched in July 1996, one of a run of container ships built for Chinese account in its final years. Among its newbuildings, the selected build list on German Wikipedia records a single motor yacht, completed in 1982. Another HSW hull became a yacht only later: the passenger ship Kollund of 1967 was converted into the yacht Oceanwolf in 1989.