SS Sneland I
Norwegian cargo ship
Sneland I (Norwegian for "snowland one") was a 1,791 GRT cargo ship which was built by Nüscke & Co. shipyard at Stettin-Grabow (then Germany) in 1922. She was the last merchant ship to be torpedoed by Germany in the Second World War, late on 7 May 1945, less than an hour before German surrender went into effect.
History
The ship was built for the German shipping line Stange & Dreyer GmbH in 1922 and got the name Ingeborg. Three years later, in 1925, it was sold to the Norwegian shipping company Richard Amlie & Sverre Amlie (Amlie & Amlie) in Haugesund, and renamed Sneland I.
On 6 May 1945 the ship was a member of Convoy EN 491, which departed Hull bound for Belfast via Methil. On 7 May 1945, the convoy was attacked by U-2336 and two ships were sunk, Sneland I and Avondale Park, which became the last merchant ships to be sunk by a German U-boat during the Second World War. The sinking, at about 22:45 on 7 May 1945, was in the last hours of the Second World War in Europe, with the official surrender taking place at 23:01 on 8 May 1945.
Sneland I sank at 56°10′N 02°31′W. Seven of the 29 crew were lost.
A signal had been sent to the U-boats on 4 May 1945 ordering them to surrender but U-2336 did not receive the signal.
“SS Sneland I” enters the record as norwegian cargo ship. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sneland, Norwegian and cargo can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q52048545. Authority coordinates are 56.167, -2.517. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1922, 1945 and 1925.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS Sneland I” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.