Thomas Disaster
bomb attack and insurance fraud in Bremerhaven, 1875
The Thomas Disaster known in German media as Thomas-Katastrophe was an explosion incident involving the North German Lloyd steamer SS Mosel at the Bremerhaven docks on the 11 December 1875. It killed around 81 people and more than 200 were injured. It was the result of a dynamite-based explosive with a timing device that accidentally went off when the explosive package was loaded into the ship. The bombing was part of a plan to commit insurance fraud by the Canadian Alexander Keith Jr. who, at the time went by the name of Thomas or Thomassen. He shot himself shortly after the explosion and died a few days later, confessing to the crime during interrogations by the German police.
Incident
The steamship Mosel belonged to the North German Lloyd company and on December 11, 1875 it was to set off for New York under Captain Leist, the originally assigned captain Hermann Neynaber having taken ill. It had 400 passengers mostly from Germany who had already boarded and it was towed by the tug Simson and was being temporarily docked to load some cargo. A large number of onlookers were assembled including those that had come to bid farewell to the passengers. One of the large packages of cargo to be loaded was armoured in iron and weighed 650 kg (1,430 lb).
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Disaster” 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.