Talk:SMS Moltke (1877)

Wiki-Fiction?
There is an exceptionally high probability, bordering on absolute certainty, that "SMS Moltke (1877)" cannot possibly be the ship identified in the New York Times and Washington Post as the cholera carrier in 1910/1911. There is no record, ever, that the Kaiser’s navy farmed out its war ships to transport Italian immigrants in steerage (in empty magazines?) from Naples and other places in the "Italian cholera belt" to the United States. The ship mentioned in the NYT is the "steamship Moltke;" the Post writes of a "Hamburg-American liner," whatever that might have been. Further, the renaming to Acheron occurred, according to the external link on the page, with the removal of the ship from active sea duty and demotion to a "hulk." In my view, the NYT and Washington Post news stories are sufficient to remove the cholera tale and footnotes from this page. I’ll give it a week or so, then remove it – unless a reputable source is produced that the Kaiserliche Marine was active in the immigrant Italy-to-US charter business.

--Gamahler (talk) 19:00, 20 January 2009 (UTC)


 * No reaction. Removed cholera references and footnotes from the "SMS Moltke (1877)" page.  In the previous version, this ship was clearly misidentified.  She was not the vessel hauling Italian immigrants infected with cholera to New York; whereas (1) she was a naval vessel, and (2) the NYT and WP stories leave no doubt that the type of ship depicted in the news clips was a civilian "steamship" accommodating passengers in different transport classes, including "steerage."


 * --Gamahler (talk) 18:02, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Long dead thread, but for the record, this Moltke was out of service by the time in question. Parsecboy (talk) 02:01, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Images
This has some good images for the article, including a nice color illustration. Parsecboy (talk) 10:21, 30 July 2018 (UTC)