Big Oil’s $3 Billion Homage to Nazi War Criminal

Ships don’t come bigger than the Pieter Schelte. They don’t come more controversial either. Built in Korea at a cost of nearly $3 billion, the gargantuan new ship is now sailing towards the Netherlands, where it will soon enter service in the European offshore oil industry.

A huge catamaran, it weighs 932,000 tons, a world record, and nearly 18 times the Titanic. It will lift offshore oil rigs weighing up to 48,000 tons, again a world record. So much for the technicalities – but there is, ahem, a slight political problem: the ship’s name.

Almost unbelievably, the ship has been named in honor of Pieter Schelte Beerema, a Dutch collaborator in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. An officer in the Waffen SS and a propagandist who allegedly denounced the Jews as “parasitic,” Beerema was sentenced to three years in prison after World War II. Although the sentence was later reduced (apparently because of evidence that, after a row with the Nazis, he had changed sides in 1943), he went on after release to flee to Venezuela, where he allegedly helped German war criminals escape Allied justice.

http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2014/12/20/big-oils-3-billion-homage-to-nazi-war-criminal/