Description: 150 years ago Otto Krümmel was born in Exin (Western Prussia, today Poland). He studied geography and geology at the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig and Berlin. In 2004, 150 years after his birth, the IFM-GEOMAR Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel organized an exhibition presenting manuscripts, letters, books and some of the few personal items that have survived the times to the general public. Today only a few students of marine sciences are aware of the fact that it was Otto Krümmel who established oceanography (in the general framework of geography) as an academic discipline at the university of Kiel. Because of his early interests in marine sciences and publications he was appointed professor of geography in Kiel in 1884 . He joined V. Hensen’s Plankton-Expedition on board the „National“ and wrote the narrative and the geophysical parts of this first Kiel blue water enterprise. He became a member of the Royal Prussian Commission for Investigations in the German Seas and was one of the German representatives for ICES from 1899 onward. He did much of the planning for the construction of the research vessel „Poseidon“ and organized the annual monitoring cruises in the North Sea and the Baltic. Although mainly occupied with many duties as professor of geography at the university of Kiel for 27 years. Krümmel was head of the physical division of the new International Laboratory in Kiel. He developed new instruments as well, such as a new sampler and advanced aerometers. Furthermore he was one of the initiators of the GEBCO-Project (first edition of the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans: Monaco 1904). So Krümmel was part of the international marine sciences network that developed at that time. Most of Krümmel’s more than one hundred publications are about marine matters, such as tides, ocean currents and morphology of the sea floor. His most important work „Handbuch der Ozeanographie“ (2 vols. 1907/11) remained a standard reference work for a long time.

Description: The greater Agulhas Current system is currently the centre of substantial international nterest because of its perceived role in the inter-ocean exchange of water between the South Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic Ocean. This exchange forms a fundamental link in the global thermohaline circulation. German researchers paid considerable attention to the circulation in the South West Indian Ocean during the 1930s and they can be considered to have been the contemporary experts on this region. More than 30 scientific papers or books on the subject were produced by German oceanographers between 1929 and 1941; a major achievement at the time. After the Second World War this knowledge was used in a few major texts, but shortly afterwards largely disappeared from sight. By the time of the International Indian Ocean Expedition in the 1960s no further mention was made of this preceding German work. Using a bibliographic investigation we here track the manner in which this knowledge was lost and speculate on its causes.

Description: Up to 1937 there was no marine science institute at Kiel, but marine research was done within the university institutes of zoology, botany, geology and geography, and since 1870 was supported by the Prussian Commission for Scientific Investigations of the German Seas, since 1900 also by the German Scientific Commission for Marine Research. In 1933, the first year of the national socialistic regime, the Philosophical Faculty developed plans for an Institute of Marine Research of Kiel University. In 1934 Kiel University sent a memorandum regarding the institute to the Minister of Education in Berlin. In 1936 Adolf Remane was appointed Director of the Zoological Institute of Kiel University and at the same time got order to found a marine science institute with departments of biology, hydrography/chemistry and hydrogeology at Kitzeberg on the eastern banks of Kiel Fjord. In 1937 the Institute of Marine Research was inaugurated and Remane was appointed provisional director. In 1944 the chemist Hermann Wattenberg became director, but he was killed on 24 July 1944 when the institute building was destroyed by bombs. After the war the institute was re-installed in Kiel