[1] Doggerbank was built in Scotland in 1926 as Speybank, one of 18 Inverbank-class motor ships for Andrew Weir & Co's Bank Line.

[5][7] On 31 January 1941 the German commerce raider Atlantis captured Speybank in the Indian Ocean and put aboard a prize crew commanded by Kapitänleutnant Paul Schneidewind.

[1] Doggerbank left France in January 1942 to lay mines off the coast of South Africa and then to proceed to Japan.

[8] In Japan, Doggerbank took aboard many of the survivors of the auxiliary cruiser Thor and the German tanker Uckermark, the former Altmark, which had been destroyed in an accident in Yokohama on 30 November 1942.

In mid-Atlantic on 3 March 1943, she was travelling ahead of schedule and the moving safety grid that protected it from inadvertent attack, when the U-boat U-43 mistook her for a British ship "of the Dunedin Star type".

[1] Doggerbank had been unable to transmit a distress signal Oberkommando der Marine (Naval High Command) took days to realise she had been lost.

[10] Kürt was rescued on 29 March by the Spanish motor tanker Campoamor, which took him to the Dutch island of Aruba off the coast of Venezuela.

[11] Kürt was exchanged in a prisoner-of-war swap in 1944, reported to the German Navy and then hid in Hamburg until the end of the war, as he was about to be arrested.