SS Nyassa was a steam ocean liner that was launched in Germany in 1906 as Bülow for Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL).

From 1940 to 1944 she made numerous voyages taking refugees from Portugal, Spain, and Morocco to the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Palestine.

Between 1903 and 1908 NDL took delivery of a class of 11 twin-screw passenger liners, of intermediate size and speed, from four different German shipbuilders.

Schichau-Werke in Danzig (now Gdańsk in Poland) built five of the class,[1] including the lead ship, Zieten, which was launched in 1902 and completed in 1903.

The watertight doors in the bulkheads could be closed hydraulically by remote control from her bridge, and she was designed to remain afloat with any two of her compartments flooded.

[7] On 26 September 1906 she left Bremen on her maiden voyage, which was on NDL's route to the Far East via the Suez Canal.

On the first she left Bremen on 23 January 1907,[4] carrying passengers including a German grand opera company recruited by the theatre producer George Musgrove.

[17] With Bülow and other ships of similar speed, NDL planned to reduce the journey time between Bremen and Sydney by five days.

On 18 June she ran aground in fog on the west side of the Isle of Portland in the English Channel.

[39][40] Bülow was only slightly damaged, and was the next day she was refloated and anchored in Portland Harbour to re-embark her passengers.

[9] On 23 February 1916, the commander of the Portuguese Navy division in Lisbon seized 36 German and Austro-Hungarian ships in the port, including Bülow.

[43] An explosive device was discovered in Bülow's boiler room, which was designed to detonate if the ship were moved.

[45] The Portuguese Government assumed ownership of all the German and Austro-Hungarian ships, and founded a state-owned enterprise, Transportes Marítimos do Estado (TME), to manage them.

Trás-os-Montes was one of the ship that it put on a route between Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro via Funchal, Recife, and Salvador (see advertisement).

[4] In 1924 Companhia Nacional de Navegação (CNN) bought Trás-os-Montes and renamed her Nyassa, after Niassa Province in northern Moçambique.

By January 1938 her ports of call were Funchal, São Tomé, Pointe-Noire, Luanda, Porto Amboim, Lobito, Moçâmedes, Cape Town, Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Beira, and the Island of Mozambique.

She left Lisbon on 23 November carrying 458 passengers, many of them refugees from German-occupied Europe, and some of whom had been held in insanitary internment camps in France.

They included the electrical engineer and inventor Georges Lakhovsky, composer Oscar Straus, the son-in-law and daughter of the former President of Lithuania Antanas Smetona, and 27 Thais on a long and indirect journey home to Thailand.

On 4 December she reached the quarantine station at Hoffman Island, New York, flying the signal flags for "I am out of control".

[53][54] On the evening of 17 March 1941, U-106 made a torpedo attack on Convoy SL 68 off the coast of French West Africa, sinking two cargo ships.

The Chief Officer's boat headed for Cape Verde, and landed on Boa Vista on 20 March.

Nyassa was en route to Lisbon via Funchal and Casablanca, where she was to disembark 400 Frenchmen who had refused to serve with the Free French forces.

[56] Two dormitories were created in Nyassa's cargo holds, one forward and the other aft, to carry an additional 400 steerage passengers.

Passengers included the historian Julius Brutzkus, art dealer Herman Rothschild, and the 83-year-old father of shipping entrepreneur Arnold Bernstein.

As Nyassa steamed up the East River to her pier, the New York pilot in charge of her miscalculated the state of the tide.

Three were detained in the Hotel de Inmigrantes, and one married couple was sent back to Europe because the wife was suffering from trachoma.

[73] On 10 July 1942 Nyassa left Lisbon, and a few days later she called at Casablanca to embark refugees who had arrived there from Marseille.

[75] The United States Customs Service seized jewellery from one refugee aboard Nyassa who had failed to declare them.

US District Court judge William Calvin Chesnut fined him $1,000 and sentenced him to 30 days' imprisonment, after which both the defendant and his wife were to be deported from the US.

[85] She was then to continue through the Suez Canal to Portuguese India and return via Moçambique to Portugal, repatriating civil servants who were long overdue home leave because of the war.