Not many noticed but as the world last week mourned the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, a ship called the Pieter Schelte quietly slipped into the port of Rotterdam.

The Pieter Schelte has two claims to fame:

1. It is the largest ship ever built.
2. Its name counts as one of the most egregiously offensive in modern history. The fact is that this stunning engineering achievement is named for a senior Dutch Nazi war criminal, Pieter Schelte Heerema.

Built mainly by Daewoo in Seoul, the Pieter Schelte is a huge catamaran that is now undergoing final kitting out in Rotterdam before entering service later this year in the North Sea oil business. The vessel is expected to boast a fully loaded weight of nearly 900,000 tonnes, about 30 percent more than the previous record holder, the Seawise Giant, a now scrapped oil tanker built by Sumitomo Heavy Industries of Japan. Perhaps more meaningfully, the Pieter Schelte weighs nearly 18 times the Titanic.

The Pieter Schelte will be able singlehandedly to uproot huge offshore oil rigs and move them around. Hitherto redeploying oil rigs has generally been a cumbersome task involving disassembly into sections which have then had to be laboriously reassembled in new locations.

The ship’s owner is Switzerland-based Allseas, which is controlled by Edward Heerema – who just happens to be the son of Pieter Schelte Heerema. The latter was a Dutch collaborator in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. An officer in the Waffen SS and a propagandist who allegedly denounced the Jews as “parasitic,” he 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.

The ship’s name is proving an acute embarrassment for Big Oil – so much so that various likely customers have not responded to emailed requests for comment. One thing seems certain: the Pieter Schelte will first be deployed by Calgary-based Talisman Energy, an oil and gas producer that was formerly known as BP Canada and is now owned by Madrid-based Repsol.

A Talisman spokesman referred questions about the ship’s name to Allseas. Shell Royal Dutch, which is another likely early candidate for the ship’s services, also referred questions to Allseas. Allseas says it has no plans to rename the ship.