These three factors contributed to what would become a death sentence for most of the ship's passengers. It was the first village in German territory reached by the Soviets and there were already rumors circulating of the draconic revenge on the part of the Soviets for German war crimes. And, though it incurred substantial losses, it would be broadly successful; with over 1,000 ships moving more than a million people to safety that winter. Legal notice | Wilhelm Gustloff (30 January 1895 – 4 February 1936) was the founder of the Swiss NSDAP/AO (the Nazi Party organisation for German citizens abroad) at Davos. One of those liners was the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. The western allies, namely Americans, English and French, did not get to Berlin until July 1945 when they took over the western sectors of the city. Fleeing before them, refugees were streaming into the German-held Baltic ports, clogging the docks, and mingling with the wounded soldiers left by German ambulance trains.
“There must have been 60,000 people on the docks,” Walter Knust, the Gustloff’s second engineer, later said. In the packed dining hall of the luxury liner "Wilhelm Gustloff," as in most of the rest of the country, a radio was broadcasting Hitler's address, but the thousands of refugees from Pomerania and East and West Prussia who had struggled onto the ship weren't listening to the Führer now. Its name came from a killed Nazi officer, and it was initially reserved for high-ranking National Socialists to take vacations in the Mediterranean or along the western Norwegian coastline. The dock area was jammed with refugees and wounded soldiers trying to escape to the West and cluttered with horse-drawn covered wagons that had brought them to the docks. The subs surged into the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland with orders to attack any shipping they encountered. Read more: The Nazi archives: Where Germany's dark past is stored on paper. Never heard of it? At around 9 p.m. on January 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler was speaking to the German people. A greater danger, the Germans believed at the time, came from British torpedo planes and bombers as well as from mines. The ship had been hit by three Soviet torpedoes within an hour; the temperature outside was minus 18 degrees Celsius. It is also interesting for the wider context of the evacuation, of which the Gustloff’s voyage was part. Before the luxury liner was given its name, it was intendedto be named after Hi… The honorary cemetery was built between 1955 and 1957 for the fallen soldiers from Great Britain and the Commonwealth States, especially Canada. Grievously overloaded with its human cargo, the ship took 40 minutes to sink, casting the majority of its estimated 10,000 passengers to their deaths in the freezing waters of the Baltic. There is evidence to support the unproven theory that German POWs — who had been "turned" by their Soviet captors and then dropped behind enemy lines using parachutes — were behind the false radio warnings to the ship. Send Facebook Twitter google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine, Seventy years ago, the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz. No one bothered to count them, but radio officer Rudi Lange later said, “I think I remember being told by one of the ship’s officers to send a signal that another 2,000 people had come aboard.”. You can find more information in our data protection declaration. On January 30, 1945, the greatest maritime disaster in history occurred when the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a German luxury liner turned military transport ship sank in the Baltic Sea after being torpedoed by a Russian submarine. It was windy and cold with hail bombarding the deck and the few passengers hardy enough to be outside. Other investigators, however, have claimed that number is actually quite low and estimated that those aboard totaled as many as 10,582 passengers and crew. Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm GustloffCathryn PrincePalgrave Macmillan 236pp £16.99, Roger Moorhouse is the author of The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-41. It was intended for the German workers of the Third Reich. ‘Operation Hannibal’ was an ambitious – if belated – attempt by the Nazi authorities to move millions of civilians and wounded military personnel westward by sea, away from the path of the Red Army. The story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is still unknown to a majority of non-Germans. Sea mines were feared along the Baltic coast, so the planned route was to traverse the open sea. (03.03.2008), © 2020 Deutsche Welle | On land, Soviet armies, enraged by earlier German atrocities, were moving into Poland and Prussia from the east, avenging themselves against the military personnel and civilians they met. The Gustloff then left Gdynia harbor accompanied by the passenger liner Hansa, which was also filled with civilians and military personnel, and with two torpedo boats to serve as a meager escort. A Soviet soldier holding a rescued child on his arm and a lowered sword over a shattered swastika — this huge monument towers above the Soviel Memorial in Treptow. Indeed, for many years the story was kept alive primarily by the tireless efforts of one survivor Heinz Schön, who worked hard to establish the truth of events and collected the personal accounts of survivors. It is a shame to be as critical as this, for Death in the Baltic should certainly be welcomed for bringing the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff to a wider audience. The German-Russian Museum exhibits the document, which was drawn up in English, Russian and German.
Chunks of ice floated on the water, and lookouts shivered at their posts. Only in recent decades has the fate of the Gustloff gained a degree of recognition beyond Germany, in part via Günter Grass’s 2002 novel Crabwalk, in which the sinking plays a prominent role. Even the eyewitness accounts used so effectively by Prince are predominantly from those individuals now in the US and Canada, with scarcely a mention of the survivor testimony, published and unpublished, that is available in German. The ship was built with an impressive structure, weighing in at 25,000 tons and reaching a length of almost 700 feet. She was a legitimate target. From January to May 1945, as the Red Army advanced from the east, German refugees, military and civilian,were being evacuated through German-held ports on the Baltic Sea. The exact number will never be known. The evacuation, codenamed Operation Hannibal, was under the control of Admiral Karl Dönitz, who later succeeded Adolf Hitler as head of Nazi Germany. Read more: Auschwitz, 75 years later: A race against time, Red Army factions had already reached German territory by late 1944. The Gustloff along with other liners, fishing boats, cargo ships, pleasure craft, and other vessels had been pressed into service to evacuate these refugees and military personnel, military technicians, and wounded soldiers in an operation that has been called the German Dunkirk. She sank taking down with her as many as 9,500 people. Aboard were 6,050 people: 173 crewmembers, 918 naval officers and men, 373 women’s naval auxiliaries, 162 wounded soldiers, and 4,424 refugees, including numerous women and children. The German Resistance Memorial Center remembers those who died while resisting the Nazi regime. She was also to carry a number of women auxiliaries, some of whom had served in antiaircraft and artillery positions to free men for the front lines, and some wounded soldiers. That figure was probably an estimate at best, but if close it sent the Gustloff’s complement to about 8,000 people. The ship was forced to stop almost immediately after casting off, however, when it was surrounded by a flotilla of small boats filled with refugees pleading to be picked up.
Oddly, she also had two lead captains, one civilian and one military. The Wilhelm Gustloff was the most lethal shipwreck in history, but some details of the sinking remain unknown.
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