Hey, Thoughty2 here.
Imagine you’re the captain of a large cruise ship steaming across the north Atlantic Ocean. It’s
a cold night, and you can see nothing but stars and endless black. Your moustache is twitching,
a sure sign you’re feeling uneasy - and not just because you had a bit too much sherry with dinner.
Out here in the freezing open ocean, you know there’s one risk to your ship greater than any
other. And that risk is……? Flooding.
Yes, unsurprisingly, the most common reason ships sink is because they fill with water. But if you
fell for my careful priming, the first thing that popped into your head was probably ‘icebergs.’ Of
course, that would have been wrong because there probably aren’t many icebergs around these days,
but inappropriate climate change jokes and my subtle nudging aside, there’s another obvious
reason an iceberg may have bobbed into view in your mind’s eye just now - because of the sinking
of the Titanic, by far the most famous maritime disaster of all time. It’s a tragic story,
and not just because scientists have recently proven something we’ve all suspected for a long
time - that Jack could actually have survived if he’d just climbed on the damn door next to Rose.
A staggering 1,500 souls perished that night when the unsinkable ship did the unthinkable and sank,
but that doesn’t even come close to topping the list of the deadliest maritime disasters
in history. Because there’s something far scarier than giant ice cubes lurking out
there in the ocean - us. What really causes large scale loss of human life at sea are torpedos,
shelling, mines, depth charges and, when all else fails, kamikaze fighters.
According to one prominent insurer, in 2020, a total of 48 ships were lost worldwide.
By comparison, between 1939 and 1945,14,341 ships were sunk. That’s more than 2,000 ships per year.
But even in the company of such morbid statistics,
the sinking of one ship in particular stands out for the almost unimaginable scale of its tragedy,
and strangely enough you’ve probably never even heard of it. Because, for reasons
which will soon become clear, the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff has been largely forgotten by
history. And to resurrect it, we have to go back in time to January 1945.
The Second World War was nearing its end and the Russian army was advancing on Europe from
the east, intent on putting an end to Nazi Germany’s hopes of establishing the
Third Reich. The Russian army wasn’t exactly known for its kind and merciful treatment of
Germans – military personnel or otherwise – and so quite possibly the largest mass
evacuation in history began on the Eastern Front under the name of Operation Hannibal.
Although a large number of civilians were taken back to Germany, the number one aim of Operation
Hannibal was to bring a large chunk of the remaining German Army back to the Fatherland to
continue the fight. Hannibal lasted for 115 days in the Spring of 1945, during which time as many
as 2 million people were evacuated. By contrast, the famous Operation Dynamo that saw the rescue of
338,000 Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk had taken just nine days in May and June of 1940.
During the evacuation of Dunkirk, every available ship or boat was
drafted in for the rescue of troops, and the same was true of Operation Hannibal.
But there was certainly a discrepancy in scale. Dunkirk saw about 235 boats sunk
and an estimated 5,000 soldiers lost during the evacuation. During Operation Hannibal,
only 10 more ships – a total of 245 – were lost, but there were more than
33,000 fatalities. And almost a third of those belonged to just one ship - the Wilhelm Gustloff,
a huge vessel that had originally been commissioned by the Nazi Party as a cruise liner.
On the 30th of January 1945, the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk in the Baltic Sea by a Soviet torpedo.
The Gustloff was carrying Germans from occupied countries like Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia,
and East Prussia, and was headed for Gdynia in German-occupied Poland. Though there were also
military personnel aboard, the passengers were mainly civilians. By most standards these were
innocent people, but this was the tail end of the biggest war in history, and the innocence of
German civilians wasn’t quite so straightforward in the eyes of many as it might have been. Fair
or not, that judgement made sure the incredible tragedy of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff,
very probably the greatest maritime disaster ever, never made it into the history books.
At over 200 metres long and weighing more than 25
thousand tons, the Gustloff was launched on the 5th of May 1937 to great fanfare.
Being the centrepiece of the KdF fleet, it was originally going to be called the ‘Adolf Hitler.’
(The KdF, which stood for Kraft durch Freude or ‘Strength through Joy,’ was a state run
leisure organisation set up in 1933 to reward the German people for good behaviour by giving
them access to fun activities. You could say the KdF put the Party into ‘Nazi Party...’)
In the end, Wilhelm Gustloff’s name was chosen for the ship - he’d been the leader
of the Nazi Party in Switzerland before being assassinated by a Jewish medical student in 1936.
After sitting next to Gustloff’s widow at the memorial service, Hitler decided on the name
change in Wilhelm’s honour. Frau Gustloff was even invited to officially launch the ship.
Before and during the war, devoted workers and Nazi officials were rewarded with cruises
and concerts aboard the Gustloff. On its unofficial maiden voyage in 1938,
the ship took Austrians on a four-day cruise in a not-so-subtle attempt to get them to vote for the
annexation of Austria by Germany, a neat little manouver known today as the Anschluss. In reality,
the Austrian populace were being threatened with a swift death for voting against annexation,
so being bribed with champagne and seasickness probably wasn’t necessary.
The Gustloff took over 80,000 passengers on pleasure cruises between March 1938 and the
outbreak of the war in September 1939, at which time it was recommissioned for use as
a hospital ship for the first year of the war. Towards the end of 1940, things changed again.
All the medical equipment was removed and the Gustloff became a barracks ship for submariner
trainees in Poland. Not much happened for the ship and its crew for the next four years,
but in 1945 it was perfectly placed to help in the evacuation efforts of Operation Hannibal,
and it was converted again, this time into an escape boat.
By the time the operation began, most of the available ships were in fairly poor condition
and the Allied Forces had a firm grip on the skies, while the Baltic Sea was heavily mined
and teeming with Russian submarines. Oh, and despite what I said earlier,
it was a brutally cold winter so icebergs were actually a genuine danger too.
All in all, the deck was heavily stacked against the fleeing Germans,
and it was the passengers on the Wilhelm Gustloff that paid the maximum price.
On the 30th of January 1945, the port of Gdynia was full of thousands of refugees, including women
and children, soldiers, Nazi Officials, and U-Boat trainees, all desperate to get away. The Gustloff
was the largest ship available, but it had only been designed to carry 1,900 people, including
its crew. By the time it set sail, there were more than five times that number on board. Some people
had tickets, but most simply forced their way onto the ship, and who could blame them? When the
options are escape or death, you’re going to give escape a go no matter how dangerous it might be.
According to records, there were 6,000 passengers and crew on the ship,
but the real number is thought to be upwards of 10,000, 90% of whom were civilians.
When the ship left port just after midday, it was hugely overcrowded with people occupying
every spare space they could find, including the long empty swimming pool. But nobody was
working on their tan – records say it was snowing that day, and the mercury was at 10 degrees below
freezing. Inside the ship, the sheer number of people ensured the atmosphere was hot and humid,
and many resorted to removing their life-jackets in an attempt to cool down.
Yeah, in hindsight that wasn’t ideal, but then again, a bit of extra buoyancy
wouldn’t have made all that much difference in the freezing waters of the Baltic sea.
In what sounds like the start of a bad joke, there were four captains onboard the ship, and they
couldn’t agree on the safest route to take. Some wanted to stick to the shallower waters along the
coast to minimise the chance of encountering submarines, while others thought the deeper,
mine-swept waters further out to sea were their best bet. In the end, they opted for the latter.
At around 6pm, a German mine-sweeping convoy was spotted in the area and,
to avoid any sort of collision, one of the captains ordered that the Gustloff’s
red and green navigation lights be turned on, lighting the ship up like a floating
Christmas tree. By 7pm the Gustloff was being tailed by a Soviet submarine called S-13.
Even though a torpedo boat was accompanying the Gustloff to protect her against subs, its
submarine detector and anti-aircraft guns had been frozen, leaving the vessels totally unprotected.
S-13 reeled in the Gustloff during a two hour chase before firing four torpedoes.
There are rumours that each of the torpedoes had been adorned with a hand painted message,
and even though the fourth missile got wedged in the submarine’s torpedo tube,
the other three successfully delivered their mail. Within an hour the Gustloff had sunk.
Dozens of people were killed instantly by the blasts, and thousands more were drowned,
trapped below decks. Those who made for the lifeboats had to navigate a stampede in which
panicked passengers were crushed to death. All but nine of the lifeboats were frozen in place,
and even those that were broken free were difficult to release because one of the
torpedoes had hit the crew’s quarters, killing the only people who knew how to operate them.
Still, several lifeboats did start getting lowered towards the sea, but about twenty
minutes after the first torpedo found its mark, the ship suddenly listed violently to port.
The lifeboats that were being lowered on the opposite side of the ship were smashed into
the Gustloff’s hull, destroying them and casting their occupants into the freezing water below.
The few lifeboats that did make it down safely were soon faced with a new threat - boarding
from the hundreds of swimmers already in the water. Eyewitness accounts speak
of desperate men and women trying to haul themselves aboard the lifeboats while the
current occupants beat them back with fists, oars, and some choice German swear words.
Support boats did eventually arrive, and between them they were able to rescue
about 1,250 people through the night. They were the very, very lucky ones.
Nobody knows exactly how many people died that night, but most estimates put the figure at
about 9,400 souls – that’s more than six Titanics, or three September the 11ths.
The last survivors were found at dawn when a German naval officer climbed
into a drifting lifeboat to check for signs of life. At first he found none,
but among the bodies was a baby that had been tightly wrapped in blankets.
It was still alive. The same officer would go on to adopt and raise the child as his own in
what was one of the few tiny bright points on one of the blackest nights in maritime history.
Thanks for watching.