Wilhelm Gustloff

1945

The largest loss of life on a single ship in history Location: Baltic Sea, off Stolpmünde (now Ustka, Poland) · Coordinates: 55.07°N 17.42°E · Casualties: ~9,400 · Survivors: ~1,252 · Depth: 44 m · Cause: submarine torpedo — Sunk by Soviet submarine S-13 (Alexander Marinesko, commanding) on 30 January 1945. Three torpedoes struck. The ship sank in under an hour in freezing Baltic waters. · Fate: continental shelf · war grave · Type: transport · former KdF cruise liner · Tonnage: 25,484 tons · Crew: 173 · Flag: Nazi Germany · Launched: 1937 Sunk by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic on 30 January 1945, during the evacuation of East Prussia. The dead were mostly civilian refugees and wounded soldiers, including thousands of children. Six times the Titanic's casualties. Suppressed for decades on both sides of the Cold War; most of the world has still never heard of it. The Vessel The Wilhelm Gustloff was a Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) cruise liner, 208 metres long and 25,484 tons, built at Blohm and Voss in Hamburg and launched on 5 May 1937. Named for the Swiss Nazi Party leader assassinated in Davos the year before, she was designed as a classless cruise ship for German workers, the visible face of the National Socialist leisure programme. Between 1938 and 1939 she carried more than 65,000 passengers to Madeira, the Norwegian fjords, and the Italian Mediterranean, each voyage photographed and broadcast as proof of the prosperity the regime had delivered. She was requisitioned as a hospital ship on 1 September 1939 and spent a year painted white with red crosses, supporting the occupation of Norway. In November 1940 she was stripped of her hospital markings and assigned as a floating barracks for the 2nd Submarine Training Division at Gotenhafen (now Gdynia). She remained in that role, essentially immobile, for four years. In January 1945 the Red Army's Vistula-Oder offensive pushed German civilian populations westward across the Baltic coast of East Prussia. The operation to evacuate them by sea, Operation Hannibal, was directed by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Among the ships designated to carry refugees was the Gustloff. The Disaster The three torpedoes struck in sequence. The first hit the forepeak; the second destroyed the drained swimming pool and the Women's Naval Auxiliary quartered around it; the third penetrated the engine room and stopped the generators, leaving the ship in darkness. She began to list to port within minutes. The lifeboats, frozen into their chocks in the minus-eighteen-degree air, would not release; davits refused to swing out; rope ladders had been cut up for makeshift cargo lashings weeks earlier. Of twenty-two boats carried, only nine were launched intact. The ship capsized to port at 23:48, forty-four minutes after the first strike. She slid under twelve minutes later, at 00:00 on 31 January, leaving about a thousand people in the freezing water. Freighters and escorts arrived within the hour: Löwe, T-36, Göttingen, Gotenland, and the torpedo boat TF-19. The Baltic that night was minus eighteen Celsius at the surface and one Celsius in the water. People who had jumped and kept afloat on debris died of cold inside five minutes. The freighters worked the debris field for hours. 1,252 people were pulled out alive. The confirmed toll was 9,343. Historians have since settled on a range of 9,000 to 9,400 dead, the largest loss of life in the sinking of any single ship in human history, six times the Titanic, twice the Doña Paz. The victims were overwhelmingly civilian: women, wounded men, and children.