We carefully sifted through the auxiliaries and gave seaborne priority to those who had family or other responsibilities.”. This ship was the Wilhelm Gustloff. [25] However, based on the latest estimates of passenger numbers and those known to be saved, Wilhelm Gustloff remains by far the largest loss of life resulting from the sinking of one vessel in maritime history. Copyright 2016 Long Island Boating World. German intelligence had already informed the Gustloff that there were no known Soviet submarines or surface ships in the area. The screams and cries of the doomed aboard were snuffed out as the frigid water covering the ship.The man responsible for sinking the Gustloff was born in 1913 to a Romanian sailor and a Ukrainian woman. She displaced 25,484 GRT, the beam was 77ft 5 inches and her draught was 21.4 feet. As a consequence of the Allied blockade of the German coastline, she was used as an accommodations ship (barracks) for approximately 1,000 U-boat trainees of the 2nd Submarine Training Division (2. Iceboating - A long tradition of speed that can top over 100mph, "USS Jamestown" and America's First Humanitarian Mission, Evolution of Modern Submarine Power Plants - Part I - Diesel Electric, Summer 2021 "Teach and Take a Kid" Free Sailing Program. Hunks of ice could be seen on the surface of the sea. With seven other ships in the KdF fleet, she transported the Condor Legion back from Spain following the victory of the Nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. She was a legitimate target. MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German military transport ship which was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea while evacuating German civilians, German officials, refugees from Prussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Estonia and Croatia and military personnel from Gotenhafen as the Red Army advanced. Filmed in Gotenhafen, the 2nd Submarine Training Division acted as extras in the movie. It was, after all, a navy ship painted gray and known to carry troops. [17], The water temperature in the Baltic Sea at that time of year is usually around 4 °C (39 °F); however, this was a particularly cold night, with an air temperature of −18 to −10 °C (0 to 14 °F) and ice floes covering the surface. Operation Hannibal was the naval evacuation of German troops and civilians as the Red Army advanced. For her third voyage she left Hamburg on 1 April 1938 under the command of Carl Lübbe to join the KdF ships Der Deutsche, Oceania and Sierra Cordoba on a group cruise of the North Sea. Using maritime EXODUS software,[23] it was estimated 9,600 people died out of more than 10,600 on board. As the Russians rolled through they murdered, raped and pillaged their way across the country. The Hansa and one of the torpedo boats soon developed engine problems, however, and were forced to turn back. This analysis considered the passenger density based on witness reports and a simulation of escape routes and survivability with the timeline of the sinking. To put that in perspective, about 1,500 people died on the Titanic, and about 4,400 in the worst peacetime disaster (the Doña Paz in 1987). The video ends with footage of divers on the wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff in the 1990s / early 2000s. Propulsion was provided by two diesel engines, which produced 9,500hp and a speed of 17.8 mph. The ship was finally pulled a few yards away from the dock to stop the rush, and those with precious boarding passes were taken by ferry to the far side of the ship and up a guarded gangway. The Gustloff sinking has never been a secret, and was the subject of Günter Grass’s short final novel, Crabwalk. Included among them were potential U-boat crews that had been training in the Bay of Danzig, wounded soldiers from the Eastern Front, Nazi officials, military families, and other civilians. They were then transported back to Tilbury. 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. Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision) in the port of Gdynia, which had been occupied by Germany and renamed Gotenhafen, located near Danzig (Gdańsk). © Copyright 2020 Center for the National Interest All Rights Reserved. The subs surged into the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland with orders to attack any shipping they encountered. 73" on Polish navigation charts,[29] and classified as a war grave, Wilhelm Gustloff rests at 55°04′22″N 17°25′17″E / 55.0729°N 17.4213°E / 55.0729; 17.4213, about 19 nmi (35 km; 22 mi) offshore, east of Łeba and west of Władysławowo (the former Leba and Großendorf respectively). She returned to Hamburg on April 12th.MV Wilhelm Gustloff happened to be the nearest ship when the 1,836 coal freighter Pegaway broadcast an SOS. 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. Many had worked at advanced weapon bases in the Baltic[13] from Gdynia/Gotenhafen to Kiel. Wilhelm Gustloff was assassinated by a Jewish medical student in 1936. In 1945, he faced a court martial following a forbidden New Year’s Eve tryst with a Swedish national. Wilhelm Zahn, a submariner, argued that the ship should stay in deep water and make as much speed as possible either on a direct course or, preferably, zigzagging. “There must have been 60,000 people on the docks,” Walter Knust, the Gustloff’s second engineer, later said. The German ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff plowed through the choppy water, her cabins, decks, saloons, and even her drained swimming pool jammed with refugees. In January, however, he had taken charge of the evacuation and had requisitioned ships of all kinds, including 25 substantial cargo ships and 13 liners. It wasn't. 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. It … Heinz Schön, a German archivist and Gustloff survivor who extensively researched the sinking during the 1980s and 1990s, concluded that Wilhelm Gustloff was carrying a crew of 173 (naval armed forces auxiliaries), 918 officers, NCOs, and men of the 2 Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision, 373 female naval auxiliary helpers, 162 wounded soldiers, and 8,956 civilians, for a total of 10,582 passengers and crew. Eventually she was put back into service to transport civilians and military personnel as part of Operation Hannibal. All three hit the Gustloff, and within an hour she sank taking down with her as many as 9,500 people. Lifeboat No. [9] A storm developed on 3 April with winds up to 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) that forced the four ships apart. [6] After completing sea trials in the North Sea from 15 to 16 March 1938 she was handed over to her owners.[7]. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war."[26]. 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. In the case of Lusitania, however, the Germans … One by one the 19 men on Pegaway jumped into the sea and were hauled onto Lifeboat No. Despite the wounded men on board, the Gustloff was not legally a hospital ship. Small boats were sent in to transport 1,172 German and 806 Austrian who were eligible voters to have the opportunity to vote. The ship had been built as the flagship of the German Labor Front and had been used by its Strength Through Joy organization to provide recreational and cultural activities for German functionaries and workers and to serve as a propaganda tool touting the glories of German power. Captain Marinesko was raised in Odessa, a port on the northwest shore of the Black Sea. It was for this reason that it became the first official evacuation ship for our girls,” Wilhelmina Reitsch, who was in command of the 10,000 female naval auxiliaries in the area, later said. The auxiliaries were all between 17 and 25 years old. It is the largest known loss of life of any sinking in maritime history, a loss of life more than three and a half times the total of those in the sinkings of the Titanic and the Lusitania combined. Over a period of time, he moved up through the ranks until he commanded a submarine, the S-13 S-Class sub, built in Russia. On 8 April 1938 Wilhelm Gustloff under the command of Captain Carl Lübbe departed Hamburg for England where she anchored over three miles offshore of Tilbury so as to remain in international waters. 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. Lifeboat No. Oddly, she also had two lead captains, one civilian and one military. At 55 degrees 07 minutes north, 17 degrees 41 minutes east lies the broken and dead body of a once proud and majestic ship. Over the years, as the ship stood at the dock serving as a barracks, a number of the boats had been borrowed for other uses around the harbor. She served as a hospital ship in 1939 and 1940. Perhaps the fact that Marinesko was facing a court martial may have been a contributing factor in his misguided decision to torpedo a ship carrying civilians and then he attempted to sink the rescue craft coming to the aid of the sinking ship. Bursts of snow mixed with the hail. By 7:45 a.m. all crews member were safe aboard the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. 6, with both them and the crew of the lifeboat back at the Wilhelm Gustloff by 7:45 am. The shipyard was founded in Hamburg in 1877 to specialize in steel-hulled ships, its most famous product is the World War II battleship Bismarck. The sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, the German warship used in World War Two (WWII), is the largest disaster in recorded maritime history in terms of loss of human life. The evacuation, codenamed Operation Hannibal, was under the control of Admiral Karl Dönitz, who later succeeded Adolf Hitler as head of Nazi Germany. In addition, the ship was informed by radio of a number of German minesweepers in the area, and Zahn recommended turning on the ship’s green and red navigation lights to avoid a collision in the dark. "Wilhelm Gustloff: World's Deadliest Sea Disasters". About 20 minutes after the torpedoes' impact, Wilhelm Gustloff listed dramatically to port, so that the lifeboats lowered on the high starboard side crashed into the ship's tilting side, destroying many lifeboats and spilling their occupants across the ship's side. In freezing temperatures, thousands fled west to the docks at Gotenhafen, Today it is called Gdyan, Poland). The oar-powered lifeboat was unable in the heavy seas to come aside Pegaway and looked in danger of needing rescuing. However, a little over thirty years after the Titanic tragedy, a 25,000 ton ship sunk in the Baltic Sea, taking almost 9,000 people down with it. It was designed to provide a positive image of the Third Reich. The idea was the ship would provide recreation and cultural activities for German functionaries and workers.
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