The Wilhelm Gustloff

The Wil­helm Gust­loff, a KdF¹ cruise ship pressed into ser­vice to aide the Ger­man war effort, was prepar­ing to leave the port of Gdy­nia². Loaded with upwards of 10,000 peo­ple aboard, it was tor­pe­doed by the Soviet sub­ma­rine S-13 on Jan­u­ary 30th, 1945.Germany and the Soviet Union were the bit­ter­est of ene­mies. Do any amount of research into Ger­man POWs in the hands of Sovi­ets and the Ger­mans will gladly say that they would have done almost any­thing to be a pris­oner of the Amer­i­cans or British. The Sovi­ets took a par­tic­u­lar plea­sure in their hatred of Ger­mans, dol­ing out vengeance with lit­tle thought. Stalin felt that because of the hor­rors that Ger­many had brought upon the Soviet peo­ple, it was not sur­pris­ing, and accept­able, for the Red Army to behave as they did toward the Ger­man people.

Against the back­drop of this knowl­edge, Ger­mans were flee­ing the advanc­ing Soviet army as fast as they could. The Wil­helm Gust­loff was there in Gdy­nia to help with the evac­u­a­tion as part of Oper­a­tion Han­ni­bal.³ Com­manded by Friedrich Petersen, the Wil­helm Gust­loff began tak­ing refugees aboard on Jan­u­ary 28, 1945, with a launch time 48 hours from then. After launch they were to head to Kiel.⁴

Armed guards allowed pas­sen­gers on in an orderly fash­ion, even though panic had taken over the har­bor. The mob mainly con­sisted of women, chil­dren and old men, as the SS was comb­ing the crowd for men to fight the advanc­ing Red Army. As the 30th approaches the throng became more pan­icked, moth­ers and chil­dren became sep­a­rated, shov­ing caused some to fall over­board into the icy waters below, hys­te­ria was set­ting in as the last remain­ing avenues of escape dried up.

At around 12:30 pm, the Wil­helm Gust­loff weighed anchor and left Gdy­nia with their escort, a small tor­pedo boat, the Löwe. The sail­ing was any­thing but smooth. Rough seas, snow and hail pelted the ship, while on the bridge the crew debated the best course of action to take. Route, opti­mal speed and whether the Gust­loff should be fol­low­ing a zigzag course to avoid detec­tion were all top­ics of dis­cus­sion. Shortly after 6 pm the crew was alerted that con­voy of minesweep­ers was approach­ing them from the oppo­site direc­tion. In order to avoid a col­li­sion, shouldn’t the ships run­ning lights be turned on? The deci­sion, which would prove fatal, was that they should.

Near 8 pm that night the crew of the Soviet sub­ma­rine S-13 spot­ted the lights of the Wil­helm Gust­loff. Cap­tain Alexan­der Mari­nesko gath­ered his offi­cers together and for­mu­lated their plan off attack on the huge ship. Because of ice, the Löwe’s anti-submarine sonar was dis­abled, forc­ing look­outs on both ships to rely on sight to spot sub­marines, which allowed the S-13 to get in close to both ships. Shortly after 9 pm Cap­tain Mari­nesko orders 4 tor­pe­does to be launched at the Wil­helm Gust­loff (only 3 worked prop­erly), each hit­ting the star­board side of the cruise ship. Pas­sen­gers were caught off guard, as most believed that the worst of their jour­ney had passed.

The 3 tor­pe­does had hit the front of the ship, mid­ship where the swim­ming pool was, and the rear of the boat near the engine room, knock­ing out all power on board the ship. Because of this the radio room oper­a­tor had to use an emer­gency trans­mit­ter to trans­mit the SOS dis­tress sig­nal. Com­plete chaos ensued as the ship descended into anar­chy. An hour and 10 min­utes after the first tor­pedo hit at 9:16 pm, the Wil­helm Gust­loff slipped beneath the waves of the Baltic, tak­ing thou­sands of peo­ple with it. Some sur­vivors flailed in the icy water attempt­ing to climb into life boats, only to be beaten back by those occu­py­ing them.

The Löwe was able to pick up 472 pas­sen­gers from the water, while another tor­pedo boat, the T-36, was able to pick up 564. The minesweep­ers which were feared to cause a col­li­sion arrived and picked up an addi­tional 179 peo­ple from the water, even­tu­ally bring­ing the com­bined total of res­cued to approx­i­mately 1,230. All in all, 9,500 peo­ple would per­ish in the sink­ing, mak­ing the sink­ing of the Wil­helm Gust­loff the worst mar­itime dis­as­ter in his­tory.⁵

1. Kraft durch Freude (KdF, lit­er­ally “Strength Through Joy”) was a large state-controlled leisure orga­ni­za­tion in the Third Reich, a part of the Ger­man Labour Front, the national Ger­man labor orga­ni­za­tion. [↩]
2. Gdy­nia was a city located in the state of Kashu­bia in East­ern Pomera­nia, a coun­try that no longer exists. It was incor­po­rated into Poland fol­low­ing the Sec­ond World War. [↩]
3. Oper­a­tion Han­ni­bal was a Ger­man mil­i­tary oper­a­tion involv­ing the with­drawal of Ger­man troops and civil­ians from East Prus­sia in mid-January 1945 as the invad­ing Soviet Army advanced. It became the most suc­cess­ful wartime evac­u­a­tion in his­tory, respon­si­ble for trans­port­ing 2 mil­lion Ger­mans safely to the West. [↩]
4. A city in north­ern Ger­many on the Baltic Sea. [↩]
5. Most of the infor­ma­tion for this piece came from the amaz­ingly thor­ough web­site wilhelmgustloff.com. [↩]