Ten

THE FORGOTTEN STORY

For nearly 70 years the survivors of the Wilhelm Gustloff have lived in a world where most people are ignorant of the tragedy they endured. Upward of 9,000 people died in this event, making it the worst maritime disaster in history. By contrast 1,517 died when the RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912, and 1,198 people died when the Lusitania sank in World War One.

In his report on the sinking, Admiral Karl Dönitz highlighted the situation in the Baltic Sea as the main reason for the disaster. He said the lack of German aerial reconnaissance and the need for the German navy to concentrate on securing refugee convoys rather than hunt for enemy submarines enabled the Russian submarines to “go about undisturbed in the Baltic Sea.”¹ Even so, Dönitz stressed that Operation Hannibal saved the lives of nearly 2 million people. Yet, the operation and the sinking remain one of the lesser-known events of World War Two.

The reasons why this story has remained unfamiliar are varied and complicated. There were no celebrities or tycoons aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, and the German media controlled everything about the ship’s departure and sinking. These two factors helped the catastrophe become a non-event from that perspective. Furthermore, that a Soviet submarine operating in present-day Polish territorial waters sank a German ship was not something the West was especially concerned about in the war’s immediate aftermath. Cold War politics took precedence.

While it is now estimated that fewer than 1,000 people survived Captain Alexander Marinesko’s swift torpedo strike, there can never be a precise count of either the survivors or the dead since no exact record of passengers exists.² This is often the case with World War Two events in which figures might be expected but the tragedies are so often measured in estimated numbers.

The survivors had lost not only their belongings but their documents too. Very few survivors had papers and precious objects, such as the photos Helga Reuter had in her trousers or the pocketknife Horst Woit had hidden in his ski pants. The priority for the survivors was to connect with family and figure out where to go. Meanwhile, German authorities handled the sinking with their customary clinical precision; they recorded the names of survivors, processed surviving sailors and Women’s Naval Auxiliary, and buried the dead in communal graves in Gotenhafen. They also made sure not to allow news of the sinking to spread.

On February 21, 1945, 22 days after the S-13 attacked and sank the Wilhelm Gustloff, the Swedish newspaper Afton Bladet published an article about the tragedy. The event received scant attention in the American press. The New York Times published a brief mention: “The Finnish radio reported tonight the sinking of the 25,000-ton German liner Wilhelm Gustloff. . . . The Wilhelm Gustloff, a passenger liner before the war, had been converted into a troop transport.”³ The event wouldn’t be mentioned again until 1955, when a news brief in the New York Times marked the tenth anniversary of the sinking, calling it “the greatest single toll on the European seas during World War Two.”⁴

Likewise, Soviet newspapers didn’t mention the attack. Of course, not one word of the sinking appeared in German newspapers since the Third Reich buried the news. In its final death throes, Nazi Germany would not permit such clear evidence of its defeat to be publicized. The Gustloff had shone as the crown jewel of the KdF fleet. The S-13’s sinking of the ship delivered an irreparable blow to the Third Reich. It was a death knell for Hitler’s grand scheme. A strategic success for the Soviet Union, Alexander Marinesko’s attack had destroyed a Nazi symbol.

An Allied propaganda newspaper in German, dropped over German territory by Allied planes, did publish a full-page article headlined “Wilhelm Gustloff, Catastrophe,” on February 19, 1945.⁵ The article related how the former KdF liner turned refugee ship was attacked:

Eastern fugitives and armed forces members were onboard when the ship ran out of Gotenhafen. . . . The Wilhelm Gustloff left nevertheless on the evening of January 30th with the perfectly insufficient security of an outpost boat and two R boats. All decks of the Wilhelm Gustloff so were stuffed that no person was able to move. . . . Many passengers who were hurled into the sea in the capsizing of the ship hardened in the icy water before aid could be brought them. Survivors report of the frightening scenes that happened after the explosion on board the ship. . . . Women and children were involved in the embittered battle that ensued around the few lifeboats; women and children were knocked ruthlessly overboard.⁶

Still, after these early and brief accounts, the postwar literature veered away from anything having to do with East Prussia, the eastern front, and the fate of German civilians. Few knew, for example, that Royal Air Force bombs and Soviet ground troops nearly destroyed historic Königsberg. In the aftermath of the war, few knew about KZ Stutthof, the first German extermination camp in East Prussia, where more than 85,000 Jewish and non-Jewish inmates perished. Few knew of the Steuben, another KdF boat that sank with more than 4,000 people on board after Marinesko’s sub attacked it too. The Steuben was a hospital ship but its markings were not visible in the dark night with foul weather. Indeed, few knew of the many other boats, large and small, that were sunk. Marinesko and the S-13 were ultimately responsible for about 14,000 deaths at sea.

Nearly 70 years ago, on January 31, 1945, Admiral Karl Dönitz conferred with Adolf Hitler during a meeting with naval leadership. The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff merited an ever-so-brief mention. Rear Admiral Conrad Englehardt had heard the news first and immediately informed his superior, Dönitz.

Thus, when Admiral Karl Dönitz heard of the sinking, he reacted pragmatically. Operation Hannibal was in its first phase. Hundreds of thousands of more refugees needed to cross the Baltic Sea. Dwelling on the catastrophe would serve no one.

“In connection with the sinking of the passenger steamer Wilhelm Gustloff by submarine torpedoes on the outer route north of Stolpe Bank, the Commander-in-Chief, Navy, declares that with the extensive transports in the Baltic Sea, it was realized from the start that there would be losses. Painful though these losses were, they represented only 1 percent of the total brought out by sea; 99 percent succeeded in arriving safely at ports on the western Baltic,” Dönitz said in a meeting with key aides. “On the other hand, the percentage of refugees lost on the overland route was very much higher.”⁷

Dönitz stressed that Soviet submarines continued to operate undisturbed throughout the Baltic Sea only because there were no German aircraft overhead ready to strike. Moreover, Dönitz said, the only practical defense against submarines is the radar-equipped aircraft, “the same weapon which enabled the enemy to paralyze our own submarine warfare.”⁸

Admiral Dönitz remarked that even had a U-boat escorted the Wilhelm Gustloff on her bold dash across the sea, it’s not likely that would have prevented the S-13’s assault. Still, they decided to make sure more escorts attended future transports across the sea. If nothing else, a more pronounced presence would give an appearance of safety and reassure the hundreds of thousands of people still awaiting evacuation under Operation Hannibal.

Earlier in the war, U-boats had escorted Germany auxiliary cruisers, blockade-runners, and supply ships as they left and entered harbors. But U-boats stood very little “chance of being able to protect its charge if it were attacked and would be quite powerless to help if it were sunk by the enemy. Such enemy attacks would, of course, be delivered either from the air or by long-range gunfire from an enemy warship, and it would take good care to keep well beyond the range of the U-boats, which it would [be presumed were] escorting the surface vessel; accordingly having sunk the ship, it would still keep its distance and then disappear.”⁹

In spite of the small attention paid to the sinking during Admiral Karl Dönitz’s meeting with Hitler, Captain Wilhelm Zahn was called before a board of inquiry five days after the sinking. He told the board that his orders included supervising the rescue equipment and signaling, as well as counseling the ship’s leadership in all military matters. However, Zahn said, he never received an order to take command over the civilian leadership, namely Captain Friedrich Petersen. “It is naturally difficult without a higher order to give a 63-year-old captain with 50 years of experience an order without the authority to do so,” Zahn said.¹⁰ “In this particular case all of my suggestions were deemed unfeasible.” Zahn told the board that he was given no orders to zigzag, no indication that such a defensive maneuver was even necessary. Although his superiors didn’t discipline Zahn, his naval career essentially ended when the boat went down.

In the first decade or so after the war, those directly involved in Operation Hannibal and the Gustloff rescue efforts exchanged correspondence. Admiral Robert Hering of the T-36 exchanged some letters with Admiral Conrad Englehardt, who had served under Admiral Dönitz.

“All in all we can say there were many mistakes in the leadership of the Gustloff. However, whether the submarine would have been successful without those mistakes no one can say,” wrote Admiral Conrad Englehardt. “At least one has to ask why the ship’s leadership did not go high speed or zigzag. It’s easy to talk about that today. This much is for sure, dear Mr. Hering—that you and your boat did all that was humanly possible to save as many people as you could given the bad weather.”¹¹

Heinz Schön, who was a 19-year-old assistant purser aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, spent decades trying to piece together what happened on January 30, 1945. The German archives in Bayreuth, Germany, hold his correspondence with Englehardt, Hering, and others. Credit is due to Schön who worked to gather the names of those who perished and those who survived. The event troubled him always, and he made it his mission to try and confirm details and figure out who was responsible for the catastrophe. Schön repeatedly wrote to Englehardt, explaining that his memory of the incident compelled him to pursue the story. In a November 17, 1965, letter to Captain Robert Hering, who had commanded the Admiral Hipper, Englehardt said Schön was so far the only surviving crewmember of the Gustloff who had agreed to help piece together the events of January 30. Englehardt also said that understanding needed to be extended to Schön since he had suffered as a result of the tragedy.¹²

These early efforts to construct a narrative were important, particularly because much of the papers and documentation regarding Operation Hannibal and the Wilhelm Gustloff were lost when the Russians advanced and subsequently occupied former East Prussia. The Soviet navy sank 206 of 790 ships used to evacuate refugees during those last weeks of the war.¹³

World War Two not only wiped away whole villages and populations. It also wiped away pieces of history. The German Red Cross records were lost. Their headquarters, which used to be in Babelsberg near Potsdam, were largely destroyed in the Soviet advance on Berlin; later, the Russians collected and destroyed most of the remaining records.¹⁴ In addition, the German Red Cross never had a central archive for its records; instead, the Red Cross societies operated independently in Germany, including in Prussia, Wurtemberg, Bavaria, and Baden.

The Wilhelm Gustloff now lies on the sandy bottom of the Baltic Sea. Almost six times as many men, women, and children perished in this attack than in the April 15, 1912 sinking of the Titanic. Yet, until recently the enormity of the Gustloff’s story was too awful to deal with for many of the survivors. For many, the tragedy lasted beyond the sinking. They had difficulty trying to create a life afterward. For many, coming to terms with January 30, 1945 required coming to terms with what it meant to come of age in Nazi Germany.

In the first decades after the sinking, cold war politics, debates about German war guilt, victimhood, and justifiable military targets all conspired to push the story to the sidelines. Initially, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the idea of collectively blaming all Germans wasn’t considered. It wasn’t until years later, after the full scale of the war’s atrocities were revealed, that this attitude emerged and the distinction between Nazis and non-Nazis in Germany blurred.¹⁵ Ignored was the idea that Germany, the nation responsible for unleashing an inferno of violence across the European continent, had also been the recipient of considerable violence: Allied strategic bombing campaigns, evacuations from cities, towns and villages, the westward flight of East Prussians and others trying to escape the Soviets, and the postwar expulsion of millions of Germans.

A few divers have visited the Wilhelm Gustloff’s final resting place off the Polish coast. Between the late 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union worked over the shipwreck site and, according to the divers, they seemed to have paid particular attention to the ship’s midsection, which would have housed much of the ship’s inner machinery and cargo.

In 2004 Mike Boring, a diver with decades of experience on various shipwrecks, obtained a permit from the Polish government to dive the Gustloff. A mass of twisted and broken metal waited on the sea floor; there was evidence of explosions and cutting saws. Boring described his dive as incredibly emotional and interesting. The low oxygen and cold waters of the Baltic Sea have preserved hundreds of shipwrecks resting on the bottom, the oldest dating back to the 1300s.¹⁶ This environment left the Gustloff’s stern and the bow very much intact, Boring said. The teak of the deck and the wooden cap of the handrail were also well preserved. However, the midsection looked as if it had suffered from damage unrelated to the 1945 torpedo attack. Normally when a wreck sinks intact, as the Gustloff more or less did, it collapses from the pressure of the sea. The ship’s bow, which absorbed the first two torpedo hits, showed a significant amount of damage. Yet, several signs one would expect to see on a wreck weren’t there, he said. For one, there is a dearth of personal effects. The nature of the Baltic Sea, its temperatures and oxygen, make it ideal for preserving evidence of the dead, but there was no evidence of the thousands of passengers. There were no bones. For some reason the wreck was stripped of all association with humanity.¹⁷ As far as cargo, the Wilhelm Gustloff was primarily carrying people, not possessions. For the most part, whatever belongings were on board had little monetary value; refugees mostly brought aboard clothes and other necessities such as identification papers, easily disintegrated over 50 years in the water. Certainly, aside from salvaging metal in the engine and mechanical rooms, the ship didn’t carry the types of cargo that invited the kind of salvage operation that appears to have occurred.¹⁸

The absence of objects has invited speculation that the Wilhelm Gustloff carried more than desperate refugees and soldiers and sailors. There are theories that the Amber Room, which was a chamber in the Catherine Palace in Russia paneled in amber, or pieces of special rockets were secured in the ship’s hold. King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia had given the Amber Room, a study in Baroque excess, to Tsar Peter the Great in 1716. The lavish gesture honored the friendship between the two nations. Germans moved the room from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to Catherine the Great’s summer palace on the outskirts of the city. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, soldiers from the Wehrmacht took down the amber paneling and sent it to Königsberg. Soldiers packed the panels into more than 70 wooden crates and drove them to a mysterious location. Erich Koch, the gauleiter of East Prussia, maintained that the Germans had stored the amber paneling in a castle to avoid damage from Allied air raids.

Koch escaped East Prussia in April 23, 1945, aboard an ice-breaker from Pillau. His flight was interrupted when the British caught him on the Island of Ruegen. The Soviets wanted to try him; instead, the British handed him over to Polish authorities. Koch stood trial in 1958 in Poland for killing 400,000 Polish citizens. He was sentenced to death for planning, preparing, and organizing the mass murder of civilians. The authorities commuted his sentence to life imprisonment due to ill health, however, some insisted the commutation was because the Soviets thought Erich Koch knew where looted art, in particular the Amber Room that once graced the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, was stashed. The original panels remain missing; however, reproductions are now on view in St. Petersburg.

After the war ended, the Russians believed the Wilhelm Gustloff carried some of the priceless objets d’art and the panels of the wondrous room aboard.¹⁹ They sent multiple dive teams to search the former KdF liner as well as other refugee ships that were sunk during the war. Historians say the panels, intricately inlaid amber with gold leaf and mirrors, were likely buried in Austrian or Czech mine shafts, which may very well have been dynamited and destroyed during the German retreat from the Soviet army. Until the 1950s, Russia banned Poland from diving to the wreck except under strict Soviet supervision.

Another reason for the repeated postwar dives was that some in Soviet military circles believed the Wilhelm Gustloff carried secret, improved military weapons and equipment in addition to the refugees. Rumors persisted that the ship was carrying parts of newly developed U-boats with batteries that enabled them to remain below the sea longer and move undetected by radar. These boats had completely isolated motor housings and were electricity-driven; they could travel up to 15 knots (17.3 miles) per hour under water and up to 23 knots (27 miles) per hour on the surface.²⁰ Indeed, the German navy had developed and manufactured more than 100 new U-boats in the second part of the war. The US Office of Strategic Services noted in January 1945 that the “new-type of German U-boats have their training stations in the Baltic and training is going on at full speed. The U-boats will shortly be removed to Bergen via Storebaelt and Oersund.”²¹ It was also rumored that the Germans had developed rockets capable of shooting shells from German territory across the English Channel that could reach all the way to London. The submariners being transported aboard the Gustloff were supposed to sail these new U-boats.

A July 1958 article headlined “6000 Victims” in the American magazine Battle Cry argued that Adolf Hitler ordered his own navy to purposely sink the Wilhelm Gustloff. The article, which was loose with facts, claims Hitler wanted to halt Operation Hannibal to show East Prussian refugees that the Baltic Sea evacuation route was too dangerous.²² If his dastardly ruse succeeded, the article said, Hitler would then have used the refugees, men and women alike, to stand their ground in Gotenhafen and fight the Red Army. This article’s unsubstantiated thesis ran counter to the evidence that Admiral Karl Dönitz and Rear Admiral Konrad Englehardt wanted to and did orchestrate the evacuation of 2 million refugees.

The silence that enveloped the world’s greatest maritime disaster lasted well after the war ended. In the case of the Wilhelm Gustloff, some survivors kept silent because they felt complicit; they were German, or had German ancestry. This group felt culpable for Nazi Germany’s crimes against the Polish and Russian peoples, the Jews and the Gypsies, and every other group targeted throughout Adolf Hitler’s regime.²³ They were afraid to talk, cowed by the idea that though they had suffered, they hadn’t suffered the same way as others. Some felt guilty about their decision to bring their family on board or their inability to save those they were responsible for. All these survivors experienced survivor’s guilt. The German leadership also imposed silence on the survivors in the months and years following the sinking. Hitler Youth warned survivors not to speak of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Inge Bendrich said her mother was threatened with dire consequences if they uttered one word about the sinking. To the Allies, Nazi Germany was the enemy. In the war’s aftermath, there was no room to consider that German civilians suffered.²⁴ A conspiracy of silence attached itself to the events of January 30, 1945, like barnacles to the sunken ship.

The Soviet Union had its own motives for suppressing the story. During the cold war, as the Soviet Union supplanted the Third Reich in its control of civilian populations, it shuttered access to free information. Those East Prussian and Baltic German refugees who faced another brutal regime quickly discovered they weren’t able to talk about the war without reservation. To question the events surrounding the Gustloff and its sinking could have sparked questions of why those civilians felt a visceral need to flee the oncoming Red Army, an army that liberated people from Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. It could also have the unintended, but dangerous, consequence of spotlighting Soviet brutality and Josef Stalin’s policies of mass deportations and suppression. Clearly this was intolerable to the repressive regime. Along this line, there was no mention of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, in spite of the fact that the Soviet forces liberated camps such as Majdanke, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Stutthof. Again, talk of this might invite talk of the Soviets’ own atrocities, such as the Katyn Forest massacre near Smolensk, where an estimated 22,000 Polish officers, customs officials, and intelligentsia were taken into the woods and shot in the back of the head.²⁵ The NKVD, the Soviet secret police, dumped the bodies into mass graves and blamed the atrocity on the Germans in order to garner sympathy from the west. The truth did not surface until after the war.

In time, German war guilt accomplished what government censorship could not. In the same way that survivors of the Dresden firebombing had difficulty finding an audience receptive to listening to and learning about their ordeal, so too did survivors of the Wilhelm Gustloff. According to Gertrud Baer, the post-war political climate in Germany dissuaded overt expression of mourning for the nation’s “4 million fallen soldiers, the 12 million civilians expelled or fleeing from Eastern Europe . . . or the 600,000 others killed by Allied air raids.”²⁶ Mourning was seen as tantamount to clinging to an immoral and evil past.

Some survivors thought discussing the sinking would be self-pitying and laid claim to an innocence that they felt they didn’t own. Few spoke about the Russian invasion and horrors associated with those times. Others worried that talking about their ordeal would put them in the same category as the German far right, which wanted compensation and revenge. And some felt the destruction of the ship was payment for hubris, for their country’s quest to dominate the world.²⁷

“The reason of man, like man himself, is timid and cautious, when left alone; and acquires firmness and confidence, in proportion to the number of which it is associated,” President John Adams once said.²⁸ Adams’s quote applies to those who survived the Wilhelm Gustloff. It has only been possible for many to begin speaking out in recent years because their social circles and the process of reaching out to one another have allowed it. There were simply more Germans and more Soviets who kept those who had been on board the Gustloff from speaking out. As the great ideological wall bifurcated Europe and the cold war froze into place, the fate of a boatload of German civilians and military refugees had little importance.

In the minds of many people after World War Two, Germany and the Nazis were one and the same. In the United States, knowledge of what happened was boiled down to one narrative starting with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, followed by D-Day on June 6, 1944, V-E Day on May 8, 1945, and V-J Day on August 8, 1945. In between were the stories of the Holocaust, the Bataan Death March, hard-fought naval battles and island-to-island combat in the Pacific, and dropping the first atom bomb on Hiroshima. It wasn’t fashionable to talk about humanity as it related to German civilians. Until recent times. Today in Germany many more know about the Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy. With that increased attention and focus comes the realization that the story of World War Two is full of difficult truths.