True also as with Goya....
The Wilhelm Gustloff was a passenger ship constructed by the Blohm and Voss shipyards. She was named after the assassinated German leader of the Swiss NSDAP (Nazi party), Wilhelm Gustloff. She was launched on May 5, 1937, measured 208.50 meters (684 feet) long by 23.59 meters (77.39 feet) wide, and weighed 25,484 GRT.
During Operation Hannibal, while evacuating German soldiers, U-boat personnel, and refugees trapped by the Red Army in East Prussia, she was hit by three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea on the night of January 30, 1945. She sank in under 45 minutes, taking possibly as many as 9,400 people with her — probably the largest loss of life in a single sinking in maritime history.
History
The ship was the first purpose-built cruise liner for the Nazi Kraft durch Freude (KdF) ("Strength Through Joy") labor organization, which provided recreational and cultural activities for German functionaries and workers, including concerts, cruises, and other holidays. The Wilhelm Gustloff was the flagship of the KdF cruise fleet until the spring of 1939. That was her last civilian role.
From then on she served the needs of the German military.
During the summer of 1939, she was pressed into service to bring the Condor Legion back from Spain after the victory of the Nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
From September 1939 to November 1940, she served as a hospital ship, her official designation being Lazarettschiff D. On her first mission to the Baltic Sea, she treated 650 wounded Polish soldiers. Later in the Second World War, as a consequence of the British blockade of the German coastline, she was used as an accommodations ship for U-boat trainees in the Baltic port of Gotenhafen (Gdynia) — near Danzig (Gdańsk).
Sinking
Final voyage
The ship's final voyage was to evacuate civilians, Kriegsmarine sailors, and wounded German soldiers from Gotenhafen to Kiel.[2] The ship's complement and passenger lists totaled 6,050 people on board, but this did not include many refugees who boarded the ship without being recorded in the ship's official embarkation records. Heinz Schön, who carried out extensive research into the sinking during the 1980s and 1990s, concluded that the Wilhelm Gustloff was carrying a crew of 173 (naval armed forces auxiliaries), 918 officers, NCOs, and men of the 2nd Submarine Training Division (2.Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision), 373 female naval auxiliary helpers, 162 badly wounded soldiers, and 8,956 refugees, for a total of 10,582 passengers and crew.[2] Although the ship was built for 1,465 passengers, she had the capacity to board many more for a short trip by utilizing her public recreation spaces to accommodate people, but she was carrying less than 50% of the rescue equipment necessary for the extra passengers.
The ship left Gotenhafen early on 30 January 1945, accompanied by the passenger liner Hansa, also filled with refugees and soldiers, and two torpedo boats. The Hansa and one torpedo boat developed problems and could not continue, leaving the Wilhelm Gustloff with one torpedo boat escort, the Löwe.[4] The ship had four captains on board, three civilian and one military, and they could not agree on the best course of action to guard against submarine attacks. Against the advice of the military commander, Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Zahn (a submariner who argued for a course in shallow waters close to shore and without lights), the senior civilian captain, Friedrich Petersen, decided to head for deep water. When he was informed by radio of an oncoming German minesweeper convoy, he decided to activate his ship's red and green navigation lights so as to avoid a collision in the dark, making the Wilhelm Gustloff easy to spot in the night. As the ship's equipment included antiaircraft weapons, it had been travelling blacked-out, it was not marked as a hospital ship, and it was transporting combat troops, it did not have any protection as a hospital ship under the international accords governing this.
The ship was soon sighted by the S-13, under the command of Captain Third Class Alexander Marinesko, which fired three torpedoes at the Wilhelm Gustloff about 30 km (20 miles) offshore between Großendorf and Leba soon after 21:00 (CET) — hitting her with all three.[2] In the panic that followed, many of the refugees were trampled in the rush to the lifeboats and life jackets. Some equipment was lost as a result of the panic. The water temperature in the Baltic Sea at this time of year is usually around 4°C; however, this was a particularly cold day, with an air temperature of -10° to -18°C and ice floes covering the surface. Many deaths were either caused directly by the torpedoes or by instant drowning in the onrushing water. Others were crushed in the ensuing panic on the stairs and decks, and many jumped into the icy, dark Baltic. Reports talk about children clinging onto adults and women trying to save their babies, though constant waves dragged them away from them, most never to be seen again. Small children fitted with life jackets for adults drowned because their heads were under water while their legs were in the air.
Less than 45 minutes after being struck, the Wilhelm Gustloff went down stern first in 44 metres (150 feet) of water. German forces were able to rescue some of the survivors from the attack: torpedo boat T-36 rescued 564 people; torpedo boat Löwe, 472; Minesweeper M387, 98; Minesweeper M375, 43; Minesweeper M341, 37; the steamer Gottingen saved 28; torpedo-recovery boat (Torpedofangboot) TF19, seven; the freighter Gotland, two; and Patrol boat (Vorpostenboot) V1703 was able to save one baby. These figures are from the research of Heinz Schön, and that would make the total lost in the torpedoing and subsequent sinking to be 9,343 men, women, and children. This would make it the largest loss of life in a single sinking in maritime history.
In an article in the magazine "Sea Classics", Irwin Kappes mentions that "there were over 6,000 passengers on board". He also states that the escort ship Löwe was alongside within 15 minutes, taking off as many survivors as she could carry, and that when Captain Henigst of the cruiser Admiral Hipper, herself carrying 1,500 evacuees, received reports from her lookouts that she was under torpedo attack, he chose not to stop to pick up survivors. Kappes gives a precise total of those lost in the sinking as 5,348. The source of this information was the German book "Die Gustloff Katastrophe" written by Heinz Schön, who later revised his original numbers.
Heinz Schön's more recent research is backed up by estimates made by a different method. The Discovery Channel program Unsolved History has undertaken a computer analysis (using software called maritime EXODUS) of the sinking, which estimated 9,400 dead -85% (among over 10,600 on board); this analysis considered the load density based on witness reports and a simulation of escape routes and survivability with the timeline of the sinking.
Controversy
Many ships carrying civilians were sunk during the war by both the Allies and Axis. However, based on the latest estimates of passenger numbers and those known to be saved, the Wilhelm Gustloff remains the largest loss of life resulting from the sinking of one vessel in maritime history. Günter Grass, in an interview published in the The New York Times on Tuesday April 8, 2003 said, "One of the many reasons I wrote Crabwalk was to take the subject away from the extreme right... They said the tragedy of the Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war."
According to the Soviet propaganda version, more than a thousand German officers, including 70-80 submarine crews died with the Gustloff. Women from the ship were falsely described as SS personnel from German concentration camps.
Wreckage
55.07° N 17.41° E is the resting place of the Gustloff. This is 30 km offshore, east of Łeba (17.33E) and west of Władysławowo (18.24E). It has been designated as a war memorial site (off-limits to salvage crews). On Polish navigation charts it is noted as "Obstacle No. 73".[11] It is one of the largest shipwrecks on the Baltic sea floor.
In 2006, a bell recovered from the wreck, and subsequently used as decoration in a Polish fish restaurant, was loaned to the "Forced Paths" exhibition in Berlin.[12] In 2007, the ship's bell was placed on display at the Gdańsk Museum in Krantor.