If you ask any given person what the worst maritime disaster
was in history, (of those who could bring one to mind) you would probably hear
about the Titanic, or even the Lusitania. However, I’d say it’s a safe
bet that the odds are astronomical that you’ll find someone who knows about the
sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Now
author Cathryn J. Prince has brought this story to our attention.
The province of East Prussia is located on the Baltic Sea,
between Latvia and a small sliver of Polish territory that allows that country
access to the Baltic. Historically, the area was a Polish duchy, but when
Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union in their Non-Aggression
Treaty of 1939, the territory went to the Nazis. Where before East Prussia was an area of mixed ethnicity, now began a period of "Germanification." The Nazis and the Soviets relocated the civilian population by the hundreds of thousands. Ethnic Germans
were expelled from Soviet states and relocated to East Prussia.
East Prussia, having been separated from the rest of Germany
during the interwar years, had not been overly influenced by the Nazi rise to
power. They were also relatively unaffected by the war until late 1944 when the
Red Army started closing in. That all changed when the Soviets began to retake their former territory. Retribution for Germans was terrifying. The anticipated rape and murder by Russian soldiers created a panic to flee the area. However, Hitler would not allow any evacuation of civilians from
East Prussia until Russian tanks were literally breaking through the German
defensive line. Almost too late, the head of the German Navy, Admiral Karl
Donitz, launched Operation Hannibal, the evacuation of both military and
civilians across the Baltic to the German port of Kiel.
The goal of Operation Hannibal was to move one million military
personnel and two million civilian refugees by ship and/or train from the
eastern provinces to northern Germany beginning on January 23, 1945. Over 800
ships, both military and merchant marine, would participate. One of those ships
was the Wilhelm Gustloff, a luxury cruise ship launched in 1938. The ship had
been previously used as a troop transport, hospital ship, and floating barracks
for the German navy. It was designed to carry only 2000 passengers and crew
when it operated as an ocean liner.
On the night of January 30, 1945 the Wilhelm Gustloff
departed Gotenhafen enroute to Kiel. It was estimated, since no records
survived if any were available, that the ship carried over 9,000 souls. The
majority were civilian refugees, women and children, and a number of wounded
military personnel on board. A short time later, the Wilhelm Gustloff was
struck by three torpedoes fired by a Soviet submarine S-13. The ocean liner
sunk within an hour. Since there were lifeboats for only a fraction of those on board, many drowned in the freezing Baltic. There were approximately 1200
survivors. Some estimate the death toll as high as 9,400. For perspective, the sinking of the Lusitania took under 1200 and the Titanic claimed just over 1500 lives.
The sinking was not deliberately kept secret over the years,
but it wasn’t exactly publicized either. In post WWII America, not many people
cared about what had happened to our former enemies. The ensuing Cold War with
the Soviets further obscured the tragedy in the world’s collective memory.
Author Cathryn Prince heard about it one day and was driven to find out more.
She found a survivor who had since immigrated to Canada. Prince went there to
interview him. That’s all it took to compel Prince to find more survivors to
interview, and finally tell their story.
Prince articulates an observation that Americans have a
tendency to not acknowledge the suffering of the German people during the war,
not wanting to view them as having the right to be “victims” of the Nazis like
other nationalities in Europe (p. 181). But if we are able to put those
prejudices aside, there is a lot to learn in the details of the closing days of
WWII in the European Theater. Moreover, as a reader and writer of military
history, I think it’s a good thing that we periodically put strategy and
tactics aside and examine the experiences of civilians during war.
The book is well written and reads at a good pace. There is
no fluff, coming in at 236 pages including back matter, but it is a thorough
history. The reader will learn about what happened on the Eastern Front in the
closing days of WWII, and be caught up in several of the survivor stories. Photographs
of the survivors as children help us see them as real people who went through
extraordinary events. In the interest of full disclosure, Palgrave Macmillan
provided a review copy of this book. I’m glad they did, as at first glance it
was not a subject I would have chosen. However, I highly recommend Death in the Baltic. It is an
interesting, well told story that brings a little known event from WWII to
light.
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