MV Wilhelm Gustloff

Wilhelm Gustloff was constructed by the Blohm & Voss shipyards. Measuring 208.5 m (684 ft 1 in) long by 23.59 m (77 ft 5 in) wide, with a capacity of 25,484 gross register tons (GRT), she was launched on 5 May 1937.

The ship was originally intended to be named Adolf Hitler but instead was christened after Wilhelm Gustloff, leader of the Nazi Party's Swiss branch, who had been assassinated by a Jewish medical student in 1936. Adolf Hitler decided on the name change after sitting next to Gustloff's widow during his memorial service.[6] After completing sea trials in the North Sea from 15 to 16 March 1938 she was handed over to her owners.[7]

Wilhelm Gustloff was the first purpose-built cruise ship for the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) and used by subsidiary organisation Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF). Her purposes were to provide recreational and cultural activities for German functionaries and workers, including concerts, cruises, and other holiday trips, and to serve as a public relations tool that would present "a more acceptable image of the Third Reich".[8] She was the flagship of the KdF cruise fleet, her last civilian role, until the spring of 1939.

The ship made her unofficial maiden voyage between 24 and 27 March 1938 carrying Austrians in an attempt to convince them to vote for the annexation of Austria by Germany.[9] On 29 March she departed on her second voyage carrying workers and their families from the Blohm & Voss shipyard on a three-day cruise.[9]

German soldiers wounded at Narvik being transported to Germany on Wilhelm Gustloff in July 1940.

From September 1939 to November 1940, Wilhelm Gustloff served as a hospital ship, officially designated Lazarettschiff D. Beginning on 20 November 1940, medical equipment was removed from the ship and she was repainted from the hospital ship colors of white with a green stripe to standard naval grey.[12] As a consequence of the Allied blockade of the German coastline, she was used as a barracks ship for approximately 1,000 U-boat trainees of the 2nd Submarine Training Division (2. Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision) in the port of Gdynia, which had been occupied by Germany and renamed Gotenhafen, located near Danzig (Gdańsk). Wilhelm Gustloff sat in dock there for over four years. In 1942, SS Cap Arcona was used as a stand-in for RMS Titanic in the German film version of the disaster. Filmed in Gotenhafen, the 2nd Submarine Training Division acted as extras in the movie. Eventually, Wilhelm Gustloff was put back into service transporting civilians and military personnel as part of Operation Hannibal.

Operation Hannibal was the naval evacuation of German troops and civilians from Poland and the Baltic states as the Red Army advanced. Wilhelm Gustloff's final voyage was to evacuate German civilians, military personnel, and technicians from Courland, East Prussia, and Danzig-West Prussia. Many had worked at advanced weapon bases in the Baltic[13] from Gotenhafen to Kiel.[14]

The ship's complement and passenger lists cited 6,050 people on board, but these did not include many passengers who boarded the ship without being recorded in the official embarkation records. Heinz Schön, a German archivist and Gustloff survivor who extensively researched the sinking during the 1980s and 1990s, concluded that she 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.[14] The passengers, besides civilians, included Gestapo personnel, members of the Organisation Todt, and Nazi officials with their families.[15][16] The ship was overcrowded, and due to the temperature and humidity inside, many passengers defied orders not to remove their life jackets.[17]

The ship left Gotenhafen at 12:30 pm on 30 January 1945, accompanied by two torpedo boats and the passenger liner Hansa, which was carrying civilians and military personnel. Hansa and one torpedo boat developed mechanical problems and could not continue, leaving Wilhelm Gustloff with one torpedo boat escort, Löwe (ex-Gyller).[18] The ship had four captains (Wilhelm Gustloff's captain, two merchant marine captains, and the captain of the U-boat complement housed on the vessel) on board, and they disagreed 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), Wilhelm Gustloff's captain, Friedrich Petersen, decided to head for deep water which was known to have been cleared of mines. When he was informed by a mysterious radio message of an oncoming German minesweeper convoy, Petersen decided to activate his ship's red and green navigation lights so as to avoid a collision in the dark, making Wilhelm Gustloff easy to spot in the dark.

As Wilhelm Gustloff had been fitted with anti-aircraft guns, and the Germans did not mark her as a hospital ship, no notification of her operating in a hospital capacity had been given and, as she was transporting military personnel, she did not have any protection as a hospital ship under international accords.[19]

Many ships were sunk during the war by the Allies and by the Axis Powers.[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 a single vessel in maritime history. Günter Grass said in an interview published by The New York Times in April 2003: "One of the many reasons I wrote Crabwalk was to take the subject away from the extreme Right... They said the tragedy of Wilhelm Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war."[26]

About 1,000 German naval officers and men were aboard and died in the sinking of Wilhelm Gustloff. Women aboard the ship at the time of the sinking were inaccurately described by Soviet propaganda as "SS personnel from the German concentration camps".[27] There were, however, 373 female naval auxiliaries amongst the passengers, only three of whom survived.

On the night of 9–10 February, just eleven days after the sinking, S-13 sank another German ship, General von Steuben, killing about 4,500 people.

Before sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, Captain Marinesko was facing a court martial due to his alcohol problems and for being caught in a brothel while he and his crew were off duty. Marinesko was thus deemed "not suitable to be a hero" for the sinking and, instead of gaining the title Hero of the Soviet Union, he was awarded the lesser Order of the Red Banner. He was downgraded in rank to lieutenant and dishonorably discharged from the Soviet Navy in October 1945. In 1960, Marinesko was reinstated as captain third class and granted a full pension, and in 1963 was given the traditional ceremony due a captain upon the successful return from a mission. He died three weeks later from cancer at age 50. Marinesko was posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.[28]

A porthole from Wilhelm Gustloff, salvaged in 1988, at the museum ship Albatros in Damp, Germany in 2000.

A model of Wilhelm Gustloff at the Laboe Naval Memorial

Noted as "Obstacle No. 73" on Polish navigation charts,[29] and classified as a war grave, Wilhelm Gustloff rests at 55°04′22″N 17°25′17″E, about 19 nmi (35 km; 22 mi) offshore, east of Łeba and west of Władysławowo (the former Leba and Großendorf, respectively). It is one of the largest shipwrecks on the Baltic Sea floor and has attracted much interest from treasure hunters searching for the lost Amber Room. In order to protect the property on board the war grave, as well as the wreck itself and the surrounding environment, the Polish Maritime Office in Gdynia has forbidden diving within a 500 m (1,600 ft) radius of the wreck.[30]

In 2006, a bell recovered from the wreck and subsequently used as a decoration in a Polish seafood restaurant was lent to the privately funded "Forced Paths" exhibition in Berlin.[31]

• Books:
  • Günter Grass: Im Krebsgang, translated into English as Crabwalk. Combines historical elements, such as the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, with fictional elements, such as the book's major characters and events.
  • Ruta Sepetys: Salt to the Sea. Young Adult historical fiction about the lives of four fictional characters during the evacuation of East Prussia and the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Carnegie Medal winner (2017).
  • I"ll Be Damned, the autobiography by the German-born American actor Eric Braeden, published by Harper Collins in 2017, discusses how he was a survivor of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff sinking.
  • The prologue of Polar Shift features the sinking of the ship while a Resistance fighter trying to smuggle a scientist out of Nazi hands is on board.
  • The novel The Other Side of Silence. London: Quercus, by Philip Kerr, includes in its plot the sinking of MV Wilhelm Gustloff by combining accurate historical facts and fictional characters.
• Films:
  • Darkness Fell on Gotenhafen (Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen), feature film by Frank Wisbar, 1960
  • Wilhelm Gustloff, two-part Television film by Joseph Vilsmaier, 2008
• Documentaries:
  • "Killer Submarine," an episode of History's Mysteries, 1999.
  • Die große Flucht. Der Untergang der Gustloff (The Great Escape. The sinking of Wilhelm Gustloff), 2001.
  • "The Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff", The Sea Hunters (television program), 2002.
  • "Wilhelm Gustloff: World's Deadliest Sea Disaster", Unsolved History (television program), 2003.
  • Ghosts of the Baltic Sea, 2006.
  • Sinking Hitler's Supership, 2008. National Geographic documentary using extensive footage from the 2008 German miniseries.
  • Triumph und Tragödie der Wilhelm Gustloff, 2012.

• MV Goya, another ship taking part in Operation Hannibal, was also sunk by a Soviet submarine with just 183 survivors out of 7,000 passengers and crew.
• Soviet hospital ship Armenia, sunk by German aircraft with only 8 survivors out of 5,000–7,000 passengers and crew.
• SS Cap Arcona
• MV Awa Maru
• Iosif Stalin
• Deutschland
• Thielbek
• Lancastria
• RMS Lusitania
• List by death toll of ships sunk by submarines
• List of maritime disasters
• List of shipwrecks
• Eric Braeden, a survivor