Largely Unknown History

[L Verge]

Our resident scholar, Eva Lennartz of Germany, recently made a short comment relative to ties to the worst maritime disaster in history to date. I'm sure that the word "Titanic" jumps into everyone's mind when they hear "worst maritime disaster," but that is incorrect. So is "Sultana" and "Lusitania."

Last Sunday, I mentioned this disaster while addressing volunteers at Surratt House Museum. No one had ever heard of this particular one -- the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on January 30, 1945. A staff member, Joan Chaconas, has a book entitled The World's Worst Historical Disasters, and a copy of its text related to the Gustloff was on my desk waiting for me.

The German ship dated to 1937 and was originally a prestige cruise liner for the German Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) movement. When the war began, however, it took on a number of different roles, such as hospital ship, until November 1940, when it was anchored at Gotenhauf to serve as a barracks ship for the Kreigsmarine until January of 1945. By that time, Germany was in chaos - especially on the eastern front where Russian forces had already advanced into the Reich territory of East Prussia.

Millions of East Prussians began to flee to the West in hopes of naval evacuations via the Baltic Sea. Their exodus was a disaster in itself as an estimated one million exposed Prussians died in subzero conditions and those that remained behind faced rape and murder by the Soviet troops. The Wilhelm Gustloff was pressed into service as an evacuation ship. On the night of January 30, 1945, she left port, badly overcrowded with 10,582 refugees on board and launched into high winds and poor visibility in heavy snow as well as freezing sea and air temperatures. She had no military escort. At 9:08 pm, torpedoes from a Russian submarine S-13 found her.

Thousands of men, women, and children went down with the ship or drowned in the frigid waters. A total of 9343 people lost their lives that night in that single incident. The survivors were rescued by a collection of small German ships that raced to the scene. Among those survivors were our Eva's mother and grandmother.

The Gustloff was not the only ship to meet such a fate during the evacuations. Two other large refugees' ships, the General Steuben and Goya, would also be sunk during the refugee operations with a loss of another 10,000 lives.