Final Voyage

by Eyers, Jonathan

  Less than 24 hours later, Germany surrendered unconditionally. In the jubilation of victory – or for many in Europe, including Germany, simply the relief of peace – the tragedy was quickly forgotten by everyone except survivors and those who lived on the Bay of Lübeck. The locals saw the heads of floating corpses bobbing in the water just offshore for days afterwards, and bodies washed up on the beaches for weeks. Bones were still being found as late as the 1970s.

  At a later war crime trial the head of Hamburg’s Gestapo revealed that Himmler intended all of those on board the ships to be killed, which added to the speculation that the SS planned to scuttle the ships, and also gave birth to the theory that the Nazis used the Allies to do their dirty work. As with the Lancastria sinking, the British government sealed all of its records regarding the disaster for a hundred years.

  The Cap Arcona’s burnt-out wreck eventually drifted onto the shore, where it was broken up in 1949. That same year both the Deutschland and the Thielbek were raised. The Deutschland was scrapped, but the Thielbek was considered salvageable. The human remains found aboard were interred in Neustadt, north of Lübeck, and the ship was repaired and renamed Reinbek. Later renamed twice more, first to Magdalene and then Old Warrior, she sailed under a Panamanian flag until she was finally scrapped in 1974.

  War of annihilation

  Between 1941 and 1945 Germany and the Soviet Union had fought a war within a war, an ideological conflict marked by unmatched carnage, the essential aim of each side annihilation of the other, and which resulted in the majority of the casualties of the Second World War. An uneasy peace existed between the two nations following the non-aggression pact that saw them both invade Poland in September 1939, but after Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s attempted invasion of Russia in June 1941, the former allies began engaging in largely unrestricted warfare on land, in the air and at sea. With naval vessels, troop transports, merchant shipping and hospital ships all considered fair game, over the next four years the two countries inflicted many of the deadliest maritime disasters in history upon each other.

  Between 1941 and 1945 Germany and the Soviet Union inflicted many of the deadliest maritime disasters in history upon each other.

  Initially the Russo-German war went very much in Hitler’s favour, with nearly 4 million men advancing over 1,000 miles into the Soviet Union, and only being checked at the gates of Moscow by a harsh Russian winter. As the German land forces swept along the coast of the Black Sea in November 1941, the Russian navy conscripted merchant ships to help evacuate personnel from the Crimea. One of these vessels was the Armenia, one of the first passenger ships built in the Soviet Union. Despite only having capacity for less than 1,000, up to five times that number may have boarded at Sevastopol for the relatively short voyage across the Black Sea to Tuapse, which was safer from the German advance. However, after leaving Sevastopol, the captain was ordered into Yalta to pick up even more. By the 6th, Yalta had been under siege for a week, all the roads had been cut off, and the city was expected to fall to the Germans within hours. In the panic at the quayside, no names were taken, no heads were counted. As the Armenia headed out into the Black Sea, she probably carried between 5,000 and 7,000 people, many of them wounded soldiers, but also refugees, including hospital staff. Doctors in Yalta had urged many of the weakest to get on the ship, and then joined them on her. If contemporary Soviet propaganda was to be believed, the Armenia had in excess of 8,000 on board.

  Had the ship not stopped at Yalta, the thousands who boarded her at Sevastopol would probably have made it safely to Tuapse. Instead the delay meant she left Yalta as the Luftwaffe secured dominion over the Black Sea’s airspace. The Armenia was only a few miles from Yalta when a Heinkel He-111 dropped two torpedoes into the water. Eyewitnesses on shore claimed they could still see the red crosses painted on the ship’s sides at that distance, so they knew the pilot must have seen them too. The first torpedo missed the Armenia, but the second hit her prow. Splitting in two, the ship went down in less than 5 minutes. People on shore heard the explosions and screaming. Most of those on board didn’t have time to escape, but many of those on deck jumped overboard and tried to swim back to the shore. Being wounded and weakened, hardly any of them made it. The true death toll will never be known, but there were only 8 survivors.

  After the disastrous battle for Stalingrad from summer 1942 to early 1943, the tide of war on the Eastern Front turned against the Germans, and in 1944 another maritime disaster in the Black Sea mirrored the loss of the Armenia three years before, and perhaps provided the Russians with a satisfying sense of vengeance. By April 1944 the Red Army had retaken enough territory to cut the Crimea off from the rest of Ukraine, trapping almost a quarter of a million German and Romanian soldiers on the peninsula. On 10th May, the captured Hungarian cargo ship Totila, and another vessel, the Teja, docked at Khersones, not far from Sevastopol. It’s possible over 9,000 soldiers, both German and Romanian, boarded for the voyage across the Black Sea to Constanta, Romania, which was still under Axis control. The Soviet airforce now controlled the skies above the Black Sea, and the ships came under attack from dozens of A-20 planes. Three bombs struck the Totila, and she sank fast. Neither the Teja nor the ships’ escort vessels stopped to pick up survivors because that would make them easy targets. Nevertheless, in the second attack wave the Soviet planes hit the Teja anyway, and she also sank quickly. This time the escort vessels did stop, but they only rescued 400.

  Operation Hannibal

  By January 1945, Admiral Doenitz had accepted that Germany was going to lose the war. Realising that the pace of the Soviet advance on the eastern front would leave millions of Germans cut off, he put Operation Hannibal into effect. Hitler was determined to fight until the end, so Doenitz may have managed to make Operation Hannibal look like a strategic repositioning, not retreating but fortifying the fatherland. Ultimately the operation became the largest evacuation by sea in history, transporting up to 2 million people – more than double the number the British evacuated from Dunkirk, Le Havre and St Nazaire – from the east, across the Baltic, to safer ports deeper inside Germany. For the most part, it was a success, the last success of the military machine that between 1939 and 1941 had seemed unstoppable.

  Operation Hannibal became the largest evacuation by sea in history, transporting more than double the number the British evacuated from Dunkirk.

  Over 1,000 vessels may have been involved at some stage, from small fishing boats up to luxury liners like the 550ft (168m) Steuben. The Steuben had sunk once before, in 1930. The first German liner to sail to New York since the end of the First World War, she was docked there in July when a fire broke out in a paint locker, spread to a storage hold and then caused an explosion. Raising and repairing the ship became one of the largest salvage efforts in history. In 1944, having been requisitioned as a troop transport, she carried thousands of men eastward. Less than a year later, on 9th February 1945, she docked at Pillau (now Baltiysk, the westernmost town in Russia) to pick up evacuees heading westward. She had cabin space for 793 but could carry about 1,800. Some 2,800 wounded soldiers boarded her at Pillau, along with at least 1,400 other refugees. Naval officers on board reported only 3,600 passengers, but merchant navy officers helping out claimed there had to be at least 5,200.

  The next day, as the Steuben passed the Stolpe (now Słupsk) Bank, only 40 miles from the German coast, she came into the sights of Soviet submarine S-13. The Russians fired two torpedoes, which hit her broadside below the bridge and split open her hull. Water rushed in so fast that when divers explored her wreck in 2004 they found everything inside that was loose had been swept away, and fittings had even been torn from the walls. As the Steuben sank, the passengers who were able surged toward the stern, hoping the bow would hit the seabed in the shallow waters and that the rear of the ship would stay propped up above the water. Instead the Steuben rolled onto her side after less than 20 minutes, sinking too fast for the thousands of injured men on stretchers still wa
iting below to be carried up on deck. In the near-freezing waters, most of those who had been on deck when she went under did not survive long. Only a few hundred survivors were picked up by an escorting torpedo boat.

  Water rushed in so fast that when divers explored her wreck they found everything inside that was loose had been swept away, and fittings had even been torn from the walls.

  About 160 vessels participating in Operation Hannibal were sunk between 23rd January and 8th May 1945. The last major loss was that of the Goya, a 5,230-ton Norwegian freighter the Germans had seized in 1940. On 16th April, carrying thousands of soldiers and civilians who had fled the Soviet invasion of Danzig (now Gdansk), she was hit by two torpedoes from Russian mine-laying submarine L-3. Her passenger list officially acknowledged 6,100 people being aboard, but it had been another chaotic evacuation, and it’s possible a thousand more could have squeezed onto the ship. The Goya had a cruising speed of 18 knots, fast enough to evade submarines, but she stopped when another vessel in her convoy developed engine problems just before midnight. The torpedoes caused the unarmoured freighter to split in two, water flooding into her so fast that it prevented most people from making it out during the mere 7 minutes she took to sink. As with the Steuben, those who survived the sinking weren’t guaranteed rescue. Most died in the icy water before two minesweepers reached the scene, by which time there were again only a few hundred survivors to be pulled up.

  The sinking of the Goya made few headlines. In Germany, these catastrophic losses, whether at sea or on land, had become almost routine as the Allies pushed in from every direction. In Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and across the swathes of Europe the Allies had already liberated, there was little sympathy for the suffering of the enemy – part of the intoxicating effect of imminent glory. But perhaps part of the reason why the Goya’s sinking went largely unnoticed at the time, and has been mostly forgotten today, is because it came so soon after another Operation Hannibal disaster, one that dwarfed the Goya in terms of loss of life, and which remains the worst maritime disaster of all time.

  7 Ten Thousand Dead

  The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff

  The Wilhelm Gustloff can now be seen as a symbol for Germany’s rise and fall under the Third Reich, and not least because she was originally going to be called the Adolf Hitler. Hitler himself chose her new name, using the first purpose-built cruise liner of the DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront – German Labour Front) to both commemorate and condemn. Gustloff was the German leader of the Swiss Nazi Party, assassinated in 1936 by a Jewish student. The imposing white liner was meant to show both her German passengers and the parts of the world they visited that Nazism wasn’t just a political movement, its success an electoral aberration that would eventually be rectified, but that the Nazi creed was an inherent part of the German identity. By martyrising such a prominent anti-Semite as Gustloff, the ship’s naming was a further attempt to normalise the Nazis’ attitudes towards the Jews. As such it was also a warning of what was to come, but one which of course few heeded.

  The Nazi propaganda that all passengers were required to sit through might not even have been necessary by that stage. Just being on the ship probably made a positive impression on most.

  Wilhelm Gustloff’s widow christened the ship herself. Laid down in August 1936, the ship was ready for launch in May 1937. Displacing 25,484 tons, she was 684ft (208.5m) long and 77.5ft (23.6m) across the beam. Across eight decks she had 489 cabins, designed to carry 1,465 passengers, attended to by a crew of 417. There was no class distinction on board the Wilhelm Gustloff. The Nazi ideology disdained the class warfare between rich and poor that defined (and inspired) socialism, as they perceived it. Under the auspices of the DAF’s subsidiary KdF (Kraft durch Freude – Strength through Joy), the Wilhelm Gustloff offered loyal German workers trips to Norway, Portugal and Italy for less than a third of the price of a comparable cruise.

  In the two years before war broke out the Wilhelm Gustloff took 65,000 people on 50 voyages. Much of Germany’s rural working class had never left their villages before. Now they were being taken around Europe on one of the most beautiful, luxurious ships in the world, treated to concerts, dances and films. The Nazi propaganda that all passengers were required to sit through might not even have been necessary by that stage. Just being on the ship probably made a positive impression on most.

  The Wilhelm Gustloff’s propaganda role wasn’t just aimed at her passengers, though. It was also her job to put an attractive face on Hitler’s new, modern Germany and cast doubts on aspersions made in the wake of punitive restrictions against Jews and laws banning opposition parties. In April 1938 the Wilhelm Gustloff docked several miles off the British coast to allow German and Austrian citizens living in the United Kingdom to vote in the referendum on Anschluss – whether Austria should be completely absorbed into Germany. Around 2,000 travelled to Tilbury to be ferried to and from the Wilhelm Gustloff. Only four of them voted no. The British press reported positively on the magnificent ship anchored near the Thames Estuary, and how the efforts Germany had gone to ensure its citizens overseas could vote showed that the Nazis were not the enemies of liberty some sabre-rattling troublemakers on the Conservative Party’s backbenches claimed they were. It was, of course, simply a propaganda exercise, and a fait d’accompli. German troops had occupied Austria a month before.

  It certainly didn’t hurt the British impression of the Wilhelm Gustloff that a week before the Anschluss referendum she had come to the rescue of a British cargo ship. The Wilhelm Gustloff had been the closest vessel when the Pegaway ran into trouble during heavy weather off Terschelling, northern Netherlands. Responding to the distress signal, the Wilhelm Gustloff rescued all 19 crewmembers from the stricken ship. As far as the British press was concerned, this heroic Germany was not the dangerous enemy that the likes of Winston Churchill predicted she would become.

  When war ultimately did break out less than 18 months later the Wilhelm Gustloff was immediately requisitioned into the Kriegsmarine to serve as a 500-bed hospital ship. In July 1940 she anchored in the English Channel with other support vessels in anticipation of Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of Britain. Following the Luftwaffe’s failure to knock out the RAF in the Battle of Britain, and Hitler’s cancellation of the invasion, she spent four years docked at Gotenhafen (now Gdynia) in occupied Poland, serving as a floating barracks for German naval personnel.

  In January 1945, only 12 years into the 1,000-year Reich that Hitler had predicted in 1934, the Wilhelm Gustloff was conscripted into Operation Hannibal. Her final voyage symbolises the final chapter in the history of the Third Reich. With the Soviet Union consuming Germany from the east and the British and Americans consuming Germany from the west, the final victims of Hitler’s war would be his own people.

  ‘A nice ship to be torpedoed’

  The winter of 1945 was the coldest in almost twenty years, but that hadn’t stopped nearly 100,000 German refugees travelling through the snow – sometimes for days, often on foot – to reach Gotenhafen on the northern Polish coast. Rumours of Soviet atrocities came in advance of their armies. There were stories of unarmed people being clubbed to death, and of women being raped and then crucified naked on doors. Stories of a Soviet spearhead catching up with a straggling group of fleeing Germans and then making them lie in the snow to be crushed under a tank drove the refugees on faster, through the night and snowstorms, never stopping for long.

  Following the joint Russian and German invasion of Poland that ignited the Second World War in 1939, some 1.3 million German civilians had moved into the Reich’s newest neighbourhoods. This was Hitler’s promise of lebensraum (‘living space’). These civilians did not see themselves as occupiers, because there were no Poles left in the areas they moved to. They were settlers on Germany’s new frontier. They did not ask where the Poles had gone, and the Nazi propaganda machine certainly did not allow them to find out. Five years later, as the Red Army swept into Polan
d, these settlers did not see the Soviet invasion as a liberation, but simply as a clash of empires. Most Russians – and most Poles, for that matter – probably saw it the same way.

  After the Soviet army surrounded East Prussia, the only escape for Germans trapped behind the Russian side of the new eastern front would be by sea.

  When the Soviet army broke through on three fronts on 12th January it wasn’t long before East Prussia was surrounded. After that point, the only escape for Germans trapped behind the Russian side of the new eastern front would be by sea. Rumours of big German ships docking at Gotenhafen had spread just as fast as the rumours of Soviet atrocities coming from the other direction. Thousands poured into Gotenhafen and headed for the docks. Though they were exhausted and cold, many waited on the piers, listening to artillery rumble like thunder in the distance, hoping it was their own but suspecting it was not. Many of them would wait there in the snow for several days.

  The Wilhelm Gustloff had been set aside to carry wounded soldiers and those similarly unfit to continue the fight. This included women with children, boys under the age of 16 and men over the age of 50. Civilian refugees would ultimately constitute the vast majority of the thousands crowded onto the ship, but military personnel, including Nazi officials who had been in Poland to administer the conquered country, were also ordered to evacuate. SS stormtroopers patrolled the dockside even before boarding commenced, searching the crowds for deserters, able-bodied men and even underage boys who could be conscripted into the final defence of the fatherland.