MV Wilhelm Gustloff

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Wilhelm Gustloff as a hospital ship. Danzig, 23 September 1939
Career
Name:	MV Wilhelm Gustloff
Namesake:	Wilhelm Gustloff
Owner:	Deutsche Arbeitsfront
Operator:	Hamburg-South America Line
Port of registry:	Germany
Builder:	Blohm & Voss
Cost:	25 million Reichmarks
Yard number:	511
Laid down:	1 August 1936
Launched:	5 May 1937
Acquired:	15 March 1938
Identification:	Radio ID (DJVZ)
Fate:	Requisitioned into the Kriegsmarine on 1 September 1939
Career (Germany)
Name:	Lazarettschiff D (Hospital Ship D)
Operator:	Kriegsmarine (German Navy)
Acquired:	1 September 1939
Fate:	Converted from hospital ship to floating barracks beginning 20 November 1940, including repainting from hospital ship colors to standard navy grey.
Career (Germany)
Name:	Wilhelm Gustloff
Operator:	Kriegsmarine
Acquired:	20 November 1940
Out of service:	November 1940 – January 1945
Fate:	Torpedoed and sunk 30 January 1945
Notes:	Used as floating barracks for the Second Submarine Training Division until the vessel returned to active service ferrying civilians and military personnel as part of Operation Hannibal
General characteristics
Class and type:	Cruise ship
Tonnage:	25,484 GRT
Length:	208.50 metres (684.1 ft)
Beam:	23.59 metres (77.4 ft)
Height:	56 metres (180 ft) keel to masthead
Decks:	8
Installed power:	Four 8-cylinder MAN diesel engines 9,500 hp
Propulsion:	2 twin-screw propellers (4 blades per prop)
Speed:	15.5 knots (28.7 km/h or 17.8 mph)
Range:	12,000 nm at 15 knots
Capacity:	1,465 passengers (as designed) in 489 cabins: 248 two-bed 241 four-bed
Crew:	417 cruise ship 173 naval

Coordinates: 55°04′N 17°25′E / 55.07°N 17.41°E / 55.07; 17.41

The MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German KdF flagship, during 1937-1945, constructed by the Blohm and Voss shipyards. It sank after being hit by three torpedoes fired by the Soviet submarine S-13 on 30 January 1945 with the loss of over 9,000 lives – the greatest loss of life in a maritime disaster in history.

The ship was named after Wilhelm Gustloff, the assassinated German leader of the Swiss Nazi party. It was requisitioned into the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) on 1 September 1939 and served as a hospital ship during 1939 and 1940. Beginning on 20 November 1940, it was stripped of medical equipment and repainted from its hospital ship colors (white with a green stripe) to standard naval grey. The Wilhelm Gustloff was then assigned as a floating barracks for naval personnel at the Baltic port of Gdynia (German: Gotenhafen), near Gdansk (German: Danzig), from 1940 onwards.

The Wilhelm Gustloff's final voyage was during Operation Hannibal in January 1945, when it was sunk while participating in the evacuation of civilians and personnel who were surrounded by the Red Army in East Prussia. The Gustloff was hit by three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea on the night of 30 January 1945 and sank in less than 45 minutes. An estimated 9,400 people were killed in the sinking.^[1][2] If accurate, this would be the largest known loss of life occurring during a single ship sinking in recorded maritime history.

Contents 1 Construction 2 Ship history 2.1 Military career 2.2 Operation Hannibal 2.3 The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff 3 Aftermath 4 Wreckage 5 Books, documentaries and movies 5.1 Books in German 5.2 Books in English 5.3 Dramatized films 5.4 Documentaries 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 8.1 Further reading 9 External links

[edit] Construction

The Wilhelm Gustloff was constructed by the Blohm and Voss shipyards. The Gustloff was launched on 5 May 1937 measuring 208.50 metres (684.1 ft) long by 23.59 metres (77.4 ft) wide with a capacity of 25,484 gross register tons.

[edit] Ship history

Please help improve this article by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (December 2008)

The Wilhelm Gustloff was the first purpose-built cruise liner for the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) and used by subsidiary organisation Kraft durch Freude (KdF) (Strength Through Joy). Its purposes were to provide recreational and cultural activities for German functionaries and workers, including concerts, cruises, and other holiday trips, and as a public relations tool, to present "a more acceptable image of the Third Reich."^[3] 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.

[edit] Military career

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, with her official designation being Lazarettschiff D.

Beginning 20 November 1940, the medical equipment was removed from the ship and it was repainted from the hospital ship colors of white with a green stripe to standard naval grey.^[4] As a consequence of the British blockade of the German coastline, she was used as an accommodations ship (barracks) for approximately 1,000 U-boat trainees of the 2nd Submarine Training Division (2. Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision) in the Baltic port of Gotenhafen (Gdynia) – near Danzig (Gdańsk).^[4] The Wilhelm Gustloff sat dockside for over four years, until she was put back in service to transport civilians and military personnel as part of Operation Hannibal.

[edit] Operation Hannibal

The ship's final voyage was to evacuate civilians, Kriegsmarine sailors, and German soldiers from Gotenhafen to Kiel.^[2] The ship's complement and passenger lists cited 6,050 people on board, but this did not include many civilians 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 wounded soldiers, and 8,956 civilians, 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.^{[citation needed]}

The ship left Gotenhafen early on 30 January 1945, accompanied by the passenger liner Hansa, also filled with civilians and military personnel, and two torpedo boats. The Hansa and one torpedo boat developed mechanical problems and could not continue, leaving the Wilhelm Gustloff with one torpedo boat escort, the Löwe.^[5] The ship had four captains (three civilian and one military) on board, 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, no notification of it operating in a hospital capacity had been given, and as it was transporting combat troops, it did not have any protection as a hospital ship under the international accords governing this.^[6]

[edit] The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff

The ship was soon sighted by the S-13, under the command of Captain Third Class Alexander Marinesko, which launched three torpedoes at the Wilhelm Gustloff's port side about 30 kilometres (19 mi) offshore between Großendorf and Leba soon after 21:00 (CET), hitting it with all three.^[2] The first torpedo struck near the port bow. The second torpedo hit just ahead of midships. The third torpedo struck the engine room in the area below the ship's funnel, cutting off electrical power to the ship. The ship took a list to starboard and was settling by the head. Later, the Wilhelm Gustloff listed to port.

In the panic that followed, many of the passengers 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 (39 °F); however, this was a particularly cold night, with an air temperature of −18 to −10 °C (-0 to 14 °F) and ice floes covering the surface. Many deaths were caused either directly by the torpedoes or by drowning in the onrushing water. Others were crushed in the initial panic on the stairs and decks, and many jumped into the icy Baltic. There are reports of 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, due to the ill-fitting survival gear.

Less than 45 minutes after being struck, the Wilhelm Gustloff went down bow first in 44 metres (140 ft) 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. The figures from the research of Heinz Schön make the total lost in the sinking to be about 9,343 men, women, and children. This would make it the largest loss of life in a single sinking in maritime history.^[2] All four captains on the Gustloff survived its sinking, but an official naval inquiry was started only against Wilhelm Zahn. His degree of responsibility was never resolved, however, because of Nazi Germany's problems in 1945.^[7]

In an article in the popular 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.^[1]

Heinz Schön's more recent research is backed up by estimates made by a different method. The Discovery Channel program Unsolved History undertook 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.^[8][9][10]

[edit] Aftermath

Many ships carrying civilians were sunk during the war by both the Allies and Axis.^[11] 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 New York Times on Tuesday 8 April 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."^[12]

About a thousand German naval officers and men, were aboard and died in the sinking of the Gustloff. The women onboard the ship at the time of the sinking were inaccurately described by Soviet propaganda as "SS personnel from the German concentration camps".^[13]

[edit] Wreckage

Noted as "Obstacle No. 73" on Polish navigation charts,^[14] Gustloff rests at 55°04′N 17°25′E / 55.07°N 17.41°E / 55.07; 17.41, about 30 km (19 mi) offshore, east of Łeba (17.33E) and west of Władysławowo (18.24E). It is one of the largest shipwrecks on the Baltic Sea floor. It has been designated as a war memorial site (off-limits to salvage crews).^{[citation needed]}

In 2006, a bell recovered from the wreck and subsequently used as decoration in a Polish fish restaurant was loaned to a privately funded "Forced Paths" exhibition in Berlin.^[15] In 2007, the ship's bell was placed on display at a Gdańsk museum in Krantor.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Books, documentaries and movies

[edit] Books in German

The most prolific German author and historian on the subject of the Wilhelm Gustloff is Heinz Schön, one of the shipwreck's survivors, whose books (in German) include:

• Der Untergang der "Wilhelm Gustloff". Tatsachenbericht eines Überlebenden. (The sinking of the "Wilhelm Gustloff". Factual account of a survivor.) Karina-Goltze-Verlag K.-G., Göttingen 1952;
• SOS Wilhelm Gustloff. Die größte Schiffskatastrophe der Geschichte. (SOS Wilhelm Gustloff. The biggest shipping disaster in history.) Motorbuch Verlag Pietsch, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-61301-900-0;
• Die Gustloff - Katastrophe. Bericht eines Überlebenden über die größte Schiffskatastrophe im Zweiten Weltkrieg. (The Gustloff catastrophe. Account of a survivor of the biggest shipping disaster in the Second World War.) Motorbuch Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-61301-027-5;
• Die letzte Fahrt der Wilhelm Gustloff. Dokumentation eines Überlebenden. (The last trip of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Account of a survivor.) Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 3-61302-897-2.

[edit] Books in English

Recent years have seen increased interest in the Wilhelm Gustloff disaster in countries outside of Germany, with various books either written in or translated into English, including:

• A.V. Sellwood: The Damned Don't Drown. The Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Naval Institute Press, London 1973, ISBN 1-55750-742-2, a work of fiction on the tragedy, as noted in the book itself.
• Christopher Dobson, John Miller, and Ronald Payne: The Cruellest Night, Hodder & Stoughton, London,1979, ISBN 0-340-22720-6
• John Ries: "History's Greatest Naval Disasters. The Little-Known Stories of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the General Steuben and the Goya". In the controversial Journal of Historical Review, 1992, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 371–381.
• Günter Grass: Im Krebsgang, which has been translated into English as Crabwalk. Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-88243-800-2.

[edit] Dramatized films

• Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen (Night fell over Gotenhafen), feature film, 1959
• Die Gustloff (The Gustloff), two-part telemovie by Joseph Vilsmaier, 2008 (Ship of No Return: The Last Voyage of the Gustloff, Australian title)
• Sinking Hitler's Supership, 2008.

[edit] Documentaries

• Killer Submarine, 1999.
• Die große Flucht. Der Untergang der Gustloff (The Great Escape. The sinking of the Gustloff), 2001.
• Ghosts of the Baltic Sea, 2006.
• "Wilhelm Gustloff: World's Deadliest Sea Disaster", Unsolved History (television program), 2003.
• "Sinking the Gustloff", 2009
• "The Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff", The Sea Hunters (television program), 2002.

[edit] See also

• Maritime disasters
• Cap Arcona, sunk by the Royal Air Force with an estimated loss of life of approx. 4,600 people, mostly prisoners of the Germans.
• Thielbek, also sunk in the RAF raid that sank the SS Cap Arcona and SS Deutschland. Over 2,800 lives lost, mostly prisoners of the Germans.
• Deutschland, sunk together with SS Cap Arcona by RAF aircraft. Unknown number of lives lost, mostly prisoners of the Germans.
• Goya, torpedoed by a Soviet submarine during the evacuation of troops and civilians, with over 6,000 estimated dead.
• Steuben, torpedoed by a Soviet submarine evacuating civilians and troops, with over 4,000 estimated dead.
• HMT Rohna, sunk by the Germans in November, 1943. Over 1,138 estimated deaths, with 1,015 of them being American troops. This still constitutes the largest loss of US troops at sea.
• Armenia, sunk by German aircraft in November 1941, with over 5,000 deaths estimated.
• Junyō Maru, sunk by the British in September 1944, with over 5,000 deaths (mostly Asian slave laborers and Allied POWs) estimated.
• Lancastria, sunk by German aircraft in June, 1940, during the evacuation of Western France with over 4,000 deaths (1,738 known dead) estimated.
• Laconia, sunk by a German submarine in September, 1942, during the Laconia Incident, giving rise to the Laconia Order.
• Ukishima Maru, suspicious ship explosion, August 24, 1945 killing over 500 Koreans.
• Arandora Star, sunk by a German submarine July 2, 1940.
• List of shipwrecks

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Wilhelm Gustloff

• Location of the wreck
• Wilhelm Gustloff Shipwreck Expedition May 2003 on Deep Image.co.uk (English)
• Details, map and position info on www.wrecksite.eu (English) (German) (French) (Dutch)
• National Geographic Channel Timeline