Final Voyage (17 page)

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.

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.

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 Poland, 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.

No fewer than four captains had been assigned to the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, which inevitably led to a clash over who was really in command before they even left port. Officially her civilian captain Friederich Petersen was in charge. He knew the ship better than the other three captains, having commanded her briefly in 1938 when, serving as second in command, he had to take over following the sudden death of her captain. Petersen was 67, and had actually been captured by the British earlier in the war. They released him on compassionate grounds, and on the assumption – and indeed, his promise – that he would not return to active service.

No fewer than four captains had been assigned to the
Wilhelm Gustloff,
which inevitably led to a clash over who was really in command before they even left port.

At 33, Wilhelm Zahn was half Petersen's age, and he had no time for the civilian's claim to command. As far as
he was concerned, the
Wilhelm Gustloff
's mission was a military one. The ship was not going on a cruise, and the operation needed to be run by a captain who knew about evading mines and aircraft. But Zahn's experience was as a U-boat commander. He had never commanded a ship like the
Wilhelm Gustloff
. But with a harsh reputation, and his Alsatian dog Hassan always at his side, Zahn was an overbearing character, and the other two young merchant marine captains on the bridge of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
were successfully cowed by his oppressive approach.

On 25th January boarding began. The first to board were not the poor who had been huddling on the pier for days but the rich who had used their money and connections to ensure they got the pick of the cabins. The soldiers supervising boarding struggled to control the surge of the crowd as the gangways were then opened to everyone else. Boarding on a first come first served basis, those stuck at the back of a crowd that filled their end of the harbour pressed forward, fearing that a ship like the
Wilhelm Gustloff
could only carry a couple of thousand people. In the crush, children were separated from their parents. Some would never see each other again, even though they all managed to board the ship.

In the crush, children were separated from their parents. Some would never see each other again.

After two days, the soldiers registering every passenger who boarded stopped taking names. There were already 5,000 people on board by that time, but the crowd in Gotenhafen didn't seem to have diminished at all as hundreds more arrived every hour. Boarding continued
until the 29th. The cabins had long been filled with more people than they could comfortably house, and now the other areas of the ship that had been cleared and laid out with mats began to fill up too. Mattresses lined the floor of the theatre. Even the swimming pools had been drained, and 400 women were housed in one of them.

On the 29th there was an air raid on Gotenhafen. When the sirens wailed some people left the ship to go to one of the harbour's shelters. Many stayed where they were, knowing they could lose their place aboard to someone more scared of the Soviets than of death. This was not an uncommon opinion. As one passenger reportedly said as she came aboard, the
Wilhelm Gustloff
was ‘a nice ship to be torpedoed, but better to drown than to fall into Russian hands.'

Mattresses lined the floor of the theatre. Even the swimming pools had been drained, and 400 women were housed in one of them.

That evening the four captains received the order to depart. The gangways were finally retracted, leaving plenty on the pier, many of them in a state of fear and panic. The last people to come aboard were the Nazi mayor of Gotenhafen and his family. They took the luxury suite that had been reserved solely for Hitler's use, but which had never been occupied in the ship's eight-year lifetime.