By late January 1945, Nazi Germany was on the verge of losing World War II. On the Western Front, its offensive in the Ardennes faile. The Battle of the Bulge was a major Allied victory that saw German forces on the defensive for the rest of the war. On the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union’s Vistula-Oder Offensive brought the Red Army to within 43 miles (69 km) of Berlin itself. The advance also began bringing to light the horrors of the Holocaust with the liberation of concentration camps like Auschwitz, Kraków-Płaszów, and Ravensbrück.
In Gotenhafen (now Gdynia), a port city on the Baltic Sea, a massive evacuation was taking place. The Germans enacted Operation Hannibal to get as many military personnel and civilians out of East Prussia and the occupied Baltic states as possible. The scale of the evacuation was massive and dwarfed the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation by comparison. Over a 15-week period, between 800,000 and 900,000 civilians and 350,000 soldiers were carried across the Baltic to safety. The German military pressed vessels of all types and sizes into service.
One of these was a Nazi cruise ship called the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. Severely overloaded, it departed Gotenhafen for Kiel, Germany on January 30 with up to 10,582 souls aboard (the exact number isn’t know). Women and children comprised most of the passenger list. Most of the people aboard would die later that night.
In her 2017 novel, Salt to the Sea, author Ruta Sepetys wrote:
The Wilhelm Gustloff was pregnant with lost souls conceived of war. They would crowd into her belly and she would give birth to their freedom. But did anyone realize? The ship was christened for a man, Wilhelm Gustloff. My father had told me about him. He had been the leader of the Nazi Party in Switzerland. He was murdered. The ship was born of death.
Strength Through Joy
The grim reality of January 1945 was utterly inconceivable to anyone at Hamburg’s Blohm & Voss shipyard on May 5, 1937. That day, everyone focused on the new ship launched by Hedwig Gustloff in the presence of Adolf Hitler. Named for her late husband, the MV Wilhelm Gustloff was to be a crown jewel in the Nazi Party’s Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude; KdF) program. As the KdF’s first purpose-built cruise ship, it was an ambassador for Nazism across the globe as it took German workers and their families on low-cost vacations. The propaganda value was enormous: Wilhelm Gustloff would put a smiling, happy face on the swastika abroad.
Originally intended to be called the Adolf Hitler, the Führer decided to change its name in 1936 after the assassination of Wilhelm Gustloff in Switzerland. He’d been the leader of the Nazi Party’s Swiss wing, and shot by a medical student named David Frankfurter. Now a martyr for the cause, the new ship proudly carried his name across the seas as happy tourists crowded aboard.
As the flagship of the KdF fleet, no expense was spared on the Wilhelm Gustloff. Built at a cost of 25 million ℛ︁ℳ︁, the ship was thoroughly modern. Its accommodations were unusually spacious for the time, and every cabin had a sea view. With 224 two-bed and 233 four-bed cabins, the ship had space for 1,471 passengers. The Gustloff’s interiors proved modest and comfortable. Two dining rooms, two ballrooms, a smoking lounge, a hairdressing salon, a theatre, a swimming pool, and an exceptionally large outdoor deck waited for passengers. In keeping with fleetwide KdF policy, however, no alcohol would be served aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff. Passengers’ activities aboard were strictly monitored.
The ship’s modernity extended to her powerplant as well. Based on the work of Rudolf Diesel, Diesel-powered ships first appeared in 1903 with the Russian Vandal and French Petite-Pierre. A building boom in the 1920s and 1930s saw an increase in the number of motor ships launched. Perhaps the most famous Diesel-powered ships of the era, White Star Line’s Britannic (1929) and Georgic (1931), proved instant hits. While the Wilhelm Gustloff would never win any speed records, her powerplant was nothing to scoff at: four MAN G8Z 52/70 diesel engines gave the Gustloff a top speed of 16.5 knots (19.3 mph; 31 km/h). The Georgic, by comparison, had a top speed of 19.8 knots (22.8 mph; 36.7 km/h).
Peacetime
The Wilhelm Gustloff set sail for the first time on March 24, 1938. During its third voyage, it responded to a distress call from the British coal freighter Pegaway, severely damaged in a storm and sinking slowly. The Gustloff arrived on scene at around 6 am on April 4 and successfully rescued the entire 19-man crew. Captain Carl Lübbe and his crew won international praise and acclaim for their heroic actions.
But the Wilhelm Gustloff was used for more than just pleasure cruises. On April 10, 1938, it dropped anchor in international waters off Tilbury, England to serve as a floating polling place for German and Austrians citizens living in Britain. The vote, on German-Austrian unification, was vital to Hitler’s plans. A total of 1,172 Germans and 806 Austrians took ferries out to the Gustloff and voted. It was a landslide victory for the Nazis. Of the votes cast aboard Wilhelm Gustloff, 1,968 voted in favor of unification while only 10 voted against it.
But this wasn’t the only time that MV Wilhelm Gustloff diverted from its regular cruising schedule. In May 1939, it and several other KdF ships brought Germany’s infamous Condor Legion back from Spain after the Nationalists’ victory in the Spanish Civil War. Their actions provided valuable training and experience for the Wehrmacht. And the lessons learned in Spain would soon be implemented all across Europe.
When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the Wilhelm Gustloff ceased her civilian service. In its short peacetime career, the ship had sailed 60 voyages and taken over 80,000 passengers to all corners of Europe.
Wartime
Wilhelm Gustloff served several different roles during World War II, but sailed little after hostilities began. It became a hospital ship in September 1939, a role for which it’d been built with in mind. Now called Lazarettschiff D, medical personnel tended to wounded soldiers for the next year. By late November 1940, though, the Wilhelm Gustloff became a barracks ship and given anti-aircraft guns. It housed U-boat trainees from the Kriegsmarine’s Second Submarine Training Division and docked in Gotenhafen. Interestingly, filmmakers shot the 1943 propaganda film Titanic in the city, and the trainees filled in as extras.
The Wilhelm Gustloff sat idle in Gotenhafen for more than four years. But when Operation Hannibal began on January 23, 1945, the former cruise ship would sail again. Pressed into service for the evacuations, crewmembers readied the Gustloff to transport German military personnel and civilians to Kiel across the Baltic Sea — and to safety.
The Sinking
When Wilhelm Gustloff left port on January 30, 1945, Soviet submarines stalked the Baltic Sea. This included S-13. It left the Porkkala Naval Base in Finland on January 11 under the command of Captain Alexander Marinesko, and arrived on station two days later. German torpedo boats intermittently attacked S-13 in the following days, but it safely escaped each time.
And then, the Soviet submarine encountered the hulking shape of the Wilhelm Gustloff in the darkness.
Captain Marinesko actually had no trouble seeing the ship. The Gustloff had its running lights turned on. The German ship had done this to avoid colliding with an oncoming convoy of minesweepers reportedly in the area. S-13 trailed Wilhelm Gustloff and its accompanying torpedo boat (which had an inoperable submarine sensor) for two hours before striking. In a daring move, Captain Marinesko surfaced his sub and swung around to his prey’s port side and ordered four torpedoes fired. It was roughly 9 pm at night.
Three torpedoes hit their marks. A direct hit on the Wilhelm Gustloff’s engine room immediately knocked out power and communications. A life and death struggle began on the stricken ship. A number of people are believed to have been killed outright by the torpedoes or drowned in the rushing water. Several died in the panicked stampede that followed the initial explosions. With most of the Gustloff’s lifeboats frozen in their davits, many people jumped into the frigid Baltic to take their chances in the water. Hypothermia claimed most of them in short order.
The Wilhelm Gustloff sank in less than one hour. It rolled heavily onto its port side and eventually slipped beneath the waves. Of the estimated 10,582 people aboard Wilhelm Gustloff — many of them women and children — only 1,239 survived. It remains the largest loss of life in any single sinking.
Aftermath
German ships picked up as many of the Wilhelm Gustloff’s survivors as possible. Of the 1,252 people plucked from the icy water, 13 later died. Although the ship had been carrying largely civilians, it’d been a legitimate target of war. Wilhelm Gustloff had military personnel aboard, anti-aircraft guns, and no markings to indicate its non-combatant status. German writer Günter Grass, author of 2002’s Crabwalk later said, “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.”
S-13 sank the SS Steuben days later on February 9, 1945. Captain Marinesko thus became the most successful Soviet submarine commander of World War II with 42,000 GRT sunk. However, he’d been facing a court martial for problems with alcohol and deemed “not suitable to be a hero.” Awarded the Order of the Red Banner instead of the title Hero of the Soviet Union, Marinesko saw himself demoted and dishonorably discharged from the Soviet Navy in October 1945. The disgraced submariner died in 1963, but not before his reinstatement as Captain 3rd rank. Mikhail Gorbachev posthumously made Marinesko a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1990.
Today, the wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff rests in 144 feet (44 meters) of water. The ship is a protected war grave, and one of the largest shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea. The British Royal Navy conducted a survey of the wreck in 2021 and found that the Gustloff had broken into three pieces. The damage to the ship is extensive.
Today, 80 years later, the Wilhelm Gustloff is little remembered despite the tremendous scale of the tragedy. Chaos and confusion reigned in the Third Reich’s last days. It’s likely that many people just didn’t know or care about the sinking of a single ship (no matter how great the loss of life). Then there’s that fact that — with the exceptions of ships like Titanic and Andrea Doria — it seems like most maritime disasters get buried in the sands of time. Whatever the reason, though, one thing is clear: the Wilhelm Gustloff and its victims found themselves caught up in events bigger than themselves and had dire consequences.
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