1, with a crew of twelve under the command of Second Officer Meyer. In order to protect the property on board the war grave, as well as the wreck itself and the surrounding environment, the Polish Maritime Office in Gdynia has forbidden diving within a 500m (1,600ft) radius of the wreck. But it was a German passenger liner. Submarines of the Russian and Soviet navies, 17181990 Von Norman Polmar, Jurrien Noot, page 190 Naval Institute Press 1991. Corrections? A night of horror, and the worst maritime disaster of all time. The ship was originally intended to be named Adolf Hitler but instead was christened after Wilhelm Gustloff, leader of the Nazi Party's Swiss branch, who had been assassinated by a Jewish medical student in 1936. The Wilhelm Gustloff was the most lethal shipwreck in history, but some details of the. The ship was sunk by the Soviet submarine S-13 on 30 January 1945 (coincidentally the 50th anniversary of her namesake's birth) in the Baltic Sea while carrying civilian refugees and military personnel from the advancing Red Army. This was human misery on a grand scale, reminiscent of what had happened to Soviet civilians during the German invasion of 1941. The Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO) in the European Theater was one of Americas bloodiest campaigns. How many died on Titanic? He remained its leader from 1932 until he was assassinated in 1936. Wilhelm Gustloff | History, Casualties, & Facts | Britannica Friedrich Petersen decided that the ship would travel no faster than 12 knots (14 miles [22 km] per hour). He has become a marked man his character deemed less than compatible with the Soviet ideal. The first torpedo caused the watertight doors to seal off the bow which contained the crews quarters where off-duty crew members were sleeping. Within years of his successful action against the Gustloff, Marinesko had been Discharged from the Soviet Navy. Arrested and sent to Siberia for three years hard labour. Diagnosed with cancer. Reinstated with his title of captain. Given a military pension. Given a ceremony honouring his actions during the Second World War.Just three weeks after these last three incidents, Marinesko died, in October of 1963. As a consequence of the Allied blockade of the German coastline, she was used as a barracks ship for approximately 1,000 U-boat trainees of the 2nd Submarine Training Division (2. At 9:16 pm the Gustloff was hit by three torpedoes and proceeded to sink over the course of one hour. The first torpedo was nicknamed "for the Motherland", the second "for Leningrad", the third "for the Soviet people", and the fourth, which got jammed in the torpedo tubes and had to be dismantled, "for Stalin". Has the wilhelm gustloff been found? - naz.hedbergandson.com After first assisting their shipmates in Lifeboat No. Wilhelm Gustloff, in full Motor Vessel Wilhelm Gustloff, German ocean liner that was sunk by a Soviet submarine on January 30, 1945. For propaganda purposes, all the cabins aboard the Gustloff were sized and apportioned similarly, making the Gustloffin appearance, at leasta ship without social classes. The sole exception was one larger cabin reserved for Hitler. At 4 am, Captain G. W. Ward of Pegaway issued an SOS when the ship was 20 nautical miles (37km) northwest of the island of Terschelling, off the coast of the Netherlands. During the summer of 1939, she was pressed into service to bring the Condor Legion back from Spain after the victory of theNationalist forces under General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The Wilhelm Gustloff was 684ft long (nearly a full 200ft shorter than the Titanic), she weighed 26,000GRT (Gross Registered Tons), a little more than half of the Titanic and she carried 417 crew and 1,460 passengers, making for a total complement of 1,877. [14], The ship's complement and passenger lists cited 6,050 people on board, but these did not include many passengers who boarded the ship without being recorded in the official embarkation records. Although widely recognized as a brilliant commander, he was downgraded in rank to lieutenant and dishonorably discharged from the navy in October 1945. About 9,400 lives were lost, the greatest death toll from the sinking of a single vessel in human history. The ship left Gotenhafen at 12:30 pm on 30 January 1945, accompanied by two torpedo boats and the passenger liner Hansa, which was carrying civilians and military personnel. [14][citation needed]. The story was not well known as there had been some conspiracy theories behind the tragedy. It was part of Operation Hannibal, the evacuation of German military personnel and civilian refugees from the ports of East Prussia, now cut off from Germany by the advance of Soviet armies deep into the province of East Prussia. [12] [27] There were, however, 373 female naval auxiliaries amongst the passengers, only three of whom survived. They said the tragedy of Wilhelm Gustloff was a war crime. There were, however, a number of female naval auxiliaries amongst the passengers. The third torpedo scored a direct hit on the engine room located amidships, disabling all power and communications. 1 had been so badly damaged by the waves that after its crew had climbed up via ladders to the safety of their ship it was set adrift, to later be washed up on the shores of Terschelling on 2 May. Using Maritime Exodus software,[23] it estimated that 9,600 people died out of more than 10,600 on board, by taking into account passenger density based on witness reports, and a simulation of escape routes and survivability with the timeline of the sinking. Aside from its operation as a cruise ship, the Gustloff was used for public-oriented missions. Not that it would have mattered much. This was the same for both passengers and crew, to create a feeling of equality onboard shipalthough only the passenger cabins would be permitted to have oceanfront views. MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German military transport ship which was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea while evacuating civilian evacuees from East Prussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Estonia and German military personnel from Gotenhafen as the Red Army advanced. Although it was originally planned that the Gustloff would be but one element in a larger convoy, mechanical problems forced two ships to turn back, and the Gustloff was accompanied by only the torpedo boat Lwe. [30], In 2006, a bell recovered from the wreck and subsequently used as a decoration in a Polish seafood restaurant was lent to the privately funded "Forced Paths" exhibition in Berlin. What was the name of Franz Ferdinands assassin? Eighty years ago, the Red Army managed to stop, contain, and ultimately defeat the largest German army on the Eastern Front. 73" on Polish navigation charts,[29] and classified as a war grave, Wilhelm Gustloff rests at .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap}550422N 172517E / 55.0729N 17.4213E / 55.0729; 17.4213, about 19nmi (35km; 22mi) offshore, east of eba and west of Wadysawowo (the former Leba and Groendorf, respectively). Before sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, Captain Marinesko was facing a court martial due to his alcohol problems and for being caught in a brothel while he and his crew were off duty. "Wilhelm Gustloff: World's Deadliest Sea Disaster", Niven, Bill; "The Good Captain and the Bad Captain: Joseph Vilsmaier's "Die Gustloff" and the Erosion of Complexity" in, This page was last edited on 20 October 2022, at 12:40. Beginning on January 21, 1945, an estimated two million Germans were brought to the west in an operation that far exceeded the British evacuation at Dunkirk. The ship was sunk by the Soviet submarine S-13 in January 1945 in the Baltic Sea while carrying civilian refugees and military personnel from the advancing Red Army. Danzig, 23 September 1939. Interview: Ruta Sepetys, Author Of 'Salt To The Sea' : NPR The recorded numbers contradict one another, and we probably never will know how many people were on board the ship. The figures from the research of Heinz Schn make the total lost in the sinking to be 9,343 total, including about 5,000 children.[. They were making for the coast, for the safety of the ports Pillau or Gotenhafen. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. MV Wilhelm Gustloff Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images All four captains on Wilhelm Gustloff survived her sinking, but an official naval inquiry was only initiated against Lieutenant Commander Zahn. Fire Safety Engineering Group, University of Greenwich. Wilhelm Gustloff as a hospital ship. The majority of those who perished succumbed to exposure in the freezing water. From September 1939 to November 1940, she served as a hospital ship, with her official designation being Lazarettschiff D. You would think S-13 Captain Marineskos troubles with the NKVD (eventually to become the KGB) would fade now that he has scored the biggest target in history. On April 10, 1938, it functioned as a polling place for Germans and Austrians living in England to vote on the annexation of Austria. The first struck the ship's bow, causing watertight doors to seal off the area where off-duty crew members were sleeping. The Gustloff did not meet any minesweepers on its way. No help was at hand. Shipping and payments. To the German worker, the Gustloff was to be the ultimate prize and reward as a holiday for all his hard work. With all these characteristics, Hitler hoped that the Wilhelm Gustloff would be a floating pleasure-ship, taking Germans all around Europe. [14] The passengers, besides civilians, included Gestapo personnel, members of the Organisation Todt, and Nazi officials with their families. The disaster remains relatively unknown. [19], Wilhelm Gustloff was soon sighted by the Soviet submarineS-13, under the command of Captain Alexander Marinesko. She served as a hospital ship in 1939 and 1940. One by one the 19 men on Pegaway jumped into the sea and were hauled onto Lifeboat No. In 1963 Marinesko was given the traditional ceremony due to a captain upon his successful return from a mission. It wasn't. The ship made her unofficial maiden voyage between 24 and 27 March 1938 carrying Austrians in an attempt to convince them to vote for the annexation of Austria by Germany. While officials argued, refugees kept pouring into the port, until by mid-January, Pillau was bulging with some 100,000 desperate civilians. Charges that Marinesko had violated the laws of war have arisen from time to time, but theyve been difficult to sustain. Wilhelm Gustloff: 9000 died (5000 were children) when the Soviets A Survey of Nazi and Pro-Nazi Groups in Switzerland: 1930-1945, Newspaper clippings about Wilhelm Gustloff, Faceted Application of Subject Terminology, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wilhelm_Gustloff&oldid=1116940775, People from the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles needing additional references from March 2009, All articles needing additional references, Articles with unsourced statements from August 2020, Articles with unsourced statements from May 2020, Articles lacking in-text citations from March 2009, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. Once again, the figure depends on the initial figure for those on board. Petersen also rejected the recommendation of First Officer Louis Reese, who had advised a course that hugged the coastline. Less than a week after the sinking, S-13 sank another ship, General von Steuben, killing a further 4,500 people. Marinesko followed the ships to their starboard (seaward) side for two hours before making a daring move, surfacing his submarine and steering it around Wilhelm Gustloff's stern, to attack it from the port side closer to shore, from where the attack would be less expected. Less than 40 minutes after being struck, Wilhelm Gustloff was lying on her side. [21], The figures from Schn's research make the loss in the Wilhelm Gustloff sinking to be "9,343 men, women and children". Whatever people are not immediately killed or drowned in the opening minutes of the attack are now desperate to get off the ship. After undertaking a further voyage on 14 to 19 April 1938, the ship went on an Osterfahrt (Easter Voyage) before her actual official maiden voyage, which was undertaken from 21 April to 6 May 1938, when she joined Der Deutsche, Oceania and Sierra Cordoba on a group cruise to the Madeira Islands. By 4 April, it was taking on water and slowly sinking. . The Sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff Is The Single Largest Maritime It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war.. Admiral Karl Dnitz felt that the earlier the evacuation took place, the better its chance of success, a reasonable assumption. On January 30, 1945, some 9,000 people perished aboard this German ocean liner after it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and sank in the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea. This analysis considered the passenger density based on witness reports and a simulation of escape routes and survivability with the timeline of the sinking. In World War II, Seydlitz was a skilled field commander, rising through division and corps command, distinguishing himself at Demyansk and Stalingrad. More died on this ship than on the Titanic, Lusitania When he was informed by a mysterious radio message of an oncoming German minesweeper convoy, Petersen decided to activate his ship's red and green navigation lights so as to avoid a collision in the dark, making Wilhelm Gustloff easy to spot in the dark. The oar-powered lifeboat was unable to come aside Pegaway in the heavy seas and looked in danger of needing rescuing. Before sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, Alexander Marinesko was facing a court martial due to his problems with alcohol and was thus deemed not suitable to be a hero for his actions and was instead awarded the Order of the Red Banner. When they arrived in Pillau, these refugees found not salvation, but chaos. She launched her Lifeboat No. 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), Wilhelm Gustloff's captain, Friedrich Petersen, decided to head for deep water which was known to have been cleared of mines. Marinesko was posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Robert Citino, PhD, is the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian in the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. Indeed, most of the ships actual crew was trapped in the forecastle, behind watertight doors that had locked automatically upon impact. An episode of Unsolved History that aired in March 2003 on the Discovery Channel program undertook a computer analysis of her sinking. The three huge holes in the ships hull causes a dangerous list to Port and the ice on the ships boat-deck sends many people sliding into the freezing January waters. From the Irish famine to Lady Godiva, journey through European history in this quiz. In June 2004, while spending a weekend in Munich away from dissertation research at the Austrian National Library, I boarded a train in the citys Hauptbahnhof(Central Station) for a short trip. Constructed as a cruise . On the night of 910 February, just eleven days after the sinking, S-13 sank another German ship, General von Steuben, killing about 4,500 people. Learn more. Adolf Hitler decided on the name change after sitting next to Gustloff's widow during his memorial service. Her purposes were to provide recreational and cultural activities for German functionaries and workers, including concerts, cruises, and other holiday trips, and to serve as a public relations tool that would present "a more acceptable image of the Third Reich". However, almost 10,000 people died that day. One thing is certain. Any crew who might be able to free them and lower them safely are probably dead already, trapped inside the ships hull. * HighClassGlass: Maugham puts a monocle on, apparently with the intention of looking high-class to Bernie, when they first meet. From November 1940 onward, it lay at anchor at Gdynia, Poland, to serve as barracks for the 2nd Submarine Training Division. Thousands of Hitler Youth members lined the route. 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 in the port of Gdynia, which had been occupied by Germany and renamed Gotenhafen, located near Danzig. The second hit the accommodations for the women's naval auxiliary, located in the ship's drained swimming pool, dislodging the pool tiles at high velocity, which caused heavy casualties; only three of the 373 women quartered there survived. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. For the last several days of its existence, before soldiers of the United States Seventh Army arrived, Dachau was a small, self-enclosed universe of decay and death. [4], Frankfurter surrendered immediately to the Swiss police, confessing "I fired the shots because I am a Jew". Meanwhile, the 1,836 gross ton coal freighter Pegaway, which had departed the Tyne on 2 April for Hamburg, was also caught up in the storm. Wilhelm Gustloff was the first purpose-built cruise ship for the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) and used by subsidiary organisation Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF). [24], Many ships were sunk during the war by the Allies and by the Axis Powers. 6, with both them and the crew of the lifeboat back at Wilhelm Gustloff by 7:45 am. [6] On May 17, 1945[7] shortly after V-E Day Frankfurter was pardoned by a Swiss court.[7]. . Less than 40minutes after being struck, Wilhelm Gustloff was lying on her side and sank bow-first, in 44m (144ft) of water. At around 9 pm (CET), Marinesko ordered his crew to launch four torpedoes at Wilhelm Gustloff's port side, about 30km (16nmi; 19mi) offshore, between Groendorf and Leba. An estimated 9,000 passengers were killed in the sinking, making it the greatest maritime disaster in history. Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff WWII: The 'Correct' Soviet Sinking of the Nazi German Ship - MV Wilhelm His wife Hedwig, who had been Hitler's secretary, received from Hitler personally a monthly "honorary pay" of 400, the equivalent of some US$13,000 today. The ship, built to carry a few thousand people, was now bulging with some 7,000-10,000 people, including 4,000-5,000 children. In under 50 minutes, the Gustloff was gone, taken beneath the icy black waters of the Baltic, and with her, 9,343 men, women and children while 1,239 people were saved by a number of German ships in the area. The dead numbered between 6,000-9,000. History for Literature/TheOtherSideOfSilence - TV Tropes So far, our main character has died seventeen times overall with six of those deaths come from season 2 so far. The Wilhelm Gustloff sank after being hit by Russian torpedoes on Jan. 30, 1945. Cargo and machinery were washed from Pegaway's decks and the ship lost maneuverability as the storm increased in intensity. Author Ruta Sepetys likes to look for what she calls "hidden chapters of. Of the estimated 10,000 people on board the Gustloff, only 1,239 could be registered as survivors, making this the sinking with the highest death toll in maritime history. The third torpedo (For Leningrad) struck the engine room in the area below the ships funnel, cutting off electrical power to the ship. Wilhelm Gustloff: 9000 died (5000 were children) when the Soviets torpedoed the German troop ship Jan 23, 2016 Nick Knight News of the Gustloff's sinking is not reported within the remains of the Third Reich. The ship was named for the leader of the Swiss Nazi Party, who had been assassinated on February 4, 1936, and it was launched in the presence of Adolf Hitler on May 5, 1937. The third torpedo was a direct hit on the engine room, cutting all power and communications. 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An Unsolved History episode that aired in March 2003,[4] on the Discovery Channel, undertook a computer analysis of the sinking. An estimated 9,000 passengers were killed in the sinking, making it the greatest maritime disaster in history. From September 1939 to November 1940, Wilhelm Gustloff served as a hospital ship, officially designated Lazarettschiff D. Beginning on 20 November 1940, medical equipment was removed from the ship and she was repainted from the hospital ship colors of white with a green stripe to standard naval grey. Many deaths were caused either directly by the torpedoes or by drowning in the onrushing water. On how many people died when the Wilhelm Gustloff sank. The Wilhelm Gustloff, like the Titanic, was a big passenger liner and was reasonably new and luxurious. Lifeboat No. Measuring 208.5m (684ft 1in) long by 23.59m (77ft 5in) wide, with a capacity of 25,484gross register tons(GRT), she was launched on 5 May 1937. "Wilhelm Gustloff: World's Deadliest Sea Disasters". This makes the destruction of Wilhelm Gustloff the largest loss of life in the sinking of any single ship. Ultimately, the Gustloff headed for a deepwater route that was known to be clear of mines. Gustloff's widow, mother and brother attended the funeral and received personal condolences from Hitler. . Beginning on 20 November 1940, the medical equipment was removed from the ship and she was repainted from the hospital ship colors of white with a green stripe to standard naval grey. From 14 March 1938 until 26 August 1939, the ship took over 80,000 passengers on a total of 60 voyages, all around Europe.[7]. 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. From Hitler simulation of escape routes and survivability with the timeline of the ships.! 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