9,000 are the residents who live in Monserrat d’Alcalà, Llagostera or San Fulgencio, to cite just three examples spread along the Mediterranean coast. 9,000 is the maximum capacity of some stadiums, the record mark that the Royal Albert Hall crowded during a concert held back in 1906 or the passengers that the Global Dream ship can accommodate. And 9,000 were also the lives that were lost in the tragedy of the Wilhelm Gustloff transatlantic, which for that very reason stands out as the greatest maritime disaster in history. As a sad and mournful reference, the Titanic mowed around 1,500, six times less.
In the long chronicle of naval misfortunes, the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff stands out for several reasons. The first, its overwhelming number of deaths, of which we use an estimate because -among other reasons- we do not know with certainty how many people were traveling on board the night of winter of 1945 in which it went under. The second is that despite such a death toll, her name is much less known than that of other sinkings, such as the Titanic or Bismark.
Both reasons are related to the origin of the ship, the context that surrounded it on that day in January 1945, and the unfortunate crew that traveled crowded into their cabins, deck, pool, auditorium, bathrooms, and even hidden among suitcases. The ship had been named in honor of a Nazi leader assassinated by a Croatian Jew and served Nazi propaganda interests for years, traveling full of refugees fleeing the advance of the Red Army and ending up sinking to the bottom of the Baltic due to the attack of a soviet submarine
From idyllic ship to overcrowded ship
To know its history, the most convenient thing —as usual— is to start at the beginning. The Wilhelm Gustloff, named after the leader of the Swiss Nazi Party assassinated in 1936, was a ship 208.5 meters long and weighing just over 25,000 tons. She was fired in 1937, during a ceremony presided over by Adolf Hitler and with a perfectly defined purpose: her goal was to become a one of the “jewels” of the Kraft durch Freude, a program that tried to appease the worker protests with an affordable leisure offer.
And Wilhelm Gustloff proved to be a valuable ally for that purpose. Her maiden voyage started in March 1938 and for 17 months she dedicated herself to covering some 50 services with 65,000 lucky people on board. She leisure within the reach of the proletariat selected by the Nazi party and well seasoned with propaganda. As the authors of the Britannica encyclopedia remember, in addition to her name, the ship was promoted as a “classless ship”, in which all the cabins had a similar size and condition… All except the cabin reserved for Hitler.
That stage as an idyllic cruise for all, which he combined with some missions, such as serving as an electoral college for the Germans and Austrians located in England in 1938, did not last long. In 1939, he was in charge of transferring the Condor Legion back to Germany and once the World War began, he assumed different tasks that had little to do with the relaxed routes through the Baltic: it was a hospital ship, it served for crew training… And, already in the mid-1940s, it became one of the pieces of what is known as Operation Hannibal, an operation designed to ara evacuate civilians and troops in areas such as East Prussia or the Polish Corridor before the advance of the USSR troops.
He was entrusted with such a task at the end of January 1945, when the ship, designed to accommodate around 500 crew members and 1,500 passengers, began to fill with people desperate to take refuge in West Germany or occupied Denmark. Local Nazi leaders, soldiers, naval auxiliaries… but also civilians, including a considerable number of children, got on board.
How many people got to embark —between shoving and desperate— on that ship designed for 1,500 people? It is not known. The crew gave up controlling it when they saw that they were approaching 8,000 and the number kept growing. Some people estimate that the number could have been almost double: more than 10,000.
What did such a number translate into? In a crowded boat. And that expression falls short. Pretty short. Overcrowded cabins. Hallways crowded. Even the suite became overcrowded. The pool was emptied to accommodate passengers and the infirmary had to be installed on the glass roof. In a chronicle dedicated to those days at the beginning of 1945, The vanguard He recounts how such an overload ended up clogging the toilets and unleashing a nauseating stench throughout the ship.
In any case, that was not the biggest problem for those who traveled aboard the Gustloff. There were no vests for everyone. No rescue boats, of course. If their places were added up and assuming that they could all be deployed in case the ship suffered an attack, they represented an opportunity for only part of the passage. How many? 5,000 people, according to Britannica. And the icy temperatures that were registered in January did not exactly help an agile operation.
Those weren’t all the ship’s problems either. In what would end up happening on January 30 there was also a dose of bad luck… and worst decisions. The original plans called for the Gustloff to form part of a larger convoy, but last-minute mechanical problems forced two of the three ships that were to escort her to retreat. She was left with only the shortstop Löwe.
To make matters worse, the ship could not advance at high speed either: its captain, Riedrich Petersen, was afraid that the engines would not respond and decided that they would travel at less than 12 knots, considerably below what they had advised him to reduce the possibility of suffering attacks. Perhaps to offset the risk, he opted to forgo a coastal route and head for a deep-water region, one he knew free of mines… but not submarines.
Mistake. He was not the only one. The captain made another decision that would ultimately prove fatal: he turned on the ship’s navigation lights to avoid a possible collision with a minesweeper that was supposedly sailing ahead of her. Taking into account that the Gustloff had been deprived of the support ships that could alert you to enemy submarines and that the ice made it difficult for the radars to work, activating the lights posed a risk. Almost throw a flare.
And more or less that ended up being. His signal did not go unnoticed by the Soviet submarine S-13, under the command of Aleksndr Marinesko. A few hours later, around nine o’clock at night, the USSR submersible launched a series of three torpedoes in the direction of the old pleasure ship of the Kraft durch Freude: the first damaged the bow, the second the pool and the third the lounge. machines.
The Gustloff technicians had time to send out an SOS message that the Lowë was able to pick up, but given the harsh conditions on board the ship, overloaded with overcrowded passengers and without lifeguards or boats for everyone, the rest of the story counts itself: around 9,000 dead. Even in her final haul, the Gustloff was not lucky: one of the Russian torpedoes had hit the crew cabin, where the personnel trained for evacuations rested.
1,239 survivors were recorded. And an episode as sad as it was delicate and complicated in naval history: the Gustloff story was a blow to Germany’s morale, it did not contribute to the chronicle it wanted to broadcast, and its balance was not easy for Moscow to handle either. On board the ship were close to a thousand soldiers and weapons, yes, but also civilians who were trying to take refuge.
Massive death toll. Discreet story.
Images: Wikipedia
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