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Wilhelm Gustloff, in full Motor Vessel Wilhelm Gustloff, German ocean liner that was sunk by a Soviet submarine on January 30, 1945. An estimated 9,000 passengers were killed in the sinking, making it the greatest maritime disaster in history.

The MV Gustloff was the first ship built specifically for the German Labour Front's Kraft durch Freude ("Strength Through Joy") program, which subsidized leisure activities for German workers. It measured 684 feet (208.5 metres) in length and weighed more than 25,000 tons. 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 Gustloff started on its maiden voyage on March 24, 1938, and over the course of 17 months it went on some 50 cruises, transporting some 65,000 vacationers.

The ship had enough space to accommodate roughly 1,900 people, including some 400 crew members. For propaganda purposes, all the cabins aboard the Gustloff were sized and apportioned similarly, making the Gustloff-in appearance, at least-a "ship without social classes." The sole exception was one larger cabin reserved for Hitler. It was not possible to simply book a voyage on the Gustloff, however. The people who were allowed to travel on the Kraft durch Freude flagship were chosen by the party.

Aside from its operation as a cruise ship, the Gustloff was used for public-oriented missions. On April 10, 1938, it functioned as a polling place for Germans and Austrians living in England to vote on the annexation of Austria. In May 1939 the Gustloff, along with other ships from the Kraft durch Freude fleet, was ordered to bring soldiers of the Condor Legion back to Germany after the Spanish Civil War ended. With the beginning of World War II, the Gustloff was requisitioned by the German navy to serve as a hospital ship in the Baltic Sea and Norway. From November 1940 onward, it lay at anchor at Gdynia, Poland, to serve as barracks for the 2nd Submarine Training Division. During a U.S. air attack on the harbour on October 9, 1943, the ship took minor damage.

As the Red Army advanced on East Prussia, Adm. Karl Dönitz began preparations for Operation Hannibal, the mass evacuation of German troops and civilians from the area. 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 Gustloff was ordered to bring the soldiers of the 2nd Submarine Training Division to western Germany. On January 25 the ship started taking other refugees on board, and by the afternoon of January 29 the count had reached 7,956 when registration was stopped. Witnesses estimated that perhaps another 2,000 people boarded after that point.

Shortly after noon on January 30, the Gustloff left the harbour. 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 Löwe. Because he was worried about the Gustloff's engines failing after years of sitting idle, Capt. Friedrich Petersen decided that the ship would travel no faster than 12 knots (14 miles [22 km] per hour). In doing so, he ignored the advice of Wilhelm Zahn, commander of the 2nd Submarine Training Division, who argued that increasing speed to 15 knots (17 miles [28 km] per hour) would reduce the likelihood of an attack, as Soviet submarines would not be able to keep up. Petersen also rejected the recommendation of First Officer Louis Reese, who had advised a course that hugged the coastline. Ultimately, the Gustloff headed for a deepwater route that was known to be clear of mines.

At about 6:00 pm a message was brought to the captain warning that a minesweeper convoy was headed their way, prompting him to activate the ship's navigation lights to prevent a collision. The origin of that message is unknown; none of the radio operators on the Gustloff or the Löwe claimed to have received it, and it is unclear whether it was a misunderstanding or possibly sabotage. The Gustloff did not meet any minesweepers on its way. However, it was spotted by the Soviet submarine S-13 at about 7:00 pm. The Soviet commander, Capt. Aleksandr Marinesko, maneuvered his submarine between the Gustloff and the coast, as an attack from that direction would be least expected.

At 9:16 pm the Gustloff was hit by three torpedoes and proceeded to sink over the course of one hour. The ship was carrying lifeboats and rafts for 5,000 people, but many of the lifesaving appliances were frozen to the deck, and their effective use was further impeded by the fact that one of the torpedoes had hit the crew quarters, killing those best trained to deal with the situation. Nine vessels took on survivors throughout the night. 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. Despite the high number of civilian deaths, allegations that sinking the Gustloff constituted a war crime are largely unfounded, because of the presence of weapons and nearly 1,000 military personnel on board.

Aside from history books and documentaries, the story of the Gustloff has been the subject of several feature films and fictional works, including the novella Im Krebsgang (2002; Crabwalk) by Günter Grass.

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Wilhelm Gustloff | History, Casualties, & Facts

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Wilhelm Gustloff, German ocean liner that was sunk by a Soviet submarine on January 30, 1945. An estimated 9,000 passengers were killed in the sinking, making it the greatest maritime disaster in history. Learn more about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in this article.

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Ruta Sepetys (Rūta Šepetys) is an internationally acclaimed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction published in over sixty countries and forty languages. Sepetys is considered a "crossover" novelist as her books are read by both students and adults worldwide. Winner of the Carnegie Medal, Ruta is renowned for giving voice to underrepresented history and those who experienced it. Her books have won or been shortlisted for over forty book prizes, are included on over thirty state reading lists, and are currently in development for film and television.

Ruta is the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee. Born in Michigan, she was raised in a family of artists, readers, and music lovers. Ruta is passionate about the power of history and story to foster global dialogue and connectivity. She has been invited to present at NATO, European Parliament, the U.S. Capitol, the Library of Congress, and Embassies worldwide. She was awarded The Rockefeller Foundation's prestigious Bellagio Fellowship for her studies on human resilience. The New York Times Book Review declared, "Ruta Sepetys acts as champion of the interstitial people so often ignored-whole populations lost in the cracks of history."

Ruta was bestowed the Cross of the Knight of the Order by the President of Lithuania for her contributions to education and memory preservation and was recently honored with a postage stamp containing her image. She is extremely proud to be of Baltic heritage, even if that means she has a name no one can pronounce.

Ruta lives with her family in the hills of Tennessee.

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Ruta Sepetys (Rūta Šepetys) is an internationally acclaimed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction published in over sixty countries and forty languages. Sepetys is considered a "crossover" novelist as her books are read by both students and adults worldwide.

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A group of teenage refugees meet on the road in the chaotic countryside of East Prussia in winter 1945. The Nazi Reich is collapsing all around them, and they, like hundreds of thousands, are fleeing the wrathful Soviet advance. They are trapped between their German conquerors and their terrifying Russian "liberators." Their story is told through the voices of Joana, a pretty Lithuanian nurse; Florian, a Prussian with a mysterious letter of passage from a high-ranking Nazi officer; and Emilia, an idealistic but damaged Polish girl in a pink knit cap. Thrown together, struggling to survive, they at first hardly trust one another enough even to exchange names, and so they often just use epithets: "the knight," "the nurse," "the Polish girl," "the wandering boy," "the shoe poet." (The last, an old cobbler, gets his name from his philosophy: "The shoes always tell the story.") Each has secrets - the galling histories that haunt anyone who has lived through war, flight and deprivation.

In her debut novel, "Between Shades of Gray," Ruta Sepetys shined light on the largely forgotten plight of the Baltic peoples crushed between the great powers at the beginning of World War II. Now she does the same for these survivors trapped in the interstices of history: neither German nor Soviet, trying to escape from a no-man's land neither Axis nor Allied in a war already lost but not yet won.

The pacing is swift as a thriller as this group evades the vengeful brutalities of the encroaching Red Army - and then plays a dangerous game by lying to the Wehrmacht in order to secure themselves spaces on a refugee ship before the whole region collapses. In brief chapters, the narrative point of view swarms from character to character; the book's drama comes not simply from the battlefield action - the bombings, the armies on the move - but from the constant wounding fire of lies and revelations, self-deceptions and desperate ententes. Occasionally, there's even humor in these shifts: We read the blustering love letters of a proud young Nazi named Alfred only to discover he's actually an acne-ridden deck swabber who spends his hours shirking in a supply closet. "Imagine, my darling," he writes his sweet Hannelore, "your Alfred is saving 2,000 lives." Then he's interrupted by a barked "Have you cleaned the toilets yet, Frick?"

One thing that makes these distinctive characters so compelling for both adult and teenage readers is an awareness that though they may be fictional, the horrors and small acts of heroism we see played out before us could essentially be real - they are statistically real. World War II - any war - is constructed out of millions of such scenes of betrayal, sudden generosity, violence and canny alliance. There is only one larger-than-life detail: One of the characters carries the key to a real World War II mystery. But Sepetys is too invested in the essential reality of the story she tells to treat even that spy-novel circumstance as an invitation for easy heroics.

Looming above the personal struggles of these young refugees is a devastating historical tragedy: The ship onto which they flee with the ugly inevitability of fate is the Wilhelm Gustloff, which was sunk by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Of the estimated 10,500 people on board, more than 9,000 perished in the icy seas. We watch these characters start to find love for one another and protect one another even as we recognize the heartbreaking certainty that not all of them will make it off that ship alive.

It would be near blasphemous to use suffering on this scale as the backdrop to provide the beats of suspense and near escape if it weren't for Sepetys's clear commitment to preserving the memory of the forgotten, the drowned. Though there are a few clumsy gestures at moments of great crisis - as a mother dies in childbirth, a startled stork takes off from the roof - the most moving and even uncomfortable images are clearly taken from Sepetys's extensive sources: A mother desperate to get her baby off the sinking ship hurls the infant down to a sailor and misses; the corpses of children in life jackets float upside down because of the disproportional size of their heads. Not merely harrowing, such images remind us that even "the good war" was a messy calamity. And once again, Ruta Sepetys acts as champion of the interstitial people so often ignored - whole populations lost in the cracks of history.

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'Salt to the Sea,' by Ruta Sepetys (Published 2016)

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A group of teenage refugees meet on the road in the chaotic countryside of East Prussia in winter 1945. The Nazi Reich is collapsing all around them, and they, like hundreds of thousands, are fleeing the wrathful Soviet advance. They are trapped between their German conquerors and their terrifying Russian "liberators."

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ww2dbaseAdolf Hitler, who installed himself at the top of the German military hierarchy, was warned repeatedly by his commanders that a Soviet offensive in the east was coming, but he chose to ignore the advice. Even the Allies gave him signs beginning in late Aug 1944 when British Lancaster bombers dropped over 1,000 tons of bombs on Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany over two nights, immersing the city in a firestorm. Werner Terpitz remembered the flames. "Everything was on fire, our things, our church, our school, and the house of my violin teacher, my violin, even the sack of blackberries, which we had just gathered. Everything I had ever owned was now ashes." In Jan 1945, Heinz Guderian approached Hitler with another warning, explaining that the Soviet forces outnumbered Germans 11 to 1 in manpower. Hitler chose to focus on his Ardennes Offensive in the west instead, calling the Red Army "the greatest bluff since Genghis Khan". Guderian shook his head, knowing that the German defenses in the east was "like a house of cards; if the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse".

ww2dbaseIn Jan 1945, General I. D. Chernyakhovsky's 3rd Byelorussian Front and Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky's 2nd Byelorussian Front marched into East Prussia, overwhelming the German defenders with 1.5 million men. This was the great offensive that Guderian feared. Initially, the Soviets made very slow progress due to the extensive minefields and a web of fortifications. Extremely heavy losses characterized the first 20 days of combat, but by end of Jan 1945, the Soviet troops reached the shores of the Vistula Lagoon, cutting off the city of Königsberg.

ww2dbaseThe people of East Prussia received no warning, and was caught by surprise when the Soviet troops neared. Even though local German military commanders had, weeks in advance, asked to evacuate the civilian population, Hitler rejected their requests, citing the need for every German to stand ground to defend the fatherland. Gauleiter of Königsberg Erich Koch, even when the Soviets were already in East Prussia, decreed that only people who lived in the east of the province could evacuate, while promising to the others that there was no danger and they should stay put. of course, Koch worked frantically to secure his own of evacuation by ship. When he left the city, he ordered the crew to bar the ship to any other refugee even though the ship had plenty of space to take on many others.

ww2dbase"[T]he Russian advance was characterized by arson, plunder and rape", wrote Isabel Denny. Nazi officials of every town and every village were dragged out to the street and shot, while Soviet aircraft strafed the columns of refugees fleeing west at the last moment. A survivor of one of the eastern town taken by the Soviets early on in the East Prussian Offensive recalled the horror as Soviets came through.

The vehicles had rolled over people, flattening them in the ice and snow. The houses had broken windows and doors and in the streets were broken china and household goods. The buildings had been completely smashed, houses and barns were half burnt out and some were only a heap of rubble and ash.... Women had their clothes slit open. Some were naked. They had been raped and lay on bare floors, or in the street, frozen stiff or dead. There were young girls no more than fifteen or sixteen years old. There were old women; age didn't seem to matter. An old man was nailed upside down on the door of the shed. Along the wall of a house was a row of bodies, all old men and young boys, shot in the back.

ww2dbaseThe atrocities committed by the Soviets were not justified, but they were almost expected. First and foremost, Nazi atrocities committed in their homelands were fresh in their minds. Men of the SS slaughtered entire villages without mercy, and some of the Soviet troops sought retribution. On top of that was the effective Soviet propaganda machine, brainwashing the troops that it was in their right to pillage and destroy. Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg stirred the troops by writings such as "crush forever the fascist beast in its den. Break the racial pride of the German woman. Take her as your legitimate booty."

ww2dbaseFor the residents of Königsberg, there were only two ways to escape. One was from the Baltic port of Pillau just a few kilometers, where the German Navy valiantly ran an entire fleet dedicated to the evacuation of Germans, largely against Hitler's orders. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz gathered over a thousand ships, 672 civilian and 409 naval, in an effort comparable to the great evacuation at Dunkirk early in the European War. It was estimated that this fleet saved around 2.5 million civilians. The other route of escape was the narrow sandy spit called the Frisches Nehrung that led toward Gotenhafen or Danzig. Long columns of Germans, with as much possessions as they could pile on wagons and sleds, slowly made their escape.

ww2dbaseAs the Soviet 2nd and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts approached the eastern territories of Germany, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz ordered General Admiral Oskar Kummetz (Naval High Commander of Baltic Sea) and Rear Admiral Konrad Engelhardt (head of naval shipping department) to prepare to evacuate German civilians and military servicemen from Courland, East Prussia, and the Polish Corridor. The Operation Hannibal evacuations began on 23 Jan 1945 at the start of the East Prussian Offensive, and would continue through the end of the war. On 26 Jan, thousands of refugees were killed while waiting for ships to evacuate them as an ammunition depot exploded after Soviet aerial attack. On 30 Jan, passenger liner Wilhelm Gustloff was attacked and sunk by a Soviet submarine off Gotenhafen, killing 8,000 of the 9,000 passengers onboard; it was a maritime disaster far worse than the Titanic. On 9 Feb, Soviet submarine S-13 claimed another ship, Steuben, killing 3,000 to 4,000, most of which were military.

ww2dbaseOn 10 Feb, Soviet command decided that even though the offensive was costly in terms of casualties, the German defenses were not going to put up a strong defense, and Rokossovsky's troops were diverted to the fighting in the Pomerania region instead. The German defenses, however weak compared to their Soviet foes, took the opportunity and organized a counterattack. On 19 Feb, led by a captured Soviet T-34 tank, the German 1st Infantry Division spearheaded the 3rd Panzer Army and the Fourth Army in breaking the Soviet lines and opened a corridor between Königsberg and Pillau. They would hold this corridor until beginning of Apr, when the Battle of Königsberg would began.

ww2dbaseAs the German troops held the corridor they had just opened, they witnessed further atrocities committed by the Soviet troops. At the suburb town of Metgehen, a witness saw

women who were still wearing a noose around their necks that had been used to drag them to death. Often there were several tied together. I saw women whose heads were buried in the mire of a grave or in manure pits whose genitals bore the obvious marks of bestial cruelty.

ww2dbaseGeneral Otto Lasch led the German Königsberg garrison which had entrenched its 5 divisions of about 130,000 men in the city's fortifications. Although inexperienced young boys and fragile old men made up a bulk of the defensive force (only about 35,000 men were regulars in Königsberg), 15 forts in outermost of three concentric rings supported by pillboxes and foxholes in the inner rings presented a difficult challenge for the Soviet troops.

ww2dbaseIn early Mar, pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, three destroyers, and torpedo boat T-36 held a position near the town of Wollin at the mouth of the Dziwna River, near the pre-war border of Germany and Poland. While the warships guarded the region, 75,000 troops and civilians were successfully evacuated.

ww2dbaseBetween 1 Apr and 6 Apr 1945, Königsberg was subjected to heavy artillery bombardment. It was to soften the defenses for a Soviet attack. On 4 Apr, Königsberg lost electric power. During the night of 4 and 5 Apr, 30,000 were evacuated from the Oksywie Heights near Gotenhafen, Germany (now Gdynia, Poland). On 5 Apr, the fog that troubled Soviet pilots in the previous few days were lifted, and the aircraft joined in on the bombardment. Hans von Lehndorff noticed that there were little or no anti-aircraft action from the city; "[w]e felt as if we were sailing on an ocean in an sinking ship". It was estimated that more than 100 Soviet aircraft were dropping bombs and strafing the city at any given time during that day.

ww2dbaseOn 6 Apr, the Soviet assault began. The 137,000 troops who had been drilled in urban warfare in the previous few weeks rushed into the city, supported by 530 tanks and 2,400 aircraft, which represented a third of the entire Red Air Force. On the southern front, initial German resistance was fierce, but the lines quickly fell as Soviet commanders called in the reserves. In the north, the first defensive line fell by noon, and fort number 5 was surrounded. On 7 Apr, German forces regrouped and attempted to counterattack, which inflicted heavy casualties on the Soviets, but they ultimately failed. Forts number 5 and number 8 surrendered after two days of bitter fighting, sometimes in close quarters, while German positions at the rail station in city center were lost. Lasch radioed Hitler for permission to surrender, but it was denied as expected.

ww2dbaseOn 8 Apr, German troops attempted to break out of the encirclement, but Soviet aircraft were decisive in foiling German plans. As the Soviets cleared out one section of the city at a time, entire German companies were buried as Soviet artillery took down one key building after another. The young boys and old men of the Volkssturm fought frantically to save their home city, but with vintage WW1 rifles in hand, they knew defeat was inevitable. At 0200 in the early hours of 9 Apr, Nazi Party authorities announced that the city was about to fall, and swarms of civilians rushed onto all the major roads. The Soviets noticed and fired upon the crowds mercilessly. During the day on 9 Apr, the Soviets knew the battle was nearly over, and the first line of troops devoted as much time ransacking the city as they did fighting. It was unofficially agreed upon that the first Soviet troops into Königsberg got the watches, the second line got the women, and troops entering afterwards were only entitled to the leftovers. Writer Arno Surminski who lived in East Prussia at the time recalled young Asiatic Soviet soldiers with rows of watches up their arms. Many of them had never seen the wealth of a major city, and they pillaged in a wild frenzy.

ww2dbaseAt 0930 on 9 Apr, after communications completely cut off therefore the defenses were becoming uncoordinated and overwhelmed, Lasch surrendered; the fighting ceased by midnight. Hitler was furious, denouncing Lasch a traitor of Germany and sentenced him to death, but there were no one to enforce his order as the 150,000 Germans in Königsberg, civilian and military, were now under Soviet control.

ww2dbaseAt the end of the battle for Königsberg, eighty to ninety percent of the city was destroyed. The Soviet occupation troops conducted a terror campaign aimed at completely breaking the spirits of the residents. As Denny described, Soviet soldiers "plundered the city, burned, robbed, drank and raped". Significant number of Germans chose to commit suicide rather than facing Soviet cruelty.

ww2dbaseOn 15 Apr, four German liners and other smaller ships evacuated 20,000 servicemen and civilians. On 16 Apr, the liner Goya was torpedoed by Russian submarine L-3, killing 6,000.

ww2dbaseThe German garrison at Pillau was assaulted immediately after the fall of Königsberg. The 20,000 German troops there fought fiercely until 26 Apr 1945, inflicting enormous damage to the Soviets but in the end had no choice but to surrender. The Operation Hannibal evacuation effort by the German Navy in the Königsberg region waned after the city's capture, but elsewhere in East Prussia it continued on with full steam. During the month of Apr 1945, ships participating in Operation Hannibal evacuated 265,000 from Danzig and the surrounding region. Between 1 and 8 May, over 150,000 civilians and servicemen were evacuated from the beaches of Hela. On the last day of the European War, 8 May, 92 ships of various sizes departed from Libau, Latvia with 18,000 on board. Although Operation Hannibal was officially ended on 8 May, evacuations continued for about another week until the terms of the German surrender prohibited such movements. During the operation, the 494 to 1,080 civilian and military vessels of all sizes rescued somewhere between 800,000 to 900,000 civilians and 350,000 military personnel from this region to Germany and Denmark.

ww2dbaseAs East Prussia was secured by Soviet forces, over 28,000 Germans were sent to labor camps in the Soviet Union, the little machinery left were broken apart and sent to Russian factories, and even herds of cattle were driven back east. In Jul 1946, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad, and Russification of the region began. Names of German towns and villages were changed, German landmarks were destroyed, and Russian settlers were brought in to settle the land.

ww2dbase Sources:
Isabel Denny,The Fall of Hitler's Fortress City
Wikipedia

East Prussian Offensive Timeline Photographs Visitor Submitted Comments
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east prussian offensive | world war ii database

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ww2dbaseAdolf Hitler, who installed himself at the top of the German military hierarchy, was warned repeatedly by his commanders that a Soviet offensive in the east was coming, but he chose to ignore the advice.

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Wilhelm Gustloff, in full Motor Vessel Wilhelm Gustloff, German ocean liner that was sunk by a Soviet submarine on January 30, 1945. An estimated 9,000 passengers were killed in the sinking, making it the greatest maritime disaster in history.

The MV Gustloff was the first ship built specifically for the German Labour Front's Kraft durch Freude ("Strength Through Joy") program, which subsidized leisure activities for German workers. It measured 684 feet (208.5 metres) in length and weighed more than 25,000 tons. 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 Gustloff started on its maiden voyage on March 24, 1938, and over the course of 17 months it went on some 50 cruises, transporting some 65,000 vacationers.

The ship had enough space to accommodate roughly 1,900 people, including some 400 crew members. For propaganda purposes, all the cabins aboard the Gustloff were sized and apportioned similarly, making the Gustloff-in appearance, at least-a "ship without social classes." The sole exception was one larger cabin reserved for Hitler. It was not possible to simply book a voyage on the Gustloff, however. The people who were allowed to travel on the Kraft durch Freude flagship were chosen by the party.

Aside from its operation as a cruise ship, the Gustloff was used for public-oriented missions. On April 10, 1938, it functioned as a polling place for Germans and Austrians living in England to vote on the annexation of Austria. In May 1939 the Gustloff, along with other ships from the Kraft durch Freude fleet, was ordered to bring soldiers of the Condor Legion back to Germany after the Spanish Civil War ended. With the beginning of World War II, the Gustloff was requisitioned by the German navy to serve as a hospital ship in the Baltic Sea and Norway. From November 1940 onward, it lay at anchor at Gdynia, Poland, to serve as barracks for the 2nd Submarine Training Division. During a U.S. air attack on the harbour on October 9, 1943, the ship took minor damage.

As the Red Army advanced on East Prussia, Adm. Karl Dönitz began preparations for Operation Hannibal, the mass evacuation of German troops and civilians from the area. 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 Gustloff was ordered to bring the soldiers of the 2nd Submarine Training Division to western Germany. On January 25 the ship started taking other refugees on board, and by the afternoon of January 29 the count had reached 7,956 when registration was stopped. Witnesses estimated that perhaps another 2,000 people boarded after that point.

Shortly after noon on January 30, the Gustloff left the harbour. 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 Löwe. Because he was worried about the Gustloff's engines failing after years of sitting idle, Capt. Friedrich Petersen decided that the ship would travel no faster than 12 knots (14 miles [22 km] per hour). In doing so, he ignored the advice of Wilhelm Zahn, commander of the 2nd Submarine Training Division, who argued that increasing speed to 15 knots (17 miles [28 km] per hour) would reduce the likelihood of an attack, as Soviet submarines would not be able to keep up. Petersen also rejected the recommendation of First Officer Louis Reese, who had advised a course that hugged the coastline. Ultimately, the Gustloff headed for a deepwater route that was known to be clear of mines.

At about 6:00 pm a message was brought to the captain warning that a minesweeper convoy was headed their way, prompting him to activate the ship's navigation lights to prevent a collision. The origin of that message is unknown; none of the radio operators on the Gustloff or the Löwe claimed to have received it, and it is unclear whether it was a misunderstanding or possibly sabotage. The Gustloff did not meet any minesweepers on its way. However, it was spotted by the Soviet submarine S-13 at about 7:00 pm. The Soviet commander, Capt. Aleksandr Marinesko, maneuvered his submarine between the Gustloff and the coast, as an attack from that direction would be least expected.

At 9:16 pm the Gustloff was hit by three torpedoes and proceeded to sink over the course of one hour. The ship was carrying lifeboats and rafts for 5,000 people, but many of the lifesaving appliances were frozen to the deck, and their effective use was further impeded by the fact that one of the torpedoes had hit the crew quarters, killing those best trained to deal with the situation. Nine vessels took on survivors throughout the night. 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. Despite the high number of civilian deaths, allegations that sinking the Gustloff constituted a war crime are largely unfounded, because of the presence of weapons and nearly 1,000 military personnel on board.

Aside from history books and documentaries, the story of the Gustloff has been the subject of several feature films and fictional works, including the novella Im Krebsgang (2002; Crabwalk) by Günter Grass.

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Wilhelm Gustloff | History, Casualties, & Facts

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Wilhelm Gustloff, German ocean liner that was sunk by a Soviet submarine on January 30, 1945. An estimated 9,000 passengers were killed in the sinking, making it the greatest maritime disaster in history. Learn more about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in this article.