Forgotten Sinking of Refugee Ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff

Hospital Ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff

The sinking of Germanys huge luxury passenger liner, the Hospital Ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff, remains the worse ever maritime disaster. It occurred in the final stages of World War II on January 30 1945. Wilhelm Gustloff′s final voyage was during Operation Hannibal while participating in the evacuation of civilian refugees. The Red Army had stormed into East Prussia and German Pomerania. Urged on by Joseph Stalin the Red Army would embark on an orgy of rape and destruction. Hannibal was a Kriegsmarine operation involving the evacuation by sea of civilian refugees who were surrounded by the Red Army in Courland, East Prussia and the Polish Corridor from January 23 - May 8 1945. This is not to forget the depleted Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS trying to hold the Soviets back while civilians evacuated. The refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff repainted from the hospital ship colors of white with a green stripe to standard naval grey was sighted by the Soviet submarine S-13, under the command of Captain Alexander Marinesko. Captain Marinesko launched three torpedoes at the Wilhelm Gustloff. Soon after that, Marinesko fired at torpedo boat Löwe that had come to the aid of the liner. Despite Löwe being overloaded with 564 survivors. For weeks after January 30 1945, frozen bodies washed up on the Baltic coasts. Before sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, 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. Marinesko was posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. German archivist Heinz Schön, who carried out extensive research into the sinking during the 1990s, concluded that the refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff was carrying some wounded soldiers, military personnel, mainly Navy personnel, technicians and 8,956 civilian refugees, among them an estimated 4,000 children, for a total of 10,582 passengers and crew. The figures from the research of Schön make the total lost in the sinking to be about 9,343 men, women, and children. This would make it the largest loss of life in a single sinking in maritime history. Besides ethnic Germans, the passengers onboard Wilhelm Gustloff included Croatians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Poles. Image: German liner Wilhelm Gustloff in the harbor at Hamburg in 1938. FU.