Final Voyage (19 page)

It quickly became apparent that regardless of who came to the rescue, they would probably arrive too late.

Back on the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, the crew began to fire red distress rockets. They had little to lose from giving away their position now. Perhaps even enemy vessels would take pity on the thousands of souls aboard her. It quickly became apparent to Petersen and Zahn, however, that regardless of who came to the rescue, they would probably arrive too late.

Below decks, dust and the smell of explosive filled the air. Panic took hold as soon as the torpedoes struck, not
least in the cabins, where those with beds had managed to get to sleep until the blasts shocked them awake. Stirring to the roar of rushing water (described by one survivor as sounding like Niagara Falls), some found they couldn't open their cabin doors. It wasn't simply a problem of fumbling in pitch darkness. The explosions had caused some doorframes to buckle, jamming the doors shut. Shrieking and hammering on the doors, passengers managed to draw the attention of people on the other side, who broke the doors open with fire axes.

As the
Lowe
drew alongside the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, the torpedo boat's captain and crew could see how badly the liner was now listing to port. Hundreds were pouring up onto the top deck every minute, finding it doubly hard to walk on the increasingly tilted deck because it was already iced over. The
Lowe
took as many as she could, until it was standing room only and she was even more crowded than the
Wilhelm Gustloff
. People had to swim a short distance through the freezing water to reach the torpedo boat. Once aboard they were taken down to the engine room to warm up, stripped of their clothes and given blankets. Crewmen on the
Lowe
even surrendered articles of their own clothing to some of the naked, shivering survivors.

The
Lowe
pulled away, to the despair of those still amassing on the
Wilhelm Gustloff
's top deck. They had reason to cheer, however, when another vessel came into sight. The lookouts of heavy cruiser
Admiral Hipper
had witnessed the torpedo attack on the
Wilhelm Gustloff
and her crew had picked up the
Lowe
's proxy SOS. The
Admiral Hipper
gave the
Wilhelm Gustloff
's passengers good reason to believe they were saved. Having survived
nearly six years of naval warfare, she was now the largest German warship in the Baltic Sea. But she was already carrying 1,500 evacuees herself. She could reach speeds of 32 knots, more than enough to escape submarines. Fearing that stopping to help the
Wilhelm Gustloff
would put them in danger, the
Admiral Hipper
's captain called off the approach and ordered the helmsman to continue to Kiel. On the frozen deck of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, a thousand people watched the warship disappear into the night.

People found themselves stepping on the dead, unable to resist the surge forward without risking being trampled underfoot themselves.

Inside the doomed liner, the emergency lighting was beginning to fail. The crush on the stairs became lethal as thousands of people jammed the stairwells. People found themselves stepping on the dead, unable to resist the surge forward without risking being trampled underfoot themselves. Desperate people grabbed at each other, reaching for the ankles of those above them to try and pull themselves up. The sound of water below, and of drowning people trapped at the bottom of the stairwells, drove people on. Families were separated in the chaos, some never to see their relatives again. Those who fought their way out of the upward surge to go and search for their loved ones would spend the rest of their lives futilely fighting their way along dark passageways, perhaps only realising too late that they should never have left the stairs.

Meanwhile, in the salon, the majestic grand piano that had never been removed during the
Wilhelm Gustloff
's years of military service slowly started to roll across the floor.

The
Wilhelm Gustloff
should have had 22 lifeboats, but 10 were missing. They had been removed in Gotenhafen, some being used in harbour to create a smokescreen that would conceal the mass evacuation from any British or Soviet reconnaissance planes flying over. In their place the
Wilhelm Gustloff
had untethered rafts, positioned on the sundeck and disused tennis courts where they would simply float up if the ship sank. At the time she was torpedoed the
Wilhelm Gustloff
only had enough lifesaving equipment for half of those aboard. But even if the ship had had a full complement of lifeboats, it wouldn't have guaranteed any more would have been saved – as the
Wilhelm Gustloff
listed ever more to port, the lifeboats on that side of the ship became unusable anyway.

At the time she was torpedoed the
Wilhelm Gustloff
only had enough lifesaving equipment for half of those aboard.

In the hurry to let passengers on board and depart Gotenhafen, no boat drills had been carried out. After departure, the sheer number of people aboard made such exercises impractical. With the crewmembers trained in launching the boats trapped in the flooding bow, nobody on deck knew what they were doing. Zahn ordered his own submariners to take up the mantle, but when they struggled across the slippery deck to reach the lifeboats, they found the launching mechanisms frozen solid beneath inches of ice. The men had to hammer the lifeboats free from the davits, but behind them came the surge of panicking passengers. Armed soldiers tried to hold them back and prevent hundreds storming each lifeboat. They called for only women and children to come forward, and
for the men to get out of the way. Some of the soldiers realised they would soon be counting themselves amongst the men who were left on the ship when all the lifeboats were gone. One submariner even fired a warning shot at an officer who abandoned the operation and got into a boat himself.

Launching the boats grew increasingly difficult. One was overloaded with almost 100 people and the lines snapped, throwing everyone into the water. Another reached the water but the frozen ropes couldn't be untied. The lifeboat was bound to the sinking ship. Luckily a 10-year-old boy on board had stolen his uncle's knife before fleeing to Gotenhafen harbour, and the crewmen on the boat used it to cut themselves free. As the ship's list steepened, the anti-aircraft guns installed on the deck broke loose. They crashed over the side of the ship and smashed into a lifeboat. Meanwhile one of those untethered rafts careened down the icy deck and swept a large number of people into the sea as it plummeted overboard.

The anti-aircraft guns installed on the deck broke loose. They crashed over the side of the ship and smashed into a lifeboat.

The last lifeboat was lowered just before 10pm. It carried approximately 80 women and children, but thousands more children remained on board. As the
Wilhelm Gustloff
's stern rose higher and higher out of the water, people lost their footing and slid off the frozen deck and into the sea. Thinking the ship was about to go under, many started jumping overboard too. They would only have survived a few minutes flailing in the freezing water. Consequently, it is likely that over a thousand people died, floating near the ship, before she even sank.

Many of those still inside the ship seemed to have a good idea that they were not going to make it, and plenty gave up trying. Survivors later reported seeing a hysterical woman chanting to herself, whilst some of the ship's officers enjoyed a cognac brought to them by the head steward.

The
Wilhelm Gustloff
's promenade deck was enclosed behind glass. The crowds on the wrong side of the glass had to watch the lifeboats being lowered on the other side. But when all the lifeboats were gone, senior officers feared that letting thousands more up onto the upper deck would make the ship top heavy and risked causing an immediate capsize. So they ordered the exits from the promenade deck blocked. Those at the back of the crowd would never find out why they were no longer moving. Those on the starboard side of the promenade deck tried to smash the glass, but it was an inch thick and didn't shatter. Those on the port side watched the water rise up on the other side of the glass and began to panic even more.

Petersen and Zahn stayed on the bridge of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
almost until the end. When it became apparent that her terminal list would soon reach the point where inertia would tip her the rest of the way, they decided to save themselves.

To the thousands still on deck, it felt like a great wave breaking over the ship. Many were swept into the sea.

Only moments before she began her death roll, power inexplicably returned to the
Wilhelm Gustloff
. Her lights blinked on again, and to those who had grown accustomed to the dim emergency lighting, it appeared like they shone brighter than ever before. Her
fire bells also began to ring again, with what seemed like a desperate urgency.

Survivors in the lifeboats watched the magnificent cruise liner slide onto her port side, slowly, almost gracefully. To the thousands still on deck, it felt like a great wave breaking over the ship. Many were swept into the sea, but there were still people standing on the side of the ship's funnel as she finally sank, bow first, straight down, less than an hour after she had been attacked.

Thousands of people struggled in the freezing water amidst a field of debris and leaked oil. Some had tried to swim away from the
Wilhelm Gustloff
in her last moments, aware that she would create a downdraught that could suck them under. But in every direction there were just more people, living and dead. Many couldn't swim – women, children and people who had spent their entire lives in rural areas, so never learnt. A couple of children grabbed onto a stranger, and rather than kick them off to save himself he swam over to a lifeboat. The occupants lifted the children inside, but there was no room for him. Some of the rafts designed to carry 60 already carried 90. They had to beat off desperate people who threatened to swamp the boats. Others resigned themselves to the fact that there wasn't room for them in the boats, and just clung to the sides to await rescue. It was hard to row the boats through all the people in the water, especially when those people were dead children floating upside down, drowned by lifejackets that were not designed for use by someone so small.

As happened following the loss of the
Titanic
, the majority of those who died survived the sinking but then succumbed to exposure. In the freezing waters, hypothermia set in within minutes. Most were dead within 10. But the harsh winter weather didn't just kill those in the water. With an air temperature between –17°C (5°F) and –10°C (14°F), those in the boats without adequate clothing began to succumb to exposure too. The blizzard continued, covering them with snow, and rough seas splashing water into the lifeboats meant nobody could stay dry either. When rescue ships began to arrive in the middle of the night, they found plenty of corpses in the boats as well as in the water. Most of the survivors of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
were young, fit sailors.

When rescue ships began to arrive in the middle of the night, they found plenty of corpses in the boats as well as in the water.

Minesweepers, torpedo boats, a freighter and other civilian craft reached the site of the sinking by dawn, but by then they were too late. The
Lowe
's several hundred survivors represented almost half of everyone rescued. Seven hours after the
Wilhelm Gustloff
sank, a patrol boat discovered the last survivor – a one-year-old boy wrapped in a blanket on a lifeboat otherwise filled with snow-covered corpses. Orphaned by the catastrophe, he was later adopted by the sailor who found him. Of the 4,000 children estimated to have been on board the ship when she sank, only 100 survived the disaster.

The remains of the dead continued to wash up on the shores of the Swedish mainland and islands throughout the spring and summer of 1945. As with the sinkings of
the
Goya
and the
Steuben
, the news was suppressed in Germany to prevent a loss of morale, and to help the Nazi propagandists promote Operation Hannibal as an unequivocal success. Soviet propaganda, meanwhile, told the Russian people that the
Wilhelm Gustloff
had been transporting SS personnel who worked in the concentration camps. The sinking came only days after the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, after all.

All four captains survived the disaster, but the official naval inquiry only investigated the responsibility of the sole military commander aboard – Wilhelm Zahn. The inquiry was still on-going when the war ended in May, and following the collapse of the Nazi regime, was never resolved.

The man ultimately responsible for the sinking went on to be awarded the highest honour possible – Hero of the Soviet Union. Though Alexander Marinesko had been dead almost 30 years by the time he received it. He was only 32 when he sank the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, a rebellious young commander with a taste for alcohol (which ultimately caused his fatal ulcer in 1963) who was almost court martialled once, and who later went on to spend years in a gulag for insubordination. His war did not end with the destruction of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, however. Just over a week later the S-13 also sank the
Steuben
(see
chapter six
).

The man ultimately responsible for the sinking went on to be awarded the highest honour possible.

In 2002 the Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass published
Crabwalk
, in which the sinking of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
is central to a plot that spans fifty years and
multiple generations all affected by the disaster in different ways. Grass remains most well-known for his 1959 novel
The Tin Drum
, about an infantilised Germany failing to face up to its actions. He revisited the theme in
Crabwalk
, exploring how the modern Far Right in Germany claimed the
Wilhelm Gustloff
as a symbol of German suffering during the war. Indeed, an internet search about the ship will eventually lead to websites run by Far Right extremists in Germany and the United States. They argue that had Germany sunk a ship carrying over 10,000 British or American civilians then those responsible would have been prosecuted for war crimes, yet nobody was prosecuted for the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the sinking of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, as if glory brought with it immunity. In
Crabwalk
, Grass turns the argument against the Far Right, arguing that they practice the resentment of victimhood because it absolves them of any responsibility.