The Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff

The luxury steam ship Wilhelm Gustloff was Christened by Hitler in 1937.  At 680 feet this ship would transition from a luxury liner to a transport for wounded soldiers a few years later. After 1943 the war began to turn on Germany.  More and more bombing missions succeeded over German industrial cities killing tens of thousands.  Then in 1945 the Red Army entered Germany.  Reports of what the Soviets were doing to German women and children spread through Berlin and other cities. Fearing for their lives, over 10,000 Germans...mostly women and children, boarded the now rescue ship, Wilhelm Gustloff.  The horrified Germans sought to escape the coming Soviet atrocities.

 On January 30, 1945, with temperatures plunging to negative 18 Celsius, as Hitler addressed Germany on radio, three Soviet torpedoes hit the Gustloff north of Gdansk.  The doomed ship was headed to Kiel, from Gdansk. Originally built to take high ranking Nazis on Mediterranean cruises, the Gustloff would be a victim of the horrors of the coming war. The German navy was so depleted as 1945 arrived that no protective convoy escorted this rescue operation.  9,000 Germans died on the ship or in the icy water, only 1,252 survived.  In a macro sense, the rescue of Germans from Soviet madness was an overall success.  2.5 million Germans were evacuated from the eastern provinces, thus avoiding God knows what.

A few months after the sinking, Hitler would commit suicide in a Berlin bunker.  Admiral Karl Donitz would succeed Hitler as chancellor.  Unlike Hitler, Donitz came into the chancellor position with some heroic military experience.  Ironically. as Hitler Christened the Gustloff, Donitz would command the rescue operation, which hauled over a thousand women and children out of the icy drink.  Eventually the Gustloff would rest on the ocean floor, about 200 feet below the surface. The victors pen the history...and Germany lost the war.  Calling the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff a war crime is a plea that will fall on deaf ears.