Richard Davenporthines

‘Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff’, by Cathryn J. Prince – review

Wilhelm Gustloff was a Nazi leader in Switzerland, who was shot dead in his Davos apartment by a Croatian Jewish medical student in 1936. Hitler at the ensuing state funeral promised that Gustloff would remain ‘immortal’ under the Third Reich. But his name is now only remembered because it was bestowed on a ship which later sank with the highest loss of life in maritime history. The torpedoing of the Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in 1945 took an estimated 9,400 lives. This is double the number who perished with the Doña Paz in the Philippines in 1987, and far outstrips the 1,523 lost on Titanic in 1912.

The Nazis built Wilhelm Gustloff at a cost exceeding £2 million as ‘the crown jewel’ of their Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) fleet of cruise liners. It was launched at Hamburg by Hitler in 1937. On board, during cruises to Fascist Mediterranean climes, Aryan workers could tan themselves, exercise and relax in the ship’s gymnasium, swimming-pool, cinema and concert-hall. As a propaganda stunt, the liner anchored off Tilbury docks in 1938, and served as a polling station for Germans wishing to vote in the plebiscite on Anschluss with Austria.

After the outbreak of war in 1939, Wilhelm Gustloff was commandeered as a floating hospital, and then used as a training-base for submariners at the Baltic port of Gotenhafen in eastern Prussia.  Cathryn Prince gives a grisly account of Gotenhafen’s slow collapse into chaos, privation and fear until, in January 1945, the Nazis decided to evacuate their outpost as Russian armies advanced. There followed, in ‘Operation Hannibal’, a German equivalent of the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 as hundreds of ships tried to take fugitives from Stalin’s savagery across the frozen Gulf of Danzig.

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