Final Voyage

by Eyers, Jonathan

  No fewer than four captains had been assigned to the Wilhelm Gustloff, which inevitably led to a clash over who was really in command before they even left port. Officially her civilian captain Friederich Petersen was in charge. He knew the ship better than the other three captains, having commanded her briefly in 1938 when, serving as second in command, he had to take over following the sudden death of her captain. Petersen was 67, and had actually been captured by the British earlier in the war. They released him on compassionate grounds, and on the assumption – and indeed, his promise – that he would not return to active service.

  No fewer than four captains had been assigned to the Wilhelm Gustloff, which inevitably led to a clash over who was really in command before they even left port.

  At 33, Wilhelm Zahn was half Petersen’s age, and he had no time for the civilian’s claim to command. As far as he was concerned, the Wilhelm Gustloff’s mission was a military one. The ship was not going on a cruise, and the operation needed to be run by a captain who knew about evading mines and aircraft. But Zahn’s experience was as a U-boat commander. He had never commanded a ship like the Wilhelm Gustloff. But with a harsh reputation, and his Alsatian dog Hassan always at his side, Zahn was an overbearing character, and the other two young merchant marine captains on the bridge of the Wilhelm Gustloff were successfully cowed by his oppressive approach.

  On 25th January boarding began. The first to board were not the poor who had been huddling on the pier for days but the rich who had used their money and connections to ensure they got the pick of the cabins. The soldiers supervising boarding struggled to control the surge of the crowd as the gangways were then opened to everyone else. Boarding on a first come first served basis, those stuck at the back of a crowd that filled their end of the harbour pressed forward, fearing that a ship like the Wilhelm Gustloff could only carry a couple of thousand people. In the crush, children were separated from their parents. Some would never see each other again, even though they all managed to board the ship.

  In the crush, children were separated from their parents. Some would never see each other again.

  After two days, the soldiers registering every passenger who boarded stopped taking names. There were already 5,000 people on board by that time, but the crowd in Gotenhafen didn’t seem to have diminished at all as hundreds more arrived every hour. Boarding continued until the 29th. The cabins had long been filled with more people than they could comfortably house, and now the other areas of the ship that had been cleared and laid out with mats began to fill up too. Mattresses lined the floor of the theatre. Even the swimming pools had been drained, and 400 women were housed in one of them.

  On the 29th there was an air raid on Gotenhafen. When the sirens wailed some people left the ship to go to one of the harbour’s shelters. Many stayed where they were, knowing they could lose their place aboard to someone more scared of the Soviets than of death. This was not an uncommon opinion. As one passenger reportedly said as she came aboard, the Wilhelm Gustloff was ‘a nice ship to be torpedoed, but better to drown than to fall into Russian hands.’

  Mattresses lined the floor of the theatre. Even the swimming pools had been drained, and 400 women were housed in one of them.

  That evening the four captains received the order to depart. The gangways were finally retracted, leaving plenty on the pier, many of them in a state of fear and panic. The last people to come aboard were the Nazi mayor of Gotenhafen and his family. They took the luxury suite that had been reserved solely for Hitler’s use, but which had never been occupied in the ship’s eight-year lifetime.

  A combined passenger list and crew complement recognised there as being only 6,050 on board. In the 1980s and 1990s research concluded that there were actually between 8,956 and 10,582 people on the Wilhelm Gustloff when she left Gotenhafen, and that around 4,000 of them were children. Whether the true number was nearer the lower estimate or the higher one, this meant that there may have only been enough lifejackets for about half of those aboard.

  ‘A dog leading an elephant’

  The Wilhelm Gustloff finally left Gotenhafen at 12.15pm on the 30th, so heavy that it took four tugs to manoeuvre her away from the pier. A lack of escort ships had delayed her departure from the previous evening, the only ones available being small auxiliary vessels of poor seaworthiness, unsuited to an open sea passage. The Kriegsmarine could not spare ships that could match the Wilhelm Gustloff’s maximum speed of 15 knots, and it lacked the materials to make repairs to others that were more suitable for escort duties, but which had been damaged by Soviet or British air attacks.

  Having to feed over 10,000 people, supplies on the Wilhelm Gustloff quickly diminished, so her four captains decided to leave with the escort they had rather than risk the possibility of never being able to leave at all. They were to travel in convoy with another passenger liner, the Hansa, which was also full of civilian refugees and military personnel. The convoy also included the whaling boat Walter Rau and two torpedo boats, but one of those, the Lowe, did not have the latest sonar or radar, and the freezing temperatures had caused her other equipment to seize up too. Another snowstorm descended over the Bay of Danzig as they left its sheltered waters that lunchtime. Zahn, looking out at their insufficient escort, commented to Petersen, ‘This looks like a dog leading an elephant into the night.’

  Two portentous events occurred before the Wilhelm Gustloff made it into the open sea of the Baltic. First she had an impromptu rendezvous with the steamer Reval, which had come from Pillau and carried 600 refugees. Unable to take them all the way to Germany, her captain requested the Wilhelm Gustloff take them instead. The four captains submitted, and all 600 were transferred to the liner. By this stage her corridors were already impassable.

  Shortly after that, the Hansa developed mechanical problems and one of the torpedo boats reported a leak. Neither could continue and had to turn back. Zahn in particular had been dismayed by their escort when they left Gotenhafen. Now Petersen and the other captains were also unsure whether it would be safe to continue, effectively alone. But Zahn’s dismay did not equate with any degree of willingness to fail his mission. So the Wilhelm Gustloff headed out into the Baltic Sea, her course set for Kiel, northern Germany.

  This was when Petersen and Zahn had their first truly significant disagreement. Zahn was a submariner and believed the best course to take would be a zigzagging course through shallow waters close to shore. Not only did Soviet submarines avoid shallow waters because it made them easier to find, but in the event that the Wilhelm Gustloff was attacked, she could always be run aground, and her more than 10,000 passengers could escape ashore. Petersen, however, feared British aircraft more than Soviet submarines, and most RAF activity was either over land or close to the coast. Zahn was more concerned about Soviet planes, though, which as far as he was aware were flying reconnaissance flights over the Baltic. A coastal course, therefore, would hopefully avoid the Soviet threat altogether.

  Ultimately Zahn’s recalcitrance failed to sway either Petersen or the other merchant marine captains, and the Wilhelm Gustloff continued along a deep-water course that had been swept for mines. The captains ordered the ship’s anti-aircraft armaments (of which the Wilhelm Gustloff had three 105mm guns and eight 20mm cannons) to be kept at a constant state of readiness. This was easier said than done for the crewmen who had to struggle across the icy decks in a mounting blizzard to repeatedly clear the frozen weapons.

  Running into trouble out at sea, with help far away, would leave the ship a sitting duck.

  Zahn also urged Petersen to push the engines to their limits. At a maximum speed of 15 knots, the Wilhelm Gustloff could outrun most submarines. Though Petersen refused, he had good reason to. The liner had been docked at Gotenhafen for the better part of four years, in which time her engines had not been run at all. Not only did running her engines at top speed risk causing them to break down, but it also risked reopening a gash in the hull that the ship had received from an earlier
explosion whilst in port. Makeshift welding ensured she was sufficiently seaworthy for this trip, but not without limitation. Petersen knew why the captain of the Hansa had turned back rather than risk the journey. Running into trouble out at sea, with help far away, would leave the ship a sitting duck, and they would stand little chance against either the Soviets or the British, whichever found them first. What’s more, the Wilhelm Gustloff’s hull had not received any anti-fouling treatments for a long time. Encrusted with barnacles, she would struggle to make 15 knots. As it was, the most she managed on her final voyage was 12 knots, a speed at which she might have struggled to outrun submarines.

  The weather grew steadily worse as evening approached. The snowstorm became thicker and visibility dropped almost to zero, which brought mixed blessings – on the one hand, the Wilhelm Gustloff was harder to spot; on the other, so were her enemies. The four captains ordered each lookout watch to be increased to eight men.

  The weather grew steadily worse as evening approached. The snowstorm became thicker and visibility dropped almost to zero.

  Sailing into darkness with her lights off, the Wilhelm Gustloff received an odd radio message. Atmospheric interference caused by the bad weather made it difficult to receive and accurately decode long distance radio messages, but the four captains took the message at face value. Apparently there was a minesweeper heading along the same course, but in the opposite direction, and she would intercept the liner shortly. However, the source of the radio message could not be ascertained. Zahn ordered that the ship’s navigation lights be turned on, an order Petersen quickly countermanded. But this time he would not get his way. The other captains were as concerned about the risk of collision as Petersen had been about the risk of driving the engines too hard, and they supported Zahn. Red running lights lit up the Wilhelm Gustloff’s port side, green her starboard. They not only made her easier to spot in the dark and amidst the blizzard, but they gave away her size and her course too. By the time the captains reached a point where they should have passed the minesweeper, realised she didn’t actually exist and turned the navigation lights off again, it was already too late.

  They had also received another radio warning but felt far enough away from the danger to ignore it. Soviet submarine movements had been decoded, and there were supposedly three submarines patrolling the Bay of Danzig. That was where they had come from, and Zahn knew the Russian vessels were too far behind to catch up with them now. What he didn’t know was that one of the submarines, S-13, commanded by Captain Alexander Marinesko, had left the others behind hours before, and by chance alone was now only a few miles from the Wilhelm Gustloff.

  ‘This is it’

  As Hitler ranted, a baby was born in the belly of the ship.

  Below decks, the Wilhelm Gustloff’s passengers were suffering. The temperature may have dropped to –17°C (5°F) outside, driven by a Force 7 gale, but inside the ship the sheer number of people squeezed onto her eight decks created a hot and increasingly humid atmosphere. Those with lifejackets had been ordered over the ship’s loudspeakers to wear them at all times, but many removed them because it was so hot. Facilities designed to cater for fewer than 2,000 people struggled to cope with more than five times as many, not least the 145 toilets, which quickly became blocked. It didn’t help that the rough seas made thousands of people seasick. Foul odours permeated through the corridors, where hundreds sat and lay on the floor because there was no room for them anywhere else. Meanwhile, upbeat music was played over the loudspeakers.

  The 30th January was the twelfth anniversary of the day Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. To commemorate the occasion he gave a speech calling upon every German to rise up and resist the Jewish Communist plot to destroy Germany before it was too late. In the end it turned out to be the last radio speech he made. At 8pm a recording was played over the Wilhelm Gustloff’s loudspeakers. The refugees listened to it because there was nothing else to do, but gone were the days when Hitler’s triumphalist rhetoric inspired an almost hysterical reaction. On the bridge, officers joked that they would happily switch it off, but didn’t want the hassle from the Gestapo. As Hitler ranted, a baby was born in the belly of the ship.

  The speech lasted about an hour, at the end of which Zahn and the other captains headed to Petersen’s cabin for dinner – hot pea soup. The cooks and stewards worked round the clock, because by the time one group had been fed, it was time to feed another. The ship’s passages were so crowded it made it difficult for stewards to reach everyone with soup, sandwiches, porridge and other basic rations. But their tallies of the number of people that needed feeding gave the captains their most accurate estimation of the number aboard, and, including those too seasick to eat, the figure was at the upper end of all the estimates.

  Now that they had turned the navigation lights off again, the four dining captains felt as good as invisible in the dark and in the constant snow. They were fatally mistaken.

  The Soviet submarine S-13 had been stalking the Wilhelm Gustloff for over an hour. Her petty officer had been on watch duty when he spotted the liner’s navigation lights. The blizzard and the big seas could have hidden the ship from the S-13’s periscope view, but her lights shone like a beacon in the darkness. Indeed, the Russians initially mistook the Wilhelm Gustloff for a lighthouse, and only on consulting their charts did they realise it was a ship. Just after 9pm, her lights now off, the Wilhelm Gustloff was about 19 miles (30km) off the Polish coast, near the Stolpe Bank. The S-13’s Captain Marinesko ordered his crew to surface on the ship’s port side, on the assumption that the liner’s lookouts would be paying more attention to dangers from seaward. Slowly, unnoticed, the Soviet submarine closed to 3,000ft (less than 1km).

  In the panicked silence of the following moments, passengers throughout the ship’s crowded cabins and corridors wondered what they had hit.

  Four torpedoes were primed and ready to fire. Marinesko gave the order. Three launched successfully. The fourth jammed in its tube. Most of the S-13’s crew were too busy trying to disarm it to take any notice of their target’s fate.

  The first torpedo struck the Wilhelm Gustloff near the bow, level with the bridge. Everybody on the ship would have heard the thunderous roar. In the panicked silence of the following moments, passengers throughout the ship’s crowded cabins and corridors wondered what they had hit. Many assumed it was a mine. The emergency fire bells started ringing immediately, but for most there was nowhere to go, not until everyone between them and the stairs moved first.

  Then the second torpedo struck, and after that there was no mistaking the fact that the ship was under attack. The torpedo hit near midship, blasting a hole in the hull just above the drained swimming pools. The explosion killed many of the women housed there instantly. The torrent of freezing seawater that followed killed the rest.

  The third torpedo hit the Wilhelm Gustloff just as the senior officer on the bridge was ordering an emergency stop. It struck the hull below the ship’s single funnel. From the Russians’ perspective, this was their most successful torpedo. It scored a direct hit on the engine room. In an instant, the Wilhelm Gustloff lost all power. Her internal lights blinked off, plunging thousands of terrified passengers into darkness. The ringing of the fire bells and the constant hum of the ship’s systems was replaced by deathly silence, broken only by the screams and shouts of those trapped inside the bowels of the ship. The emergency generators quickly activated, but the dim red emergency lights would only have been bright enough to show most people just how difficult it would be to escape such an overcrowded ship.

  By the time the four captains made it onto the bridge, the Wilhelm Gustloff was already settling by the head and listing slightly to port. Both Petersen and Zahn knew immediately that the ship was doomed. ‘Das ist es,’ Petersen muttered. This is it. He knew as well as Zahn how many people they had aboard, and he knew that with the ship foundering so fast, most of them would die. He took the decision to close all the bow bulkheads. Doing so slowe
d the water’s progress and gave people more time to try and escape. Despite this, it was not an easy or obvious decision to make. After all, sleeping in their bow quarters at the time of the attack were most of the crewmembers who were trained in how to launch the lifeboats. Closing the bulkheads not only condemned them to death, but ensured everyone else aboard would have to fend for themselves too.

  Dead in the water

  Finding the line to the engine room dead, Zahn accepted the futility of hoping to restore power to send a distress signal. The emergency generator provided insufficient power to send long-distance messages, so Zahn used a spotlight to contact the torpedo boat Lowe, which was 15 minutes away. The crew of the Lowe received the sobering news that the Wilhelm Gustloff would sink within the hour, and dutifully carried out Zahn’s instructions. They sent the SOS that the sinking liner could not, requesting immediate assistance and directing all available ships to hurry to the Wilhelm Gustloff’s aid. Then the Lowe’s captain followed those directions himself.

  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.