Death in the Baltic

by Cathryn J Prince

  Death in the

  Baltic

  Death in the

  Baltic

  THE WORLD WAR II SINKING OF THE

  WILHELM GUSTLOFF

  CATHRYN J. PRINCE

  DEATH IN THE BALTIC

  Copyright © Cathryn Prince, 2013.

  All rights reserved.

  First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the U.S.— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

  Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

  Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

  ISBN: 978-0-230-34156-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Prince, Cathryn J., 1969–

  Death in the Baltic : the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff / Cathryn J. Prince.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-230-34156-2

  ISBN-10: 0-230-34156-X

  1. Wilhelm Gustloff (Ship) 2. Shipwrecks—Baltic Sea—History—20th century. 3. Germans—Prussia, East (Poland and Russia)—History—20th century. 4. Refugees—Prussia, East (Poland and Russia)—History—20th century. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Evacuation of civilians—Prussia, East (Poland and Russia) 6. Shipwreck victims—Interviews. 7. World War, 1939–1945—Baltic Sea. 8. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations—Submarine. 9. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, Soviet. I. Title.

  D772.3.P76 2013

  940.53’161089310438—dc23

  2012030182

  A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

  Design by Letra Libre

  First edition: April 2013

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For Nathan and Zoë

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  One

  “You Have to Go on This Ship”

  Two

  Hitler’s Hostages: Life in the Eastern Territories

  Three

  Operation Hannibal and the Crown of the Fleet, the Wilhelm Gustloff

  Four

  “We Knew We Had to Get Out”

  Five

  Saving a Scuttled Reputation

  Six

  Battle for the Baltic

  Seven

  Chaos on Deck

  Eight

  Plummeting to the Sea Floor

  Nine

  The Little Red Sweater

  Ten

  The Forgotten Story

  Eleven

  “We Had To Get Over It”

  Appendix

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Eight pages of photographs appear between pages 112 and 113.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Although writing can at times be a lonely process, it is not possible to complete a book alone. I am therefore grateful for having so many people in my life who were present during the writing of this book.

  Many thanks to the archivists at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. Thanks to Simon Hessdorfer of the Bundesarchiv in Bayreuth, Germany, for answering my questions from afar. Thanks to Wendy Gulley, curator at the Submarine Force Museum in New London, Connecticut. Many thanks to Marco Hedler for his valuable research assistance and to Edward Petruskevich, curator of the online Wilhelm Gustloff Museum. Thanks are also due to the many librarians and professors who pointed me in the right direction when it came to tracking down bits and pieces of history.

  I am incredibly grateful to Jill D. Swenson and the entire team at Swenson Book Development. Jill, thank you for helping develop the initial book proposal, for helping me shepherd it through the writing process, and most of all, for your friendship and advice.

  My deep thanks to my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Luba Ostashevsky, for recognizing the importance of this story and giving it a home. Your insightful edits helped drive the narrative of this story and kept it on track. I’d like to also recognize Laura Lancaster and the entire team at Palgrave Macmillan, including Andrew Varhol, Victoria Wallis, Allison Frascatore, and Roberta Melville, as well as the art department for their exceptional and bold book jacket design.

  My heartfelt thanks go to the survivors and their families for opening their doors to me, both literally and figuratively, for sharing their stories, photographs, diaries, and letters.

  For my parents, Marvin and Norma Prince, the words “thank you” will never adequately express how much your encouragement and enthusiasm for what I do means to me.

  My children, Nathan and Zoë: Perched upon my soul, you are my laughter and light.

  Pierre: From the start you knew this was not going to be an easy book to write. I am blessed to have you by my side. You are my yesterday, you are my today, and you are my tomorrow.

  INTRODUCTION

  Sometime after the publication of my second book, and well before the idea for my third book took root, my father mentioned a startling fact. He told me about a small passage in a history trivia book that mentioned a German ship sunk at the end of the war in Europe, in January 1945, which ranked as the highest loss of life in peacetime or wartime. He said the sinking made the Titanic look like a fender bender.

  Few people outside the military took note of the sinking and few American historians have written about it. The most information I found consisted of footnotes in World War Two histories mentioning the bare facts: that the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk by a Soviet torpedo early in the morning on January 30, 1945, and that more than 9,000 refugees perished in the frigid waters of the Baltic. I had no explanation for the lack of news articles. Was it because it was something that happened to our enemy? Was it because there were no Americans aboard? As has happened before, my reporter’s instincts kicked in, and I promptly began researching the Wilhelm Gustloff.

  Looking at January 30, 1945, and the weeks, months, and years before that date allows us to gain further insight into one of the most tumultuous times in history. By hearing from a few whose stories have not yet been told, we gain a little more understanding of what millions endured.

  I got the contact information for Horst Woit, who had been a 10-year-old boy aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff with his mother Meta, from a Canadian documentarian I found through a website. After the sinking, Horst Woit lived behind the iron curtain in Soviet-occupied East Germany for several years until immigrating to Canada in the late 1940s.

  My mother and I traveled to Canada to meet Horst. Wearing a faded blue sweatshirt and jeans, Horst waited for us outside, his dog beside him. We hugged hello. It seemed a natural greeting. Nearly 70 years later, the sinking continues to haunt Horst. It is something he thinks about every day. Though the loss of life was massive, and as desperate as the conditions were that forced Horst and his mother to flee, stories like Horst’s have remained largely unknown, in part because it happened in wartime to refugees and naval personnel from Nazi East Prussia. Growing up in Canada after the war, Horst told us, he read stories about the Titanic—what a horrific accident it had been, the grisly details of how almost 2,000 people perished in the frozen waters. In those moments he would want to yell, “Well, let me tell you about a sinking nearly five times as bad as the
Titanic.”

  I knew after the first hour of our visit that Horst’s story and those of the other survivors had to be told. Stories like Eva Dorn Rothschild’s, who at 86 still shows the same spirit that got her kicked out of Hitler Youth when she was barely 13. Or that of Helga Reuter and her parents, Kurt and Marta. They had owned a furniture store in Königsberg until the Nazis requisitioned it and turned it into a uniform factory. Kurt and his wife did what they could to make sure the workers were well fed and clothed. I visited Helga in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she now lives in a one-room apartment in her son’s house.

  Black-and-white photographs of those who survived and those who died when the Wilhelm Gustloff sank beneath the Baltic Sea sit on my desk. They are a constant reminder of why I wrote this particular book. For nearly 70 years the survivors have lived in a world where most people are ignorant of this wartime catastrophe. By looking at this tragedy through several individual stories, another perspective of World War Two surfaces. By listening to the stories and reading the letters and diaries of those who survived and those who perished in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea on that January morning in 1945, a moment in history is resurrected.

  One

  “YOU HAVE TO GO ON THIS SHIP”

  To the streams of refugees who first glimpsed the ship soaring several stories out of the water, the Wilhelm Gustloff appeared as a harbinger of hope.

  The Russian Army was closing in on East Prussia’s coastline, and by January 1945 most every German—from the highest ranking officer to the mother trying to protect her child—understood that they had lost the war. The Third Reich was in free fall, on the verge of social, political and economic ruin, but to say as much amounted to treason. Indeed, displaying a defeatist attitude earned junior military officers a swift execution.1 The teenagers who were drafted to be the face of Nazism in the Hitler Youth began to desert. If they were caught, they were forced to wear cardboard signs that read, “I am a deserter. I was a coward in the face of the enemy,” before being thrown over balconies with ropes around their necks.2 On the eastern front the German Army investigated those soldiers suspected of self-inflicted wounds, trying to gather legal proof of defeatism.3 The Nazi leadership strained to convince the German people to ignore the shifting forces of war. Adolf Hitler broadcast daily orations rousing his people to fight to the last man.4 Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels insisted that Germany could still emerge victorious. Despite the threat of retribution from the police, thousands of Germans living in the eastern part of the country—referred to as East Prussia—chose to evacuate their home cities and towns. For days they arrived in a constant stream to the port of Gotenhafen, a major naval base situated in East Prussia on the Bay of Danzig. The province also shared a border with Lithuania to the north and east, and to the west lay the Free City of Danzig, and to the south and east, Poland. These refugees were part of a late-stage effort called Operation Hannibal that was to evacuate them from the advancing Soviet Red Army.

  The Baltic seaside city of Gotenhafen (now Gdynia—see appendix with list of cities and current names) had come under Nazi control in 1939 after the Third Reich invaded Poland. The Germans renamed the seaside city after the Goths, an ancient German tribe. Almost immediately the military turned the seaport into a German naval base. They expanded the base in 1940, making it an extension of the Kiel shipyard, located across the Baltic Sea near the Danish border. Until the Soviet onslaught, the Gotenhafen harbor had been largely spared from the hostilities, which made it an attractive place for heavy cruisers and battleships to lay anchor.

  Days before the first bedraggled evacuees arrived in Gotenhafen, the German authorities ordered Friedrich Petersen, the Wilhelm Gustloff’s 63-year-old captain, to acquire fuel, prepare to take on refugees, and get ready to sail westward to the German port of Kiel. Before the war, the Wilhelm Gustloff had been a 25,000-ton passenger liner that took ordinary Germans on what was often their first vacation. During the war the Gustloff was first used as a hospital ship and then by the German navy as a U-boat training school. On that freezing January in 1945, it joined thousands of ships, large and small, in Operation Hannibal, an eleventh-hour exodus designed to transport primarily wounded military personnel and war materiel, and secondarily refugees from the eastern territories away from the fast approaching Red Army. The Gustloff wasn’t the only ship crowding the key naval port, but at 684 feet long it was one of the largest. Along with the Gustloff sat a cohort of smaller liners, fishing boats, dinghies, and trawlers.

  With the influx of refugees from across East Prussia, Gotenhafen’s population swelled. Hundreds of thousands of people clogged the harbor, trailing their belongings. Everyone vied for boarding passes. Initially, the German authorities issued passes to wounded soldiers and sailors and to Nazi Party officials and their families only. Later, passes were given to women with children and families. The harbor thrummed with fear and anxiety. An air of lawlessness threatened the once orderly city. As a warning to others, German police shot looters and left their bodies lying on the streets or strung from lampposts.

  There were people of every age; women wrapped in woolen shawls, men in fur coats, children perched on sleds. Many had been without adequate food and water for weeks. People searched for food, a ladleful of soup or a slice of bread, amid broken buildings and bomb craters. Rats ran rampant over mounds of garbage. People sought shelter in abandoned trolley cars and abandoned buildings. There were no resources to collect the piled-up corpses. Wounded soldiers arrived daily from the front lines. As the refugees abandoned their belongings, the port of Gotenhafen resembled a graveyard of overturned carts, upended sledges, discarded trunks and suitcases.

  The thousands of evacuees waited sometimes days on end in these conditions. The Nazi leadership had finally allowed them to leave their homes and try to outrun the Red Army troops, which were, at that moment, surging toward the Baltic Coast.5

  In this crowd stood a little boy of ten gripping his mother’s hand. Dressed in long underwear and ski pants, his hair was yellow. Once, Horst Woit lived in Elbing, East Prussia, a German enclave on a lagoon to the Baltic Sea. The town’s iron works manufactured locomotives, U-boats, and armored vehicles for the German military. The Russian Army would soon lay waste to the land.6

  Woit was sad that he and his mother, Meta, had left their home. Home meant bread slathered with marmalade his mother had saved even during strict wartime rationing, a box of tin soldiers, and a mother who tucked him in nightly. Home comforted the young boy after his father left for the front just a year and half before. While war raged across much of Europe, his home remained largely peaceful. Then the Soviet tanks came too close and war thrust the Woits into a desperate flight for safety.

  The Woits set out from their house intending to reach Schwerin, a city northwest of Berlin. That’s where his mother’s younger brother and his wife and son lived. The family had decided it would be the best and safest place to meet, as it was likely to fall under either British or American control. Once there, Meta would resolve whether she and her son would stay in Germany or emigrate.

  Horst, an only child, was born on December 24, 1934, in the city of Insterburg. His grandparents lived in neighboring Gumbinnen and his aunt lived with her family in nearby Königsberg. His parents left Insterburg and moved to Elbing, 37 miles east of Danzig, before his second birthday. Today Horst treasures the few pictures that date from his childhood, collected after the war from relatives and friends. One of them shows Horst as a toddler, standing in front of a school. Later in the war the school was turned into a military hospital. In another black-and-white photo taken on his first day of school, a beaming six-year-old holds his first-day coronet of cookies, a family tradition.

  The Woits didn’t own a car. Taking the train to visit his grandparents, Heinrich and Johanna Wesse, in Gumbinnen remains one of Horst Woit’s fondest childhood memories. He remembers his mother putting him on the train in Elbing with a sign hanging around his neck declaring his destinati
on in case he forgot. After Meta took him to the train station and helped him board, Horst would settle into his seat, preferably next to a window but always under the watchful eye of the conductor. He loved watching the landscape roll past during the trip.

  “By the time I got to there I had driven everybody nuts, asking all the time ‘Are we there yet?’” Horst said. “My Grandpa used to pick me up at the train station; he was a great guy. I have a picture of him from the First World War on the Russian Front and one of Bismarck on parade.”

  Horst and his grandparents were close. Adventure filled his weekend visits. On at least two occasions his grandfather rushed the young boy to the hospital for serious scrapes and cuts. He still has the scars.

  Then, in late 1944 the train trips stopped and became smaller in his mind, the same way the station in Elbing looked as the train pulled away. Soon “all one ever heard was ‘the Russians are coming closer,’” Horst said. Then too, ever so quietly, worry trickled into the house. And just like that the smells and sights of lovely childhoods, of flowers, spring, birds, and bicycles disappeared.

  “At the time the Second World War started I was five years old and I did not understand the real meaning; but as time went on I could not go to the school I started at—it became a hospital. Then my father was drafted into the army and my mother had to go to work. I spent a lot of time on my own, browsing the city,” Woit said.7 After Horst’s school became a hospital, he went to classes in another building. The adults in his life spoke little about the war. Looking back on that time, Horst said he believes his mother, his teachers, and his grandparents were trying to protect the children.

  In January 1945 Leonilla “Nellie” Minkevics Zobs and her parents, Voldemars and Zelma, also chose to flee East Prussia before the Red Army could attack. Years after the war, the Minkevicses eventually moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, nearly half a world away from the town where she grew up. Nellie and her husband, Peter Zobs, became naturalized citizens.8 Of course, the then 24-year-old remembered the war’s outbreak in 1939 and what happened in the weeks before the Soviet tanks penetrated the German lines during the winter of 1944–1945. A few years before she died, Nellie recalled the moment she left her home for the last time to walk to Gotenhafen where a boat waited to whisk her to safety.9 Together with her father and some family friends they walked to the pier where the vessel awaited.10 Like the thousands of other refugees boarding the Wilhelm Gustloff, she wore heavy winter boots and a woolen coat over her dress.