Death in the Baltic

by Cathryn J Prince

  “There were no tables, no stools, and we were lying like sardines,” Helga said. “They gave us a half a loaf of bread. Finally we found a toilet so we could wash our faces and hands. So we were happy to get to lie on a clean floor. It was next to the staircase. We were in the middle of the top deck. One staircase up to the lifeboat.”

  Sapped of strength, the three young women fashioned bed-rolls using their life vests as mattresses. The girls spread their fur coats atop the vests. Then the trio curled up, closed their eyes, and searched for sleep.

  The Reuter sisters and their aunt had now been aboard the ship for two days.

  On January 29, the ship’s crew directed Horst, his mother, and her friend Hildegard and daughter Christa to a place in a large empty hall. Horst doesn’t remember if it was the ship’s ballroom or dining room. Even before they had a moment to put their belongings down, a sailor told them to relocate to a cabin on the upper decks on the port side at the stern. “The four of us slept in one cabin together,” Horst said.20 They were fortunate that they didn’t have to share the space with anyone else.

  While his mother and her friend settled in, Horst decided it was time to explore the vast ship. To the 10-year-old boy, the Wilhelm Gustloff was fascinating and, as Horst remembers it, the ship seemed, however briefly, to promise adventure. Before Meta could tell Horst to stay put, the boy scampered out of the cabin—he was certain he’d seen a dog padding about nearby. Hassan, the German shepherd, belonged to Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Zahn. The 35-year-old officer had a strong, chiseled face; a goatee and mustache framed his set jaw. Horst laughed and chased the dog up and down stairs and back and forth in the upper corridors, weaving in and out of streams of people. He glanced over the ship’s rail and saw other KdF liners-turned-refugee-ships tethered to Gotenhafen’s piers. They were the Deutschland and the Hansa. He spied the two lighthouses at the mouth of the harbor.

  Irene and Ellen Tschinkur, their mother Serafima, and cousin Evi settled down in the upper-deck dining room. Using their lumpy lifejackets as pillows, the four lay alongside one of the room’s four walls.

  Only six years old, Ellen Tschinkur not only didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation, she decided to make her complete displeasure and discomfort about the situation known to everyone, especially to her mother.

  “I was very naughty. I complained the whole time,” Ellen Tschinkur said, her eyes lighting mischievously at the memory. “My poor mother. I just kept whining that it was hot, that I didn’t want to be on the boat. I asked when we could go home.”21

  Finally the rocking of the boat lulled the three girls and Serafima to sleep.

  Nellie Minkevics and her father squeezed on board with everyone. They were assigned a space on the highest deck above the women’s auxiliary.22 They were in an unfortunate location, below decks and far from the lifeboats. Yet, the pair was grateful to be aboard. Like so many on board, they had a moment to savor the idea that peace and safety was upon them.

  Clutching baby Inge to her breast, Milda Bendrich allowed herself the quickest sighs of relief. She paused before gladly handing the last of their possessions to the crew of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Milda and her parents received life vests in exchange.

  “We were directed to our places. My parents and the old ladies were to sleep on mattresses in the theater, you and I in a cabin with several berths, which, as time went on, were insufficient for the increasing numbers of mothers and children. On the second night there was an air-raid warning, and many, including us, left the ship to seek refuge in an air-raid shelter,” Milda wrote to her daughter Inge long after the war. “I cannot remember in detail any of my companions in fate except a 50-year-old East Prussian lady who had already made the arduous journey from Königsberg. I had noticed her because she was terribly nervous, as if she had an inner feeling of the impending disaster. Shortly before the W.G. received the order to leave, this woman left the ship. I don’t know if she returned. I never saw her again.”

  Four captains occupied the bridge of the Wilhelm Gustloff, each with his jurisdiction, and they all vied for control. No one agreed on the best route to safely cross the Baltic Sea. Of the four, two were the dominant force: Lt. Commander Wilhelm Zahn and Captain Freidrich Petersen. Zahn, the military commander and former submariner, thought the Gustloff should follow the shoreline and maintain total blackout conditions. Zahn, 33, had been commander of the department of the 2nd U-boat Training Division and had recently been appointed Military Transport Leader. Petersen, the 63-year-old civilian captain, vehemently disagreed. Petersen wanted to maintain a speed of less than 12 knots, about 10 miles per hour. The broad-faced captain, who also sported a trim goatee and mustache, was anxious about taxing the ship too much, thinking its years in dry dock had robbed its engines of the ability to handle any stress. Nonsense, thought Lt. Commander Zahn. He argued for the Gustloff to travel at least 15 knots, or about 17 miles per hour, to better avoid an enemy attack. A naval dispatch had reported enemy submarine activity off Pomeranian coast. They bickered. They fought. Zahn tried hard to assert his position.

  Captains Zahn and Petersen also quarreled about whether the Wilhelm Gustloff should follow the coastal route though the waters there were shallow and mined.23 Theoretically, this route in an outward shipping lane offered more protection to the vessel from a Soviet submarine attack. The other option required heading for deeper water, miles off the coast. German minesweepers would have already cleared floating mines dropped by aircraft, but this route put the Wilhelm Gustloff in a more vulnerable position regarding a possible submarine attack. In the end, they settled on following a zigzag route, relying on decades of military practice. In World War One and World War Two, surface ships often steered a zigzag course to impede torpedo attacks.

  However, the zigzag carried its own risks, in fact it could be quite dangerous. There was always the danger of collision—if a ship poorly executed a turn, it could venture into the path of an oncoming vessel. Or, sometimes, as in the case of the British liner Arabic, a U-boat found its mark and sank the boat in spite of it having zigzagged.24

  After the Gustloff sank, a naval board of inquiry called Zahn to testify. He told the board that a contributing factor to the extreme loss of life was that Croatians had replaced many of the ship’s German crew members. He blamed them for neither following nor understanding orders. In addition, Zahn said that he hadn’t received orders about whether or not to zigzag. “Before we left I got three phone calls and was told to leave,” Zahn said. “I was confirmed to take the deep water route. I had gotten neither verbal nor written orders to zigzag. As it related to submarines, I knew from discussions with other colleagues that there were no submarines in the area. I had also assumed the sea area in question had been reconnaissanced and had a submarine been sighted, I would have been notified.”25

  As the gray cruise liner sailed past the harbor mouth, Friedrich Petersen and Wilhelm Zahn agreed to take it through a channel that was “officially” mine swept. Even so, Petersen made another fatal mistake when he switched on the ship’s red and green navigation lights to avoid colliding with the German minesweeper colony operating in the area.26 The Wilhelm Gustloff twinkled like a Christmas tree.

  In the meantime, the crew struggled against stubborn winds and sea spray to chip ice from the Gustloff’s antiaircraft guns, rigging, and davits. The upper deck gleamed like an ice skating rink. It was windy, but so far the visibility remained fair. Lookouts with night glasses were stationed on the upper decks. They searched the infinite darkness for signs of enemy ships. The wind howled, whistling in the antiaircraft turrets. Night fell; the cold intensified, and many refugees became violently seasick. Some of the queasy moved to the center of the boat, amidships, where they wouldn’t feel the pitch and roll from choppy seas. It took a long time for the rolling and rocking ship to reach deeper waters of the Baltic Sea.27

  The pier in Gotenhafen did not easily relinquish the Wilhelm Gustloff. When the liner finally pulled away around
1 P.M. a heavy coating of mud encased its hull.28 Engines churned the water into a murky brew. Four tugboats helped the ship to the harbor, and as it reached the open sea, the tugs dropped back one by one. Captain Paul Vollrath noticed the Gustloff was almost all alone as it sailed toward the Hela peninsula. Rather than a convoy of protection, a single minesweeper served as escort. Normally several ships served as escort to help protect against submarines. These support ships traveled at high speeds to search for submarines and lay depth charges as precautions against the U-boats. The Löwe, a torpedo boat, joined the minesweeper just after the Gustloff passed the harbor’s mouth. Also, a smaller torpedo-retriever ship, the TF-1, which was about 100 tons, announced it too would serve as escort. There were supposed to be two other escorts, but to wait for them would have been to risk air strikes or artillery barrages.

  “This was our spectacular escort force, two small units of the German navy without any practical experience of escort duties, no submarine chasers, and that in spite of a submarine warning having been circularized and being imminent in the very area we were to pass through,” Vollrath recounted in a memoir penned some 35 years after the sinking. “For the first time during the whole war, Russian submarines had been able to clear the very extensive minefields and nets laid at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland and had broken out.”29

  After Captains Petersen and Zahn received their orders to embark, the Gustloff proceeded to a mine-swept channel called route No. 58. It ran about 20 miles north of the Pomeranian coast. This was to avoid the coastal lane, which was reportedly infested with mines. Although a minesweeper had preceded the Gustloff, there were always stories of ships that blew up after a completed sweep. The intricate devices incorporated into the last magnetic and acoustic mines defied many normal mine detecting devices, no matter how modern they were.30

  After the Gustloff left, the Hansa remained tied to the pier. It continued taking refugees on board, some of whom came alongside the ship on tenders. The Admiral Hipper, which was also supposed to help, was evacuating 1,500 wounded soldiers.31 These ships sailed after the Gustloff had ventured further out to sea. However, engine problems soon forced the Hansa and the TF-1 back to shore. Only the Löwe remained. Well aware that scores of mines lurked beneath the churning sea, the German navy had dispatched minesweepers ahead.

  “Already we felt safe,” Milda said. “It was not long before the first victims of seasickness clung to the washbasins. An attempt to reach the toilets in time would have been useless because the corridors and stairs were crowded with people, mostly women and children. Of course, I was sick, too, as the heavy swell together with the foul smell in the cabin would have turned anybody’s stomach. I can still remember that I fed you porridge for dinner and that I had a little of this myself to settle my stomach. We were told not to undress but we took off fur coats and boots. You were partly undressed. We were all so exhausted that it quickly became quiet and dark in the cabin.”

  The ship left in a heavy snowfall, the four captains confident the blizzard would shield the ship from aerial attacks. The captains, the crew, and the passengers could not know that a certain Soviet submarine captain, Alexander Marinesko, had entered the Gulf of Danzig in his S-13. Marinesko didn’t relay his position to command.32

  It was no secret that the Wilhelm Gustloff had left Gotenhafen; it would have been impossible to conceal the ship’s movement from the Soviets.33 On the pier, a dejected and envious crowd stood. Hundreds watched what they thought was their last best hope for survival sail away. This time, unlike the days when the Gustloff sailed the Mediterranean as a KdF pleasure boat, no music played and no flags waved. In the distance, the night sky flashed red.

  Eight

  PLUMMETING TO THE SEA FLOOR

  During the Wilhelm Gustloff’s days as a KdF liner, passengers would gather in the common areas to play cards, listen to music, or read. Now, the round tables and upholstered chairs had been removed to make room for refugees. Sailors and officers assigned people arbitrarily to cabins, which they might share with strangers, or to one of several community rooms. When the larger common spaces and smaller cabins were filled, people bunked down in whatever space remained, whether stairwells, holds, closets, the spaces under stairs, and hallways.

  The refugees understood that sailing across the Baltic Sea aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff presented the easiest and fastest way to escape the Soviets. Some were cautiously optimistic as they tried to ignore the sea’s own dangers, such as mines and submarines. The upper decks were safer since one could get stuck below deck in an emergency. However, space in the dining room and ballroom quickly filled. The more crowded the ship became, the more it stank. People were hot and body odor pervaded the cabins and halls. Toilets clogged. Some people, sick from nerves, vomited over the sides of the ship.

  The crew divided up the hundreds of wounded on board and billeted them into large lounges and halls. Pregnant women were shown to one of the makeshift hospital rooms, and though the ship wasn’t fully equipped for labor and delivery, an unknown number of babies were delivered on board. The Naval Auxiliary women helped and held the hands of many mothers-to-be.

  Officially the crew forbade anyone from coming on board after the night of the January 29. However, some survivors recall people coming on hours later.

  “Perhaps since Dad belonged to the Baltic Sailing Club—on the other side of the quay where the Gustloff anchored—Dad had made friends with sailors on that ship and they got us into that dining room in the last hours—but, it’s all speculation on my part. I do have some old black-and-white pictures where sailors are in uniform partying with members of the Baltic Sailing Club,” said Irene Tschinkur, thinking back on that time.1

  The night between January 29 and 30 was “hell” as more and more refuges, wounded soldiers, and sailors boarded the ship, Vollrath wrote. All the while the Gustloff’s officers tried to go about their duties. They pushed through crowds and climbed over personal belongings. The ship’s purser and his staff tried to get a head count and keep up with the ship’s manifest. Much of the crew hurried about gathering equipment. They brought additional life rafts on board but didn’t properly secure them. These new rafts, similar to pontoons, had floors made of net. They were put on the ship’s upper decks. The crew told passengers that in an emergency the rafts would float up from the water.

  Around 8 P.M. on January 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler delivered a speech commemorating the twelfth anniversary of his rise to power under the banner of the National Socialist German Workers Party. The Wilhelm Gustloff broadcast the speech over the ship-wide public address system. Passengers couldn’t blot out his words. His lengthy monologue obligingly addressed the situation on the eastern front:

  “The horrid fate that is now taking shape in the east and that exterminates hundreds of thousands in the villages and market places, in the country and in the cities will be warded off in the end and mastered by us, with the utmost exertion and despite all setbacks and hard trials. . . . In this fateful battle there is therefore for us but one command: He who fights honorably can thus save his own life and the lives of his loved ones. But he who, because of cowardice or lack of character, turns his back on the nation shall inexorably die an ignominious death.”2 As he spoke, each word seemed to punch the air. Nearly 70 years later, Helga Reuter from Königsberg remembers trying to ignore the long speech and rest.3

  The Wilhelm Gustloff approached the gravel-rich bed known as Stolpe Bank, located off the coast of modern-day Poland. Captains Friedrich Petersen and Wilhelm Zahn breathed a little easier. They shared a cognac toast, believing the worst had passed.4 Their détente was brief. At this point Zahn and Petersen couldn’t agree on whether the Gustloff should increase its speed. Zahn later told a naval board of inquiry that he wanted the boat to go faster but that Petersen and others told him the ship couldn’t maintain a high speed for long. “While we were debating this at 21:20 there were three detonations within two second intervals,” Zahn said.5

  Just after
9 P.M., almost immediately following Hitler’s fevered address, Alexander Ivanovich Marinesko, the captain from Odessa, commanded the S-13 to fire all four of her torpedoes at the Wilhelm Gustloff. Packed with 660 pounds of explosives, the torpedoes streaked toward the ship. One of the four torpedoes got stuck in its launching tube, with its primer fully armed. Torpedoes of this period traveled a few thousand meters under water to their target. Batteries or electric motors propelled the torpedoes forward until they detonated either when close to or upon contact with the target. The slightest jolt would blow up the S-13. The crew disarmed the failed torpedo; it was the one labeled “For Stalin.” Generally, a submarine had to be between 2,000 and 3,000 yards away to hit its mark. The S-13 was less than 1,000 yards away. Captain Marinesko made a brief note in his log.

  “Immediately the ship had a 5 degree port listing,” Zahn testified before the naval board of inquiry five days after the sinking. “All of the officers met on the bridge and the refugees were told to go to the upper deck and not to panic.”6 Zahn said the frozen davits weren’t the only reason lifeboats weren’t lowered. Again, he pointed to the replacement crew for the reason. “Only four to six boats were lowered with the help of soldiers, under difficult circumstances. The davits were iced and the Croats were absent.” The captains tried to maintain calm, and Zahn remembered that for the first 20 minutes after the strike the boat didn’t list much. Then it did, and there was panic. “We calmed them [the refugees] down by calling to them that we had run aground.” Zahn ordered his subordinates to destroy the radio room. The boat listed more, the people panicked more. Zahn said they announced that the ship could float for several hours. As the listing increased to between 25 and 30 degrees, Zahn realized the ship was doomed.