“I spent this night sitting on a chair. Around me were women, each one engrossed with her own fate. As if in a fog, I heard a woman in another room screaming hysterically. Somebody explained that this woman had to leave her three children on the W.G.,” Bendrich wrote in her letter. “I must have suffered from shock as from the first moment I had felt no fear and instinctively knew that I would not give up.”
Milda and Inge were reunited the next morning. A doctor assured the young mother that he had examined the baby girl and that she was well. The baby slept peacefully through the night.
Wilhelmina Reitsch, who supervised the evacuation of the Women’s Naval Auxiliary, had remained in Gotenhafen until the end of March when the port was under fire and she left on a fishing boat.15 She had decided to put the auxiliary women on the ships because the few trains available were deemed unsafe and there were no other options. Even when she heard about the Gustloff’s fate, she continued putting her officers and sailors on board ships. However, just about a day after the sinking, she faced a grim task. The recovered dead auxiliaries found in lifeboats or floating in the waters around the Gustloff were taken to Gotenhafen. There she and other auxiliary leaders identified them whenever possible. Reitsch received the Iron Cross in recognition of her service. Because the catastrophe happened on January 30 in very cold temperatures and because they knew them, Reitsch and her staff were able to identify the young women on sight. Most casualties of the army, Luftwaffe, and other refugees were not identified. Unidentified bodies were buried in the seaside city of Gotenhafen. Irene and Ellen Tschinkur believe their cousin Evi was buried in a mass grave with the other dead.
Once Helga Reuter reached Sassnitz, she tried to find Inge. “I went to the Red Cross to look for my sister. Maybe find information from the camp. The last I saw of her she was in the water,” Helga said. Although Helga asked and searched, she held out little hope that Inge lived. The water had been too cold, the wait for help too long. Besides, she couldn’t deny that last vision of Inge floating away like a frozen lily pad.
Helga realized it was time to plan. She wouldn’t return to Königsberg. That left her with only one option, to continue her journey to Berlin. The Soviets were still coming on one side, the Americans and British on the other. Other survivors in similar situations joined together. Helga decided it would be safer to travel with someone else. So Helga paired off with a lady who had sat and rested next to her on the rescue boat. The lady hoped to reach Dresden. Helga can’t remember the woman’s name, but her face lights up when she speaks of her these many years later.
“She had lost her oldest son in Königsberg and her youngest slipped out of her arms on the Gustloff. Now she had to write to her husband who was in army and tell him. She asked me to come with her. I said ‘I have no shoes.’ The lady said ‘I have no coat.’ We left together after a nurse scrounged up a coat for the lady and shoes for me,” Helga said.
Together the mother without a child and the sister without a sibling walked to an airfield. It took them nearly two hours. Helga’s legs felt numb. Finally, they arrived in Dresden. Almost two weeks later, Helga decided to continue on the road to Berlin. She was so appreciative of the woman’s graciousness but now it was time to leave.
What should have been a two- or three-hour trip took eight hours. At one point the train stopped in its track in the middle of the forest. Helga peered out the window. She saw a phantasmagoric outline of trees and little else. The train shook up, down, and from side to side. The Allies were firebombing the baroque city of Dresden, best known for its delicate porcelain dolls. In four raids in mid-February 1945, British and American planes participated in the firebombing of Dresden in support of the Red Army’s drive on that city.16
Eva Dorn isn’t sure how long she floated in the lifeboat before the T-36 under the command of Captain Hering came alongside. Sailors from the torpedo boat started pulling Gustloff survivors up from the lifeboat. Eva was the last one in the lifeboat when the T-36 crew received a warning that enemy submarines were in the area. It was going to leave, even though Eva remained. “Throw me something,” Eva yelled. Down came a seaman’s chair. Shaped like a triangle, it’s what sailors sat on while cleaning or painting the side of a ship. She had to jump over the water to catch the chair and she worried she’d miss. A dead woman floated in the water. With every wave her head banged against the side of the T-36, her hair undulated like seaweed. Eva held her breath and jumped. She caught the chair and was pulled up. Eva Dorn became the last of the 564 survivors pulled aboard the T-36.
The sailors ushered her down iron steps to the engine room, the warmest part on the ship. She undressed and put her clothes on a machine to dry. The room was crowded with survivors and smelled of wet clothes.
Hours later the T-36 reached Sassnitz where the Red Cross was busy helping sort out the survivors; because Eva was a member of the Women’s Naval Auxiliary, she was directed to a military barracks on the island. She spent the night there in a room with 14 other young women. In the morning Eva went to the laundry and washed her seawater and vomit-encrusted uniform. She received a four-week leave of absence and decided to go home to Halle (Saale). Her mother, Aliza, opened the door. She thought Eva had returned because she’d received the cable about her sister-in-law dying in childbirth. No, Eva told her mother, she hadn’t heard. Rather, she was on leave. She sat next to her mother on the sofa. She told her the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff. “My mother looked at me and said, ‘How terrible, but couldn’t you have saved at least one suitcase?’ She just didn’t get it,” Eva said.17
Finally, Serafima Tschinkur understood that her niece, 13-year-old Evi, had not survived the torpedo attack and had drowned in the icy sea. Neither Ellen nor Irene remembers talking about their despair at the time. After a day or so at the Sassnitz camp, the three Tschinkurs were taken to the mainland where they received train passes from the German authorities. They were lodged in a home for a couple of days and were given clothes to wear. “For many years we kept a handmade lavender-and-white triangle shawl until it fell apart in Canada. That’s all we had to remember from the Isle of Ruegen,” Irene said.
Serafima decided to travel to Poznan, a risk since the Russians were headed there; however, she needed to find Evi’s mother, her sister. Their train passes allowed them to sit in a compartment normally reserved for officers. So the three sat, not talking very much, when two officers entered the cabin. Ellen still remembers the high sheen of their boots and just how clean they looked. The pair sat facing the Tschinkurs. Ever so meticulously the two peeled opened wax paper bags. Inside were neatly cut sandwiches.
“We just looked at those sandwiches. We couldn’t turn our eyes away from them,” Ellen said.
Before taking their first bites, the officers motioned for the conductor. Clearly agitated, the two demanded to know, “What are these persons doing in our car?” The conductor explained the family had just survived a torpedo attack. That quieted the officers but didn’t make them generous. They ate slowly, methodically chewing every morsel.
Once in Poznan the three Tschinkurs went directly to their Aunt Irene’s house.
“The worst part of all of this was not the shipwreck. It was when they got to my Aunt Irene’s house,” Irene said. “When she opened the door, she held my face in her hands. ‘Evi?’ My mother gently pushed me aside. She had to tell her Evi died.” Their Aunt Irene quaked with grief.
Nearly seven decades later, Irene and Ellen sit together in Irene’s home. An advent candle, much like the one they lit when they were children, sits on the table covered with a cream-colored hand-crocheted cloth. Irene tells how she publishes Evi’s picture in the local newspaper every five years. It’s just a reminder, she said, a simple, but important way to memorialize her.
Irene pushes back her chair and takes a framed picture off the wall. Under the glass is the two-page letter their mother wrote to a friend after the war. The yellow lined paper is an unexpected gift; they only recently discovered its exist
ence. Irene and her sister Ellen now know how their mother remembered those first moments after they literally fell off the Wilhelm Gustloff.
“After a long search I found Ellen two days after the catastrophe in Sassnitz, nobody could give me any news about Evchen. We were not allowed to stay in Sassnitz and had to move on. Without clothes (even the clothes we wore disappeared while “drying”), in torn clothes, without food, no food stamps and without . . . bread I went with my 2 children to Harz where Oma and Reny [Aunt Irene] were. That is how I got to Gandersheim. Now, dear Otti, you can imagine my situation, how could I tell Reny that I did not know where Evchen was. At this moment I wondered, why Evchen? It would have been better if one of my children had gone missing,” Serafima wrote.
Ellen speaks. She looks around, her eyes settling on one of the many black and white photographs covering the table. She looks at the photo of Evi, in which her light hair is pulled back in a braid, her face tilted away—a happy, serene look on Evi’s face.
“How do you tell parents you lost their child? I just felt so guilty,” Ellen said, adding that their Aunt Irene died of tuberculosis soon afterward. “Truthfully? We never talked about it. We never talked about. Why did the three of us survive? It’s not fair. But then I ask, how could three members of a family survive it at all? It boggles my mind.”
Ten
THE FORGOTTEN STORY
For nearly 70 years the survivors of the Wilhelm Gustloff have lived in a world where most people are ignorant of the tragedy they endured. Upward of 9,000 people died in this event, making it the worst maritime disaster in history. By contrast 1,517 died when the RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912, and 1,198 people died when the Lusitania sank in World War One.
In his report on the sinking, Admiral Karl Dönitz highlighted the situation in the Baltic Sea as the main reason for the disaster. He said the lack of German aerial reconnaissance and the need for the German navy to concentrate on securing refugee convoys rather than hunt for enemy submarines enabled the Russian submarines to “go about undisturbed in the Baltic Sea.”1 Even so, Dönitz stressed that Operation Hannibal saved the lives of nearly 2 million people. Yet, the operation and the sinking remain one of the lesser-known events of World War Two.
The reasons why this story has remained unfamiliar are varied and complicated. There were no celebrities or tycoons aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, and the German media controlled everything about the ship’s departure and sinking. These two factors helped the catastrophe become a non-event from that perspective. Furthermore, that a Soviet submarine operating in present-day Polish territorial waters sank a German ship was not something the West was especially concerned about in the war’s immediate aftermath. Cold War politics took precedence.
While it is now estimated that fewer than 1,000 people survived Captain Alexander Marinesko’s swift torpedo strike, there can never be a precise count of either the survivors or the dead since no exact record of passengers exists.2 This is often the case with World War Two events in which figures might be expected but the tragedies are so often measured in estimated numbers.
The survivors had lost not only their belongings but their documents too. Very few survivors had papers and precious objects, such as the photos Helga Reuter had in her trousers or the pocketknife Horst Woit had hidden in his ski pants. The priority for the survivors was to connect with family and figure out where to go. Meanwhile, German authorities handled the sinking with their customary clinical precision; they recorded the names of survivors, processed surviving sailors and Women’s Naval Auxiliary, and buried the dead in communal graves in Gotenhafen. They also made sure not to allow news of the sinking to spread.
On February 21, 1945, 22 days after the S-13 attacked and sank the Wilhelm Gustloff, the Swedish newspaper Afton Bladet published an article about the tragedy. The event received scant attention in the American press. The New York Times published a brief mention: “The Finnish radio reported tonight the sinking of the 25,000-ton German liner Wilhelm Gustloff. . . . The Wilhelm Gustloff, a passenger liner before the war, had been converted into a troop transport.”3 The event wouldn’t be mentioned again until 1955, when a news brief in the New York Times marked the tenth anniversary of the sinking, calling it “the greatest single toll on the European seas during World War Two.”4
Likewise, Soviet newspapers didn’t mention the attack. Of course, not one word of the sinking appeared in German newspapers since the Third Reich buried the news. In its final death throes, Nazi Germany would not permit such clear evidence of its defeat to be publicized. The Gustloff had shone as the crown jewel of the KdF fleet. The S-13’s sinking of the ship delivered an irreparable blow to the Third Reich. It was a death knell for Hitler’s grand scheme. A strategic success for the Soviet Union, Alexander Marinesko’s attack had destroyed a Nazi symbol.
An Allied propaganda newspaper in German, dropped over German territory by Allied planes, did publish a full-page article headlined “Wilhelm Gustloff, Catastrophe,” on February 19, 1945.5 The article related how the former KdF liner turned refugee ship was attacked:
Eastern fugitives and armed forces members were onboard when the ship ran out of Gotenhafen. . . . The Wilhelm Gustloff left nevertheless on the evening of January 30th with the perfectly insufficient security of an outpost boat and two R boats. All decks of the Wilhelm Gustloff so were stuffed that no person was able to move. . . . Many passengers who were hurled into the sea in the capsizing of the ship hardened in the icy water before aid could be brought them. Survivors report of the frightening scenes that happened after the explosion on board the ship. . . . Women and children were involved in the embittered battle that ensued around the few lifeboats; women and children were knocked ruthlessly overboard.6
Still, after these early and brief accounts, the postwar literature veered away from anything having to do with East Prussia, the eastern front, and the fate of German civilians. Few knew, for example, that Royal Air Force bombs and Soviet ground troops nearly destroyed historic Königsberg. In the aftermath of the war, few knew about KZ Stutthof, the first German extermination camp in East Prussia, where more than 85,000 Jewish and non-Jewish inmates perished. Few knew of the Steuben, another KdF boat that sank with more than 4,000 people on board after Marinesko’s sub attacked it too. The Steuben was a hospital ship but its markings were not visible in the dark night with foul weather. Indeed, few knew of the many other boats, large and small, that were sunk. Marinesko and the S-13 were ultimately responsible for about 14,000 deaths at sea.
Nearly 70 years ago, on January 31, 1945, Admiral Karl Dönitz conferred with Adolf Hitler during a meeting with naval leadership. The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff merited an ever-so-brief mention. Rear Admiral Conrad Englehardt had heard the news first and immediately informed his superior, Dönitz.
Thus, when Admiral Karl Dönitz heard of the sinking, he reacted pragmatically. Operation Hannibal was in its first phase. Hundreds of thousands of more refugees needed to cross the Baltic Sea. Dwelling on the catastrophe would serve no one.
“In connection with the sinking of the passenger steamer Wilhelm Gustloff by submarine torpedoes on the outer route north of Stolpe Bank, the Commander-in-Chief, Navy, declares that with the extensive transports in the Baltic Sea, it was realized from the start that there would be losses. Painful though these losses were, they represented only 1 percent of the total brought out by sea; 99 percent succeeded in arriving safely at ports on the western Baltic,” Dönitz said in a meeting with key aides. “On the other hand, the percentage of refugees lost on the overland route was very much higher.”7
Dönitz stressed that Soviet submarines continued to operate undisturbed throughout the Baltic Sea only because there were no German aircraft overhead ready to strike. Moreover, Dönitz said, the only practical defense against submarines is the radar-equipped aircraft, “the same weapon which enabled the enemy to paralyze our own submarine warfare.”8
Admiral Dönitz remarked that even had
a U-boat escorted the Wilhelm Gustloff on her bold dash across the sea, it’s not likely that would have prevented the S-13’s assault. Still, they decided to make sure more escorts attended future transports across the sea. If nothing else, a more pronounced presence would give an appearance of safety and reassure the hundreds of thousands of people still awaiting evacuation under Operation Hannibal.
Earlier in the war, U-boats had escorted Germany auxiliary cruisers, blockade-runners, and supply ships as they left and entered harbors. But U-boats stood very little “chance of being able to protect its charge if it were attacked and would be quite powerless to help if it were sunk by the enemy. Such enemy attacks would, of course, be delivered either from the air or by long-range gunfire from an enemy warship, and it would take good care to keep well beyond the range of the U-boats, which it would [be presumed were] escorting the surface vessel; accordingly having sunk the ship, it would still keep its distance and then disappear.”9
In spite of the small attention paid to the sinking during Admiral Karl Dönitz’s meeting with Hitler, Captain Wilhelm Zahn was called before a board of inquiry five days after the sinking. He told the board that his orders included supervising the rescue equipment and signaling, as well as counseling the ship’s leadership in all military matters. However, Zahn said, he never received an order to take command over the civilian leadership, namely Captain Friedrich Petersen. “It is naturally difficult without a higher order to give a 63-year-old captain with 50 years of experience an order without the authority to do so,” Zahn said.10 “In this particular case all of my suggestions were deemed unfeasible.” Zahn told the board that he was given no orders to zigzag, no indication that such a defensive maneuver was even necessary. Although his superiors didn’t discipline Zahn, his naval career essentially ended when the boat went down.
Death in the Baltic Page 17