The Deadliest Ship Disaster in History Wasn’t the Titanic

The deadliest maritime disaster of all time wasn’t the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 or the Lusitania in 1915. That unfortunate distinction belongs to a more recent, but far less famous, catastrophe: the torpedoing of the German ocean liner Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945.

While no one will ever know the exact death toll, historians estimate that as many as 9,000 men, women and children died aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, compared with about 1,500 aboard the Titanic and 1,200 aboard the Lusitania.

The Wilhelm Gustloff remains little more than a footnote in maritime history. Why it has largely been forgotten is just one of many mysteries surrounding the ship, including tantalizing rumors that it was carrying priceless treasures that remain at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

The Gustloff began its career as a cruise ship designed to take German workers on subsidized vacations, part of the Nazi government’s Strength Through Joy recreation program aimed at winning over the masses. By many accounts the ship was originally slated to be named the Adolf Hitler but was instead named for Wilhelm Gustloff, a Nazi official in Switzerland, after his assassination made him a martyr to the Third Reich. Hitler, himself, delivered the eulogy at Gustloff’s funeral in 1936, attended the ship’s launching in 1937 and took a guided tour after its completion. The Wilhelm Gustloff even had a special set of secure rooms known as the Hitler Suite, though he never used it.

Sleek and modern, with a bright white hull and single funnel bearing a stylized swastika, the 684-foot-long vessel was deliberately less opulent than some ships of the era—Hitler himself called it “the working man’s Europa,” after one of the most luxurious German ocean liners afloat. But it still had all the amenities passengers could ask for, including an indoor swimming pool and plenty of deck chairs for relaxing in the sun.

Through 1938 and well into 1939, the Gustloff carried thousands of passengers on subsidized cruises to the Norwegian fjords and Mediterranean ports, like Naples and Venice in fascist Italy. Counting the Gustloff and older ships requisitioned for the purpose, 180,000 Germans set sail in 1938 alone, according to A Social History of the Third Reich by British historian Richard Grunberger.

The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 marked the beginning of World War II and the end of the Gustloff’s life of leisure. It was pressed into service as a hospital ship, supporting Germany’s 1940 invasions of Denmark and Norway and reinforcing skeptics’ suspicions that it had been intended as a military asset all along. In 1938, The New York Times even ran an article suggesting that it and similar ships with long upper decks and a single funnel might “quickly be converted into aircraft carriers.”

Later that year, the Gustloff relocated to the Baltic seaport of Gotenhafen, now Gdynia in Poland, to become a floating barracks for German sailors training for submarine duty. Painted naval gray to make it a less conspicuous target for enemy bombers, the Gustloff spent the next four years moored there.

Then, in early 1945, with the war turning against it, Germany launched Operation Hannibal, a huge effort to evacuate German civilians and military personnel from the region before the advancing Soviet Red Army arrived. Refugees by the thousands poured into the port city to escape the coming invaders, whose brutality toward German civilians was fueled in part by vengeance for Nazi atrocities in the Soviet Union. The Gustloff was chosen to be one of the evacuation vessels.

Germany’s first priority was to get its troops out of harm’s way, especially those who had already been wounded in the fighting. With land routes cut off, that meant enlisting a vast fleet of ships, both large and small. Space permitting, the ships would also evacuate civilians, with women and children taking precedence.

Because it wouldn’t be a very long voyage—just 300 miles to the west, where the German port of Kiel was considered safe territory—the officers in charge saw no problem with packing the ships with far more passengers than they would ordinarily have held. The Gustloff, which carried just under 1,500 passengers in its cruising days, officially took on about 6,000 before the number grew to more than 10,000, by current estimates.

In addition to cabins, passengers slept in hallways and closets, on the floors of the large public rooms, in the drained swimming pool and basically anywhere a human body could squeeze in. As cramped and uncomfortable as it was, most were grateful to be escaping the horrors they feared at the hands of the Soviets.

The Gustloff had four captains on board, each with strong opinions about the course the ship should follow. Hugging the coast was one option. That would lessen the risk of a Soviet submarine attack but also put the ship at greater risk of hitting a mine. The alternative was sailing farther from shore, where mines had largely been cleared but submarines might be lurking. Ultimately, the Gustloff rejected the coastal route and headed for deeper water.

Shortly after noon on January 30, 1945, the Gustloff set off for Kiel. Snow was falling heavily, the air was freezing cold, and the sea was choppy, making countless passengers violently seasick. Meanwhile the four escort vessels that the Gustloff’s captains expected to accompany their ship had dwindled to just two, one of which then broke down and had to return to port. The weather brought some consolation: The captains believed that the near-blizzard conditions lessened the odds of an attack by enemy planes.

Beneath the waves, however, there lurked a more serious menace. A Soviet submarine, the S-13, sighted the Gustloff at about 8 p.m. and began following it. The sub’s captain, Alexander Marinesko, later said he recognized that the large ship was an ocean liner, and “I was sure that it was packed with men who had trampled on Mother Russia and were now fleeing for their lives. It had to be sunk.” After two hours of tailing its prey, the sub maneuvered into position within 2,000 yards of the Gustloff and prepared to fire four torpedoes in succession. All four had earlier been inscribed: “For the Motherland,” “For Stalin,” “For the Soviet People” and “For Leningrad.”

“For Stalin” got stuck in its launch tube, but the other three struck the ship. Hundreds of the passengers crammed below decks most likely died instantly in the explosions, hundreds more as the water rushed into the hull. One captain ordered crew members to close the ship’s watertight doors, effectively entombing anyone in the forward part of the ship. Almost immediately, the Gustloff began to list to its port side.

“This made escape from lower decks impossible,” writes Cathryn J. Prince in her 2013 book, Death in the Baltic. “Staircases tilted at crazy angles and stairs were hard to climb, especially for those with young children and babies. Indeed between 1,000 and 2,000 people died in the first few minutes after the attack.”

Not surprisingly, given that the ship had taken on thousands of passengers beyond its usual capacity, there were far fewer lifeboats on board than needed. What’s more, the boats that were available often proved impossible to launch because of the freezing cold or the dangerous angle of the ship. As the Gustloff began to list even more, many passengers had to take their chances in the icy waters.

Meanwhile, a German torpedo boat, the T-36, hurried to the scene, arriving before the Gustloff had completely disappeared beneath the surface. While thousands of passengers were already dead or dying, its crew managed to save 564 of them. As other boats joined the rescue attempt, they “kept coming upon an all too familiar sight: aimlessly drifting lifeboats filled with the frozen dead,” Prince wrote. “Some of the people had died from exposure, others from the sheer exhaustion of trying to balance on rickety life rafts…. From inside the rafts and lifeboats, a maddening chorus of women, children, and men filled the air.”

By early morning the chorus had gone silent. All that remained was a seascape of debris and dead bodies. In the end, Prince writes, it’s now estimated that “fewer than 1,000 people survived.”

The sinking of the Gustloff received scant media attention at the time. The New York Times, for example, ran a couple of brief items on its inside pages, but other war news quickly displaced it. That included Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945, three months to the day after the disaster. With Germany’s defeat and the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, the world moved on.

Prince says she believes a major reason for the silence was that “survivors wouldn’t, or felt they couldn’t, talk about what happened to them and the governments involved were uninterested in talking about it because it would have invited an examination of their own actions during the war.”

Today, the wreck of the Gustloff rests in about 150 feet of water, about 20 miles off the Polish coast. Because Poland considers it a war grave, divers are forbidden from visiting the wreck without permission. An international team of divers that was able to explore and photograph it in 2003 found that while portions remained largely intact, a large middle section had been ripped apart decades earlier, apparently during Soviet salvage operations. Some writers suggest they might have been searching for lost remnants of the legendary Amber Room, part of a Russian palace that Nazis looted. Others speculate that the ship could have been transporting crates of stolen Nazi gold.

Prince says her research points to a more mundane explanation, that the Soviet divers “were looking for whatever advanced technology they thought the Germans might have on the ship.” In fact, few experts who have studied the Gustloff put much credence in the rumors of a precious cargo, exciting as that might be to contemplate. The human cargo was precious enough—and most of it was lost forever.