Maritime Disasters: MV Wilhelm Gustloff - Operation Hannibal

Operation Hannibal and the Last Voyage

The Wilhelm Gustloff as a hospital ship off the coast of Oslo, Norway; 1940

For four years, between 1941-1945, the Gustloff had remained at anchor. During this time, it was used mostly to house sailors and submariners, but by 1944 and the Invasion of Normandy in June of that year, the War started going bad for Germany, especially on the Eastern Front. Operation Barbarossa, the attempt by Hitler to invade the Soviet Union, was a complete disaster and now the Russians wanted revenge. By January 1945, the German army was fighting off Italy, Russia, England, America, Commonwealth troops, Free French fighters and resistence-fighters on almost every front imaginable and it was rapidly losing the war.

As the Russian army pushed westward across Eastern Europe towards Poland, Operation Hannibal was executed.

Operation Hannibal was nothing less than the biggest seaborne evacuation in military history. It even eclipsed the famous Dunkirk Evacuation when the “little ships” were used to evacuate Allied soldiers from the beaches of France in 1940. In total, Operation Hannibal was going to try and evacuate about one and a quarter to two million people in roughly a thousand ships over the course of fifteen weeks. 

One of those ships, was the M.V. Wilhelm Gustloff.

On the 22nd of January, 1945, the Wilhelm Gustloff is given the order to prepare to take on thousands of escaping German refugees. Many are women, children and wounded soldiers. German civilians are terrified of what retributions the Russians might unleash as they sweep westwards and many want to escape back to Germany as fast as possible. The Wilhelm Gustloff is at anchor in the port city of Gdynia, German-Occuped Poland. The crew are worried. Apart from the fact that they have to house so many thousands of people, they are worried about the mechanical strain; the Gustloff’s engines have been cold for the past four years while it was in harbour, and there is no time to run the necessary maintenance and safety-checks. 

On the 28th of January, the Gustloff’s crew receive the order to prepare for evacuation. Thousands of refugees, mostly sailors, nurses, civilians and wounded soldiers file onboard, each person bearing a permit of travel that allows them refugee status and permission to board the Gustloff.

Gustloff’s last voyage took place on the 30th of January, 1945. On this day, the ship is ordered to raise anchor and steam westwards towards the German city of Kiel. The official passenger manifest lists about 3,000 people onboard (the Gustloff is rated to carry only 1,800 passengers and crew), but even this is not even close. In the panic of evacuations, thousands of people who aren’t supposed to be there, force their way onboard the already dangerously overcrowded ship. Even as the Gustloff leaves the harbour, people are offloaded onto the ship from harbour-tugs which pull up alongside while their passengers climb on, using the ship’s boarding-stairs. In total, the Gustloff is carrying about ten and a half thousand people. 

January 30th, 1945. The Gustloff leaves Poland. This is the last photograph ever taken of the ship

Onboard the Gustloff, things are far from easy. The ship is crammed so far beyond capacity that even with extra safety-equipment onboard, there is only enough lifeboats, flotation-vests and life-rings for less than half the ship’s full complement of passengers and crew. The passenger-quarters are so full that any space at all is fair-game as a sleeping-area during the voyage back to Germany. 

On the bridge, the Gustloff is in the combined command of four captains, three civilian captains and one military one. They argue constantly on the best precautions to take. Do they turn off the ship’s lights to prevent detection? Do they stay near the coast where Soviet submarines will find it harder to patrol? Do they go into deeper water away from the shoreline where lights from cities will certainly outline the shape of the ship? Do they go straight ahead to make the most of what short time they have, or do they steer a conventional wartime zig-zag course to try and throw off enemy submarines who might try and torpedo them? 

The only thing that the captains seemed to agree on was that their escort was wholly inadequate. All they had was one torpedo-boat, the Lowe, to protect them from the formidable force of the Russians and anything that they could throw against them. The ship was a sitting duck.