Well, you’d have been crazy to set sail at that time with no protection and not blacked out. The whole war was open season on civilian and merchant shipping. Just a convenient excuse for the atrocity. It was carrying 9,000 refugees. It was refugee ship.

“…concluded that the Wilhelm Gustloff was carrying a crew of 173 (naval armed forces auxiliaries), 918 officers, NCOs, and men of the 2nd Submarine Training Division (2. Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision), 373 female naval auxiliary helpers, 162 wounded soldiers, and 8,956 civilians, for a total of 10,582 passengers and crew…”

“As the ship’s equipment included antiaircraft weapons, it had been travelling blacked-out, it was not marked as a hospital ship, no notification of it operating in a hospital capacity had been given, and as it was transporting combat troops, it did not have any protection as a hospital ship under the international accords governing this.”

A tragedy indeed but futher down the page we read: “Günter Grass, in an interview published in The New York Times on Tuesday 8 April 2003 said, “One of the many reasons I wrote Crabwalk was to take the subject away from the extreme Right…They said the tragedy of the Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn’t. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war.”"