More Tragic Than The Titanic

This is the Wilhelm Gustloff, all set to sail on an exotic cruise from Hamburg. It was built during the golden age of luxury liners, a floating showcase of shining brass, polished mahogany, pampering cabin staff and Captain’s Table cuisine.

During wartime it was pressed into service as a hospital ship. On its last voyage it was torpedoed while evacuating those fleeing the East Prussian front. As it listed and sank, some 9000 perished in the icy Baltic waters. Half of the dead were children.

The fate of the Wihelm Gustloff is an episode in a recent book by Isabel Denny about Konigsberg, ‘The Rise And Fall Of Hitler’s Fortress Town‘. Digging into Konigsberg/Kaliningrad history tends to turn over a lot of old bones. Konigsberg, like Dresden and Magdeburg, was one of those unfortunate German towns trashed and burned twice over, once by RAF fire-bombing and once by the Red Army.

This stuff is not usually for the squeamish. Isabel, however, writes well about the crazed mood of ‘anything goes’ revenge at the end of the war. Years of war, hunger and death led to a breakdown of society and inevitably to some of the greatest – and most unnecessesary – atrocities coming right at the end of the war, when the fight against Germany was really won and dusted. Konigsberg itself was surrounded and 100 kilometers behind enemy lines when the Red Army started its final assault.

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is one of the world’s biggest but least known maritime disasters in history. It has never made it into pop culture. The curator of the excellent Wilhelm Gustloff site suggests a number of reasons. Certainly there was no Hollywood factor – no famous people were drowned – while Germany’s war guilt has always minimised the terrible retribution its people endured.

But perhaps the most interesting anecdote is about the submarine commander, Alexander Marinesko, who fired the fateful torpedos.

By all accounts, Alexander was both an ambitious Soviet officer and a wild card. He was known to fudge and exaggerate reports of his crew’s exploits. And worst of all, during the war, he disappeared for three days while onshore in Hanko with a Swedish restaurant hostess. In Stalinist times, fraternising with foreigners was one of the most heinous crimes imaginable. Girls who had as much as a one night stand with the brave allied sailors from the Atlantic Convoys relieving Murmansk and Archaengelsk were regularly sent to the Gulag.

So, there was no hero’s medal for Alexander Marinesko after the sinking the great ‘fascist ship’ . His exploit was never headlined in Soviet propaganda of the day. The NKVD had a file on Marinesko and their attentions soon drove him to drink. In the same year as the fabled sinking, he was dismissed from the navy. By 1949, he found himself in a prison camp accused of common theft.

But twenty years later, things turned around. For some reason, a Soviet postcard from the seventies appears dramatising the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff refugee ship as if it were an even contest.

Even later, in 1990, Alexander was finally rehabilitated by Gorbachev with the hero’s medal he always wanted. Too bad he died in 1963. But move on another two decades, and Russians are wondering whether the remaining monument to Alexander Marinesko, in Kaliningrad, is ‘appropriate’.

If you can bear to read them, books like Isabel Denny’s are a very good insight into our changing brainframes, views and sympathies about the past. No matter who’s side you were on. Just this episode shows you that history is rewritten not once but several times over.