Gone and Forgotten

the Wilhelm Gustloff                                             Russ Willoughby Collection

We all know the story of the RMS (which stands for Royal Mail Ship, btw) Titanic, if not the real one, then Hollywood's version, and most of us think of it as the greatest accident involving a passenger-carrying ship ever. But it wasn't. Maybe we don't know about the Wilhelm Gustloff because it sank in the last year of World War II, or maybe it was because it was a German ship named after a Nazi leader, or maybe it was because it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, and at the time, we thought of the Soviets as our allies. But it was carrying more than 10,000 people, mostly refugees, half of whom were children, and the death toll was six times that of the Titanic. from wisegeek.com:

Most people know about the Titanic, the large passenger ship that sank in 1912. Some even believe it to be the worst maritime disaster, ever. But the worst maritime disaster in history is actually the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German military ship which sank in 1945, causing the deaths of an estimated 9,343 people on board. The death toll was six times the death toll of the Titanic disaster which took the lives of 1,517 people.

The Wilhelm Gustloff was a 700-feet long luxury liner that began cruising in 1937. By 1945, it was serving to evacuate German civilians from East Prussia which was quickly being taken over by the
Soviet Red Army. On 30 January, 1945, the ship, which had been designed to carry 2,000 passengers at most, was carrying 10,582 German refugees and soldiers, almost half of whom were children. The ship was hit by a Soviet submarine, killing the majority of the passengers.

More about the Wilhelm Gustloff:

• The ship was named after Wilhelm Gustloff, leader of the Swiss Nazi Party who was assassinated in 1936.


• The navigation lights, which the captains of Wilhelm Gustloff had turned on to avoid collision with a German convoy, made the ship visible to the Soviet submarine.


• The Soviet submarine hit the Wilhelm Gustloff with three torpedoes.