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.
Maybe because the rules of war when fighting the Soviets were different. No one spared. Sure, 9k odd innocent lives go down in the Gustav, but let’s face it, a rare occurrence. Considering the methods and frequency of the Einsatzgruppe (with the help of their buds the Abwher - who until fairly recently, were considered have behaved ‘honorably’ on the eastern front) who could almost take up to three days to liquidate 6,000 men, women and children in places like Belorossiya, so no biggie really. The Nazis gave no quarter (my apologies to Led Zep) and none in return. Add to that a psychopathic georgian was running the SU at the time who’s orders were somewhat maximalist, well…
Rant over, but off on a tangent, are ‘war crimes’ worse than ‘peace crimes’? Sticking to the naval theme, I”m particularly thinking of the story of the SS Exodus springs to mind. In war, extremes become the norm. and tend to fry the brain, but in peace time the calculated pro-con comes into play. Why is it the brits (and other ‘moral powers’ are so clinical about their own atrocities, but so ‘hot’ about others? I suppose it has something to do with perspective and pretending that history doesn’t really live….
Well, the context here is maritime disasters, which as you say, pale into insignificance when compared to the land-based massacres. You might liken it also to the way airline disasters receive more coverage than the daily deaths on the roads.
Isabel Denny’s book is careful to detail the ‘provocation’ received by Russians. I agree about the double standards. When the British bombed Dresden it was largely full of refugees. Some Germans had the misfortune of escaping from Konigsberg to Dresden.
The whole issue of ‘war crimes’ is a difficult one and surely the term is itself an anachronism, since modern warfare is waged against civilians.
I wouldn’t really call it a ‘maritime disaster’ either as I think that kind of implies and accident in peace time (i.e. your allegory with the Titanic), which I gather it certainly was not, hence my comment about war crimes which if the Gustav (I assume) was painted white and had great big red crosses painted on the sides, which it certainly was. Not that I think getting into relativism about war crimes is particularly healthy nor desirable, yet ultimately difficult to avoid.
The Titanic, definitely yes, though research has shown sloppy engineering and or the wrong materials would lead to a trial of criminal negligence these days. Sorry to be picky but every time I go to a bloody book store, a good half-dozen ‘best-sellers’ on the presentation shelves are about how bad Russians/their leaders are, so another what appears to be a good book on a lesser known historical incident kind of adds to the impression, regardless of its stature.
I really need to stop being so grumpy (not helped by the masses of rubbish being put out over the current excitement in Georgia), up my Gin & Tonic uptake and chill out! BTW, did you see that Yushenko recently said David Zhvania had something to do with his poisoning?
I followed up with a bit of reasearch and found:
http://www.wilhelmgustloff.com/history.htm
I came across it via this post by Igor 1: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-44872.html
It looks like I was wrong when I assumed it was painted white and had prominent big red crosses on it….
ja si myslím že je titanic ovela ale ovela lepsia lod wilhem neni taka známa aj mam dvokazi píše sa o titanicu jednej knihe tuto sobotu na spektrume sa ukazovali z titanicu veci aj sa ukazovali foto ale o wilheme sa skoro nespomína skoro vobeca tita nic je ovela,ovela lepsia visia lod ako wilhelm a zomrelo na nej viac ludí a je to najznámejšia a najlepšia lod je to proste najrýchlejšia lod to sa hovorí vo filme ale aj hovorili na spektrume že je to najlepšia lod a že je najrýchlejšia
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