The Cruelest Night Author:Christopher Dobson, John Miller, Ronald Payne The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, with a loss of as many as 7,000 lives, is marked by ironies. Although the ship carried civilians and wounded soldiers, it was recognizably a legitimate military target owing to its contingent of German naval personnel as well as its armament (anti-aircraft guns). The Soviet submarine which sunk the Gustloff h... more »ad been built before the war as part of the clandestine Soviet-Nazi military cooperation. The Gustloff sailed from Gothenhafen, the renamed Polish port of Gdynia which the Germans had seized as part of their conquest of Poland in 1939. The refugees crammed into the doomed ship, having escaped the attentions of the avenging Soviet land forces, fell instead to the Soviet Navy.
The Soviet commander, ostensibly a hero for killing fascists, ended up in Siberia, and it took nearly twenty years for him to be totally vindicated. The whole range of human behaviors was exhibited by the humans once the three torpedoes hit.
Some civilians cried helplessly and were paralyzed by fear into inaction. Others were methodical in their attempts to save themselves. Some men gave up their life jackets. Other men fought off women and children in order to get the lifeboats and rafts for themselves. The ship's crew was also preferentially saved. The last survivor was an infant who was discovered at first dawn, hours after the sinking, surrounded by the huddled-together frozen bodies of his relatives on a floating lifeboat or raft.« less