The Damned Don't Drown - The Sinking of the `Wilhelm Gustloff'

The Wilhelm Gustloff was one of Nazi Germany's most vaunted Strength-Through-Joy cruise liners, but by January 1945 she was one of the last ships to leave the Gulf of Danzig before the Russian armies swept in. She took on board a mixed cargo of refugees, fleeing peasants, fragmented army units, train- and truck-loads of German wounded, and remnants of Prussian garrisons, members of the German Wimen's Naval Service, and scores of SS officers and top-ranking Nazis. She was heavily overloaded, with an estimated 6500 crammed on board, when she left Gotenhafen on a bitter January day, Twelve miles offshore she was torpedoed. A minesweeper in the area, alert for further attack, could only pick up a small number of survivors. Panic broke out on board Gustloff, and there were scenes of appalling horror side by side with heroism and selflessness. An SOS message brought the cruiser Hipper and an escorting destroyer to the rescue, but there was little they could do, and in the end only about 500 people survived from the Gustloff. Measured in terms of loss of life, this was the greatest sea disaster ever recorded,,,