Even their tears froze

This year saw the 70th anniversary of the worst maritime disaster in history. We know oddly little about it. But the books are there, and they tell a tale of epic horror

What was the worst-ever maritime disaster, in terms of lives lost? Some would say the Titanic, but they’d be quite wrong. Not even close. In fact, with just over 1,500 dead, it lies in fifth or sixth place even in the list of peacetime disasters (the worst was the ferry Doña Paz, which collided with a tanker when on passage from Leyte to Manila in 1987; the death toll was not much less than 5,000). If you count wartime disasters, the Titanic is a footnote; it is not even the worst loss of life on a British ship (that was the Lancastria off St Nazaire in 1940). But the worst of all was the Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945. The death toll was twice that of the Doña Paz, and six times that of the Titanic; and many, possibly half, of the dead were children.

The Wilhelm Gustloff at Danzig in late September 1939 (Bundesarchiv)

There is plenty of material available on the disaster in German. In English there is much less. However, a brief book by a British journalist, A.V. Sellwood, appeared in 1974. The “standard” work, The Cruellest Night (Cruelest in the US), by Christopher Dobson, John Miller and Ronald Payne, was published in 1979. Now there is a third account, Cathryn J. Prince’s Death in the Baltic (2013). Finally, there is an English edition of a novel – Crabwalk, the last novel by Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass. All, in their different ways, shed light on a story that is barely known in the English-speaking world. And they invest it with an epic horror that makes the Titanic banal.

II

The Wilhelm Gustloff was large – over 25,000 tons (just over half as big as the Titanic). She had been built in the 1930s as a cruise liner for the Nazi Strength through Joy movement. Launched in 1937, she was named after a Nazi official in Switzerland who had been assassinated by a Jewish student the previous year. On January 30 1945 she lay in what is now the Polish port of Gdynia, where she was being used as a submarine depot ship.  The area had historically belonged to Germany, but had been ceded to Poland as part of the Treaty of Versailles, and the Poles had built a port there. Between the wars, it was in the Polish Corridor that reached the sea between Pomerania and East Prussia. The Germans had reoccupied it in 1939, but by the end of January the Soviet armies had effectively cut East Prussia off from the rest of Germany.

The commander-in-chief of the German navy, Großadmiral Dönitz, had foreseen this; unlike most of the German leadership, he had had the courage to plan for defeat.  On January 23 he had signalled Gdynia with the single word: HANNIBAL. According to The Cruellest Night, this was the command for the submarine arm to evacuate Gdynia. In fact, it set in train the far larger Operation Hannibal, by which not only large numbers of troops but also hundreds of thousands of civilians would be lifted from what was then eastern Germany and out of the path of the Russian advance.  A number of large liners besides the Wilhelm Gustloff were pressed into service, including the pride the Hamburg South America line, the Cap Arcona, said to be one of the most beautiful ships afloat; and a trio of large liners built in the 1920s for the North Atlantic run. These were the Deutschland and two slightly smaller liners: the General Steuben, and the Berlin III, remembered for its role in rescuing some of the passengers of the British liner Vestris in 1928. All of these ships would have a bad end, but in one case it would be long deferred.

The Wilhelm Gustloff was hurriedly readied for sea, despite having lain at Gdynia for the best part of four years.  The city was thronged with fleeing Germans, who fought for permits to board.  Submariners took priority, but over 4,000 civilian refugees were allowed on board, along with several hundred woman naval auxiliaries. There were also 162 wounded. According to Dobson, Miller and Payne, the final official list recorded 6,050 passengers and crew.  However, as the ship drew away from the quayside, it was forced to stop:

...a number of small boats drew alongside, each one filled with refugees, mostly women and children. They blocked the ship and from their crowded decks came pathetic shouts and appeals. “Take us with you. Save the children!” Nobody could resist such cries. The liner drifted while the crew put out gangways and scrambling nets and the last-minute refugees... struggled on to the Gustloff. No-one bothered to count them...

The ship did now leave Gdynia, in the company of another liner, the Hansa. It was early afternoon on January 30, and bitterly cold; there was hail, and one passenger noticed ice floating in the harbour. Their escort consisted only of two torpedo boats and a torpedo recovery vessel.  Shortly after leaving Gdynia, the Hansa and one of the torpedo boats developed engine trouble. The Gustloff  initially hove to but was ordered to proceed alone, escorted only by the torpedo recovery vessel and the torpedo boat. The authors describe the latter as “an ancient torpedo boat called the Löwe (Lion), which had been captured by the Germans during the Norwegian campaign in 1940.” In fact, the Löwe was technically not a torpedo boat but a destroyer, and was not ancient; built by the Norwegians for their own navy in 1938, she was moderately well-armed and, when new, would have made over 30 knots. It was still not a large escort for a large target.

The Soviet submarine force had failed so far. According to Dobson, Miller and Payne, its 218 submarines in 1941 had made it the largest undersea fleet of the day, but it had sunk just 108 merchant ships and 28 small warships by war’s end.  Until 1945 it had been bottled up in the eastern Baltic. But by January 30 the Soviet submarines had re-emerged into the Baltic, using their new access to Finnish ports. From one of these came the S13, commanded by an able but unstable maverick called Sasha Marinesko.  Just after 9 pm, he found the Gustloff off the coast of what was then Pomerania. Marinesko fired a fan of four torpedoes. One misfired. The remaining three struck home. The Gustloff sank in about 40 minutes.

Most of the passengers did not know how to get out; the embarkation had been chaotic and although there had been an attempt at a safety drill, not everyone heard it. The lifeboats were insufficient and in any case there were problems launching them, for the release and lowering mechanisms were iced over. There are several reports of passengers shooting their families before shooting themselves. The Löwe, another torpedo boat, the T36, and the torpedo recovery vessel recovered more; several other ships also participated, including the cruiser Admiral Hipper, which was in poor condition and being withdrawn to Kiel.

How many people actually died in the sinking is not known. As The Cruellest Night points out, to know that, one would have to know exactly how many people were on board when she left Gdynia, and no-one really does. Writing in 1979, the authors gave an estimate of 8,000. “It is known that 964 people were picked out of the sea, some of whom died later,” they say. “It is likely, therefore, that at least 7,000 people perished.” Actually it was more. After the war, Heinz Schön, an 18-year-old assistant purser who survived the sinking, went on to research and write extensively about the disaster, and became the foremost authority on it. Schön, who was interviewed by the authors in the 1970s, later concluded that there were not 8,000 but nearly 10,600 on board, of which he thought about 1,230 had survived. He put the eventual death toll at 9,343. An unknown but very large number (Schön thought nearly half) were children.

III

The Cruellest Night was not, in fact, the first book about the Gustloff in English. British journalist A. V. Sellwood heard of the sinking from survivors when he was covering the Berlin Airlift in 1948. In later years, as he researched several books about the war at sea, he heard more stories, and began to get an inkling of what an enormous disaster it had been. His book The Damned Don’t Drown was published in 1974. 

Sellwood was a journalist, not an historian. He wrote a number of popular non-fiction books, sometimes co-written with his wife, Mary, or others. Most were on the war at sea but they included one on Victorian railway murderers, and a 1964 “startling exposé” called Devil Worship in Britain. This journalistic approach is very evident in The Damned Don’t Drown. It sometimes grates. Sometimes he adopts the viewpoint of an eyewitness, which of course he was not, or writes as if he knew someone’s thoughts: “In one of the few intervals he could spare... [Captain] Petersen found time to wonder briefly how the passengers were finding it. ...he felt a twinge of sympathy for their plight.” Petersen did survive, but died a year or so later and won’t have spoken to the author. There is also very little explanation of how the ship was caught by the submarine; Sellwood simply says that it was “waiting in their path” and saw them by accident. In fact Petersen was so worried about collision with other German vessels that he was not taking evasive action, and had the navigation lights on.

But it doesn’t really matter, because that’s not what you read this book for. The strength of The Damned Don’t Drown is its survivors’ stories. As the ship started to sink, literally thousands of people were trapped below deck, and the stories of those who did get out are gripping. So are the accounts of the fights to get into the lifeboats, the struggles to launch them from frozen davits, the attempts by the crew to keep order at gunpoint, and the bitter cold as the temperature dropped to (Sellwood says) -20 deg C.

There is cowardice; a Party official shoots his wife as part of a suicide pact, then lacks the courage to kill himself (a passing soldier, disgusted, does the job for him). There is brutish behaviour; people on an already overloaded raft “used feet and fists to batter swimmers struggling to join them ...until finally the float itself was overturned. Dozens drowned in the ensuing panic.” But there is also great courage and selflessness. A teenager who Sellwood names as Ilse Bauer is being evacuated after being raped by Soviet troops in East Prussia. She is slipping down the icy, sloping deck into the sea when a sailor rescues her and wedges her behind a deck fitting, where an older woman hugs her to keep her warm; later, the woman gives Bauer her fur coat, then jumps into the sea, presumably to her own death. The coat protects Ilse and she survives, just. A newly-married naval auxiliary, Ruth Fleischer, is literally flung onto a lifeboat by a burly seaman who thrusts aside others who are fighting for a place. Fleischer too survives, although her new husband – the communications officer on a nearby cruiser – is convinced for some days that she is dead.

The Damned Don’t Drown isn’t a history book and doesn’t pretend to be. There’s no index, and nothing is referenced; presumably it’s all from survivor interviews and some of it will have been secondhand. It’s also quite brief (the US edition is 160 pages). A better-referenced, and very recent, book is Cathryn J. Prince’s Death in the Baltic (2013). It contains some excellent research; the author has consulted a wide range of sources, some quite obscure. She has also interviewed survivors and obtained some outstanding eyewitness accounts – no mean feat given that Prince is writing nearly 70 years after the event. The book lacks the rigour of The Cruellest Night; there are signs of careless editing, and also an odd omission that gave me some reservations about the book (of which more below). But Prince conveys a sense of who the victims really were, their diversity, and the shades of grey that surround the sinking.

Death in the Baltic’s main strength is the testimony of the survivors. Their accounts are very alive, even after 70 years. Horst Woit, then 10 years old, today living in Canada, tells Prince how he and his mother had fled their home in Elbling, East Prussia, a few days earlier; on impulse, as they leave, the boy grabs his uncle’s eight-inch jackknife. Later, he and his mother will be among the few who get into a lifeboat, but the crew will be unable to sever the icy rope holding it to the ship; then he produces the knife. “The knife,” he tells Prince, “saved 70 lives.” Eva Dorn, later Eva Dorn Rothschild, is a naval auxiliary, and should have been billeted with the rest of them in the drained swimming-pool below decks, but realises it’s an overcrowded death-trap. She goes up to help the doctors, who are delivering children and treating the wounded. When the torpedo strikes, a skeleton in a glass case falls over in front of her. She steps over it, and tells herself: “You have stepped over death. Nothing will happen to you.” She has stepped over death; the second torpedo strikes the swimming-pool where she is supposed to be, and some 300 young women are blown to pieces. 

Besides capturing testimony of the actual sinking, Prince has done very well to tell us who the civilians aboard really were. Eva Dorn, the naval auxiliary, was not some stereotyped Nazi but the daughter of an improvident unemployed opera singer and a viola player. A rebellious young woman, she was delighted to be thrown out of what Prince calls the Hitler Youth (actually it will have been the female equivalent, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, or BDM). Even more interesting are the Tschinkur family, who don’t seem really to have been German at all. They were from Riga, but when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, the Baltic States (soon to be swallowed up by Stalin) were pressurized into repatriating anyone who was vaguely German. Their mother was Russian but their father had been German some generations back, so they were classified as Volkdeutsch and forcibly “repatriated” to the Reich. Resettled in Gotenhafen, one of the children is caned at school because, asked to recite a poem, she does so in Russian. It is a strength of Prince’s book that she helps us see the passengers on the Gustloff not as a bunch of Germans who had started a war and whose lives were thus forfeit, but as thousands of individuals, each with their own story, and some surely deserving of something better.

Two things do let Death in the Baltic down. One is a certain carelessness in the editing. Friedrich Petersen, the captain of the Gustloff, is 63 in both 1938 and 1945 (both wrong; he was 67 in 1945). The Polish name for the old German city of Thorn is Toruń, not Turin. There are a few other relatively minor things. All authors make mistakes, but Prince had a major publisher behind her and they should have picked these up. A more serious problem, however, is the book’s claim to break new ground. In her introduction, Prince says that “few American historians have written about it. The most information I found consisted of footnotes in World War Two histories... I had no explanation for the lack of news articles.” But both the two earlier books had had American editions, and Prince must have known about them. As she doesn’t quote from or rely on them, she is not obliged to cite them; she has done nothing improper. But it is odd that she does not at least reference them as general sources. As Prince’s book is otherwise very well-referenced, it may be that her publisher discouraged her from mentioning them. If so, they did her a disservice.

IV

In any case, while Prince’s book and Sellwood’s are well worth reading, anyone who wants to read only one book should stick with The Cruellest Night. It is a book that combines journalism and historiography, both to a high standard. Besides, the Gustloff sank on the night of January 30 1945, but the evacuation continued and so did the deaths; and whereas Prince and Sellwood end their accounts with the Gustloff, Dobson, Miller and Payne do not. Farther east from Gdynia, many refugees had made their way to the port of Pillau in East Prussia, not far from the major city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad); the area was now surrounded by the Red Army. The authors recount that:

...In the early stages of the evacuation the order had been made that men and women with children should be given priority for places on the refugee ships ...People were so desperate that mothers already on board [threw] their babies to relations on the quayside, who used them as boarding vouchers Sometimes the infants fell into the water between ship and quay; more often they were trampled in the rush to catch them, as strangers grabbed for them, fragile passports to safety.

General Steuben (then München) in 1925 (Bundesarchiv)

On February 8 one of the former North Atlantic liners, the 23-year-old General Steuben, arrived in Pillau. The authors state that the defensive perimeter around Königsberg was thought to have given way, and there was widespread panic in the port.  (In fact, Königsberg would hold out for another two months.) In the chaos, it was not possible to record exactly how many people boarded the Steuben for her westward voyage, but the authors quote contemporary estimates that there were about two thousand wounded, a thousand refugees, about 350 medical staff and a hundred crew – so, about 3,450 all told. Once again, the ship was escorted only by an old torpedo boat (this time the authors are right – the T196 was from the first war), and an equally ancient torpedo recovery vessel.

It was the latter that would be the Steuben’s undoing. Marinesko was still at sea in the S13. Around midnight, one of his lookouts spotted a curious pattern of lights low on the horizon. They were sparks from the ancient coal-burning vessel, which was struggling to keep up. They led Marinesko to the Steuben, which he later said he mistook for a cruiser (the authors say this could have been true). Marinesko’s torpedoes hit the ship just before 1 am. The authors say she sank in just seven minutes. Other sources say about 20, but it doesn’t matter:

Only a handful of those in the forward part of the liner could reach the upper decks. Many of the solders realised this and, tired of struggling for life, shot themselves on their stretchers. ...Many of those who jumped from the stern... were torn to pieces by the turning propellers. ...As the General Steuben went under, a great scream issued from the people trapped aboard. It was something the men on the escorting warships never forgot.

Once again, no-one really knows how many people died. The authors say about 3,000, but in fact 659 people are now known to have been rescued, which would make their estimate a little high. On the other hand, the authors probably underestimated the number aboard.  They may have done so by quite some number. The wreck of the Steuben was found about 10 years ago, and the National Geographic published a feature on it. In an accompanying piece, a researcher for the magazine, David W. Wooddell, reported that a surviving German officer claimed to have counted 5,200 people on board. He said they had deliberately underreported the numbers because they were not meant to have carried so many. If this is correct, the death toll was about 4,500. However, Heinz Schön eventually put the number at 4,267, of which 3,608 died. It seems hard to be that accurate, given the circumstances. But Schön’s research is respected, and it is the best estimate anyone is likely to get.

There was worse to come. On April 16 a smaller ship, the 5,000-ton troopship Goya, left the Hela Peninsula off Gdynia after taking on members of the 35th Tank Regiment. The number of refugees is again uncertain, but the total number of people on board is thought to have been about 7,000. The ship stood off Hela and loaded by lighter, but there was still a fight to board.  Dobson, Miller and Payne recount the testimony of a German officer who heard:

...a young man with his wife confronting [an] older man and woman who seemed to be his parents. The young man, who had only one arm, screamed at them that they must stay behind because they were old and useless, whereas he and the girl had a lifetime before them. Under the dazed eyes of the old people, he and his wife climbed the scrambling nets up the side of the Goya, and never looked back at those they left behind.

The Goya left, again with an inadequate escort; she was a modern ship and could outrun a submarine, but was slowed by a breakdown of one of the ships accompanying her. Just before midnight, she was hit by two torpedoes from a Soviet submarine (not the S13 this time). She split in two and sank, according to the authors, in just four minutes. Of the estimated 7,000 people aboard, just 183 survived.

V

There are some inconsistencies in The Cruellest Night. The authors devote a lengthy postscript to the fate of the Amber Room, looted from the Winter Palace in Leningrad – but no-one really knows if it was on board, and it is surely tangential to the story. More seriously, the book describes the loss of the Steuben and Goya as well as the Gustloff; yet there is only a page or so on the sinking of the Hamburg-Amerika liner Cap Arcona, which was set on fire off Lübeck on May 3 by rockets from Typhoons of the Royal Air Force.  The RAF apparently thought the vessel contained members of the SS who were escaping to Norway. There were SS on board, but they were guarding thousands of concentration-camp inmates brought from the East who they may have planned to kill by scuttling the ship at sea. The British had occupied Lübeck the previous day and seem to have known that the ships lying off the port contained prisoners, but this information was not passed to the RAF. Thousands of prisoners died. The authors could also have mentioned, at least in passing, that the Hannibal sinkings were matched by the death of several thousand (possibly 7,000) refugees and wounded on the Soviet hospital ship Armenia, sunk by the Luftwaffe off the Crimea in 1941. But again, they may just not have known of it. In any case, The Cruellest Night generally avoids moral judgments of the “well, they started it” variety. It is surely right to do so. This is not a book about who started the war.

The Cap Arcona burning off Kiel on May 3 1945 (RAF photo)

Although The Cruellest Night has the odd quirk, it is extremely well researched. The S13’s captain, the flamboyant and headstrong Sasha Marinesko, had died in 1963; he had been disgraced and was a partial “unperson”, and questions about him were discouraged in the Soviet Union. Yet the authors managed to find out a great deal about him, and appear to have interviewed friends and comrades, although they did not feel able to name their sources. Better still, in a considerable coup, one of the authors, Ronald Payne, secured an interview with Dönitz himself. The former commander-in-chief of the German navy, and briefly Hitler’s successor, was 87 and rather deaf (he died two years later). But he seems to have received Payne kindly, if formally, and was ready and able to talk. He clearly believed that his evacuation of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and refugees from the east was one of his greatest achievements. He had even managed to negotiate a surrender with the British two days before the other Allies. This must have irked Eisenhower but allowed Dönitz to bring hundreds of thousands more evacuees west into the British zone. Dönitz was also the architect of the U-boat offensive, and was convicted at Nuremberg of waging aggressive war. There is no free pass for him. One doubts he would seek one. But from December 1944, knowing the war was lost, he turned to the future of Germany and the survival of its people. Few of Hitler’s other commanders really did this, though some claimed later that they tried.

Moreover, while the sinkings of the Gustloff, Steuben, and Goya were appalling human tragedies, Hannibal as a whole was a success. Between January 23 1945 and the end of the war, the German navy lifted a staggering 1.2 million people out of the path of the Red Army, 900,000 of them civilians. Just 1% of the evacuees were lost. In fact, Dobson, Miller and Payne credit Dönitz’s operations of May 1945 with nothing less than the rebuilding of Germany:

Without it the post-war German miracle might never have been achieved, for the revival of West Germany needed manpower as well as Marshall Aid and Allied encouragement. It is ironic to reflect that Admiral Dönitz’s initial worry was whether Western Germany could house and feed the refugees. In fact, the country had been drained of millions of men, and... absorbed the newcomers with ease.

Is this true? Many of the soldiers arriving in the British zone went straight into prisoner-of-war camps and stayed for several years in Britain, due to a debatable decision by the Attlee government to make them help in British reconstruction – a story well told in Matthew Barry Sullivan’s excellent Thresholds of Peace. They would indeed help rebuild Germany, but not until later. As to Western Germany feeding and housing the refugees “with ease”, it didn’t. It struggled terribly. Yet it is true that many hundreds of thousands of Germans escaped the Iron Curtain because of Hannibal. By 1948, when the Deutschmark and Marshall Aid began the economic miracle, most of those held in Western countries had been released. The authors are probably not right to credit Operation Hannibal with West Germany’s postwar prosperity. But it will have played a part.

There are some strange codas to Hannibal. One is that the Cap Arcona had been used, earlier in the war, as a stand-in for the Titanic in a Nazi propaganda film about that ship. Another is the fate of Marinesko; always suspect politically, he was drummed out of the Navy after the war, found a job on a building site and was then deported to Siberia. He survived and was released, but died in 1963 at the age of just 46. As stated earlier, at the time The Cruellest Night was written, he was still in partial disgrace. In fact, Gorbachev was to make him a posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union in 1990.

There is a further, stranger coda. The authors do not mention the last of the big North Atlantic liners involved in Hannibal. This was the Berlin III, the ship that had rescued the passengers of the British liner Vestris in 1928. The day after the Gustloff sinking, the Berlin III left for a new trip eastwards but hit a mine and was beached near Kiel. In 1949 the Soviets salvaged her and converted her to a Black Sea cruise liner, and renamed her Admiral Nakhimov. Although used briefly as a troop transport to Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis, she remained in her Black Sea role for many years. Just after 11pm on August 31 1986, the 61-year-old ship was rammed by a bulk carrier while on passage to Sochi. She sank in just a few minutes, and over 400 of the 1,200-odd Soviet passengers and crew died. Was there an ancient curse?

VI

Although few English speakers know of the Wilhelm Gustloff, Germans do remember. The late Günter Grass claimed that it had become a political football, with right-wing revisionists claiming the disaster as a war crime. That, he said, was why it became the subject of what turned out to be his last novel, Crabwalk – to wrest the Gustloff from the hands of the Right. In fact, the book appeared during a period of debate in Germany after W.G. Sebald’s 1997 warning that Germans’ silence about their own suffering had given the Right free rein to use it for its own purposes. Grass clearly agreed.

Crabwalk is the story of a fictional German teenager, Tulla, who gives birth to a boy on the ship that has rescued her from the sea. After the war she settles in East Germany, and becomes an enthusiastic Stalinist. But son Paul goes to the West and becomes a journalist. He is pressed by his mother to write the story of the sinking, although he does not wish to. In the meantime, he marries and has a son of his own; the marriage fails, and the son, Konrad, grows up to become an awkward, geeky teenager with neo-Nazi tendencies. He starts a revisionist website dedicated to the Gustloff and the Nazi “hero” after whom it was named. But a Jewish boy enters his chatroom, and starts to argue with him. Who this Jewish boy turns out really to be, and how their dispute ends, shouldn’t be revealed here. But this book is a fascinating allegory for Grass’s view of postwar German history. The wartime generation (Tulla) appears to repent (but does it? – or does it simply adopt new orthodoxies?); the next generation (Paul) is so appalled by their country’s history that they barely speak of it, and so do little to help the third generation (Konrad) come to terms with it. The book ends against a backdrop of skinhead hate crimes in the late 1990s, forging a link between fascists past and present.

If I were German, I’m not sure how I would view this book. If I liked Grass, I might see it as a shrewd warning of time-bombs from the past. If I didn’t, I might see it as a contrived vehicle for Grass’s own view of postwar Germany. Either way, my view would likely be coloured by where I lay to the left or right. I honestly don’t know. Let Germans decide. In any case, it isn’t seen as Grass’s best book. The characters, though well-drawn, are unattractive and don’t engage you. The structure is complex and confusing. Neither is it especially vivid; there’s nothing like the haunting horse’s head scene in The Tin Drum. The critical reception for the English translation was mixed (the Observer, in particular, gave it a good kicking). Nonetheless it’s a sharp, shrewd sideways look at history, by a man who, at 75, was still profoundly engaged with the past and future of his country.

Still, it isn’t Crabwalk that brings the disasters in the Baltic alive. It’s the other three books that show how wars are not historical events in which X beat Y. Rather, they are accretions of individual agonies. Seen in the mass, they are beyond comprehension. They become easier to grasp when A.V. Sellwood describes passengers trying to escape from the Gustloff’s sun deck and being held back at gunpoint; or the marine auxiliaries settling down cheerfully in the swimming pool where they will soon be blown apart. In Death in the Baltic, Cathryn J. Prince describes how many of the children drowned because their lifejackets were too big, and they were seen floating with only their legs above the water. The Cruellest Night includes an ID picture of one of the auxiliaries before the sinking, pretty and smiling with a saucy cap on her curly hair (she was to be one of the very few survivors). The same book describes refugees waiting at Pillau, from which the ill-fated General Steuben would leave on February 9. “They queued before the wrecked buildings where the authorities boiled cauldrons of porridge to feed the helpless... A soldier reported that the most pathetic sight was that of the children who had lost their parents. ‘Even their tears froze’.”

Why have we known so little of the Gustloff and the other Hannibal disasters? After all, they have never been a secret, at least not in the West (the Eastern bloc did discourage their discussion). Perhaps it’s not a mystery. There was little sympathy for the Germans at the time. The Allied occupiers in the three western zones of Germany had their hands full with literally millions of German refugees from the east; there was little time to ask how they had got there, and what they had seen on the way. In any case, 1945 was the worst year in history. When everyone has a story, no-one does.  

Nearly seventy years later, survivors would tell Prince that they had never felt able to discuss the wreck. Ellen Tschinkur, who emigrated to Canada, mentioned it tentatively years later to a Canadian workmate. “One of her colleagues interrupted her. ‘Oh the war. That was hard, we had to use margarine’,” she says. Tschinkur did not speak of it again. Instead, says Prince, some of the remaining survivors talk to each other each January 30; sharing, in Prince’s poignant phrase, their “lifeboat of shared memory”.

It is a phrase that Heinz Schön might have understood. He was the young assistant purser who survived, but devoted much of the rest of his life to researching, and writing about, the Gustloff and other losses during the evacuation. When he died in April 2013 at the age of 86, the urn with his ashes was placed on the stern of the wreck that he had survived, but not escaped, as an 18-year-old nearly 70 years before.

There is an extensive online display of pictures and memorabilia on the Wilhelm Gustloff and her sister ship, the Robert Ley, at http://www.wilhelmgustloffmuseum.com

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Mike Robbins’s latest book, Three Seasons: Three Stories of England in the Eighties, is available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Scribd and other online retailers, and can also be ordered from your local bookshop. Requests for review copies should be sent to thirdrailbooks (at) gmail.com, via NetGalley, or to the author.

Being beastly to the Germans

On January 17 1947, a book review by George Orwell appeared in Tribune. “I hope everyone who can get access to a copy will take at least a glance at Victor Gollancz's recently published book, In Darkest Germany,” he wrote, and continued: “It is not a literary book, but a piece of brilliant journalism intended to shock the public of this country into some kind of consciousness of the hunger, disease, chaos and lunatic mismanagement prevailing in the British Zone."

Eilbek, Hamburg, in 1945 (Imperial War Museum/F/O J. Dowd)

He was not joking. The letters to newspapers and other documents that made up In Darkest Germany had already caused quite a rumpus. But its author liked a rumpus. Gollancz is remembered today as a publisher, but was as much an activist and polemicist. The Nazi regime was an early target. As early as 1933, the year Hitler came to power, he produced a pamphlet, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror. During the war he published another, Let My People Go, in which he argued that “a million or two” Jews had already been murdered in Europe, and said, with chilling prescience, that six million would die. 

Gollancz's support for the Germans after the war will have surprised some. He was Jewish. Yet in the postwar years he would devote considerable energy to call for better treatment for German, as well as other European, people.  Although he was a successful as a publisher (producing Orwell’s first books, among others), in 1947 many people would have known him as a political activist. In the later 1930s he had followed the Moscow line, and had not published Homage to Catalonia, which cast doubt on the ‘official’ Left's view of Spain. But Gollancz himself would split with it over the Nazi-Soviet pact, and in later years was no-one's man but his own. 

In October and November 1946 Gollancz made a six-week visit to the British Zone. The resulting book, In Darkest Germany, was based on the letters, public and private, that he wrote during the visit.  It could therefore be rushed out quickly on his return. Nonetheless one is impressed at the speed with which it was done, at a time when books were set in hot metal and there were also austerity regulations for book production. The book is 128 pages, plus 144 photographs – the latter would each have required an individual block to be made.  But the book was out in January 1947. Moreover, my own copy shows it to be a second impression in the same month – suggesting that sales had been brisk.

The pictures are stark. Plates 4 and 5 are the heads of men lying on hospital beds. Plate 8 is a full-length picture of a naked man from the back; it is captioned, “Emaciation, not oedema. 56, looked 70. Was clearing rubble and got half heavy worker’s ration.”  Plates 14 and 15 show boys of about 10 or 11, though they may be older. They are stripped to the waist; according to the caption, at the author’s request.  They are thin; their ribs show, and they are clearly undernourished, which seems somehow wrong, because they are white.

Neither is the text easy reading, although the facts have long passed away. In Hamburg, Gollancz reports, about 100,000 people were suffering “from hunger oedema or the equivalent”.  In the same city, he stated, “active lung tuberculosis is at least five times as prevalent as before the war, and may even be 10 times as prevalent.” The reasons for the growth in TB, he argued, were twofold – malnutrition and overcrowding: “In the British zone 12,000 people with open, infectious tuberculosis live in the same room with others – sometimes in the same bed with children.” It should be said that he does not quote a source for this (though his own observations do seem to bear it out). But he does quote a survey under British auspices of around 1,000 Hamburg postal employees in which the incidence of hunger oedema was found to be 17% amongst males and 9% amongst females. Reproducing one of his own letters, he also gives a figure of 13,000 hospitalized cases of hunger oedema for Düsseldorf in September; this apparently was challenged, so he goes on to point out that the British colonel in command of the Düsseldorf district had said that the number of non-hospitalized cases was nearly double that.

The reason for this was not hard to see, according to Gollancz. The standard ration (that is, for people not doing heavy work) had recently been increased but was still just 1,550 calories, in contrast to the 2,650 that UNRRA had stated as necessary for “full health and efficiency” in a normal population. (Today Britain’s NHS says men need  about 2,500 to maintain body weight, women about 2,000.) However, most people in Düsseldorf were not even getting 1,550 calories a day as most basic foodstuffs were in short supply. Gollancz went so far as to say that those who could not or would not supplement their rations on the black market were managing on 400-1,000 calories a day. Once again, it is not clear where he got this figure; he is perhaps giving his own observations – but sometimes he is able to quote more official figures:

In the Control Commission’s information room at Bünde there is a chart ...showing a graph of seven diseases with March 30 1946 as the first date and September 14 as the last. Scarlet fever is about the same... diptheria is a trifle higher, gonorrhea considerably higher, syphillis much higher, tuberculosis about a third higher, and typhoid nearly double. But what really matters is a more generalised degeneration in the health and strength of the whole community.

A British health official, thinking Gollancz to be a visiting politician, let fly at him in a mess in Hamburg one afternoon. “What on earth are you politicians up to? ...Do you realise what’s going on here?” he asked. “An epidemic of any kind would sweep everything before it. ...If you...don’t do something about it two problems that seem to have been worrying you will be solved. The size of the German population and manure.”

II

Homeless in a Hamburg air-raid shelter (Imperial War Museum/Sgt Smith)

There can be no doubt that the refugees from the east worsened the situation. Gollancz recounts being shown a list of the clothing needs for those in Schleswig-Holstein. He calls them “expellees” and they will have included some who were literally expelled from what had been eastern Germany, but one suspects that many will have arrived earlier as part of Operation Hannibal, the German navy’s mass evacuation of the Eastern regions in the last few months of the war. They numbered 1.2 million out of Schleswig-Holstein’s 3 million population and needed 200,000 men’s overcoats, a million pairs of shoes, 800,000 undergarments and half a million blankets. Gollancz visits a ship and a camp in which expellees are housed, and sees “mostly stretchers, wooden bunks, and bundles of sordid beclothes on the floor: indeed ...I don’t recollect seeing a single bed.” Not that the people of Hamburg were doing much better; Gollancz enters one building and finds a woman and her four children living in a single room. The husband is a prisoner in Russia. Nearby, a couple, their seven children and a dog are living in a two-room makeshift shelter totalling 200 sq ft.

Rebuilding was clearly urgent. According to Gollancz, the cement works in the British Zone had a capacity of 7.7 million tons. But 25 cement works, accounting for about half of this total, were threatened with closure as reparations.  This was an iniquitous facet of the 1945 Potsdam four-power agreement under which plant and assets were not only to be seized as reparations, but also destroyed if they could be used in the future to make war. Cement could be used to construct docks for U-boats, fortifications etc., so must not be allowed – although it was not clear how ordinary Germans were to be housed without it.

This lunacy extended right across large parts of the economy, affecting even food production. Thus 13 fishing vessels at Bremerhaven had been used during the war as minelayers; the Germans wished to return them to their real purpose, but the British would not permit it. In another case, a fishing vessel was a metre longer than the permitted length. The Germans offered to reduce the vessel’s size, but the British refused and blew it up instead. “Meanwhile, the wretched German fish ration has been reduced,” writes Gollancz, “and we complain that the cost of feeding Germany is almost more than we can bear.”  He quotes other examples of this crass stupidity, and others were raised in Commons debate on November 27 1946, in which his reports were debated.

Gollancz regarded the destruction as wholly irrational – including the shipyards. He would, he said, be asked whether he had forgotten the weapons that Blohm & Voss  had built. No, he said, and indeed he had warned of the dangers of fascism in the 1930s (this was true; Gollancz had been a vigorous opponent of appeasement). “But I say that if there is one absolutely certain way of making a repetition of the last few years inevitable, it is to acquiesce in this godless destruction, and to drive a whole people, with whom we have to live, into hatred and despair.”

Why had the British Zone, with its 23 million inhabitants, got into such a state? Was this an act of revenge by the British for a war that they had not wanted?  Many British people were deeply angry with Germany well into my own lifetime (I was born in 1957). Was this a mass punishment-beating?

III

The evidence, at least for the British Zone, strongly suggests otherwise. To be sure, the Germans were not the flavour of the month. But there was genuine public concern in Britain about their conditions; much of it was humanitarian, and it was reflected in Parliament and in the Press. It is especially evident from the support Gollancz had for his campaign, which had begun in earnest only a few months after the war had ended. It focused initially on the mass expulsions of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The campaign was driven by vivid descriptions in the Daily Herald and the News Chronicle of the scenes around Berlin’s Stettiner Bahnhof, where refugees were arriving from the east. 

Aircraft at Flensburg airfield await disposal (Imperial War Museum/Saidman) 

The skill and energy with which Gollancz latched onto these events as a humanitarian cause has been recounted in an interesting and engaging 2006 article by Matthew Frank (The New Morality – Victor Gollancz, Save Europe Now and the German Refugee Crisis, 1945-1946, in Twentieth Century British History, 17:2). Frank describes the startling extent to which Gollancz managed to mobilise the chattering classes, and a big chunk of the political establishment on both right and left. Gollancz asked people to send in a postcard pledging their willingness to give up ration points in support of German refugees. Within just over a week he had received 20,000. One wonders how many signatures would have been received had one been able to respond online.

By mid-September 1945, according to Frank, the issue was receiving extensive coverage right across the British press, even the right-wing dailies (apart from the Beaverbrook group. And one newspaper that did support the campaign headed its leader “Feed the Brutes”).  On the left, J. B. Priestley, a writer so sympathetic to the USSR that Orwell later fingered him as a fellow-traveller, wrote a dispatch from Berlin for the News Chronicle. “Whatever happens to the German people this winter ...the world conscience must see to it that the children of Germany do not starve,” he rumbled.  To be sure, not all of this was compassion. Frank makes it clear that much of it was based on the argument that an epidemic or disorder in the British Zone meant trouble for Britain, for it would spread. Nonetheless there was a strong humanitarian undertone. The wave of sympathy and/or self-interest reached a peak at the end of November 1945, when Gollancz’s Save Europe Now (SEN) held its inaugural meeting at the Albert Hall. The crush was so great that there were two overflow meetings in the nearby church of the Holy Trinity, Brompton. The speakers included such diverse figures as the former Conservative minister Bob Boothby and the young left-wing MP and journalist Michael Foot.

Matthew Frank is unimpressed, seeing the moral crusade less as a humanitarian movement than as an affirmation of Britain’s image of itself. This is not entirely fair – but there is truth in it. However, what the SEN episode does suggest is that the British establishment, and for the most part the people, did not want unnecessary suffering for the Germans, however self-inflicted it might be. Their attitude was probably summed up in Noel Coward’s flippant and rather silly satire from 1943:

Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans

When our victory is ultimately won...

Let's be meek to them

And turn the other cheek to them

And try to bring out their latent sense of fun

Let’s give them full air parity

And treat the rats with charity

But don’t let's be beastly to the Hun.

IV

The British, then, had no wish to make the Germans in their Zone miserable. So why the shambles?

Surprisingly little has been written about the British occupation of north-west Germany, an area of 23 million people. This is beginning to change as interest grows in the entire post-war era, and modern scholars of the occupation, such as Christopher Knowles, are not always so bleak about it. But Gollancz was right that the Germans under British occupation faced terrible hardship (though conditions elsewhere in Germany were scarcely better).

British Army of the Rhine headquarters inGermany (Imperial War Museum) 

There were several reasons. Perhaps the Attlee government simply did not pay enough attention to Germany. It was extremely busy – not just with Germany but with the crisis in India, which looked likely to explode at any minute if no agreed path to independence could be found. Britain was also still fighting in both Greece and Palestine. She was also broke; much of her gold reserves had been spent on the war, and the US had insisted, as part of its postwar loan agreement, that sterling be convertible within a few years. This was a huge financial bomb waiting to go off, and the occupation of north-west Germany was costly (in the end, reparations would cover just 2% of its cost). At home, labour shortages in the mines restricted coal supplies and would immiserate everyone in the winter of 1946-47, still the worst in Britain in living memory.

Moreover, the British found the Zone in a terrible state, not least because of their own bombing.  In a recent (2014) article in History and Policy, Knowles states that 66% of the houses in Cologne were destroyed, and in Düsseldorf 93% were uninhabitable – figures that confirm Gollancz’s own impressions.  The housing shortage was exacerbated by German refugees from what had been eastern Germany and from other parts of central and eastern Europe where Germans were no longer welcome. Meanwhile, the country was full of displaced persons (DPs), often former forced or slave labour brought forcibly to Germany by the Nazi regime. All were walking somewhere.  Knowles quotes Ivone Kirkpatrick, a British diplomat who later became head of the Foreign Office, describe his first impressions of Germany in 1945; there were “hundreds of thousands of Germans on foot, trekking in all directions … as if a giant ant-heap had suddenly been disturbed.”

The British authorities were also hamstrung by the Potsdam agreement in the summer of 1945, under which the four-power occupation had been agreed in detail. Potsdam had decreed the “orderly” transfer of populations (it was anything but orderly) but also had clauses on reparations and demilitarization. Clause 3(i) called for: “The complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany and the elimination or control of all German industry that could be used for military production.” It was this clause that had led to the orgy of bureaucratic destruction that Gollancz had described. In fact, the agreement stated that Germany could retain industries essential for war to the extent that it needed them for its prewar peacetime economy. However, there was also a provision for reparations that was effectively a license to loot. Moreover it was specified that 10-15% of industrial plant from all three Western zones should be dismantled and sent to the USSR, meaning that even if the British had decided to remove nothing as reparations for themselves, they would still have had to dismantle some plant that the Germans really needed to keep.

There were other constraints. The Potsdam Agreement stated that occupied Germany should be treated as a single economic unit, but not everyone cooperated. Eventually, frustrated, the British and Americans would merge their zones. In 1948, failure to agree with the USSR on currency reform, among other things, would lead the Western allies to clear the way for the creation of the Deutschmark in the three western zones. At the time of Gollancz’s visit, however, the British zone was effectively an economy on its own. An industrial region, it could not import sufficient food from areas further east that had supplied it, even those that were still part of Germany – which they were often not.

V

Gollancz must have been aware of all this, but did not allow it to blunt his attacks. He was at least partly right not to; although the British administration in Germany faced a difficult situation, some of its problems were of its own making.

For a start, not everyone was as punctilious on Potsdam as the British, who could have taken it a little less literally. As the Conservative Bob Boothby put it in the Commons debate in November:  “Are we going to continue to sabotage industrial production in the British zone in Germany...  by carrying out the terms of an Agreement which most of us believe the other signatories are making not the slightest attempt to carry out? ” Besides, the British administration was not always up to it. This has been discussed by John E. Farquharson, in a paper in German History (The British Occupation of Germany 1945-6: A Badly Managed Disaster Area?, 1993, 11:3). Farquharson describes how authority was vested, after some confusion, with the Control Office for Germany and Austria, or COGA, which was based in London. (There was also a British Zone of Occupation in Austria, centred around Klagenfurt in Carinthia.) Not only was COGA not in Germany; it was headed by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, John Burns Hynd, who almost never went there, did not have Cabinet rank, and did not impress his contemporaries. (According to Farquharson, British staff in the Zone itself referred to COGA as “Hyndquarters”.)

The quality of the British control commission staff in Germany itself was mixed. They had no future when the occupation came to an end, and they would have to return to Britain, where the best jobs would already have been taken. So it was hard to get the best people. Farquharson quotes a London civil servant as saying in 1946 that they were mainly “a highly-paid army of retired drain inspectors, unsuccessful businessmen and idle ex-policemen.” Farquharson also refers to heavy drinking after wartime abstinence, and corruption (“Officials were making hay while the sun shone, as there was no real future in Germany”). Some of this may have been unfair. Some of it may have been all too fair. One staff member was the former star record-breaking pilot of the early 1930s, C.W.A. Scott; unable to handle loss of fame as the war approached, he struggled in later years, and eventually joined the control commission staff in 1946, perhaps for want of something better. Soon after arriving, he blew his brains out.

Gollancz himself encountered attitudes amongst the control commission staff that he did not like. “Though there are many fine exceptions, the general attitude varies from a disgusting offensiveness, through indifference... to that humane and almost unconsciously superior paternalism which is characteristic of the “white” attitude to “natives” at its best.” He quotes examples of misuse of privilege: a hairdresser keeps a British wife waiting for 20 minutes, and the next day is warned that her premises may be requisitioned; there are separate queues at the cinema. The building of a new headquarters and facilities in Hamburg, when the materials and labour were desperately needed to rehouse Germans, was especially iniquitous. As Benn Levy MP was to remark in the November 1946 Commons debate: “It is not good for a nation to be conquered. But it is also not good for people to be conquerors.”

VI

In Darkest Germany was not the end of Gollancz’s campaign. In August 1947 he was back in Germany; on his return to London he penned a 40-page pamphlet, Germany Revisited, in which he reported that, “during the Spring and Summer...  rations for the normal consumer of about 1,000 calories or even considerably less were common...”. “For 25 percent,” he added, the diet is a daily experience of dull and devitalising misery.” He once again expounded on shortages of underwear, shocking housing, wanton acts of destruction under the guise of reparations or demilitarisation, and the surreal bureacracy of denazification.  One wonders how the British administrators in the Zone saw him; probably as a pompous pain in the arse.

Lighter with a map of the British zone (Imperial War Museum)

But in the end, of course, Gollancz and the British administration were both moot. Most Germans would have known that they had got themselves into this situation and would have to get themselves out, and they did. In 1948 a currency reform ushered in the Deutschmark in the three Western zones, and the next year saw assumption of power by the new republic. 

From then on, the British army was only nominally an army of occupation; in reality, it became part of Germany’s defences. It will finally leave in 2019, after which it will likely be remembered chiefly as a traffic hazard. Meanwhile the Germans rebuilt their country with lightning speed. They may have had another, longer, journey, summed up perhaps in Heinrich Böll’s novella, The Bread of Those Early Years. But that journey they took alone.

What should we make of Gollancz’s extraordinary crusade, 70 years on? Like Orwell, he should not be seen as some sort of secular saint. (One remembers Orwell’s own comment in Reflections on Gandhi: “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”)  Although Gollancz split with the Communists after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he had hitherto supported them, despite mounting evidence of their real nature from the war in Spain. His April 1945 pamphlet What Buchenwald Really Means, which appeared to pin as much blame for Hitler on the British as on the Germans, was premature and ill-judged, and drew a stinging rebuke from an Austrian former prisoner, Franz Burger.  Gollancz may also have been something of a gadfly, flying from one fight to another. By 1948 he had moved on to other causes, including relief for the Middle East and eventually the abolition of capital punishment.  In The New Morality, Matthew Frank quotes him thus:  “‘There is nothing so depressing’, Gollancz once told a veteran of one of his many campaigns, ‘as a movement which has attained its aims’.”

As for In Darkest Germany, it is a museum piece; it was not reprinted after 1947, and is now very hard to find. Victor Gollancz Ltd is now part of Orion, and publishes science fiction and fantasy. There is a Victor Gollancz  elementary school in Berlin, but one wonders if the pupils, or residents of the Gollanczstraße in which it stands, know who he was.

But perhaps that would not have bothered him greatly. One can view him as a gadfly or polemicist, but his actions were underpinned by a profound morality. He would probably have argued that his compassion towards the Germans was not in spite of his Judaism but because of it. In What Buchenwald Really Means he argues that the Judaeo-Christian tradition cannot compromise with fascism: “For the one the ultimate reality is the human soul, individual, unique, responsible to God and man, while for the other this ultimate reality is some abstraction – a State, Folk or Collective which men have created out of nothing, and which has no existence except in their vain imagination. ...This Judaeo-Christian tradition is our inner citadel.” In the end, Gollancz was at least touched by greatness – something the British state finally acknowledged with a knighthood in 1965, a year or so before his death at the age of 73.

One of the many, often upsetting, photographs in the book is taken in a hospital. It is a high-key print lit by a window that is just out of shot to the right; soft light catches the white blanket and sheets on the iron bed, on which there is a young boy. The caption reads: “Child of 10 dying from TB in the Town Hospital, Düsseldorf.” Above the bed stands a balding man with a moustache, round dark-rimmed glasses and a professorial air; he is dressed in a dark winter coat and scarf. It is hard to read his expression, but his distress seems real.  One wonders who his successors are today, and where one would find public intellectuals in British life who have made so clear a decision to serve good over evil.

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Mike Robbins’s latest book, Three Seasons: Three Stories of England in the Eighties, is available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Scribd and other online retailers, and can also be ordered from your local bookshop. Requests for review copies should be sent to thirdrailbooks (at) gmail.com, or to the author.