The Other Side of Silence

“Not that the ship looked to me to be anything but seaworthy, although I’m no sailor. Much later on I learned that for the best part of five years the Gustloff had been docked at the pier in Gotenhafen, where it had been used first as a hospital ship for German soldiers wounded in Norway, and then as a floating barracks for trainees in the submarine division of the German navy. Consequently, the ship’s engines hadn’t been in operation for all that time and most of the skeleton crew wasn’t even German, but it was only supposed to be a three-day voyage, so this didn’t seem like a problem for a ship launched in nineteen thirty-seven. And certainly not as much of a problem as the sheer number of people who had boarded her. It was hard to say how many had crowded onto the ship to escape the Russians, but some estimates put it as high as twelve thousand, including a crew of one hundred and seventy-three. Back in the day it had been designed to accommodate fourteen hundred passengers and four hundred crew. So you can imagine what the scene at Gotenhafen was like. A vision of hell, perhaps. A Dore wood engraving of the Inferno. It goes almost without saying that there were not enough lifeboats, nor were there enough life vests, and in all respects, the ship was woefully ill-prepared for any kind of emergency. With so many people on board, nearly all of the exits and gangways were blocked and there was no time to practice any emergency drills. Also there were only two escort vessels to provide some sort of protection against Russian submarines. Because of the extreme cold, one of the two escort vessels-a torpedo boat-developed a crack in its hull and was forced to return to Gotenhafen. Which left just one escort vessel. The Lowe. Not only that, but a group of German minesweepers operating in the area of the Bay of Danzig was deemed to be in danger of colliding with the Gustloff, and so a decision was taken to turn on the ship’s navigation lights. Which went against all naval practice in wartime.

“Of course, all that would have been bad enough, but after the unencrypted message that Hennig forced Irmela to send on an open radio channel, there were already three Russian submarines heading for the area when the Gustloff set sail. At the submarine base in the Finnish port of Turku, they’d heard the same open-microphone message regarding the Gustloff and the Amber Room as the Russian Baltic naval headquarters in Kronstadt, and confusion now reigned about exactly what to do next. Eventually, the captain of one Russian submarine, the S-13, sighted the Gustloff lit up like a Christmas tree, radioed HQ for further instructions, and was ordered to shadow the ship but hold fire. Because it was night, the S-13 felt safe enough to surface, and then awaited clarification regarding the Gustloff and its priceless cargo from Kronstadt HQ, which had itself been desperately seeking a final decision from the Kremlin. Finally, the Kremlin responded: At all costs the Gustloff was not to be sunk.

“Unfortunately, the captain of the S-13 was a drunk named Alexander Marinesko, who was already facing a court-martial for a previous bender. He was probably drunk when he decoded the message from Kronstadt, and in the decryption of his orders it seems that he must have made a fatal flaw, probably omitting the word ‘not’ from his plaintext message. Minutes later, at eight forty-five p.m. on January thirtieth, nineteen forty-five, he ordered four torpedoes loaded into the S-13’s forward-firing tubes. At nine fifteen he gave the order to fire, and three of the torpedoes hit their target.

“I can hardly imagine what it must have been like. The snow, the cold, the freezing water, the high seas, the dark. All of the naval auxiliary women, including Irmela Schaper, were quartered in the empty swimming pool on the ship’s lowest deck, and they were probably killed instantly by the second torpedo. Others were not so lucky. Thousands of passengers were drowned inside the ship as water flooded in through the damaged hull. Thousands more jumped into the water and were drowned or quickly succumbed to hypothermia and died. The ship sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea less than an hour after the torpedoes hit, with the loss of over nine thousand lives, making the Gustloff the largest single loss of life in maritime history. Eight thousand of them were women and children. By contrast, just fifteen hundred people were lost on the Titanic.”

“Good God,” said Maugham. “I had no idea. I mean, I’ve never even heard of the Wilhelm Gustloff.”