While the current  circumstances involve completely different scenarios in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it behooves us to highlight once again the incredible inhumanity inflicted on ordinary folks who end up paying the price of warfare  through absolutely no fault of their own.

Participants at the Potsdam Agreement. Stalin and Truman seen on the left.

As it turned out, the Potsdam agreement resulted in perhaps the largest documented case of state sanctioned ethnic cleansing on record, and one of the most disturbing events of relatively recent European history. It was a direct result of  the US and England giving in to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s demands to keep the part of Poland he had already annexed earlier under the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler in 1939 as well as  most of the German province of East Prussia.

Not only would two million Poles be forced to abandon their homes and lands and resettle behind the redrawn Polish/Soviet Union border (the Curzon Line) to the West,  the entire ethnic German population east of the Oder-Neisse line was to be expelled and “repatriated” to the remaining German territory west of the Neisse River.  The territories affected would be the German provinces  of Silesia, Pomerania, and East and West Prussia,  as well as sections of Czechoslovakia. This meant that a staggering number of around 13 million  ethnic Germans would be forced from their former homelands where many of their families had lived and worked as far back as the 13th century.

While the plan was to allow for “the orderly and humane repatriation of Germans”, this didn’t quite work out that way. Around 5 million people were forced to flee almost immediately ahead of the Soviet red army advance into East Prussia in the manner of a vicious barbaric horde bent on raping, killing and – in general – ransacking everything in their path.

Rape, in particular, was the highlight on the pillager’s menu. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then a young captain in the Red Army, described the entry of his regiment into East Prussia in January 1945 as follows: “For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction”.

German Expellees Leaving East Prussia

Of the remaining 8 million Germans that were forced to repatriate roughly 1.2 million did not survive the unassisted trek west across their now former homelands and through Polish territory to the relative safety of Allied-occupied German territory on the other side of the Neisse river. The survivors – typically not the very old or the very young, and mostly ordinary farm or small town folk who had done nothing more than toil ceaselessly for a living from dawn to dusk their entire lives – told of months and weeks of incredible suffering. They were habitually beaten, robbed of the few possessions they carried with them, the women raped repeatedly. Thousands of expellees committed suicide, not able to withstand the absolute barbarity inflicted on them any longer.

Expellees Leaving East Prussia

Looking back at this ignominious event some years later, the great 20th century humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, in his speech accepting the Noble Peace Prize in Oslo in 1954, said:

“The most grievous violation of the right based on historical evolution and of any human right in general is to deprive populations of the right to occupy the country where they live by compelling them to settle elsewhere. The fact that the victorious powers decided at the end of WWII to impose this fate on hundreds of thousands of human beings and, what is more, in a most cruel manner, show how little they were aware of the challenge facing them, namely, to re-establish prosperity and, as far as possible, the rule of law.”

The 208 meter liner was being used to evacuate civilians and military personnel from East Prussia. Of the estimated more than 10,000 mostly women and children, elderly men and including about 1,200 navy sailors, only very few – 1,252, to be precise – made it off the steamer alive. Three Soviet torpedoes had hit the ship within an hour; the temperature outside was minus 18 degrees Celsius.

On January 12th, the Soviet army had broken through on three fronts, and by the 26th they reached the eastern shore of the Gulf of Danzig. This effectively cut Prussia off from the rest of Germany, and from that moment the only escape could be by sea.

MS Wilhelm Gustloff

At around 9 p.m. on January 30, 1945 in the packed dining hall of the luxury liner Wilhelm Gustloff, as in most of the rest of the country, a radio was broadcasting an address by Hitler but the thousands of refugees from Pomerania and East and West Prussia who had struggled onto the ship weren’t listening to the Führer now as they wanted only one thing – to be rescued!

The solace offered by the Wilhelm Gustloff was enormous for the passengers who boarded the ship at Gotenhafen. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians had wanted to embark on ship in the port near Gdansk, in what is today Poland. The Red Army was on their heels and their thoughts were of Nemmersdorf. It was the first village in German territory reached by the Soviets and rumours were circulating of the draconian revenge on the part of the Soviets for German war crimes. Only the navy could rescue them now.

At 208 meters (680 feet), the Gustloff wasn’t the largest ship used to transport wounded soldiers and civilians. But it was by far the most well known. It was the Nazis’ luxury liner, christened by none other than Hitler in 1937. Its name came from a killed Nazi officer, and it was initially reserved for high-ranking National Socialists to take vacations in the Mediterranean or along the western Norwegian coastline. By the end of the war, however, the ship had taken on an entirely different role – for its last journey.

The civilian escape via the Baltic Sea belongs to one the most impressive chapters in German WWII military history. Historians have estimated that around 2.5 million people were rescued by ship out of the German eastern zones. The Wilhelm Gustloff was just one of dozens of ships used in the Baltic rescue operation. Its tragic end wasn’t inevitable, experts have contended, singling out three fatal decisions as responsible for the disaster.

Firstly, there was no convoy to offer protection, and since the ship carrying some 1,000 soldiers was intended to reach Kiel as quickly as possible, there was also no flank protection.  A small torpedo boat was all the protection the ship was given.  And since sea mines were feared along the Baltic coast, the planned route was to traverse the open sea. Finally, since the Gustloff hadn’t been used in over four years, Captain Wilhelm Peterson only dared a speed of 12 knots, instead of the possible 15.

These three factors contributed to what would become a death sentence for most of the ship’s passengers. If the ship had been  escorted by a convoy and  provided with flank protection, and travelled at a faster speed, experts have said the Soviet submarine S-13 would never have been able to hit the Wilhelm Gustloff with its torpedoes.

Seven decades on, some details of the disaster still remain a mystery, however. Was sabotage to blame when a suspicious radio message warning of sea mines reached the command bridge, just before the first torpedo hit? In order to avoid a collision amid heavy snowfall, Captain Peterson had turned on the ship’s position lights: 90 minutes with bright lighting, but no minesweepers. The Gustloff was a sitting duck.

There is much to support the theory that German POWs – “turned by the Soviets” and positioned behind enemy lines via parachutes – were behind the false reports. For Heinz Schön, that is a horrible thought. He was 18 years old at the time, onboard the Gustloff as an aspiring naval pay clerk. Although he was one of the very few survivors, he is reticent to call the sinking of the Gustloff a war crime. It was ultimately carrying soldiers, sailing under enemy colors and armed. The firing of the torpedoes in no way contravened martial law. (*)

The Statue of Alexander Marinesko in Kaliningrad

For most of the war, the Nazis had kept the Soviet fleet bottled up in the Russian port city of Kronshtadt located on Kotlin Island, 30 kilometers west of Saint Petersburg, by a blockade and by mining the Gulf of Finland. But after the Russo-Finnish armistice on September 19, 1944 the agreement awarded the Russians important military bases on Finnish territory, including the strategic Hangö peninsula.

On the morning of 11 January 1945 the 780-ton Soviet sub S-13 under the command of  Submarine commander Alexander Marinesko left the Hangö harbour at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland  to take position near Kolberg on January 13.

While in the first few days his submarine was attacked several times by German torpedo boats, during nineteen days at sea he encountered only civilian small craft in the frigid waters off Lithuania.

He received radio dispatches from his home port describing the fall of Memel (present-day Klaipeda, Lithuania) and Königsberg so he reasoned that naval transports might be evacuating troops to the west. Hugging the coastline, he saw no activity where he expected it most, but on 30 January 1945 Sub-13 attacked and sank the Wilhelm Gustloff.

Days later, on 10 February, Marinesko sank a second German ship with two torpedoes, the Steuben, carrying mostly military personnel, with an estimated total number of 4,267 casualties. Marinesko thus became the most successful Soviet submarine commander in terms of gross register tonnage (GRT) sunk, with 42,000 GRT to his name.

Before sinking the Wilhelm Gustloff, Alexander Marinesko was facing a court martial due to his problems with alcohol and was thus deemed “not suitable to be a hero”. He was instead awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Although widely recognized as a brilliant commander, he was downgraded in rank to lieutenant and dishonourably discharged from the navy in October 1945.

In 1960 he was reinstated as captain third class and granted a full pension. In 1963 Marinesko was given the traditional ceremony due to a captain upon his successful return from a mission. He died three weeks later on 25 November 1963 from cancer, and was buried at the Bogoslovskoye cemetery in St. Petersburg. Marinesko was posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 after rehabilitation by newspaper Izvestia.

(*) Segments of this account are based on a Deutsche Welle (DW) article of Jan 30, 2015)