The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany's Easternmost Province by Peter B. Clark

Author:Peter B. Clark [Clark, Peter B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

The Cap Arcona went under and in its hull swam human beings, our comrades, who had awaited all those long years the end of the war and the return home. Others lost their lives in the waters of the Baltic, which were cold at that time of year. We had imagined that the first day of freedom would be different.25

The third-largest loss of life in the Baltic rescue operation involved the steamer Steuben, a 17,500–ton former luxury liner, built in 1920, which ran between New York and Europe during the 1930s. Starting in July 1944, it was used in the Baltic area to transport wounded soldiers and refugees to the west. Its last voyage began on February 9, 1945, from Pillau, where it took on board close to three thousand wounded soldiers and almost a thousand refugees, which, together with doctors, nurses, and crew, brought the total on board to 4,267, more than any of its previous voyages. Helping to load the wounded on board the ship was Pastor Johannes Jänicke from Palmnicken, who was serving as a medical officer in the Wehrmacht. As he was leaving the Steuben to return to his quarters in Pillau, he was surprised to find several members from his church waiting to board the ship. They could only exchange a few parting words, and in his memoirs he recalled having a certain feeling of bitterness because his friends would shortly be sailing to safety, while he would be facing—admittedly of his own free will—either a Russian prisoner-of-war camp or death.26

Shortly after noon on February 9, the Steuben departed from Pillau and steered toward Hela to meet its escort vessels, the torpedo boat T-36 (which had rescued hundreds of survivors from the Gustloff ) and the torpedo recovery boat TF-1. Around midnight the one-time luxury liner and its escorts reached the vicinity of the sinking of the Gustloff ten days earlier. Undetected by the escort vessels, none other than Commander Marinesko in the S-13 lay in waiting. At 12.52 a.m. on February 10 he gave the order to fire two torpedoes from the stern tubes of the S-13. The two torpedoes hit their target, one near the bow and the other amidships, and the Steuben immediately began to sink bow first. It took only thirty-three minutes for the ship to slip beneath the waves, with loss of life of 3,608 and 659 survivors. Pastor Jänicke’s church friends all drowned, and when he later learned of their fate, he felt ashamed of feeling bitter when they parted company in Pillau as they headed for the presumed safety of the west.

Notwithstanding these losses, Operation Hannibal was a huge success. By one estimate some 2.5 million people were evacuated in the last months of the war, mostly German civilians who were escaping the advancing Red Army.27 Historian Philip Karl Lundberg has described this evacuation effort as the most successful rescue by sea in modern history.28 This rescue operation exceeded by far the better-known rescue of more than 300,000 British troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in May and June of 1940.

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