I’ve often wondered, even as a child, why they did not collect every mattress on that ship to use as life boats?.....................
Too much panic. Hundreds were trampled. Nearly 500 killed outright when the first Russian torpedo that slammed into her port side, struck a deck that had a drained swimming pool. All that tile came loose and acted as an enormous fragmentation grenade and killed everyone on the deck but 3 people. Almost 10,000 German civilians died. 9,400 and some change, I think
Also, only one lifeboat cleared the davits, but it fell and capsized. The rest weren’t dropped due to the unimaginable chaos