Posted on 02/01/2015 2:57:53 AM PST by Paid_Russian_Troll
Over 9,000 people died in the Baltic Sea on January 30, 1945, in an attempt to evade the Red Army. The Wilhelm Gustloff was the largest shipwreck in history, but little is known about the catastrophe seven decades on.
At around 9 p.m. on January 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler was speaking to the German people. In the packed dining hall of the luxury liner "Wilhelm Gustloff," as in most of the rest of the country, a radio was broadcasting Hitler's address, 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.
They wanted one thing - to be rescued. Only very few, 1,252 to be precise, made it off the steamer alive, of the well over 10,000 - mostly women and children, but also navy sailors. The ship had been hit by three Soviet torpedoes within an hour; the temperature outside was minus 18 degrees Celsius.
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 there were already rumors circulating of the draconic revenge on the part of the Soviets for German war crimes. Only the navy could rescue them now.
(Excerpt) Read more at dw.de ...
It was war—they were the enemy—not real human beings.
Sinking a civilian ship packed with civilians is a war crime.
The Germans did far worse to Russian civilians. By the end of the war, the armies on the Eastern Front mostly didn’t recognize the concept of civilian any more.
Makes it understandable, though not excusable.
Assuming that the sub commander knew that, you're right. However, only the defeated get charged with war crimes.
Unless your CIC is also the Enemy, then...
Clint Lorance is a former first lieutenant in the U.S. Army who was found guilty of two counts of second-degree murder in 2013 for ordering soldiers in his unit in Afghanistan to open fire on three men on a motorcycle who were approaching his patrol. His sentence includes 20 years in prison, forfeiture of all pay and dismissal from the U.S. Army.[1]
The Soviet Union lost millions of people during the war to the German War machine. Lokk what happened to Germany in the areas that the Soviet Union took over - the areas were stripped of every type of machinery that was there and shipped it back to Russia. When the Allies divided up Germany the Russians wanted more and more. Most people do not realize the war ended in 1845, but many of the POWS held by Russia were not released until well after the war in 1952. As a youngster I grew up in a German speaking church in the Milwaukee area. many of the members of the church were people whom served in Germany during the war, they would tell of where they served - eastern Front, against the British against the Americans or the younger ones will tell of Hitler Youth camps that they served in until they were needed to man rifles and so forth at the age of 14 because there were no men to serve anymore. Many of the same people who have served there have passed away now.
According to the article, about 1,000 of the passengers were military.
Moreover, an enemy-flagged ship in a declared war zone is a legitimate target.
1945 ? :)
The worst American “sea” disaster occurred in 1865 when a riverboat jammed with 1500 Union soldiers about to be released from the Union Army caught on fire and sank on the Mississippi killing 1100.
True but the world didn’t have a lot of sympathy for the Germans at that point. Unless there was something of value to them, I doubt the nazis would have done anything different.
It is interesting how war changed from WWI to WWII. My great grandfather came to the USA on the SS mount temple which was later sunk by the Germans in WWI. A couple of Mount Temple crew members were killed but they were firing back with deck mounted guns. The Germans removed the few remaing crew and passengers and scuttled the ship. Interestingly enough, the primary cargo was fossils.
Somewhere out there are photos of the sinking but I don’t feel like hunting them right now.
Another failure of the spell-checker.
Total war is totL war. Large ships are targets. Sad but true.
it is the process of fabricating war crimes that has put us in the untenable position we find ourselves today. we can not defend our selves from enemies because of lawyers that enrich themselves cobbling up and prosecuting war crimes
I was watching a documentary on the war on the Eastern Front; of the 100K+ German soldiers captured in Stalingrad, 5K were ever seen again.
What skews the Soviet death toll is that some of their “dead” fought for the Axis (particularly in the Ukraine); a small part of the war there was basically a civil war.
Most people think U-boats were designed to sink ships with torpedoes; they were actually designed to sink them with the deck gun (they couldn’t carry enough torpedoes to operate very effectively at any long range). Early in the war, the U-boats would surface next to the freighter, warn the captain (and let the crew abandon ship), then sink it with shells below the waterline.
As Britain fought back by arming freighters and using decoys (Q-ships) and escorts, the U-boats couldn’t risk surfacing like that (they were easy targets with thin hulls); the war became more brutal at that point.
There was one instance (possibly before the US was in the war) where people on a beach in Florida watched a U-boat sink a freighter; IIRC the U-boat was on the surface between the beach and the prey. Incredible.
I have no problem with the Soviets considering the ship a legitimate target at that point; the war in the east had no rules anyway. If I was the Soviet high command I would assume that either the passengers were military or they were civilians that may have been complicit in some of the atrocities from that period.
The collapse of the eastern front is interesting, as pockets of Germans were trapped further north (in Estonia/Latvia), while Finland as part of their separate peace with the USSR were expected to turn over German troops still in Finland.
On a related note, most people talk about 6 mil Jews killed in WW2, and that was a true tragedy. Most don't talk about 20 mil Russians (conservative estimates) killed in WW2. And, estimates also include around 7.5 mil Germans & Austrians (civilians & military) dead during same war -- not 100% accurate numbers, but by many estimates I can find online still pretty accurate to put the numbers into perspective (Am not favoring any particular grp).
Putin is still grappling with the depopulation problems
The fight between the Germans and the Russians changed the genetic make up of both populations
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.