The deadliest shipwreck in history cost more lives than the wrecks of the Titanic and Lusitania combined. The ship was the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a German ocean liner that sank on January 30, 1945, after being struck by torpedoes from a Soviet submarine. The sinking claimed 9,000 lives.
The MV Gustloff first carried German passengers on North Atlantic and Mediterranean cruises. When World War II broke out in 1939, it was converted into a hospital ship and later became a floating barrack. In late 1944, the MV Gustloff began evacuating German troops and civilians from East Prussia as the Soviet army advanced on the area. With the ship’s conversion from a hospital ship, which had put it off limits as a military target in accordance with the laws of war, the ship became a target because it had antiaircraft guns and carried troops on board.
On January 30, 1945, the MV Wilhelm Gustloff left the port of Gotenhafen (now Gdynia, Poland) with an estimated 10,000 passengers. Many were refugees trying to escape before the Soviets arrived. The ship was built only to accommodate 1,900 passengers. Later that evening, just after 9:00 PM, three torpedoes hit the port side of the ship that had been fired from a Soviet submarine.
Many of the lifeboats on the ship were unusable because of ice accumulation, and many of the crew members trained to handle an evacuation had either been killed by the explosions from the torpedoes or were trapped below decks. It took just over an hour for the ship to sink in the Baltic Sea.
Although rescue attempts had begun only minutes after the ship’s initial SOS call, only 1,200 people were rescued, while around 9,000 people were lost in the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff.
