Only on the bridge, with the worst of the conflict resolved, was the mood reportedly somewhat optimistic. The four captains thought that having reached the Stolpe Bank, they had put the greatest danger behind them. In the first officers cabin a meal was being consumed: pea soup with ham. Afterward, Lieutenant Commander Zahn had the steward pour a round of cognac. It seemed appropriate to drink to a voyage on which Fortune was smiling. At his masters feet slept the German shepherd Hassan. Only Captain Weller was on watch on the bridge. Meanwhile time had run out.
From childhood on, I have heard Mothers often repeated formulation: “The first time it went boom I was wide awake, and then it came again, and again…”
The first torpedo hit the bow of the ship far below the waterline, in the area where the crew quarters lay. Any crew member who was off watch, munching a hunk of bread or sleeping in his bunk, and survived the explosion, nonetheless did not escape, because after the first report of damage Captain Weiler ordered the automatic closing of the watertight doors, sealing off the forward part of the ship, to prevent the vessel from sinking rapidly at the bow; an emergency drill in closing the watertight doors had been conducted just before the ship put out to sea. Among the sailors and Croatian volunteers thus sacrificed were many who had been drilled in loading and lowering the lifeboats in an orderly fashion.
What took place — suddenly, gradually, finally — in the closed-off forward portion of the ship no one knows.
Mothers next utterance also made an indelible impression: “At the second boom I fell out of bed, that's how bad it was…” This torpedo from tube 3, whose smooth surface carried the inscription for the soviet people,” exploded beneath the swimming pool on E deck. Only two or three girls from the naval auxiliary survived. Later they spoke of smelling gas, and of seeing girls cut to pieces by glass shards from the mosaic that had adorned the front wall of the pool area and by splintered tiles from the pool itself. As the water rushed in, one could see corpses and body parts floating in it, along with sandwiches and other remains of supper, also empty life jackets. Hardly any screaming. Then the light went out. These two or three naval auxiliaries, of whom I have no passport-sized photos, managed to escape through an emergency exit, behind which a companion-way led steeply up to the higher decks.
And then Mother said, “Not till the third boom” had Dr. Richter turned up to check on the women in the maternity ward. “By that time all hell'd broke loose!” she exclaimed every time her neverending story reached number 3.
The last torpedo hit the engine room amidships, knocking out not only the engines but also the interior lighting on all decks, as well as the ship's other systems. After that everything took place in darkness. Only the emergency lighting that came on a few minutes later provided some sense of orientation amid the chaos, as panic broke out everywhere on the two-hundred-meter-long and ten-story-high ship, which could no longer send out an SOS; the equipment in the radio room had also gone dead. Only from the torpedo boat Löwe did the repeated call go out into the ether: “Gustloff sinking after three torpedo strikes!” In between, the location of the sinking ship was transmitted over and over, for hours: “Position Stolpmünde, 55.07 degrees north, 17.42 degrees east. Request assistance…”
On S-13, the successful hits and the soon unmistakable sinking of the target gave rise to quiet rejoicing. Captain Marinesko issued an order for the partially pre-flooded submarine to submerge, because he knew that this close to the coast, and especially over the Stolpen Bank, there was little protection from depth charges. First the torpedo stuck in tube 2 had to be disarmed; if it remained sitting there, ready for ignition, with the firing motor running, the slightest vibration could cause it to explode. Fortunately no depth charges were dropped. The torpedo boat Löwe, its engines cut, was sweeping the mortally wounded ship with its searchlights.
On our global playground, the vaunted ultimate venue for communication, the Soviet U-boat S-13 was labeled categorically “the murder vessel,” this on the Web site to which I had a familial connection. The crew of this naval unit belonging to the Baltic Red Banner Fleet were condemned as “murderers of women and children.” On the Internet my son set himself up as the judge. When his bosom enemy raised objections — all he could think of was cranking up his antifascist prayer wheel and calling attention to the high-ranking Nazis and military personnel on board, and the 3-cm antiaircraft guns mounted on the sundeck — they were no match for the comments that now flooded in from all continents. Most of the chatters chimed in in German, with scraps of English. The usual hate stuff, but also pious invocations of the apocalypse, filled my screen. Exclamation points following the balance of terror. Here and there casualty figures from other maritime disasters for purposes of comparison.
The frequently filmed drama of the Titanic was trying to maintain its lead. Close behind came the Lusitania, sunk during the First World War by a German U-boat, which supposedly led to the USA's entry into the war, or at least hastened it. A lone voice also piped up with the sinking of the Cap Arcona, loaded with concentration-camp inmates, by English bombers in the Bay of Neustadt in Holstein; this mistake occurred only a few days before the end of the war, and for now topped the charts on the Internet, with seven thousand dead. Then the Goya climbed to the same level. But in the end the Gustloff won out in this competitive numerical chatter. With the zeal fueled by his passion for thoroughness, my son had succeeded in using his Web site to draw the right-wing circles' muddled attention to the forgotten ship and its human cargo, rendering the vessel visible in the form of a schematic drawing, with jagged-edged circles marking the spots where the torpedoes had hit, so that from then on the ship's name came to carry global significance as the epitome of disaster.
But the statistics fighting it out in cyberspace had little to do with what actually took place on the Wilhelm Gustloff, starting at 2116 hours on 30 January 1945. In spite of the overly drawn-out prologue, Frank Wisbar did a better job of capturing, in his black-and-white film Night Fell over Gotenhafen, something of the panic that erupted on all decks when the three hits caused the ship to heel to port, with the bow already under water from the first hit.
Past omissions came home to roost. Why hadn't the lifeboats, of which there were too few in any case, been swung out in anticipation of being needed? Why hadn't the davits and block and tackle been deiced at regular intervals? In addition, there was the absence of the crew members trapped in the forward part of the ship when the watertight doors were closed — and perhaps even still alive. The naval recruits from the training division had no experience with lifeboats. The mass of people crowding from the upper decks onto the slick, ice-coated sundeck, which was also the boat deck, slipped and slid as the boat listed. Already the first ones went flying overboard, because there was nothing to hang on to. Not all of those who fell wore life jackets. Now many jumped into the water out of sheer panic. Because of the heat inside the ship, most of those making their way onto the sundeck were too lightly dressed to withstand the shock of an air temperature of — 18 °Celsius and correspondingly low water temperature — was it two or three degrees warmer? Even so they jumped.