In January of 1945 the Wilhelm Gustloff sailed from the German port of Gotenhafen (now Polish Gdynia), heading westward and crammed with some ten thousand passengers, for the most part German civilians fleeing the advancing Red Army.
In the icy waters of the Baltic it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine under the command of Captain Aleksandr Marinesko. Some twelve hundred survivors were picked up; everyone else died. The death toll, estimated to be as high as 9,343 including 5,000 children, six times more than the Titanic, makes it the worst maritime disaster in history.
"History is written by the victors", and so the atrocities committed upon ethnic Germans in their flight from the east, the Schrecklichkeit of the fire-bombing of German cities, the raping of hundreds of thousands of German women and girls by the Red Army, the prolonged coldhearted indifference of the Allies to the sufferings of the population after the war, has been kept silent, a silence first imposed by outsiders, then adopted as a considered political measure by Germans themselves.
This taboo is today being re-examined in Germany: that ordinary Germans - not just those who perished in the camps or died opposing Hitler - have a claim to be numbered among the victims of World War II.
