Operation Hannibal
The Operation "Hannibal" () was, by any measure, the largest emergency resue and evacuation mission by sea of logged history, dwarfing the c. 338,000 escapees evacuated from Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo over nine days in 1940, although western historiography rarely mentions the scale and heroic feat of Operation "Hannibal" from its start on 23 January 1945 until it concluded the day after the end of World War II on 9 May 1945. It must not be confused with the Operation "Hannibal" 1941, the German airborne operation to seize the bridge over the Corinth Canal on 26 April 1941 during Unternehmen „Marita“.
History
"We're leaving soon and the letter has to go out. My crew members are either over 50 or between the ages of 18 and 19. They all know what it's about. Not a single one called in sick or even deserted, everyone assembled punctually for the rescue operation. So much sacrifice and heroism in such a dark time brings tears to my eyes. It's my duty to bring them all home safely, but if we fall, it's my honor to die with these men. Goodbye, dearest wife, I kiss and love you all."[1]
Prelude
The stage for German defeat was set in June 1944, when Moscow launched Operation Bagration to coincide with the opening of the Western Front in France. It pushed the Germans back from Leningrad all the way to Latvia and liberated Belarus. By August it had obliterated Army Group Center, cut off Army Group North, and was driving toward the Baltic. The Germans retreated into a defensive pocket (Kurland-Kessel) on the Courland Peninsula (Latvia), where 200,000 Germans and Latvians, 33 divisions in all, fought with their backs to the sea against 1.7 million Soviet troops. By October 1944, they were surrounded and cut off from all resupply except by sea. Not even the Luftwaffe could help the Heer, as it was concentrated in the west to defend against the British and American bombing campaign.
In early January 1945, Hitler granted permission for a partial withdrawal from the Courland pocket. Dönitz’s little crackerjack fleet pulled out the 4th Panzer Division, 31st, 32nd, and 93rd Infantry Divisions, 11th SS Division “Norland”, remnants of 227th, 218th, and 389th Infantry Divisions, and the 15th Latvian SS Division. This still left nearly 120,000 men trapped in the pocket, ordered to hold down the Russian army, and Karl Dönitz still had to keep them supplied and bring out the most severely wounded.
As the Red Army threatened Berlin in early 1945, Josef Goebbels promised the German people that the capital would be defended to the last stone and the last man. “We cannot let Königsberg put us to shame,” he declared, comparing Berlin to the capital of East Prussia, at the time surrounded and desperately holding out against the bolshevik hordes. Königsberg (Endkampf um Königsberg) would hold out until 9 April 1945, three weeks before Berlin fell. In the closing days of the war the crisis for German civilians trapped on the Eastern Front by the Russians reached a peak. Many lived between the Soviet advance and the Wehrmacht defense of Germany. They were fearful of the murder and rape orgies the Soviets brought with them, whereever they invaded. Since all land routes had been cut off, an evacuation by sea was the only way to provide escape for the millions of civilians who were forced to leave their homeland.
- In August 1944, news got out that in the East Prussian villages of Nemmersdorf and Goldap, the Red Army had raped, tortured and murdered all of the inhabitants down to the last baby. In Nemmersdorf, reporters from Switzerland and Sweden were present when the grisly atrocities were uncovered. In barns, houses and sheds where the Red Army had discovered civilians hiding, they had not only machine gunned them but had thrown hand grenades into the groups. 95 German civilians were murdered in this bestial fashion in the Nemmersdorf area of Schulzenwalde, above. Below: Swiss journalists photographed bodies of two raped and murdered German women and three children also murdered by the Red Army in Metgethen, East Prussia, another place of slaughter. This scene soon played out in West Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, the Sudetenland and other areas of eastern Europe. The Red Army was cajoled to behave in Germany “as Mongolian hordes of old” by Stalin’s propagandists, among whom was the grand master of hate, Ilya Ehrenburg, who encouraged troops to injure, torture, rape and kill all German civilians. As the violence spread, the only option for the endangered East Prussians was to flee, and they would face uncounted scenes of terror. [...] In the winter of 1945, East Prussia was cut off from the west, the only escape route for many being from the small port of Pillau and over the Baltic Sea toward the west. Throngs of desperate Königsberg civilians had only one way out, a frigid walk over half frozen lagoons to Frische Nehrung, a narrow slice of land, from where they hoped to reach Danzig. Almost a million people are said to have tried this perilous crossing. Survivors later recounted the hopelessness and horror of making this deadly trek in the dark as whole families pulling carts and sleds filled with children and the elderly slid into holes in the ice and plunged into the unforgiving sea. In daylight, Soviet planes circled overhead and intentionally cut off large ice floes with artillery fire, sending them hopelessly adrift. Those who escaped on land joined an endless parade of stunned, bereaved people on overflowing roadways. They witnessed whole cartloads of people crushed and mowed over by advancing Russian tanks, with wailing children and frantic mothers stretched for mile after mile of human misery. Unprepared for the 60 degree below zero wind chill and deep snow, some turned back home in despair. Blazing farms lit up the horizon, burned by the Red Army or set on fire by hopeless owners who then committed suicide. This was the “orderly and humane expulsion” of Germans that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin shook hands to. More than 1.9 million of nearly 2.4 million East Prussians joined by Germans from central Poland fled westward under horrible conditions. 173,000 people could not or would not leave. Later, researchers of the Federal Archives counted 3,300 locations just in areas they had access to where at least 120,000 German civilians were either shot or beaten to death by the Red Army.[2]
The first sea evacuation campaigns began at the end of July 1944 with the evacuation of the town of Memel and shortly afterwards, as a result of the armistice between Finland and the Soviet Union, with the repatriation of the military from the Finnish Baltic Sea ports. The evacuations of Reval, Riga, Windau and Libau followed in mid-September. Around 140,000 people were evacuated from Memel and Reval. By December 1944, 70 ships that had been used to transport refugees and wounded were lost to enemy action in the Baltic Sea; their total tonnage was 153,275 GRT.
Hitler’s standing orders on the Eastern Front were “no surrender, no retreat.” He insisted on a strategy of Feste Plätze, which meant holding “fortified places” like the Courland peninsula and the cities of Kolberg, Königsberg, and Danzig at all costs.[3] He believed it would cost the Red Army more to take these places than it would the Germans to hold them. Also known as the “wave-breaker” strategy, this produced a series of encirclements and precipitous retreats in late 1944 that so infuriated Hitler that in January 1945 he issued orders that no troop movements whatsoever be initiated without his personal approval. This meant no withdrawal to more defensible lines. It also meant, as the Red Army raced across East Prussia covering a hundred miles in little more than a week, that the sea was the German defenders’ last lifeline. East Prussia became a death trap for tens of thousands of Germans. Masses of civilians joined broken military units fleeing to the west. Those who made it across the Oder River swelled the refugee population of Germans already evacuated from bombed-out cities in the western Reich.
Operation
By early 1945, Germany controlled only a narrow land corridor some 50 miles wide stretching along the Baltic coast from Königsberg to Swinemünde. It was under constant attack from the air and would be completely cut off by the Russian army in March. Long before then, the best escape route was not overland but by ship to safe ports. Control of the Baltic was crucial to mass evacuations. It had been a “German lake” at the beginning of the war. Kiel was the home port of a large part of the German fleet. However, by 1944 things had changed—RAF bombers and Soviet submarines were making operations risky.
In 1944, the Kriegsmarine had gotten practice shuttling transports up and down the coast when it evacuated British and American POWs from stalags (POW camps) in Poland and East Prussia. Most POWs had to march overland, but some were transported in the holds of ships. They ironically dubbed their trips “Baltic cruises.” The Kriegsmarine itself had very little to do with these evacuations, only providing escort. Still, those evacuations served as a blueprint for the wholesale evacuation of Germans a few months later. Thus, Baltic ports were not just defensive citadels; they were havens for fleeing Germans. Civilians trapped in the pockets with the defenders faced three distasteful options: stick it out and hope their defenders could keep them safe, surrender to the Red Army and get murdered or become forced labourers, or try to get aboard an evacuation ship.
On orders from Karl Dönitz and with the password "Hannibal", Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg gave instructions on 23 January 1945, due to the advance of the Red Army, to relocate the 2nd U-Lehrdivision stationed in Gotenhafen, home port for several units of the Kriegsmarine, with the 22nd U-Flotilla out of the contested area to the west. He put Generaladmiral Oskar Kummetz and Rear Admiral Conrad Engelhardt in charge of the operation. Their pairing and their ranks are an indication of the high priority Dönitz put on the operation, and he issued the formal orders.
Dönitz had managed to save most of his ships from the scrap pile, but keeping them at sea was a different matter. The idea for Operation Hannibal came to him in late 1944 or early 1945. He was supposed to keep supply lines open to the Baltic strongholds and carry off the wounded. With most of his surface fleet tied up at the docks, he was forced to assemble a makeshift flotilla to mount a sea-borne evacuation of massive scope. To man his fleet, he would have to make do with the skeleton crews he still had at his command, augmented by the wharf rats he could scrape together in German-held ports. While German officers like Generalobersts Ferdinand Schörner (de) and Lothar Rendulic (de) dutifully held their positions on the Baltic front, Dönitz defied the Führer’s “no retreat, no surrender” orders. Dönitz was the rare German officer who refused to follow Hitler’s headlong rush to annihilation.
Operation Hannibal was implemented on his initiative alone to evacuate military personnel in addition to as much of the desperate German population of East Prussia as he could save. Such an evacuation plan was fraught with many dangers. Soviet submarines prowled the Baltic Sea where the ships would sail and the Red air force bombed the ports and ships at sea. Most of the available ports were under siege by the Red Army and civilians who tried to reach the ports were often killed or died in the winter weather. To save the civilians and some of the German soldiers, the Kriegsmarine developed a plan for the evacuation called Operation "Hannibal" in early 1945. The Baltic ports capable of handling large ships and masses of people were Gotenhafen, Pillau (tip of the Samland peninsula), and Swinemünde (on the Oder-Neisse estuary), but even those were not truly safe. Swinemünde came under RAF bombardment in 1945, and the land link between Königsberg and Pillau was so vulnerable to Russian bombardment that civilians were forced to flee across the frozen Vistula Lagoon on foot.
The operation was exceptionally rag-tag in its design. They used almost any ship they could get their hands on. Cruise ships, freighters, fishing vessels (Kriegsfischkutter) and various other vessels – the Germans enlisted all to help in this evacuation. Various ships made several crossings to and from Gotenhafen, evacuating many thousands of expellees, refugees and wounded soldiers. One was called the "Deutschland", another cruise ship that was slightly smaller than the "Gustloff". The "Deutschland" made seven crossings of the Baltic Sea from Gotenhafen across to Kiel, and took out tens of thousands of refugees and wounded soldiers.
The first evacuation ship out of Pillau sailed on 28 January 1945, carrying 1,800 civilians and 1,200 badly injured military casualties. The ship slipped out of port without escort under cover of darkness to avoid air attacks and reached safety the next day. Back in the Königsberg pocket, the German defenders fought to keep the lifeline to Pillau open because it was their last hope of escape. By the end of January 1945, the Kriegsmarine coordinated the transport of a total of 250,000 people on ships of the Navy and Merchant Navy from Danzig, Elbing, Gotenhafen, Hela, Königsberg, Libau, Memel, Pillau and Swinemünde. The loss of a total of twelve ships as part of these transports cost the lives of 12,600 people. In the second half of February 1945, the Wehrmacht managed to break through the Red Army's siege of Königsberg. As a result, refugees again streamed out of the city to the surrounding ports of Samland, primarily Pillau. The “Seetransporte” (SeeTra) department of the Kriegsmarine, headed by Rear Admiral Engelhardt, ensured transport as far as possible, but could not transport more than 5,000 people a day due to a lack of ships – and not even to Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark or Mecklenburg, but only to Gotenhafen or to Danzig near the front.
- On February 9, a German counterattack by elements of the 3rd Panzer Army and 4th Infantry, led by a captured T-34, reopened the route from Königsberg to Pillau. The Germans managed to keep it open until April, allowing supplies to come in to the defenders and casualties and refugees to be evacuated. The Soviets focused their attentions on smashing the defenders, content to let the sick and wounded flee back to Germany. Surviving soldiers would be in no condition to fight again, and the refugees would be an added burden on a collapsing German economy. Elderly civilians in Pillau wait patiently to be granted passage on an evacuation ship, February 1945. Operation Hannibal enabled some 265,000 Germans caught in the Soviets’ route of advance to reach safety. Elderly civilians in Pillau wait patiently to be granted passage on an evacuation ship, February 1945. Operation Hannibal enabled some 265,000 Germans caught in the Soviets’ route of advance to reach safety. Some German civilians got on the evacuation list because of their previous sacrifice for the Reich. The pastor of a small East Prussian village church and his wife got a pair of passes because they had given two sons to the army. But first they had to get to Gotenhafen, which meant joining a stream of refugees on the icy roads going west. They took whatever personal belongings they could carry with them. The pastor made it and was taken on board the Wilhelm Gustloff, but his wife died along the way, to be hurriedly buried on the side of the road. He told a crew member of the Wilhelm Gustloff, “Everywhere we looked there was only suffering and despair.” The pastor’s journey to hell was not over yet. He was on board the Wilhelm Gustloff when it was torpedoed and went down. He was one of the few survivors. Luftwaffe Captain Franz Huber was one of the fortunate wounded German soldiers whose injuries were serious enough to get him a ticket home without being fatal. He was scheduled for evacuation on February 9 from Pillau. Arriving at the port, he was loaded aboard the General von Steuben, along with other wounded Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht officers, headed for Swinemünde and a German military hospital. They were all under the impression they would have safe passage aboard an official hospital ship, although not a single Operation Hannibal transport had the distinctive Red Cross painted on it. There was no time, nor any guarantee the Russians would have respected it. Space was limited even on the available passenger liners because of the harsh winter weather. Refugees could not be left on open decks for the entire voyage. [...] Civilians were placed in steerage class and passageways. Still, some managed to stow away out of sight on the upper decks, desperate enough to take their chances with the weather. No one complained about their accommodations. Other issues came up that were a product of the desperate times. Large passenger liners like the Wilhelm Gustloff and the General von Steuben were supposed to carry a full complement of lifeboats, but those had been taken for other purposes at this stage of the war, and there was no time to find replacements. Life jackets, which should have been issued to all passengers and crew, were also in short supply. That did not matter much, because anyone plunged into the icy waters of the Baltic would die of hypothermia in a matter of minutes. Then there was the matter of fueling and making sea-worthy the rust-buckets that had sat at anchor for months. The Wilhelm Gustloff, for instance, had not put to sea for four years. During that time, it had been used as a training barracks for submarine crews. Soviet aircraft did not make things any easier. Not having to tangle with the Luftwaffe, they strafed oil tanks and refugees crowded onto the wharves. German antiaircraft fire was limited by a shortage of guns and ammunition. Even the idea of sending the evacuation ships in convoy proved to be wishful thinking; the Kriegsmarine did not have sufficient escort vessels to protect the ships. The only warships available were the handful of destroyers, minesweepers, and torpedo boats still operable. [...] The operational plan of Hannibal was for the evacuation ships and any escorts they could muster to make a dash for their destination under cover of darkness, sticking close to the coastline to avoid Soviet airstrikes standing out against the night sky. It was a flawed plan, though, because while a dark, overcast sky might hide them from aerial attack, it could not protect them if a Soviet submarine caught sight of them. Nor could darkness offer any protection against the mines both sides had liberally seeded the sea routes with. Every voyage was a roll of the dice but still preferable to setting out overland with all the horrors that held. Everyone had heard the stories of slaughter and rape being perpetrated by the Red Army. And if the Red Army did not get them, they faced death from exposure or starvation. Operation Hannibal was fortunate that the Soviet surface fleet did not come out to challenge it. But Soviet submarines were not so passive. Several refugee ships were torpedoed and went down, with little hope of rescue ships showing up. The waters were icy cold, and many passengers were weak from hunger or wounds. Once they went into the water, they survived only a few moments even if they had on lifejackets. There was also the fact that potential rescue vessels were reluctant to help because they, too, were afraid of being torpedoed. [...] Even in the last 48 hours of Eisenhower’s ultimatum, Dönitz kept Operation Hannibal going. It is estimated that in the last several weeks of the war, when, for all practical purposes, the Kriegsmarine had ceased to exist, Operation Hannibal managed to carry 265,000 Germans caught behind the surrender lines to safety. Operation Hannibal was still going on, in defiance of surrender terms, even after Germany’s capitulation on May 8, 1945. Unarmed coastal craft continued to steam up and down the Baltic coast, picking up frantic groups of refugees and carrying them beyond the reach of the Red Army. There were still a few ports inside German borders where refugees could be dropped off. What happened to them after that was up to fate. On the very last day of the war, as Dönitz formally surrendered the Third Reich, a flotilla of 92 vessels left the Latvian port of Libau (Liepāja), part of the Courland pocket, saving 18,000 soldiers and civilians from Soviet clutches. Or not. Russian motor torpedo boats pursued the little group and forced the slowest ships to heave to so they could be boarded. Their passengers went into captivity, where those who did not die remained for years to come. By the end, Dönitz’s mass evacuation was no longer an organized operation. It simply kept going on its own momentum until it ran out of gas, figuratively and literally speaking. With no warships and no command and control, the Kriegsmarine ceased its humanitarian mission when the news of the official surrender finally reached the last holdouts of the Reich. Left in the lurch were an estimated 180,000 German troops still in the Baltic region. They would soon be swallowed up by the Red Army and shipped off to POW camps, from which very few would return. Operation Hannibal was the most successful operation conducted by the Third Reich in the latter stages of the war. [...] In 1940, East Prussia was home to 2.2 million Germans. By the end of May 1945, that population had been reduced to 193,000 desperate, starving people. Still, Dönitz was justifiably proud of what Operation Hannibal had accomplished. Writing in his Memoirs 10 years later, he said, “Ninety-nine per cent of the refugees brought out by sea succeeded in arriving safely at ports on the western Baltic. The percentage of refugees lost on the overland route was very much higher.” Of an estimated 200,000 who fled west by land, untold thousands died of exposure and Soviet bombs and strafing. Of those taken off by ship, the best estimates are that only three percent died at sea. [...] but Operation Hannibal was a remarkable success story attributable to German ingenuity, determination, and more than a little luck. It was a credit not to Nazis ideology but to old-fashioned classic German efficiency. In the end, Operation Hannibal deserves to be recognized as a magnificent logistical accomplishment, ranking ahead of the British evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, the American flight from Corregidor in 1941, and the failed Russian withdrawal from Sevastopol in 1942.[4]
Numbers
Over 1,000 refugee ships were used, of which 245 with 738,735 GRT were sunk, taking 33,000 evacuees and sailors down with them, mostly on "Wilhelm Gustloff", "Steuben" and "Goya". These losses are shocking war crimes. The sinking of the "Wilhelm Gustloff" alone, on its first run during the operation, cost c. 10,000 lives, among them more than 5,000 children, thousands of women, elderly and wounded. This made it the largest maritime disaster in history. Another tragic loss was the "Karlsruhe" with c. 950–1.050 dead.
The refugees were dropped off at several ports and fishing villages on Germany’s Pomeranian coast: Swinemünde, Sassnitz (Rügen Island), Rostock and Warnenemünde (Bay of Mecklenburg), Stolpmünde and Rügenwalde. These places were out of the path of the Soviet army but in no way prepared to receive thousands of refugees. Due to the hasty and secretive nature of the operation, the locals were unprepared to either feed or house the refugees dropped in their laps.
The supposed safety of these destinations proved short-lived, in any case, because they did not have defensive garrisons or anti-aircraft defenses. This merely prolonged the agony of many evacuees, who had believed they were now safe. Other drop-off places could not even be dignified by calling them ports; they were dots on the map, with names like Horst, Dievenow, and Wollin (the name for both the town and the island it was on).
In total, c. 2.5 million Germans were estimated to have been evacuated from the east during Operation "Hannibal", over three-quarters of them civilians and the rest military personnel. The figure does not include concentration camp prisoners, for whom figures are largely absent.
Rescue Medal "Baltic Sea 1945"
The Rescue Medal "Baltic Sea 1945" (Rettungsmedaille „Ostsee 1945“) for the largest rescue operation in maritime history was donated by Heinz Schön (1926–2013) in 1987 "as a token of gratitude and recognition of all those rescued across the Baltic Sea" and jointly awarded by the "Kuratorium memorial site Albatros - Rescue over See e. V." („Kuratorium Erinnerungsstätte Albatros – Rettung über See e. V.") and the "Baltic Sea Archive Heinz Schön" („Ostsee-Archiv Heinz Schön").
As described in Die Letzte Fahrt, Heinz Schön was a member of the German merchant marines and the purser trainee aboard the ship when it was torpedoed and sunk.[5] One of the well-known honorees is Hans-Walter Buch, son of Reichsleiter Walter Buch. Chairman of the Board of Trustees Frigate Captain a. D. Friedrich Rohlfing (1910–1992) emphasized at the award to ten, meanwhile elderly, rescuers in May 1988:
- "Few receive the award for many."
- „Wenige erhalten die Auszeichnung für viele.“[6]
External links
References
- ↑ Original text: Wir fahren gleich ab, und der Brief muß noch raus. Meine Besatzungsmitglieder sind entweder über 50 oder zwischen 18 und 19 Jahren. Sie wissen alle, um was es geht. Kein einziger meldete sich krank oder desertierte gar, alle traten pünktlich zur Rettungsaktion an. So viel Aufopferungsbereitschaft und Heldenmut in einer solchen dunklen Zeit treibt mir die Tränen in die Augen. Es ist meine Pflicht, sie alle wieder heil nach Hause zu bringen, sollten wir aber fallen, dann ist es mir eine Ehre, mit diesen Männern gemeinsam zu sterben. Auf Wiedersehen, liebste Frau, ich küsse und liebe Euch alle.
- ↑ The Sad Story of East Prussia
- ↑ In October 1944, Königsberg was completely cut off by the Red Army, leaving 130,000 German defenders bottled up inside. From that point on, the only way in or out was by sea—either from its own harbor facilities or through Pillau. The last German strongpoint on the coast was Kolberg, transformed into a defensive bastion even as 70,000 civilian refugees poured into the city. The German Army High Command (OKH) hoped to keep Kolberg open as a supply port for forces farther east while bleeding the Russian army white at the gates. What Hitler saw as “fortified places” to wreck the onrushing Russian juggernaut were in reality death traps. They were defended by forces that existed mostly on paper, like the impressive-sounding 4th, 16th, and 18th Armies, which were actually a grab-bag of SS, Wehrmacht, and Volkssturm units possessing few tanks or heavy weapons.
- ↑ Operation Hannibal: The Third Reich’s Last Hurrah
- ↑ The M.S. Wilhelm Gustloff in German Memory Culture: A Case Study on Competing Discourses, 2013
- ↑ Neun tapfere Seeleute ausgezeichnet, Ostpreußenblatt, 18 July 1992, p. 19