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Death in the Baltic
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Review
“Based on German and Russian records, as well as material gained from interviews with survivors, author Prince has written a gripping account of one of the least-known human disasters of World War II.†―Military History Magazine“In describing the experiences of survivors, whom she has been adept in tracing, the journalist Cathryn Prince gives voices to ‘ordinary people who suffered during extraordinary times' -- and does so with scrupulous empathy.†―The Spectator“A must-read for anyone wanting to examine the effects of the War on both sides.†―Warfare magazine“The story of the worst maritime disaster in history…Prince has scoured the planet for survivors, treating their harrowing stories with gentle empathy, from the first sickening bolts of the torpedoes to the chaos and terror of the ship's swift sinking as passengers fell into the freezing water, clambered for lifeboats and watched loved ones disappear in the tumult… An engaging study of a shocking tragedy.†―Kirkus Reviews“If you think that the sinking of the Titanic was the worst maritime disaster ever, then you're wrong….Amazing and harrowing story, well written and documented.†―Jean-Paul Adriaansen, Water Street Bookstore“The sinking of the cruise liner that was once the pride of Hitler's Strength Through Joy program has long been overlooked by maritime historians. Yet when the Wilhelm Gustloff disappeared beneath the freezing waters of the Baltic in January of 1945, she took with her more than six times the number of people lost on the Titanic. Through careful research and interviews with the few remaining survivors. Cathryn J. Prince vividly recreates the chaos and terror of this epic maritime disaster.†―Hugh Brewster, author of Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers And Their World“Death in the Baltic is the engrossing story of a tragedy that should never have been forgotten. With the grace of a writer who truly feels the loss of thousands in the cold waters of the Baltic Sea, Cathryn J. Prince has preserved their memory and improved our sense of history.†―Gregory A. Freeman, author of The Forgotten 500“Cathryn Prince reaches into the dark corners of history, and draws attention to this unreported tragedy through the experiences of the people who lived it.†―Stacy Perman, author of A Grand Complication“With Death in the Baltic author Cathryn J. Prince recounts an important but little known aspect of World War II. Rich in detail, drama, and tragedy, Prince's gripping narrative skillfully interweaves the traumatic events of the final weeks of the war with moving stories of survivors of a maritime disaster which claimed more lives than the sinking of the Titanic.†―Dwight Jon Zimmerman, award-winning author of Uncommon Valor“Death in the Baltic tells a gripping, invaluable story. Out of a desire for vengeance and recognition, one Soviet submarine commander caused the deaths of thousands of refugees, deaths that the victors of World War II chose to ignore. Cathryn Prince breaks the silence around the devastation many German civilians suffered at the end of the war. Parting the curtain on the "collateral damage" the Allied Forces accepted as a necessary strategy for defeating Hitler, Death in the Baltic reveals that war's trauma spares no one.†―Leila Levinson, award-winning author of Gated Grief“The story of the sinking of the Willhelm Gustloff is still unkown to a majority of non-Germans…It is certainly a grimly fascinating story, not least because of the wealth of human interest that it contains…Cathryn Prince tells the story of the Gustloff briskly and engagingly…making good use of the eyewitness accounts of the survivors.†―History Today
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About the Author
Cathryn J. Prince is the author of A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science, for which she won the Connecticut Press Club's 2011 Book Award for non-fiction. She is also the author of Burn the Town and Sack the Banks: Confederates Attack Vermont! and Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland. She worked as a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in Switzerland and in New York, where she covered the United Nations. Prince covers the Connecticut State House for Patch.com.
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Product details
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Griffin; Reprint edition (August 5, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1137279192
ISBN-13: 978-1137279194
Product Dimensions:
6 x 0.6 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.0 out of 5 stars
75 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,070,717 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Cathryn J. Prince’s Death in the Baltic is an account of the worst maritime disaster in history, the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945. It contains some excellent research; the author has consulted a wide range of sources, some quite obscure. She has also interviewed survivors and obtained some outstanding eyewitness accounts – no mean feat given that Prince is writing nearly 70 years after the event. She also conveys a sense of who the victims really were, their diversity, and the shades of grey that surround the sinking. Yet there are signs of careless editing, and also an odd omission that gave me some reservations about the book.The 25,000-ton liner Wilhelm Gustloff was launched in 1937 as a Strength through Joy ship, designed to take deserving Germans on cruises. It was noted for its modernity and luxury. However, it spent much of the war as a submarine depot ship, lying in Gotenhafen – previously, and now once again, the Polish port of Gdynia. This lay in what had been the Polish Corridor between the wars, and a substantial part of East Prussia lay to its east, including the ancient German city of Königsberg. In January 1945 Soviet forces had surrounded the latter and were pressing into eastern Germany from the east and the south. The Germans had embarked on a major sea evacuation, Operation Hannibal, that between January 23 and the end of the war would lift an astonishing 1.2 million-odd people out of the path of the Red Army, including about 900,000 civilians. The Gustloff was reactivated after her years in dock, and was one of the first really large ships to take part. At lunchtime on January 30 she left for Kiel. She was packed with German naval personnel, including over 300 female auxiliaries, and an unknown but very large number of civilian refugees.Just after 9pm she was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine off the Pomeranian coast. She sank in less than an hour. The scene on board, by all accounts, made the Seventh Circle of Hell look benign. People fought each other, darkness and the ice on the decks to save themselves. Many were trapped below. At least a few seem to have committed suicide rather than enter the cold water; those who did jump mostly froze. No-one knows how many people died, because no-one is quite sure how many people were on board. However, postwar research by Heinz Schön, an 18-year-old assistant purser who survived the sinking, eventually concluded that there were 10,600 on board, of which he thought about 1,230 had survived. He eventually put the death toll at 9,343, most of which were civilian refugees, including a very large number of children. This toll dwarfed the Titanic, with about 1,500 dead (the Titanic was not even the worst British disaster). Yet the story of the Gustloff is far less well known. It is understandable that Prince, a researcher with several books to her credit, decided it would be a good subject. She is right.Death in the Baltic’s main strength is the testimony of the survivors. Their accounts of the sinking itself are very alive, even after 70 years. Horst Woit, then 10 years old, today living in Canada, tells Prince how he and his mother had fled their home in Elbling, East Prussia, a few days earlier; on impulse, as they leave, the boy grabs his uncle’s eight-inch jackknife. Later, he and his mother will be among the few who get into a lifeboat, but the crew will be unable to sever the icy rope holding it to the ship; then he produces the knife. “The knife,†he tells Prince, “saved 70 lives.†Eva Dorn, later Eva Dorn Rothschild, is a naval auxiliary, and should have been billeted with the rest of them in the drained swimming-pool below decks, but takes one look at it and decides it’s an overcrowded death-trap. She goes up to help the doctors, who are delivering children and treating the wounded. When the torpedo strikes, a skeleton in a glass case falls over in front of her. She steps over it, and tells herself “You have stepped over death. Nothing will happen to you.†She has stepped over death; the second torpedo strikes the swimming-pool where she is supposed to be, and some 300 young women are blown to pieces.Besides capturing testimony of the actual sinking, Prince has done very well to tell us who the civilians aboard actually were. Eva Dorn, the naval auxiliary, was not some stereotyped Nazi but the daughter of an improvident unemployed opera singer and a viola player. A rebellious young woman, she was delighted to be thrown out of the Hitler Youth. Even more interesting are the Tschinkur family, who don’t seem really to have been German at all. They were from Riga, but when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, the Baltic States (soon to be swallowed up by Stalin) were pressurized into repatriating anyone who was vaguely German; in fact their mother was Russian but their father had been German some generations back, so they were classified as Volkdeutsch and forcibly “repatriated†to the Reich. Resettled in Gotenhafen, one of the children is caned at school because, asked to recite a poem, she does so in Russian. It is a strength of Prince’s book that she helps us see the passengers on the Gustloff not as a bunch of Germans who had started a war and whose lives were forfeit, but as thousands of individuals, each with their own story, and mostly deserving of something better. She is also good on the postwar feelings of the survivors, who never felt able to discuss the wreck. Ellen Tschinkur, who emigrated to Canada, mentioned it tentatively years later to a Canadian workmate. “One of her colleagues interrupted her. ‘Oh the war. That was hard, we had to use margarine’,†she says. Tschinkur did not speak of it again. Instead, says Prince, some of the remaining survivors talk to each other each January 30; sharing, in Prince’s poignant phrase, their “lifeboat of shared memory.â€Two things do let this book down. One is a certain carelessness in the editing. Friedrich Petersen, the captain of the Gustloff, is 63 in both 1938 and 1945 (actually both wrong; he was 67 in 1945, and although he survived the sinking, he died a year or so later). The Polish name for the old German city of Thorn is ToruÅ„, not Turin. There are a few other relatively minor things. All authors make mistakes, but Prince had a major publisher behind her and they should have picked these up.A much more serious problem for me was the book’s claim to break new ground. On the jacket blurb (presumably written by the publisher, not Prince herself) we’re told that “both East and West kept this story hidden for 65 years.†No they didn’t. A veil was drawn over it in postwar Eastern Europe, it’s true; but West Germans knew of it. Moreover, in her introduction, Prince says that “few American historians have written about it. The most information I found consisted of footnotes in World War Two histories... I had no explanation for the lack of news articles... my reporter’s instincts kicked in, and I promptly began researching the Wilhelm Gustloff.â€This is strange. It may be that there is little American material, but there are two books in English, A.V. Sellwood’s The Damned Don’t Drown (1973) and The Cruellest Night, by Christopher Dobson, John Miller and Ronald Payne (1979). The former is reportage and has its flaws, but is very vivid; Sellwood is particularly good on the horrors of the actual sinking – better, in fact, than Prince, good though she is. The Cruellest Night (Cruelest in the US) is an excellent, well-researched, well-written and thorough account. Both books had American editions, and Prince must have known about them. As she doesn’t quote from or rely on them, she is not obliged to cite them; she has done nothing improper. But it is odd that she does not at least reference them as general sources. As Prince’s book is otherwise very well-referenced, it may be that her publisher discouraged her from mentioning them; if so, they did her a disservice.Prince also does not discuss something germane to her last chapter – the debate that has gone on in Germany since the 1990s on the suppression of memory, sparked by the late W. G. Sebald’s essay On the Natural History of Destruction. The Gustloff has been dragged into this and has become a political football – to the extent that Nobel laureate Günter Grass based his last novel, Crabwalk, around the sinking, in an attempt to reclaim if from the far right. Again, it’s surprising that Prince doesn’t mention Grass’s book. But this is a less serious omission. It may be that she simply felt her book had to end somewhere, and perhaps she was right.If I were to read just one book on the Wilhelm Gustloff, I’d go for The Cruellest Night, which is a more rounded account with more context, and is extremely well-researched. And for eyewitness accounts of the sinking itself, Sellwood’s The Damned Don’t Drown is more detailed and immediate. I would also have felt much happier about Death in the Baltic if it had acknowledged that it was not the first such work in English.Nonetheless, for anyone seriously interested in the Gustloff, or in the last months of the war, Death in the Baltic is a compelling read. It is also especially good at humanizing the passengers and showing who they really were. Despite misgivings, I do recommend it.
I discovered the fate of the “Wilhelm Gustloff†as a child while skimming through my 1975 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. The ship’s sinking was simply noted as history’s “worst maritime disaster†on a list of several other catastrophic events causing significant loss of life. While the sinking of the “Lusitania†and the “Titanic†are deemed historical events, the combined number of deaths associated with those ships is roughly 3x less than the number of deaths from the “Gustloffâ€. Astonishingly, most people have never heard of the “Wilhelm Gustloffâ€. With DEATH IN THE BALTIC, Cathryn Prince shines a much-needed light on the ship, its demise and the reasons why such a catastrophe is still nothing more than a historical footnote some 70 years later.In many ways, DEATH IN THE BALTIC underscores the huge difference between the Western Allies’ war against Germany and the one the Soviet Union fought. The war in Western Europe sought to liberate while the focus in Eastern Europe was annihilation. Had it been sunk in the Atlantic by a British or American submarine, the name “Wilhelm Gustloff†and its nearly 10,000 victims likely would have been a must discussed history topic. But, with such an incident occurring on the Eastern Front, its death toll is rather insignificant … just another atrocity in a conflict defined by more deadly atrocities.Cathryn Prince provides a nice, well-rounded perspective for readers by providing ample background prior to the ship’s demise. The first several chapters of the book are designed to provide us with a better understanding of how the overall scenario developed over time. She starts by detailing the precarious situation that East Prussians found themselves facing in early 1945 … an isolated part of Germany sandwiched between occupied Poland and the unstoppable, revenge-fueled Red Army rapidly approaching from the East. The situation demanded a solution to save some 2 million German lives by sea-born evacuation (Operation Hannibal). Similar to the British/French evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, a variety of suitable vessels were needed, including the luxury liner “Wilhelm Gustloffâ€. Prince provides several first-hand accounts to accentuate the experience faced by East Prussians essentially cutoff from the German homeland. The accounts include those of young children whose lives were both enjoyable and “normal†when the war was far from their doorsteps. We are also informed of the dangerous situation in the Baltic Sea, where the escape vessels are forced to contend with mines (some 60,000) and a re-invigorated Soviet Navy, including a submarine commander needing a heroic deed to save his career from insubordination. By including all these angles, Prince sets the table for the night of January 30, 1945.Although we essentially know what happens shortly after the “Gustloff†sets off into frigid abyss that January in 1945, the book does a good job maintaining suspense as we are given an idea as to what it was like on board the overcrowded vessel, with civilians and soldiers alike feeling they’d escaped certain death or captivity by leaving East Prussia. When the S-13 fires 3 torpedoes into the “Gustloffâ€, chaos and survival are evident, but there is also an element of order. When the torpedoes strike, the story gets a little confusing as each survivor’s account is told after another (giving the impression of multiple attacks), but these accounts eventually “even outâ€. While the ship sinks in relatively short order, the ordeal of those in the water is dramatic and miserable (think of the movie “Titanic†x 10). Life and death decisions on the surviving, yet overcrowded life boats in the icy Baltic make it difficult to believe there were almost 1,000 survivors, including children. The accounts of surviving in the water are some of the more dramatic moments in the book.I found one off the book’s most interesting attributes to be the aftermath of the ship’s sinking; how survivors and the sub-commander fared and how history views the incident. For the most part, everything was forgotten … survivors wanted to avoid the shame of Germany’s Nazi past and the Soviet Union did not want to draw attention to the sinking of a civilian ship (which was carrying military passengers as well). The S-13 actually sank another vessel shortly after the “Gustloffâ€, making the sub responsible for another 3-4,000 deaths. The details of S-13’s commander (A. Marinesko), his wartime service and life, is an interesting story by itself. Mysteriously, modern-day explorations of the “Gustloff’s†wreckage have oddly found “no trace of human existenceâ€, indicating the Soviet Union was involved in “cleaning up†the wreckage (possibly in search of valuable military or historical cargo). Essentially, the sinking of the “Wilhelm Gustloff†and the lack of information following its demise (from survivors and German/Soviet records) shroud this story in mystery. While the book sufficiently encapsulates events, we are still left with the feeling that there are questions that can’t or won’t be answered.I found DEATH IN THE BALTIC to be both informative and interesting to read. It is astounding that the sinking of the “Titanic†garners so much attention, yet the fate of the “Gustloff†is relatively unknown. This book provides an excellent overview of the before-during-after aspects of a significant tragedy that is still quite mysterious.
I really wanted to enjoy this book given the fact that it is a relatively unknown event of the war. Unfortunately the author created a jumbled mess of the valuable research of personal accounts of events. These first-hand stories became intertwined in a relatively non-cohesive manner that tended to bounce around on a chronological scale. Given the fact that most readers would not be familiar with the geography of the region, you would have thought that there would have been a better map of the area with the referenced cities from the book. The map that was provided didn't even have the location of the port of Gotenhafen where the Gustloff set out, nor the location of Kiel where she was originally destined. C'mon!The author tended to repeat the same statements fairly often throughout the book that you will experience déjà vu. Throw in a couple of typos and the failure to use the proper pronoun "her/she" when referencing a ship (not "it") made me wonder where the editors were in the process.All in all, I thought it was a good book. Had it been written by Erik Larson, it would have been a great read.
Extremely detailed and heavy on names and information. It's a wonderful place to learn about this (in)famous sinking. The problem is that there is TOO much information presented in so short of a time (the book is literally 200 pages), and time skips forward and backward and forward and backward: rather than present each character simultaneously and keeping it all coherent, the narrative jumps from one to the other, then to another's past, then to another's future...it become difficult to keep track of. Only once the ship is sinking (spoilers) around the 125 page mark do things even out.
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