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Operation Hannibal was a German naval operation involving the evacuation by sea of German troops and civilians from the Courland Pocket, East Prussia, West Prussia and Pomerania from mid-January to May 1945 as the Red Army advanced during the East Prussian and East Pomeranian Offensives and subsidiary operations. The operation was one of the largest evacuations by sea in history.
Planning for Operation Hannibal started in late 1944, although it was done quietly since Hitler opposed such measures. The coordination of the evacuations was entrusted to Rear Admiral Conrad Engelhardt . By the end of 1944, Engelhardt had assembled a fleet of 22 passenger liners, each weighing over 10.000 tonnes (11.023 short tons). Overall responsibility of the operation went to Admiral Oskar Kummetz. In early 1945, the Germans had two Escort Divisions in the area, the 9th and the 10th Escort Divisions . (German : Sicherungs-Division) [1]
The 9th Escort Division mainly consisted of minesweepers.
The East Prussian Offensive by the Red Army's 3rd Belarusian Front under General Ivan Chernyakhovsky commenced on 13 January 1945 and, with Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front, subsequently cut off East Prussia between 23 January and 10 February 1945. German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz ordered General Admiral Oskar Kummetz, as Naval High Commander, Baltic, and Rear Admiral Konrad Engelhardt, head of the Kriegsmarine's shipping department, to plan and execute the Rettungsaktion (evacuation operation). [2] Dönitz radioed a message to Gotenhafen in occupied Poland on 23 January 1945, to begin evacuations to ports outside the Soviet area of operations. The operation was codenamed Hannibal. [3]
On 19 February, the Wehrmacht had managed to open up a corridor from Königsberg to Pillau, which allowed thousands of refugees to escape and wait for ships in Pillau, which would eventually transport them west of the Polish Corridor. Refugees also came from Cranz, Heiligenbeil, Elbing and Preußisches Holland . By 8 April as many as 450,000 refugees were in Pillau. [4]
The flood of military personnel and German civilians eventually turned the operation into one of the largest evacuations by sea in history, even larger than the far more widely known British evacuation of Dunkirk five years earlier. Over a period of 15 weeks, somewhere between 494 and 1,080 merchant vessels of all types, including fishing boats and other craft, [5] and utilizing Germany's largest remaining naval units, carried between 800,000 and 900,000 German civilians and 350,000 soldiers [6] across the Baltic Sea to Germany and German-occupied Denmark.
Operation Hannibal commenced on 23 January 1945. [7] At first, only 14 liners were available along with twenty-three freighters of more than 5,000 tons and many other smaller ships. On 30 January Wilhelm Gustloff , Hansa, and the whaling factory ship Walter Rau left the harbor at Gotenhafen in occupied Poland, bound for Kiel. Hansa was forced to return to port with mechanical trouble, but the Gustloff, overcrowded with more than 10,000 civilians and military personnel aboard, continued. She was torpedoed and sunk by the Soviet submarine S-13 off the Pomeranian coast, with possibly as many as 9,500 deaths, the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history. Those on Walter Rau eventually reached Eckernförde.
On 9 February the SS General von Steuben sailed from Pillau with between 3,000 and 4,000 mostly military personnel on board, heading for Swinemünde. She was also sunk by the S-13, just after midnight, with 650 survivors.
In early March, a task force composed of the German cruiser Admiral Scheer accompanied by three German destroyers and the Elbing-class torpedo boat T36 were giving cover to a German bridgehead near Wollin. During that operation, naval small craft evacuated over 75,000 soldiers and civilians who had been isolated in that area. They were taken to larger warships and other transports lying offshore. While a number of these transports were sunk, large liners such as SS Deutschland got through and carried up to 11,000 soldiers and civilians each.
During the night of 4–5 April a flotilla of small boats and landing craft evacuated over 30,000 soldiers and civilians from Oxhöfter Kämpe and took them to Hela. It is estimated that nearly 265,000 people were evacuated from Danzig (modern Gdańsk) to Hela during the month of April alone. [8]
On 15 April another large convoy consisting of four liners and other transports left Hela with over 20,000 soldiers and civilians. On 16 April the Goya was torpedoed and sunk by L-3, with the loss of over 6,000 lives; 183 survived.
Initially, on becoming Reich President on 1 May, Karl Dönitz was determined to continue the war, going so far as to instruct Generaloberst Carl Hilpert that combat troops would have priority in evacuation to Germany from the Courland Pocket. It was not until the afternoon of 6 May, with British troops practically on his doorstep, that he gave up on that plan. [9]
From 1 to 8 May, over 150,000 people were evacuated from the beaches of Hela. At 21:00 on 8 May 1945, the last day of the war, a convoy consisting of 92 large and small vessels left the Latvian city of Liepāja (German : Libau) with 18,000 soldiers and civilians. [10] While several hundred of those who had boarded small ships on the last day of the war or after were captured by Soviet MTBs, evacuations to the west continued for at least a week after all such movements were prohibited by the terms of the German surrender.
Shortages plagued the operation with food and medicine being seen as primary issues for the Nazi administration, causing a trend of elderly and very young children to die on board the rescue ships. [7] Other shortages included only a three-week supply of coal remaining for the sea transport tasks and only a ten-day supply for rail transports to move troops to the front, with fuel being at its lowest levels since the war began. [7]
In addition to the Goya, Wilhelm Gustloff, and General von Steuben, 158 other merchant vessels were lost during the 15-week course of Operation Hannibal (23 January – 8 May 1945). [11]
Karl Dönitz was a German navy officer who, following Adolf Hitler's suicide, succeeded him as head of state of Nazi Germany in May 1945, holding the position until the dissolution of the Flensburg Government following Germany's unconditional surrender to the Allies days later. As Supreme Commander of the Navy beginning in 1943, he played a major role in the naval history of World War II.
MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German military transport ship which was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea while evacuating civilians and military personnel from East Prussia and the German-occupied Baltic states, and German military personnel from Gotenhafen (Gdynia), as the Red Army advanced. By one estimate, 9,400 people died, making it the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history.
The Kriegsmarine was the navy of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It superseded the Imperial German Navy of the German Empire (1871–1918) and the inter-war Reichsmarine (1919–1935) of the Weimar Republic. The Kriegsmarine was one of three official branches, along with the Heer and the Luftwaffe, of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces from 1935 to 1945.
The Laconia incident was a series of events surrounding the sinking of a British passenger ship in the Atlantic Ocean on 12 September 1942, during World War II, and a subsequent aerial attack on German and Italian submarines involved in rescue attempts. RMS Laconia, carrying 2,732 crew, passengers, soldiers, and prisoners of war, was torpedoed and sunk by U-156, a German U-boat, off the West African coast. Operating partly under the dictates of the old prize rules, the U-boat's commander, Korvettenkapitän Werner Hartenstein, immediately commenced rescue operations. U-156 broadcast her position on open radio channels to all Allied powers nearby, and was joined by several other U-boats in the vicinity.
SS General von Steuben was a German passenger liner and later an armed transport ship of the German Navy that was sunk in the Baltic Sea during World War II. She was launched in 1923 as München, renamed General von Steuben in 1930, and renamed Steuben in 1938.
SS Cap Arcona, named after Cape Arkona on the island of Rügen, was a large German ocean liner, later a requisitioned auxiliary ship of the Kriegsmarine, and finally a prison ship in the later months of World War II (1939-1945). A flagship of the Hamburg Südamerikanische Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft, she made her maiden voyage on 29 October 1927, carrying passengers and cargo between Germany and the east coast of South America, and for a brief period of time she was the largest and fastest ship on the route, until one month later she was surpassed on the same Europe-South America route by the Italian liner MS Augustus.
Deutschland was the lead ship of her class of heavy cruisers which served with the Kriegsmarine of Nazi Germany during World War II. Ordered by the Weimar government for the Reichsmarine, she was laid down at the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel in February 1929 and completed by April 1933. Originally classified as an armored ship by the Reichsmarine, in February 1940 the Germans reclassified the remaining two ships of this class as heavy cruisers. In 1940, she was renamed Lützow, after the unfinished Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruiser Lützow was sold to the Soviet Union the previous year.
Alexander Ivanovich Marinesko was a Soviet career naval officer. During the last year of World War II, he became known as the captain of the submarine S-13, which sank the German military transport ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic Sea in January 1945. Passengers included civilians and women and children being evacuated from East Prussia, in addition to military and related personnel. More than 9,300 of the more than 10,000 passengers and crew died.
Goya was a Norwegian motor freighter used as a troop transport by Nazi Germany and sunk with a massive loss of life near the end of World War II.
The evacuation of East Prussia was the movement of German civilian population and military personnel from East Prussia between 20 January and March 1945, that was initially organized and carried out by state authorities but quickly turned into a chaotic flight from the Red Army.
Admiral Hipper was the lead ship of the Admiral Hipper class of heavy cruisers which served with Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine during World War II. The ship was laid down at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg in July 1935 and launched in February 1937; Admiral Hipper entered service shortly before the outbreak of war, in April 1939. The ship was named after Admiral Franz von Hipper, commander of the German battlecruiser squadron during the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and later commander-in-chief of the German High Seas Fleet. She was armed with a main battery of eight 20.3 cm (8 in) guns and, although nominally under the 10,000-long-ton (10,160 t) limit set by the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, actually displaced over 16,000 long tons (16,260 t).
The Baltic Sea campaigns were conducted by Axis and Allied naval forces in the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Bothnia, the Gulf of Finland and the connected lakes Ladoga and Onega on the Eastern Front of World War II. After early fighting between Polish and German forces, the main combatants were the Kriegsmarine and the Soviet Navy, with Finland supporting the Germans until 1944 and the Soviets thereafter. The Swedish Navy and merchant fleet played important roles, and the British Royal Navy planned Operation Catherine for control of the Baltic Sea and its exit choke point into the North Sea.
The Soviet hospital ship Armenia was a transport ship operated by the Soviet Union during World War II to carry both wounded soldiers and military cargo. It had originally been built as a passenger ship for operations on the Black Sea.
German submarine U-3505 was a Type XXI submarine of Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine during World War II. The U-boat was laid down on 9 July 1944 at the Schichau-Werke yard at Danzig, launched on 25 August 1944, and commissioned on 7 October 1944 under the command of Oberleutnant zur See Horst Willner.
The German torpedo boat T36 was the last of 15 Type 39 torpedo boats built for the Kriegsmarine during World War II. Completed in late 1944, T36 was assigned to convoy escort duties and supporting German forces in the Baltic. At the end of January 1945, she rescued survivors from the torpedoed ocean liner MV Wilhelm Gustloff. The boat screened German warships as they bombarded advancing Soviet troops and escorted convoys over the next several months. In May, T36 began to ferry refugees; she struck a mine on 4 May and was sunk by Soviet aircraft the following day.
Wilhelm Zahn was a German Kriegsmarine officer during the Second World War. He was U-boat First Watch Officer, then became U-boat commander and was finally promoted to Korvettenkapitän on 1 April 1943. As commander of U-56 he was able to avoid detection by the destroyers surrounding HMS Nelson and came in close proximity to the British flagship, launching three torpedoes against her whilst she was carrying Winston Churchill and the high military command of the British Navy. Following that incident he became widely known as the "Man who almost killed Churchill" amongst the U-boat submariner corps. He was one of the commanding officers during the sinking of MV Wilhelm Gustloff which has been described as "Adolf Hitler'sTitanic".
Darkness Fell on Gotenhafen is a 1960 German war drama film, directed by Frank Wisbar. It dramatizes the sinking of MV Wilhelm Gustloff, which was sunk while carrying German servicemen and around 6,000 civilian evacuees. Heinz Schön presents the combined death toll as 9,343.
MV Robert Ley was a cruise ship of the Nazi Party leisure organization Kraft durch Freude. She was considered the flagship of the KDF fleet.
The Soviet naval Baltic Sea campaign in 1945 was launched by the Soviet Navy to harass enemy shipping and naval military assets of Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front during World War II. Both submarines and surface units of the Soviet Navy were employed. The campaign scored successes during Operation Hannibal.
SS Vale was a cargo steamship that was built in Germany in 1939 for Seereederei „Frigga“. In the Second World War she carried German refugees and wounded in the evacuation of East Prussia in 1945. A Soviet air attack sank her that April, killing about 250 of the people aboard her.