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.
Wilhelm Gustloff was a German politician and meteorologist who founded the Swiss branch of the Nazi Party/Foreign Organization (NSDAP/AO) at Davos in 1932. The NSDAP/AO was formed as the wing of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) for German citizens living outside Germany. Gustloff continued to lead the Swiss branch of the NSDAP/AO until 1936, when he was assassinated by David Frankfurter, a Croatian Jew angered by the growth of the NSDAP. After killing Gustloff, Frankfurter immediately surrendered to the authorities and confessed to the Swiss police that "I fired the shots because I am a Jew."
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.
S-13 was an S-class submarine of the Soviet Navy. Her keel was laid down by Krasnoye Sormovo in Gorky on 19 October 1938. She was launched on 25 April 1939 and commissioned on 31 July 1941 in the Baltic Fleet, under the command of Captain Pyotr Malanchenko. The submarine is best known for the 1945 sinking of Wilhelm Gustloff, a German military transport ship/converted cruise ship. With a career total of 44,701 GRT sunk or damaged, she is the highest-scoring Soviet submarine in history.
SS Andrea Doria was a luxury transatlantic ocean liner of the Italian Line, put into service in 1953. She is widely known from the extensive media coverage of her sinking in 1956, which included the remarkably successful rescue of 1,660 of her 1,706 passengers and crew.
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.
Crabwalk (2002), published in German as Im Krebsgang, is a novel by German author Günter Grass, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. Born in 1929 in the Free City of Danzig, Grass explores the effects of the past on the present: in this novel, he interweaves various strands and combines fact and fiction in exploring the lack of attention to German victimhood in their losses in World War II.
Martha Wells is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has published a number of fantasy novels, young adult novels, media tie-ins, short stories, and nonfiction essays on fantasy and science fiction subjects. Her novels have been translated into twelve languages. Wells has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards and three Locus Awards for her science fiction series The Murderbot Diaries. She is also known for her fantasy series Ile-Rien and The Books of the Raksura. Wells is praised for the complex, realistically detailed societies she creates; this is often credited to her academic background in anthropology.
Monique T.D. Truong is a Vietnamese American writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Yale University and Columbia University School of Law. She has written multiple books, and her first novel, The Book of Salt, was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2003. It was a national bestseller, and was awarded the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize and the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. She has also written Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, along with Barbara Tran and Luu Truong Khoi, and numerous essays and works of short fiction.
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.
Sara Zarr is an American writer. She was raised in San Francisco, and now lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with her husband. Her first novel, Story of a Girl, was a 2007 National Book Award finalist. She has subsequently had nine novels published.
Alan Richard Baxter is a British-Australian author of supernatural thrillers, horror and dark fantasy, and a teacher and practitioner of kung fu and qi gong.
Ruta Sepetys is a Lithuanian-American writer of historical fiction. As an author, she is a New York Times and international bestseller and winner of the Carnegie Medal and The Josette Frank Award for Fiction.
Between Shades of Gray, a New York Times Best Seller, is the debut novel of Lithuanian-American novelist Ruta Sepetys. It follows the Stalinist repressions of the mid-20th century and follows the life of a teenage girl Lina as she is deported from her native Lithuania with her mother and younger brother, and the journey they take to a Gulag labor camp in Siberia. It was nominated for the 2012 CILIP Carnegie Medal and has been translated into more than 27 languages.
Lifeboats played a crucial role during the sinking of the Titanic on 14–15 April 1912. The ship had 20 lifeboats that, in total, could accommodate 1,178 people, a little over half of the 2,209 on board the night it sank.
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".
Sarah Pinsker is an American science fiction and fantasy author. She is a nine-time finalist for the Nebula Award, and her debut novel A Song for a New Day won the 2019 Nebula for Best Novel while her story "Our Lady of the Open Road won the 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her novelette "Two Truths and a Lie" received both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award. Her fiction has also won the Philip K. Dick Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award and been a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Tiptree Awards.
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.
Dina Nayeri is an Iranian-American novelist, essayist, memoirist, and short story writer. She wrote the novels A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (2014) and Refuge (2017) and the creative nonfiction books: The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), The Waiting Place (2020), and Who Gets Believed (2023).
Imogen Taylor is a British literary translator. She translates works from German to English, and has previously won the Goethe-Institut Prize for her work. Her notable translations include Sasha Marianna Salzmann's novel, Beside Myself, Melanie Raabe's The Trap, as well as Florian Huber's Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945; and Sascha Arango's novel, The Truth and Other Lies. Her work has been shortlisted for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize and Helen and Kurt Wolff's Translator Prize.
