My mother was one of the few survivors of Goya. My brother who was 4 months old died. I never knew of him until about 10 years ago. I am 70 years old. My mother would wake up screaming several times a week while I was growing up.
Goya must have been the most terrible of them all because it was a cargo ship. Most of the refugees were housed in the deep holds and had no chance of getting out when the ship was hit by a torpedo. I think the few survivors were people who were on deck. Maybe your mother told you once. My father told me about it. At that time he was a machinist on a minesweeper and they were on their way from Gotenhafen to Kiel with over a 1000 refugees. 5:55
@@folkestender2025 In terms of survival ratio, Goya was the worst. The best chances of survival were Steuben, followed by Gustloff, and finally Goya. If you were aboard Goya, you had < 3% chance of survival, because most onboard were housed deep in her holds. They had no chance, as she went down in just 4-7 minutes.
My mother, grandmother, and aunt were Prussian refugees and my grandmother decided not to get on the ship, don’t know which one. They continued on to Berlin, walking at night and hoping not to be intercepted by the Russian army. They made it after 6 weeks in the cold winter temps, and my mother married a German/American soldier and came to the states in 1949. My 3 sisters and I are grateful for my grandmothers insistence on not boarding one of the boats.
some years ago, I met an Austrian wehrmacht soldier who had been on the run from Russian captivity after he had lost his unit. he told me that he had missed the Goya which he had intended to travel on only by minutes, in fact so closely that he could have thrown a stone onto the deck of the ship, standing on the pier where it had just left. In the following weeks, he walked all the way down to Austria, sleeping at day, walking at night, and when he got to Austria, he could not return to his family in Graz/Styria, because this was the Russian sector, so he stayed in north-western Styria near Liezen (American zone for a short period, then British) for all those years until 1956 when the allied (and the Russians) left the country. the last people who can tell these stories first hand are dying now.
@@gregb6469 yes, he was. before 1956, they had been in contact via mail and also met a few times in the British sector where he lived and worked on a farm, "standing in" for their son who had died in Russia. Until his death a couple of years ago, he lived near Graz, visiting his Upper Styrian "2nd family", as he called them, on a regular basis.
@@roede101 no he didn´t explicitly, but from his backgrund back then (Austrian in north-eastern Germany having lost his unit on his Empereor-Napoleon-Memorial-Race (his words), arriving moments to late to board the ship he thought would bring him to safety) I think it is pretty safe to conclude he did not know anyone on board or at least was not aware of knowing anyone on board.
"Steuben" and "Goya" were discovered in 2003 by the Polish Navy. No one had to "discover" them again. The "Gustloff" resting place has been known since the ship sank.
Yeah, that's what I heard also. National Geographic also published pictures and graphics of Steuben's wreck in one of its 2005 issues. So yeah, we knew about these wrecks before this documentary came out.
@@jasong782 They misused the word "discovery" to increase viewership of their program. This is the norm when it comes to documentaries produced today. This is what one of the first dives on M / S "Goya" looked like. In the censored version: th-cam.com/video/9cIFKnsPmRM/w-d-xo.html I saw the cut-out scenes in 2004 ... and I remember them to this day.
The first hand accounts of WWII are rapidly vanishing. Memories of first-hand accounts are still readily available and it's so important to document them before they're lost to humanity.
I wish I had written down everything my parents and extended family told me. They're mostly all gone but were refugees of WWII. The sad thing is so many were frightened to death to talk about their ordeal of the war. There are still people alive today that wish that war never ended.
Then the Facists will rewrite that history and the tragedy begins again. Society has already started doing this and actively trying to white wash and rehabilitate histories most heinous monsters .
This is one of the most powerful documentaries I have ever seen. The tragedy of war and its futility are present even today. Thank you for posting this very important part of history.
Ed Word: Why I don't know about the other 2 ships. But on the Gustloff the mechanisms for lowering the boats were frozen over with thick ice and they had to get axes to chop each boat free and many boats were never freed and launched. Maybe that's why some are found on the bottom, close to the ship. The weight of the ice and being swamped by rough seas were enough to take them down. I am no mariner, got deathly sea sick the one time I went out of sight of land on a boat, but so many people died in the water, as noted by captains of German rescue vessels. I think the majority died inside the ship as she went down. Not everyone on deck survived. But some who went into the water did; because they surfaced close enough to a floating life boat or raft to swim to it and to be helped into the boat.
@@loditx7706 that's correct. But it doesn't mean it will happen every time. On every ship. So his comment stays true, it's better to stay near them just in case.
Charles McCarron:When I first started in Law Enforcement,I was assigned as bailiff for a Circuit Judge who was OSS/Jedburgh...Jumped 3 times into Greece...Talk about an interesting guy...Once he established I was former military,he opened up and we became friends over the following 2 yrs...I was asked to be a pall bearer...It was an honor to have known him🆒
Thank you for posting this! Love history and had never heard about this. Still trying to find out what happened to some of my German relatives during WWII and afterwards.
Interesting that only the ships sunk by the Soviets are mentioned. No mentioning of the Cap Arcona sunk on May 3rd 1945 by the British where 4600 perished also in the Baltic. Folks in Germany know about these ships, it is the folks in the english speaking countries that know little about them.
I wish the storyteller wouldn't use the metric system or at least convert it while telling the story so we aren't distracted away having to look it up. Not lazy but it only makes common sense.
@fred brant Well today's liners are no different when it come to being pierced. 2012 a state of the art ship, the Costa Concordia was punctured and capsized killing people onboard.
I am watching this today, knowing that we are close to another world war and helpless to do anything about stopping it! That is probably what those poor refugees thought when they forced their way onto those ships, hoping to put mileage between them and the bombs. But history shows that one has to face the enemy and do WHATEVER one is capable of doing to STOP the evil that is fast approaching! God be with our leaders and our service men and women as the time draws near for each one of us to show what we are made of.
You like WAR , keep voting DEMOCRAT ….. open US BORDER ….but 40 Billion to Weapons Manufacturers , to profit in a broken agreement between REAGAN and GORBECHOV ….NOT TO ARM THE NEUTRAL ZONE ….of former EASTERN ZONE …. West broke the agreement … keep voting DEMOCRAT …for Joe and Nancy ..
On top of the tragedy from WWll, thousands of ships that sank still have fuel oil on board. They are between sixty and seventy years old of being in the salt water, ready to release all of it!!! The Exxon Valdes had 63,000 tons of oil when it wrecked. We're looking at nearly 600,000 tons of oil sitting at the bottom, with holding tanks rusting away.
The way I have read it, the W.Gustloff was used as a rest area for Uboat crews back from their patrols late in her service. The W.Gustloff was not really ready for the sea as it's engines were in poor shape. Alot of ranking German soldiers bumpt off passengers from their chance to board her.
Thank you for posting this. Before I watched it I hadn't known anything about it... an extremely sad and upsetting story. I hope there won't be any other tragedies as this any more...
They are officially war graves and their positions are marked as such on all international nautical charts. Diving and fishing is prohibited there. Only official, state-approved organizations are allowed to conduct archaeological research there. Fortunately, it is no longer possible for boats with amateur divers to go there secretly, as the entire sea ways of the Baltic Sea are permanently monitored by radar of traffic centers.
too deep and cold for that regardless, any rec diver's gotta be damn lucky to find anything af value and fence it without being caught.. Besides spending that kind of money on a support ship, mixed gasses, warming gear etc.. only the very wealthy and determined can reaaly reach these wrecks..as soon as you try to sell a name plate, plaque etc, well, it would be a very select private auction..don't see divers going down there on the casual, so they are safe for now..
I can see a lack of sympathy for these people after what they we’re finding at the concentration camps. It’s too sad but that war was brutal in many ways
The question is who committed the war crime? The Russians for shooting a ship with civilians or the nazis for using civilians as shields to hide military training? Which is worse? If the Russians knew it was really a military training ship then technically it's legitimate warfare. We're the germans trying to save civilians or use them to hide last minute training? Something to think about
@@SanitysVoid one of the ships had "several hundred submariners" on it when the ship sank. Was it a rescue mission or was it a military exercise being masked by the use of civilians? That was the entire point of the documentary.
My step sister and her mom are still passengers on the Wilhelm Gustloff. The ship was clearly marked as a refugee ship as my father (who was there and loaded his family on board tells it). The idea that the Russian Submarine was hunting a few German submariners and that over 10,000 innocent people were expendable or incidental to a legitimate war goal is both preposterous and incredibly offensive. It might be footnoted that at this stage of the war able bodied submariners were being reassigned to infantry duty to defend the Fatherland where it actually mattered most... on the front lines against the Allied armies. Even if some submariners were still on board the Wilhelm Gustloff rather than defending the city, what evidence did the Russians have to know that. These sinkings were inexcusable, savage and unnecessary and no person claiming to have a shred of humanity should ever defend them knowing what we know today. Maybe, I'd prefer that the world would forget what happened to the innocent women and children on board these ships than to forgive the criminals that perpetrated the mass murders and make films justifying their crimes against humanity..
You missed one important observation. You can't expect to analyze through 21st century eyes what was the mindset of combatants through 1945 eyes...hindsight is always just an argument in semantics often debated by those who were not alive when these events occur and can only hypothesize on the decisions made in war and the reasons behind those decisions.
@@Praetoria113-zm3no Up to a point, you are correct. The cold analytical historian in me reminds me not to judge. But I'm actually old enough to have known and grown up with actual White Russians who fought in the war, Communists, German soldiers, Nazis, GIs and friends who were in concentration camps and in cities which were bombed out with them in them. And yes, I only exist because my father's first family perished on the Wilhelm Gustloff and my mom's first husband was most likely killed by partisans on the Russian Front. I saw the pain in people's faces when they told a story or couldn't finish a story. And I'm going to add that the stories that I heard would make most people prefer nightmares... and most of those were told through the lens of desensitized humor. I generally don't judge people. And I spent a good deal of time with Vietnam Veterans with very high kill counts. And I learned a great deal about alternate morality, fresh from guys that torched villages with people inside them. But even I have to draw the line somewhere... maybe this one is personal... but coldly targeting a marked red cross evacuation ship with 3 torpedoes and drowning thousands of defenseless innocent civilians in the freezing North Sea with absolutely no military purpose is a war crime that rivals anything that was done in the concentration camps or gulags. Even if we could somehow understand the alternate reality through the eyes of the submarine commander, and perhaps conclude that he was a fine fellow otherwise... in the cold light of historical objectivity, we have to accept the fact that this was a brutal, senseless crime against humanity and stop trying to pretend it was anything else. Sure, we can forgive the people involved in war crimes for what they did when their morality was compromised. I'm sure some went to their graves feeling completely justified in what they did. But we can't allow ourselves to justify the crimes themselves or rewrite history for the sake of political convenience. As a species, we at least have to acknowledge the crime... then we can understand or even forgive it if we so choose or even can.
@@RJ-vb7gh Your discernment and detailed historical experience are so necessary and sorely lacking in education, and particularly historical writing, which is most in the care of academics largely sanctioned by the same perpetrators of crimes against humanity. If there are any books from your perspective you can recommend, please advise.
@@annak29 My father spent quite a bit of time interviewing survivors at the time, basically in search of his wife and newborn daughter, in hopes they survived. Naturally he followed up reading whatever contemporaneous sources were available at the time... again looking for leads to survivors and maybe some explanation to what happened to his family and his life. But the Soviet army was moving in fast and as an Estonian, he really couldn't stick around too long and had to flee westwards with everyone else that didn't want to be overrun by the red army. After he pretty much lost everything and there was no hope left, and having been there from the day the ship left the harbor to the point where all hope was lost, he never made much of an academic inquiry into the geopolitics behind the tragedy. I do recall that he told me he had read a book or two on the subject written in German after the war was over. He felt that the accounts were generally accurate and filled in some details he couldn't gain on the ground.... But aside from the oil painting of his first wife, he had commissioned shortly before the tragedy of his wife that still hangs in our living room he never talked about it much. As it was a sore spot for him, either did anyone else... What people forget is this was a terrible human tragedy, short and simple, not in any way relevant to the geopolitical events of the time. If there were a few military or submariners who might have crewed submarines that didn't exist fleeing on board that was entirely irrelevant to the war by that point. It's agonizing when so many years later armchair historians try to blur the actual details of events by adjusting their focus to suit their political perspective. This was nothing more and nothing less than an alcoholic psychopath trying to score brownie points with his superiors using a powerful ship of war to destroy a functionally unarmed refugee ship and thousands of innocent civilians. Any other interpretation of events is literally a war crime after the fact.
Besides wrecks being designated grave sites, and with strict no diving rules for civilians (besides survey and archaeological expeditions) people still try to dive on them. But the wrecks are also extremely dangerous, last year navy divers that were doing documentation of the condition of wreck of Gustloff found body of diver.
I think we need to define the term total war. Both countries have declared total war at the time. This is so sad whichever side you are on. There were no winners
This is a much better piece of Sea Hunting history. Hit the mark.... There unknown minions of us that like to know where our history is and what happened to our relatives.
beautiful documentary, thank you. im not one to stand up for the germans in WW2, but, sinking ocean liners, with thousands of civilians and wounded soldiers on board, is IMO, dispicable. i hope the russian captain was proud of himself.
yeah he sunk a German navel ship painted in the standard grey german navy colors and hasn't been a hospital or civilian ship for over 3 to 4 years , and it came from a port that was harboring enemy combatants which were conducting operations from there. dont see any wrongdoing at all.
To willfully and knowingly put civilians on a transport that is carrying military personnel and who you know will be targeted for death is a war crime.
We talk about the Titanic because its sinking was made for human drama. The ships designer (who went down with the ship) designed it to stay afloat until rescue could arrive. While these ships went down so fast there was little drama, just quick death.
M/S Estonia catastrophe in 1994, it was often said that it was the worst civilian ship sinking since Titanic in peace time. In year 1912 Titanic sinked and claimed some 1500 victims. Estonia tragedy, 852 died. One might start thinking what about civilian ships during war times? This video gives some answers.
No, the worst one was the sinking of the Doña Paz, a Filipino ferry that collided with the oil tanker Vector on December 20, 1987. She was overcrowded with thousands of passengers heading to cities to visit family for Christmas. She and the Vector caught fire following the collision and both ships sank killing thousands.
bodies washed ashore for weeks, I have been there, sadness fills the air. The soviets claim it was a troop transport and were justified in its sinking.
There were no armed troops on board, only wounded soldiers and, in some cases, young soldiers from a training unit for submarines. There were also some young naval assistants on board the Gustloff, young 18 to 20 year old girls who did paperwork, telephone service etc. for the navy. Since this was the case and the ships were under the command of the Navy, they were warships according to international law. Still, the overwhelming majority of the passengers were civilians, women, children and the elderly. In the last weeks of the war, all ships were used to get the concentrated people out of the area enclosed by the Red Army. Passenger ships, freighters, fishing boats and warships drove and even floating docks of shipyards were loaded with people who were pulled by a tug. Everything that swam somehow was used at that time for evacuation. It was chaos in the last weeks of war and no regular ship voyages wit Passenger lists. All ships were loaded with people to 10 times their capacity. My father was on a minesweeper at the time. His boat was also involved in evacuating people. You can see a boat with refugees of this type in minute 5:55
I have read the Book "Wilhelm Gustloff by Stefan Aust. How come we have made films about the Titanic but never about this disaster which had five times the casualty rate.
Because the Titanic was the so called unsinkable new ship, full with rich and famous people and cargo. The Gustloff, Steuben and Goya were filled with refugees. No lost diamants, no scandalous affairs. Nobody made a film about the woman travelling third class and surviving the sinking of the Titanic and Britannic and the colliding of the Olympic. Nor did anyone bothered to make a movie about the guy who survived Titanic and Britannic to die with the sinking of the Donegal. People don’t pay money to go and see a movie about everyday people. Unless portrayed by good looking actors.
All three of these ships. Were clearly marked as hospital refugee ships. The Russians attacked them clearly knowing what they were. It was revenge murder
@ Vincent Harling WRONG!!! Gustloff, Steuben, and Goya were all registered as Navy transport ships at the times they were sunk, thus making them fair game for Soviet subs. In addition, Gustloff was carrying nearly 1,000 newly trained U-boat cadets who were meant to man the Type-21 U-boats which posed a huge threat to the Allied convoys. Those men were weapons of war in that they've been trained to destroy the convoys. Regardless of the Gustloff being packed with those refugees, because she was transporting those cadets to the submarines in Kiel and was equipped with anti-aircraft guns, that made her a legal target and her sinking a legal act of war and not a war crime. Because Steuben and Goya were also registered as Navy transports that made them legitimate targets, therefore their sinkings are acts of war. The deaths of the refugees though horrible, were collateral damage, but these sinkings were not war crimes.
Another major disaster is the sinking of the ship Riegel on 27th November 1944. The ship was sunk by British planes and most of the app 2500 killed was Soviet POW. A lot of survivors from the initial strike was killed in the water and in lifeboats as they were repeatedly strafed with 20mm gunfire according to witness accounts: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Rigel
I researched this event and could find no record or mention of people in the water or in lifeboats being strafed. Most of the POW's were in locked holds. Several of the holds took direct hits and the ship was on fire. The ships captain managed to beach the ship but only 267 people survived. The British had mistaken the MS Rigel as a troop ship. It was attacked by Supermarine Seafire fighters and Fairey Firefly bombers. While coming in to attack the ship, firing 20mm canons or machine guns could have also hit lifeboats close to the ship but the only reference I found was of 'several' POW's hit while in a boat. Watch videos of gun camera footage taken in WWII of planes strafing ships. Bullet and canon splashes are all over the place.
In one place the guy says something about the beauty of a sunken wreck, and later expresses his delight to be able to dive into history. I would rather not comment. It is still possible today, to experience the WWI there, on the sea bottom. Why should anyone wish, passionately, to experience a war, especially a such one? The answer to this question would possibly tell us, why the wars happen again and again.
A great book about this subject - The Wilhelm Gustlof - is a truth laden novel called Salt To The Sea by Ruta Sepetys....... She has another called Between Shades Of Gray. Both are WWII novels chocked full of historical, factual information...... Good Reads
JB Townsend, I believe bones actually dissolve over time in saltwater. That being said, it looks like there is a femur at 51:34 just before they show the German military belt and buckle.
Goya's wreck is LITTERED with human remains. There's a video of divers visiting the wreck of the Goya in 2003 where a hold or someplace was littered with skulls and bones of the victims. th-cam.com/video/9cIFKnsPmRM/w-d-xo.html
Can't Believe really that diving down to see that shipwreck "Goya", it's still so well preserved. I'm amazed seeing belt buckle with a leather still looking alright. It's a graveyard, yes ... But still like pyramids, even better yet to be discovered...
Certain seas have pockets of low oxygen. In Black sea, we have huge areas rich in hydrogen sulfide, which makes the shipwrecks preserve so well, but also doesn't let it have any deep sea fauna. Maybe there's a similar situation in that area in Baltic?
Correct me if I am wrong, but Germany started a total war of aggression. Until the date of surrender, civilians were a legitimate military target, no? Perhaps they should have been conscripted as Russian military assets or prisoners instead, but how was that possible? I see a tone here that attacking German civilians was unjustified. This tone needs to be explained. If nothing else, the ship was a useful asset that needed to be sunk or captured. And it is important to remember the historical context. The USSR had just been almost totally massacred by the German people and German forces.
@Me Smith Civilian victims should not be offset against each other. Wrong is wrong no matter who does it. So one shouldn't arrogantly say that "only" Germans died there who deserved to die. Civilians, and especially children, never deserve to die because they cannot be responsible for what others have done.
@Me Smith I do not portray Germany as an innocent victim. I only portray civilian women and children as innocent victims, no matter in which country and by which army they are killed. Somehow you got me wrong.
Were these sinkings wrong, certainly. Were they justifiable to the USSR at the end of WWII, without a doubt. I remember reading or hearing that the Allies might have tsk, tsked, but I could certainly be wrong. How can we so many years in the future really comprehend the horrors of that mess? We grieve intensely over a few war dead, (not disregarding those dead in the least). I am not German, or Soviet and I can not judge the enemity of those two countries during and after that war.
@@folkestender2025 Wile killing civilians is obviously something we would consider a war crime today, back then it was considered necessary to demoralize the population.
7:20 in, Pillou (forgive spelling) was the place where the Gross Duetchland Division made their last stand holding back the red army so the civilians could evacuate - it was sheer horror for ALL involved, and I mean all, I strongly recommend the book by Guy Sajar, "The Forgotten Soldier", for those who have the nerve and stomach for such, but be warned, it is grim. Also forgotten to history is the fact that Admiral Donets forces evacuated 2 million in that short time, an amazing feat of which nothing was made account of because, like the man said in the videos beginning, it was a tiny microcosm of the tragic 2nd WW.
@@williamhilbert8324 slaughtering innocent civilans is not justified no matter who does it or for what reason... if you commit the same crimes as the "evil side" then you become just as bad.. pretty simple concept
Was that his only accomplishment? I'm sure they justified putting leaving it up saying he did many other good things, just as we do elsewhere, unfortunately.
My mother in law was born around d 1914 and came to America in 1934 when the Czar let 6000 people out of Russia. Dolins. My grandmother born near 1898 came from Russia also. They died in 2001 & 1952 respectively.
Kinda annoying to hear like five times in the first five minutes that this story has been overlooked by history and is unknown to almost all and this not to be the case at all for most people who live in Germany or are from Germany.
I can understand your frustrations especially if you are a citizen of great Germania of relatively connected but if you think of it from the writers poi t of view ?....You literally just named less than 1% of the educated world therefore I think they are correct in saying that it is indeed lost to history.
The reason that hardly anyone knows this is because all of the victims were German and back then the attitude was....Good Riddance...... This video is a great start but this terrible tragedy needs to be told in great detail, they will never know the total loss of people
Where are all the bodies, or at least bones. Do they totally disintegrate, or are they scavenged? Or do the photographers, out of respect, simply not photograph them?
Yes, but lots of other stuff, also organic (e.g. wooden furniture), is still there. I didn't expect to see soft tissue, but some bones perhaps. Also, things decay much slower in very cold water. Didn't they find remains on the Titanic?
Bob Rabinoff Correct cold preserves Organic will be eaten over time by organisms Wood is most likely stained or I believe they said teak decks which is why it is used on boats as it withstands the salt and abuse it will encounter on the sea Bones could have been covered by silt or they didn’t show em Also I do not believe they found any remains at the tiatanic site
@@peterpiper_203, thing is that this is the Baltic. so while there are large amount of fish and there are boneworms here the salinity is to low for the typical wood eating worms that you find out in the Atlantic but to high for the freshwater variants to live, the water is also very cold all year around and have low pH value. so wood are extremely well preserved in the Baltic. one of the best example is the infact shown in this clip around 3:25 and next 10sec. this ship is a dutch trading ship from the early 1600's and is so well preserved that they joking that it would only needed some bondo to make it float again. this is an Norwegian article but you can see from the pictures how well it is www.aftenposten.no/verden/i/75WVo/dette-vraket-er-350-aar-gammelt?
@@Missmori I totally agree. But the case of what Japanese have done after their invasion into Manchuria is difficult to forgive or to be generalized as “all wars are bad”! Wikipedia has a short description of “Unit 731”.
Michael, thank you for your reply. Well, your comment certainly opens the door into a debatable and unknown area. The way I see it is, that although God may choose or not choose too intervene in the various follies of man, humans are always responsible for their actions. Those who believe understand that God is a Supreme Being (beyond human) and therefore is not subject to the rules that govern mankind. I don't have all the answers, but I guess, a lot of how we each view the world depends on how much faith we have. Thanks again.
My mother was one of the few survivors of Goya. My brother who was 4 months old died. I never knew of him until about 10 years ago. I am 70 years old. My mother would wake up screaming several times a week while I was growing up.
How sad. Hope they are together ih heaven now 💖
Goya must have been the most terrible of them all because it was a cargo ship. Most of the refugees were housed in the deep holds and had no chance of getting out when the ship was hit by a torpedo. I think the few survivors were people who were on deck. Maybe your mother told you once. My father told me about it. At that time he was a machinist on a minesweeper and they were on their way from Gotenhafen to Kiel with over a 1000 refugees. 5:55
@@folkestender2025 In terms of survival ratio, Goya was the worst. The best chances of survival were Steuben, followed by Gustloff, and finally Goya. If you were aboard Goya, you had < 3% chance of survival, because most onboard were housed deep in her holds. They had no chance, as she went down in just 4-7 minutes.
God bless 🙏
Bless your family! What a difficult thing for her to carry all those years!
Just started to watch this… Maybe five minutes in… And I’m already mind blown. Thank you so much for posting this amazing documentary.
My mother, grandmother, and aunt were Prussian refugees and my grandmother decided not to get on the ship, don’t know which one. They continued on to Berlin, walking at night and hoping not to be intercepted by the Russian army. They made it after 6 weeks in the cold winter temps, and my mother married a German/American soldier and came to the states in 1949. My 3 sisters and I are grateful for my grandmothers insistence on not boarding one of the boats.
That's a great story, God had a plan 👍🇺🇲
some years ago, I met an Austrian wehrmacht soldier who had been on the run from Russian captivity after he had lost his unit. he told me that he had missed the Goya which he had intended to travel on only by minutes, in fact so closely that he could have thrown a stone onto the deck of the ship, standing on the pier where it had just left. In the following weeks, he walked all the way down to Austria, sleeping at day, walking at night, and when he got to Austria, he could not return to his family in Graz/Styria, because this was the Russian sector, so he stayed in north-western Styria near Liezen (American zone for a short period, then British) for all those years until 1956 when the allied (and the Russians) left the country. the last people who can tell these stories first hand are dying now.
Was he able to reunite with his family?
@@gregb6469 yes, he was. before 1956, they had been in contact via mail and also met a few times in the British sector where he lived and worked on a farm, "standing in" for their son who had died in Russia. Until his death a couple of years ago, he lived near Graz, visiting his Upper Styrian "2nd family", as he called them, on a regular basis.
Did he ever mention anyone he knew who was on the Goya?
@@roede101 no he didn´t explicitly, but from his backgrund back then (Austrian in north-eastern Germany having lost his unit on his Empereor-Napoleon-Memorial-Race (his words), arriving moments to late to board the ship he thought would bring him to safety) I think it is pretty safe to conclude he did not know anyone on board or at least was not aware of knowing anyone on board.
What a fascinating piece of history
"Steuben" and "Goya" were discovered in 2003 by the Polish Navy. No one had to "discover" them again. The "Gustloff" resting place has been known since the ship sank.
Yeah, that's what I heard also. National Geographic also published pictures and graphics of Steuben's wreck in one of its 2005 issues. So yeah, we knew about these wrecks before this documentary came out.
@@historywatchdog2923 Well....yeah.
Interestingly, the General Steuben was named after von Steuben who fought for the Americans in our revolution.
Wait so wtf? Were they just reenacting the original discovery or something?
@@jasong782 They misused the word "discovery" to increase viewership of their program. This is the norm when it comes to documentaries produced today.
This is what one of the first dives on M / S "Goya" looked like. In the censored version:
th-cam.com/video/9cIFKnsPmRM/w-d-xo.html
I saw the cut-out scenes in 2004 ... and I remember them to this day.
Everyday you learn something new about WWII.
The first hand accounts of WWII are rapidly vanishing. Memories of first-hand accounts are still readily available and it's so important to document them before they're lost to humanity.
I wish I had written down everything my parents and extended family told me. They're mostly all gone but were refugees of WWII.
The sad thing is so many were frightened to death to talk about their ordeal of the war. There are still people alive today that wish that war never ended.
I belong to ww11 committee to restore museums and memorials for veterans. I hope folks younger than me at 69 will carry it on later. Its 2023 now.
Then the Facists will rewrite that history and the tragedy begins again. Society has already started doing this and actively trying to white wash and rehabilitate histories most heinous monsters .
To forget history is to repeat it.
😔
This is one of the most powerful documentaries I have ever seen. The tragedy of war and its futility are present even today. Thank you for posting this very important part of history.
More people should know about this!
Amazing how many people die when ships go down and in such terrifying circumstances.
Note to self: If on a refugee ship during war; stay on deck.
near the lifeboats
Ed Word: Why I don't know about the other 2 ships. But on the Gustloff the mechanisms for lowering the boats were frozen over with thick ice and they had to get axes to chop each boat free and many boats were never freed and launched. Maybe that's why some are found on the bottom, close to the ship. The weight of the ice and being swamped by rough seas were enough to take them down. I am no mariner, got deathly sea sick the one time I went out of sight of land on a boat, but so many people died in the water, as noted by captains of German rescue vessels. I think the majority died inside the ship as she went down. Not everyone on deck survived. But some who went into the water did; because they surfaced close enough to a floating life boat or raft to swim to it and to be helped into the boat.
@@loditx7706 that's correct. But it doesn't mean it will happen every time. On every ship. So his comment stays true, it's better to stay near them just in case.
So much from those times is still classified and sealed
Charles McCarron:When I first started in Law Enforcement,I was assigned as bailiff for a Circuit Judge who was OSS/Jedburgh...Jumped 3 times into Greece...Talk about an interesting guy...Once he established I was former military,he opened up and we became friends over the following 2 yrs...I was asked to be a pall bearer...It was an honor to have known him🆒
Charles McCarron:I agree...Dulles was a Major Player thru it all....His papers would be enlightening👍
Most of this can be found at most WWII histories written after 1980. I've read these stories several times since then.
RIP all these poor souls
this so AMAZING, the Steubens Steering wheel, compass and telemotor's are still in place.
Thank you for posting this! Love history and had never heard about this. Still trying to find out what happened to some of my German relatives during WWII and afterwards.
This is just a really great documentary. Thanks so much for sharing it. Amazing stuff.
Politics aside, I am very anti Soviet. Brutality existed towards Stalin's own people long before WW2.
Exactly they’ve always treated their own badly even before Catherine the great
My mum and her family was supposed to be on the gustloff, but she was late getting there..
I had no idea about this? SO sad...
Breaks my heart, pray for their lost souls. (This is the wife.) Very interesting and thank you for posting. Peace people, peace.
Interesting that only the ships sunk by the Soviets are mentioned. No mentioning of the Cap Arcona sunk on May 3rd 1945 by the British where 4600 perished also in the Baltic. Folks in Germany know about these ships, it is the folks in the english speaking countries that know little about them.
That's because the Allied countries didn't do anything evil or wrong.
@@michaelmace924 Shows how little you know, if you had checked on google who was abord the Cap Arcona, you would have skipped that dumb comment.
Tiberiotertio. Censorship by the allies.
@@Tiberiotertio I think hes being sarcastic lol
@@michaelmace924 XD hahahahahaha, you know as funny as that is there are still people who unfortunitly believe that
I wish the storyteller wouldn't use the metric system or at least convert it while telling the story so we aren't distracted away having to look it up. Not lazy but it only makes common sense.
The Steuben is still a beautiful ship. Old ocean liners were made so perfect.
@fred brant Well today's liners are no different when it come to being pierced. 2012 a state of the art ship, the Costa Concordia was punctured and capsized killing people onboard.
@@CaptainSmith23 Wait.... You are captain Smith two?
They are classic
@E mills Yes.
I am watching this today, knowing that we are close to another world war and helpless to do anything about stopping it! That is probably what those poor refugees thought when they forced their way onto those ships, hoping to put mileage between them and the bombs. But history shows that one has to face the enemy and do WHATEVER one is capable of doing to STOP the evil that is fast approaching! God be with our leaders and our service men and women as the time draws near for each one of us to show what we are made of.
You like WAR , keep voting DEMOCRAT ….. open US BORDER ….but 40 Billion to Weapons Manufacturers , to profit in a broken agreement between REAGAN and GORBECHOV ….NOT TO ARM THE NEUTRAL ZONE ….of former EASTERN ZONE …. West broke the agreement … keep voting DEMOCRAT …for Joe and Nancy ..
So many war crimes in ww2... Humans can be so brutal!!
Humans are still brutal .
Just remember "no war is a good war" no matter who wins and gets to tell one side of the story.
oh shush. everything is brutal and selfish
@@HeyGuy4321 No, cynic. Not all.
On top of the tragedy from WWll, thousands of ships that sank still have fuel oil on board.
They are between sixty and seventy years old of being in the salt water, ready to release all of it!!!
The Exxon Valdes had 63,000 tons of oil when it wrecked.
We're looking at nearly 600,000 tons of oil sitting at the bottom, with holding tanks rusting away.
The way I have read it, the W.Gustloff was used as a rest area for Uboat crews back from their patrols late in her service. The W.Gustloff was not really ready for the sea as it's engines were in poor shape. Alot of ranking German soldiers bumpt off passengers from their chance to board her.
Thank you for posting this. Before I watched it I hadn't known anything about it... an extremely sad and upsetting story. I hope there won't be any other tragedies as this any more...
Ukraine is a tragedy unfolding.
@@MendTheWorld Tragically, yes.
Mans inhumanity to man , think about it, it still goes on
I hope they are designated as war graves to protect the wrecks form recreation divers and souvenir hunters.
They are officially war graves and their positions are marked as such on all international nautical charts. Diving and fishing is prohibited there. Only official, state-approved organizations are allowed to conduct archaeological research there. Fortunately, it is no longer possible for boats with amateur divers to go there secretly, as the entire sea ways of the Baltic Sea are permanently monitored by radar of traffic centers.
too deep and cold for that regardless, any rec diver's gotta be damn lucky to find anything af value and fence it without being caught.. Besides spending that kind of money on a support ship, mixed gasses, warming gear etc.. only the very wealthy and determined can reaaly reach these wrecks..as soon as you try to sell a name plate, plaque etc, well, it would be a very select private auction..don't see divers going down there on the casual, so they are safe for now..
"... in a war one can't be considerate."
Sad but true.
I can see a lack of sympathy for these people after what they we’re finding at the concentration camps. It’s too sad but that war was brutal in many ways
2 of the 3 ships were sank before anything from the concentration camps was known.
Heart wrenching, as all others were.
It's the greatest naval Catastrophe, wait no it's a war crime, call it what is/was, a war crime.
All war is a crime.
@@user-fs5ji1tv6l Not all. Defence is never a crime. Yes using defence as the excuse to wage war is also a crime but true defence is not.
The question is who committed the war crime? The Russians for shooting a ship with civilians or the nazis for using civilians as shields to hide military training? Which is worse? If the Russians knew it was really a military training ship then technically it's legitimate warfare. We're the germans trying to save civilians or use them to hide last minute training? Something to think about
Don't matter what it was used for prior it was on a rescue mission
@@SanitysVoid one of the ships had "several hundred submariners" on it when the ship sank. Was it a rescue mission or was it a military exercise being masked by the use of civilians? That was the entire point of the documentary.
My step sister and her mom are still passengers on the Wilhelm Gustloff. The ship was clearly marked as a refugee ship as my father (who was there and loaded his family on board tells it). The idea that the Russian Submarine was hunting a few German submariners and that over 10,000 innocent people were expendable or incidental to a legitimate war goal is both preposterous and incredibly offensive.
It might be footnoted that at this stage of the war able bodied submariners were being reassigned to infantry duty to defend the Fatherland where it actually mattered most... on the front lines against the Allied armies. Even if some submariners were still on board the Wilhelm Gustloff rather than defending the city, what evidence did the Russians have to know that. These sinkings were inexcusable, savage and unnecessary and no person claiming to have a shred of humanity should ever defend them knowing what we know today.
Maybe, I'd prefer that the world would forget what happened to the innocent women and children on board these ships than to forgive the criminals that perpetrated the mass murders and make films justifying their crimes against humanity..
You missed one important observation. You can't expect to analyze through 21st century eyes what was the mindset of combatants through 1945 eyes...hindsight is always just an argument in semantics often debated by those who were not alive when these events occur and can only hypothesize on the decisions made in war and the reasons behind those decisions.
@@Praetoria113-zm3no Up to a point, you are correct. The cold analytical historian in me reminds me not to judge. But I'm actually old enough to have known and grown up with actual White Russians who fought in the war, Communists, German soldiers, Nazis, GIs and friends who were in concentration camps and in cities which were bombed out with them in them.
And yes, I only exist because my father's first family perished on the Wilhelm Gustloff and my mom's first husband was most likely killed by partisans on the Russian Front.
I saw the pain in people's faces when they told a story or couldn't finish a story. And I'm going to add that the stories that I heard would make most people prefer nightmares... and most of those were told through the lens of desensitized humor.
I generally don't judge people. And I spent a good deal of time with Vietnam Veterans with very high kill counts. And I learned a great deal about alternate morality, fresh from guys that torched villages with people inside them.
But even I have to draw the line somewhere... maybe this one is personal... but coldly targeting a marked red cross evacuation ship with 3 torpedoes and drowning thousands of defenseless innocent civilians in the freezing North Sea with absolutely no military purpose is a war crime that rivals anything that was done in the concentration camps or gulags.
Even if we could somehow understand the alternate reality through the eyes of the submarine commander, and perhaps conclude that he was a fine fellow otherwise... in the cold light of historical objectivity, we have to accept the fact that this was a brutal, senseless crime against humanity and stop trying to pretend it was anything else.
Sure, we can forgive the people involved in war crimes for what they did when their morality was compromised. I'm sure some went to their graves feeling completely justified in what they did. But we can't allow ourselves to justify the crimes themselves or rewrite history for the sake of political convenience. As a species, we at least have to acknowledge the crime... then we can understand or even forgive it if we so choose or even can.
@@RJ-vb7gh Your discernment and detailed historical experience are so necessary and sorely lacking in education, and particularly historical writing, which is most in the care of academics largely sanctioned by the same perpetrators of crimes against humanity. If there are any books from your perspective you can recommend, please advise.
@@annak29 My father spent quite a bit of time interviewing survivors at the time, basically in search of his wife and newborn daughter, in hopes they survived. Naturally he followed up reading whatever contemporaneous sources were available at the time... again looking for leads to survivors and maybe some explanation to what happened to his family and his life. But the Soviet army was moving in fast and as an Estonian, he really couldn't stick around too long and had to flee westwards with everyone else that didn't want to be overrun by the red army. After he pretty much lost everything and there was no hope left, and having been there from the day the ship left the harbor to the point where all hope was lost, he never made much of an academic inquiry into the geopolitics behind the tragedy. I do recall that he told me he had read a book or two on the subject written in German after the war was over. He felt that the accounts were generally accurate and filled in some details he couldn't gain on the ground.... But aside from the oil painting of his first wife, he had commissioned shortly before the tragedy of his wife that still hangs in our living room he never talked about it much. As it was a sore spot for him, either did anyone else...
What people forget is this was a terrible human tragedy, short and simple, not in any way relevant to the geopolitical events of the time. If there were a few military or submariners who might have crewed submarines that didn't exist fleeing on board that was entirely irrelevant to the war by that point. It's agonizing when so many years later armchair historians try to blur the actual details of events by adjusting their focus to suit their political perspective. This was nothing more and nothing less than an alcoholic psychopath trying to score brownie points with his superiors using a powerful ship of war to destroy a functionally unarmed refugee ship and thousands of innocent civilians. Any other interpretation of events is literally a war crime after the fact.
Agree totally.
this is just 1 more fantastic doco from you guys so it truly sucks that so many of your awesome docos are region locked, truly a sad thing
One of the most important thing for an historian to learn is that you will encounter untold horrors, and you must not let them bother you.
Wow. Thank you for this. Mind blown.
It's the little details that really bring into focus just how devastating world war two was.
Besides wrecks being designated grave sites, and with strict no diving rules for civilians (besides survey and archaeological expeditions) people still try to dive on them. But the wrecks are also extremely dangerous, last year navy divers that were doing documentation of the condition of wreck of Gustloff found body of diver.
I think we need to define the term total war. Both countries have declared total war at the time. This is so sad whichever side you are on. There were no winners
This is a much better piece of Sea Hunting history. Hit the mark.... There unknown minions of us that like to know where our history is and what happened to our relatives.
A very well made and bone chilling documentary.
beautiful documentary, thank you. im not one to stand up for the germans in WW2, but, sinking ocean liners, with thousands of civilians and wounded soldiers on board, is IMO, dispicable. i hope the russian captain was proud of himself.
yeah he sunk a German navel ship painted in the standard grey german navy colors and hasn't been a hospital or civilian ship for over 3 to 4 years , and it came from a port that was harboring enemy combatants which were conducting operations from there. dont see any wrongdoing at all.
Innocent people die in war all the time. Its despicable and unimaginable.
How was he to know or trust anything he may or may not have known from the Germans. How many innocent Jews died?
After what the Germans did at Stalingrad, Russia was giving no quarter.
@@naturgrel And Leningrad. It was Leningrad and the discovery of the Nazis' genocidal brutality that made Russia decide to give no quarter.
So much pure evil in the world
kinda sad how I live quite near where that happened and have never heard of it
When the speaker said to find out why the
Gustloff sank that is such a dumb question… it was sank by a Russian sub that fired torpedos at it.
Rest in peace to all that suffered .
THANK YOU FOR SHARING
To willfully and knowingly put civilians on a transport that is carrying military personnel and who you know will be targeted for death is a war crime.
Russia is the traditional ally of London !
There is a museum for the gustloff in kiel, germany. even with parts of the maschine telegraph ;)
I had only known about the Gustloff.
There are more such wrecks in the Baltic Sea.
Wars are about profit and greed and have nothing to do with protecting the masses
Great documentary...turned into frivolous speculation.
@Jason Street agreed ....TF ?
Never to be forgotten❣🇸🇪🦋
Thank you for sharing love history ❤
It's so sad that many people lost their life because of wicked men orders
We talk about the Titanic because its sinking was made for human drama. The ships designer (who went down with the ship) designed it to stay afloat until rescue could arrive. While these ships went down so fast there was little drama, just quick death.
M/S Estonia catastrophe in 1994, it was often said that it was the worst civilian ship sinking since Titanic in peace time. In year 1912 Titanic sinked and claimed some 1500 victims. Estonia tragedy, 852 died. One might start thinking what about civilian ships during war times? This video gives some answers.
No, the worst one was the sinking of the Doña Paz, a Filipino ferry that collided with the oil tanker Vector on December 20, 1987. She was overcrowded with thousands of passengers heading to cities to visit family for Christmas. She and the Vector caught fire following the collision and both ships sank killing thousands.
It is very difficult to click "like" on a story of such tragedy, however, it is good that it is told.
bodies washed ashore for weeks, I have been there, sadness fills the air. The soviets claim it was a troop transport and were justified in its sinking.
new england patriot There were troops on board, wounded ones.
There were no armed troops on board, only wounded soldiers and, in some cases, young soldiers from a training unit for submarines. There were also some young naval assistants on board the Gustloff, young 18 to 20 year old girls who did paperwork, telephone service etc. for the navy. Since this was the case and the ships were under the command of the Navy, they were warships according to international law. Still, the overwhelming majority of the passengers were civilians, women, children and the elderly. In the last weeks of the war, all ships were used to get the concentrated people out of the area enclosed by the Red Army. Passenger ships, freighters, fishing boats and warships drove and even floating docks of shipyards were loaded with people who were pulled by a tug. Everything that swam somehow was used at that time for evacuation. It was chaos in the last weeks of war and no regular ship voyages wit Passenger lists. All ships were loaded with people to 10 times their capacity. My father was on a minesweeper at the time. His boat was also involved in evacuating people. You can see a boat with refugees of this type in minute 5:55
Thanks 💜
I have read the Book "Wilhelm Gustloff by Stefan Aust.
How come we have made films about the Titanic but never about this disaster which had five times the casualty rate.
Because the Titanic was the so called unsinkable new ship, full with rich and famous people and cargo. The Gustloff, Steuben and Goya were filled with refugees. No lost diamants, no scandalous affairs. Nobody made a film about the woman travelling third class and surviving the sinking of the Titanic and Britannic and the colliding of the Olympic. Nor did anyone bothered to make a movie about the guy who survived Titanic and Britannic to die with the sinking of the Donegal. People don’t pay money to go and see a movie about everyday people. Unless portrayed by good looking actors.
The Titanic's first class cabins were stuffed with high society from both side of the Alantic.
Die Gustloff 2008. It's online with English subs... may be an English dubbed version as well. Good movie.
@@danielwatson3985 Hear hear. Yes, it was.
All three of these ships. Were clearly marked as hospital refugee ships. The Russians attacked them clearly knowing what they were. It was revenge murder
@ Vincent Harling WRONG!!! Gustloff, Steuben, and Goya were all registered as Navy transport ships at the times they were sunk, thus making them fair game for Soviet subs. In addition, Gustloff was carrying nearly 1,000 newly trained U-boat cadets who were meant to man the Type-21 U-boats which posed a huge threat to the Allied convoys. Those men were weapons of war in that they've been trained to destroy the convoys. Regardless of the Gustloff being packed with those refugees, because she was transporting those cadets to the submarines in Kiel and was equipped with anti-aircraft guns, that made her a legal target and her sinking a legal act of war and not a war crime. Because Steuben and Goya were also registered as Navy transports that made them legitimate targets, therefore their sinkings are acts of war. The deaths of the refugees though horrible, were collateral damage, but these sinkings were not war crimes.
@@historywatchdog2923 CONSIDER THE LUSITSNIA AND THE CULPABILITY OF RN IN ITS LOSS.
@@cliffordljacksonjr8020 What do you mean by RN?
The sinkings were a crime and they were marked. They were marked with Redcrosses.
Wow..that water is almost crystal clear at the bottom
There's something totally horrific about the Goya. Ultimate death trap, as the narrator says.
Yes, because no one belowdecks got out and I don't think any of the lifeboats made it off the davits, because she sank so quickly.
Another major disaster is the sinking of the ship Riegel on 27th November 1944. The ship was sunk by British planes and most of the app 2500 killed was Soviet POW. A lot of survivors from the initial strike was killed in the water and in lifeboats as they were repeatedly strafed with 20mm gunfire according to witness accounts: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Rigel
Agskytter see! Everybody likes blood letting!
I researched this event and could find no record or mention of people in the water or in lifeboats being strafed. Most of the POW's were in locked holds. Several of the holds took direct hits and the ship was on fire. The ships captain managed to beach the ship but only 267 people survived.
The British had mistaken the MS Rigel as a troop ship. It was attacked by Supermarine Seafire fighters and Fairey Firefly bombers. While coming in to attack the ship, firing 20mm canons or machine guns could have also hit lifeboats close to the ship but the only reference I found was of 'several' POW's hit while in a boat. Watch videos of gun camera footage taken in WWII of planes strafing ships. Bullet and canon splashes are all over the place.
@@dcabana1 I don’t know if everyone likes it, but many are capable of it in the brutality and fog of war.
That's the unfortunate reality of the fog of war.
In one place the guy says something about the beauty of a sunken wreck, and later expresses his delight to be able to dive into history. I would rather not comment. It is still possible today, to experience the WWI there, on the sea bottom. Why should anyone wish, passionately, to experience a war, especially a such one? The answer to this question would possibly tell us, why the wars happen again and again.
I never heard of this. How sad.
I'm petrified watching such a sobering event. I've never heard of this and am shocked at the cruelty against humanity!
War breeds cruelty beyond reason.
A great book about this subject - The Wilhelm Gustlof - is a truth laden novel called Salt To The Sea by Ruta Sepetys....... She has another called Between Shades Of Gray. Both are WWII novels chocked full of historical, factual information...... Good Reads
See the Laconia incident when British Navy kept Italian POWs locked below deck when ship was sinking
Surprised there wasn’t more bones and human remains. Or maybe they don’t show them?
JB Townsend, I believe bones actually dissolve over time in saltwater. That being said, it looks like there is a femur at 51:34 just before they show the German military belt and buckle.
Ells, crabs, fish - all feast on any remains until all flesh and bone are consumed. Within a few weeks or months there would have been nothing left.
Goya's wreck is LITTERED with human remains. There's a video of divers visiting the wreck of the Goya in 2003 where a hold or someplace was littered with skulls and bones of the victims.
th-cam.com/video/9cIFKnsPmRM/w-d-xo.html
15 minutes of useful content inflated by overblown drama and music
Fifteen minutes of filming and 2 hours of decompression. Boy that sucks. 38:19
beerborn : Nope that's deep sea diving.
Can't Believe really that diving down to see that shipwreck "Goya", it's still so well preserved. I'm amazed seeing belt buckle with a leather still looking alright. It's a graveyard, yes ... But still like pyramids, even better yet to be discovered...
Certain seas have pockets of low oxygen. In Black sea, we have huge areas rich in hydrogen sulfide, which makes the shipwrecks preserve so well, but also doesn't let it have any deep sea fauna. Maybe there's a similar situation in that area in Baltic?
It's the tannic acid used for the leather that allows it to survive in the water.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Germany started a total war of aggression. Until the date of surrender, civilians were a legitimate military target, no? Perhaps they should have been conscripted as Russian military assets or prisoners instead, but how was that possible? I see a tone here that attacking German civilians was unjustified. This tone needs to be explained.
If nothing else, the ship was a useful asset that needed to be sunk or captured. And it is important to remember the historical context. The USSR had just been almost totally massacred by the German people and German forces.
@Me Smith Civilian victims should not be offset against each other. Wrong is wrong no matter who does it. So one shouldn't arrogantly say that "only" Germans died there who deserved to die. Civilians, and especially children, never deserve to die because they cannot be responsible for what others have done.
@Me Smith I do not portray Germany as an innocent victim. I only portray civilian women and children as innocent victims, no matter in which country and by which army they are killed. Somehow you got me wrong.
Were these sinkings wrong, certainly. Were they justifiable to the USSR at the end of WWII, without a doubt. I remember reading or hearing that the Allies might have tsk, tsked, but I could certainly be wrong. How can we so many years in the future really comprehend the horrors of that mess? We grieve intensely over a few war dead, (not disregarding those dead in the least). I am not German, or Soviet and I can not judge the enemity of those two countries during and after that war.
@@folkestender2025 Wile killing civilians is obviously something we would consider a war crime today, back then it was considered necessary to demoralize the population.
Good documentary but so you really have to have so many ads??? I can understand maybe two but geez this is obnoxious.
That's TH-cam's doing. We have no control over it.
@@historywatchdog2923 Yes we do. Install Ad Block.
@@sirridesalot6652 What do you say to those for whom it's cost prohibitive?
We should be ashamed of ourselves
7:20 in, Pillou (forgive spelling) was the place where the Gross Duetchland Division made their last stand holding back the red army so the civilians could evacuate - it was sheer horror for ALL involved, and I mean all, I strongly recommend the book by Guy Sajar, "The Forgotten Soldier", for those who have the nerve and stomach for such, but be warned, it is grim. Also forgotten to history is the fact that Admiral Donets forces evacuated 2 million in that short time, an amazing feat of which nothing was made account of because, like the man said in the videos beginning, it was a tiny microcosm of the tragic 2nd WW.
I read the book of Guy Sajar
This documentary seems to be portraying these sinkings as far more controversial than they are in the real world.
How so?
Film shows Admiral Eric Raeder, not Karl Doenitz.
Some 6 to 9 thousand people died on the Wilhelm Gustloff.
There are exact numbers. 9,343 people died on Wilhelm Gustloff, 1,239 could be saved.
The loss of life was tragic - but if you start a war then what goes around comes around
True that the russkies were getting payback for the German invasion
@@williamhilbert8324 slaughtering innocent civilans is not justified no matter who does it or for what reason... if you commit the same crimes as the "evil side" then you become just as bad.. pretty simple concept
@@bbvollmer that's the liberal reply not a sailing man's reply
The war between Germany and the Soviets was a war of no quarter to any. It was a war of hopefully exterminating one side or the other.
In fact in Kaliningrad there is a monument of the captain of the Russian sub which sank the Gustloff. What a Russian hero!
Was that his only accomplishment? I'm sure they justified putting leaving it up saying he did many other good things, just as we do elsewhere, unfortunately.
@@PrettyH8Mach1n3 Look at the monument. You should find it through Google. It´s clear what they meant.
Ef Russia.
My mother in law was born around d 1914 and came to America in 1934 when the Czar let 6000 people out of Russia. Dolins. My grandmother born near 1898 came from Russia also. They died in 2001 & 1952 respectively.
Kinda annoying to hear like five times in the first five minutes that this story has been overlooked by history and is unknown to almost all and this not to be the case at all for most people who live in Germany or are from Germany.
I can understand your frustrations especially if you are a citizen of great Germania of relatively connected but if you think of it from the writers poi t of view ?....You literally just named less than 1% of the educated world therefore I think they are correct in saying that it is indeed lost to history.
The reason that hardly anyone knows this is because all of the victims were German and back then the attitude was....Good Riddance...... This video is a great start but this terrible tragedy needs to be told in great detail, they will never know the total loss of people
The other reason is that any discussion of these ships was strictly taboo, as long as there was an Iron Curtain!
@@mikesgoodmann9349
I never thought of it that way thanks
This is why I hate war. So many people died when those three ships were torpedoed.
The wages of war are not in the dead but in the children of survivers.
Where are all the bodies, or at least bones. Do they totally disintegrate, or are they scavenged? Or do the photographers, out of respect, simply not photograph them?
Bob Rabinoff
70+ years under water Bob
Nature has a way of cleaning up
Yes, but lots of other stuff, also organic (e.g. wooden furniture), is still there. I didn't expect to see soft tissue, but some bones perhaps. Also, things decay much slower in very cold water. Didn't they find remains on the Titanic?
Bob Rabinoff
Correct cold preserves
Organic will be eaten over time by organisms
Wood is most likely stained or I believe they said teak decks which is why it is used on boats as it withstands the salt and abuse it will encounter on the sea
Bones could have been covered by silt or they didn’t show em
Also I do not believe they found any remains at the tiatanic site
@@peterpiper_203 Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return...
@@peterpiper_203, thing is that this is the Baltic.
so while there are large amount of fish and there are boneworms here the salinity is to low for the typical wood eating worms that you find out in the Atlantic but to high for the freshwater variants to live, the water is also very cold all year around and have low pH value.
so wood are extremely well preserved in the Baltic.
one of the best example is the infact shown in this clip around 3:25 and next 10sec.
this ship is a dutch trading ship from the early 1600's and is so well preserved that they joking that it would only needed some bondo to make it float again.
this is an Norwegian article but you can see from the pictures how well it is
www.aftenposten.no/verden/i/75WVo/dette-vraket-er-350-aar-gammelt?
The Russian did same thing to the Japanese refugee ships by the Russian subs after the war was over near the Kuril island !!!!!
A story that needs to be told
What happened to the citizens of Manchuria when the Japanese invaded? Sorry, I have no sympathy for the Japanese.
@@dcabana1 when the Japanese ARMY invaded. ANY TIME Civilians are killed its a trajedy.
@@dcabana1
Neither do I! For the Germans, British and Americans even less so!
@@Missmori I totally agree. But the case of what Japanese have done after their invasion into Manchuria is difficult to forgive or to be generalized as “all wars are bad”! Wikipedia has a short description of “Unit 731”.
What are they looking for? They know a Russian sub sunk them mistaking them for military ships. It’s tragic but known.
Pretty eerie
NYC'S INDEED.
Michael, thank you for your reply. Well, your comment certainly opens the door into a debatable and unknown area. The way I see it is, that although God may choose or not choose too intervene in the various follies of man, humans are always responsible for their actions. Those who believe understand that God is a Supreme Being (beyond human) and therefore is not subject to the rules that govern mankind. I don't have all the answers, but I guess, a lot of how we each view the world depends on how much faith we have. Thanks again.
Thanks John, for a clear thought, the creator will judge us all from beginning to end.
Such a Sad ending to the terrible war, so many Innocent people lost for revenge on a crazzzy man.
Just too sad. Ended up not watching most of it.
This is terrifying