PETER HANSEN (251-LIFE-1987) spent time working for the ABWEHR (the German Secret Service) during WW II and he has information that is known to a mere handful of people. He gives this secret information especially to SHARKHUNTERS. Here he tells us:

GUSTLOFF

In KTB #174, you feature some Periscope text which is a bit old, I think, and I would like to forward you herewith some detailed addition of the facts behind the GUSTLOFF loss and matters connected with it. Only late last year did I receive the actual naval numbers from the estate of the chief investigator of the sinking, who had a big fight with Zahn and felt obligated to not let out the actual numbers for some idiotic sworn to secrecy reason. From the 2nd Division of the 2nd ULD (U-Bootlehrdivision), mostly technical men of engine room staff, 406 drowned but not Zahn, who had only been transferred by Georg Schultz to travel with the 2nd Division, as he had headed the 1st Division which were seamen. They traveled on the HANSA during Operation ALBATROSS, which developed engine trouble 10 miles out of Gotenhafen and had to anchor off Hela and thus did not participate in this transfer with insufficient escorting ships, but was not sunk either.

GUSTLOFF had only the old training/exercise torpedo catcher TF-7 which developed a strong leak due to heavy seas and also remained off Hela. The former Norwegian torpedoboat LÖWE (ex GYLLER), a war prize, was the sole escort but her sonar was out of order! Zahn could only make suggestions. Civilian Captain Petersen refused to accept them and the disaster occurred.

8th U-Boat Flot.

The 8th U-Boat Flot. was a transit flotilla, composed of a frequently changing number of Type VII U-Boats in the Baltic training and preparatory exercises for future front service assignments. This meant there was little permanency, as new U-Boats arrived while others transferred elsewhere.

Since June of 1944, a section of the 8th U-Boat Flotilla had been made a front service U-Boat Flotilla, supplying and coordinating up to eleven fully trained Type VII U-Boats on operation in the Eastern sea area of the Baltic usually along the huge antisubmarine mine barrier between Finland and Estonia. This was a triple net, mine and obstacle barrier to bottle up the Soviet Russian submarines and surface ships in Kronstadt, the port of St. Petersburg as well as other ports on the Gulf of Finland.

But recent defeats on the Russian Front had pushed the German army back quite a bit. The Soviet Russians had reconquered Estonia and the frontlines were no longer firm but changing. Soon Latvia would return to Soviet rule and Finland dropped out of the Eastern war entirely, concluding an armistice with the Soviet Union, bringing about the second defeat of Finland since the 1939/1940 winter war.

These developments created considerable problems in keeping those sea barriers effective and it had become impossible to retain a close watch and observation set-up along that barrier. Particularly so once Finland dropped out of the war, since the Finnish Navy had been mainly engaged in these watch, observation and barrier defense operations.

Because the German Navy was criminally short of effective escorting ships and suitable patrol vessels in the Baltic, Dönitz had ordered German U-Boats to watch and protect these barriers in the best way possible, though U-Boats were not very suitable for such operations in fairly shallow waters. However, it was considered important to maintain the effectiveness of these barriers to the greatest extent possible to keep Soviet Russian submarines and other ships from breaking through these defensive barriers entering the Baltic Sea west of the Finnish Gulf and attacking German shipping there.

New minefields had been laid to repair the sports the Soviets had cleared and to block further breakthrough operations. But these U-Boat operations were seen as a temporary emergency situation, to last only until the Eastern Baltic froze over with the beginning of the coming winter.

These combat U-Boats were based in Danzig and provisioned, serviced and looked after by the 8th U-Boat Flotilla in every respect, except actual operational assignments and the planning of same.

This responsibility had been given to the admiral commanding the Eastern Baltic, Vice Adm. Theodor Burchardi, already overloaded with many different tasks including the charting of the minefields or rather recently mine-swept routes and shipping channels.

To stay on top of that type of work and to utilize the far too few escort vessels available and arrange for their operational distribution, the 9th Escorting and Security Division had been created, commanded by Adalbert von Blanc for the Eastern Baltic area. It was the only organization that was as current as possible on the minefield locations and the available shipping routes and channels. Thus, for any ship movement outside of the close-in Bay of Danzig area, this coordinating office had to be consulted and informed, to minimize shipping losses or operational problems. This included the U-Boats of the 8th U-Boat Flotilla whether they were assigned as frontboats or only engaged in exercises and tests.

When such advance consultations and safe routing requests had been disregarded, several serious mishaps had already occurred and a number of ships were lost that way. The 9th Escorting and Security Division became even harder to reach due to insufficient telephone lines, which caused a growing delay in the assignments of the inadequate number of escorting vessels. Many got damaged, but repairs were slow due to lack of spare parts and shipyards. Moreover, the navy had removed too many suitable escort vessels from the Baltic and transferred them to Norway, Denmark, France and Holland on orders by Dönitz.

One of the losses involved U-250, a Type VII U-Boat commanded by Leutnant Werner Karl Schmidt (Crew 1935), posted to this Russian section of the 8th U-Boat Flotilla in July of 1944. U-250 left Kiel on the 15th of July, but did not call in Danzig at all, proceeding instead directly to Reval, Estonia and thence to Kalasika, Finland. Consequently U-250 did not receive the latest information available, leaving Finland on the 26th of July for a watch type of patrol along the net and mine barrier, which called for an observation operation within a limited area. On the 28th of July, Schmidt sunk a small Soviet harbor patrol boat, the MO-105 of only 56 tons, with an acoustic torpedo.

But this brought sister ships belonging to the same group to the scene, once a German U-Boat had been spotted. The MO-103, commanded by Lieutenant A. P. Kovalenko, found U-250 in the narrow Koivisto Strait on the 30th of July and sunk her with depth charges. The Baltic was only 42 meters (138 feet) deep in that area. Forty-six men of the crew drowned, but Schmidt and five other crewmembers managed to get out of the wreck, using their dragger type escape gear, and rose to the surface. Here they were promptly caught by the Soviets and made prisoners of war. The MO-103 took these six men immediately to Kronstadt and turned them over to Soviet naval intelligence interrogators, who put the screws on them quickly to obtain information.

The Soviet Navy swiftly dispatched divers, who entered the wreck of U-250 and recovered the naval Enigma machine M-4, the required coding and decoding tables, operational instructions and all other secret papers and documents. This included the U-Boat Commander’s instruction books, maps of all obligatory shipping routes and the mineswept channels in the Baltic as well as the location of all German laid minefields.

Very soon the Soviet Navy decoded and read the German naval radio signals with increasing speed and effectiveness. Soviet submarines laid mines into these mineswept channels and other submarines were posted directly into the obligatory shipping routes to attack German ships that could not detour or take evasive action due to the narrowness of these rigid routes. This captured material became largely responsible for those huge shipping losses and terrible sea disasters in 1945.

The Soviets also recovered the latest model of the acoustic torpedoes, improved from the T-4 FALCON and T-5 WREN. They brought lifting cranes and raising equipment from Kronstadt to bring the sunk U-250 up from the bottom, towing her to Kronstadt for a close inspection and minute investigation. A decision was reached to repair and rebuild this U-Boat and to put her back into operation as a Soviet submarine after complete reconditioning. She was renamed TS-14 on the 14th of April 1945.

None of this became known to the German Navy because the Soviets imposed total secrecy in such matters and the information only seeped out to Western Europe many years later.

Soviet armies entered East Prussia in January of 1945, when German armies were already surrounded in Courland and Latvia by Soviet armies. Dönitz had fiercely opposed the timely evacuation of these armies to Germany. Once the huge mass exodus of civilian refugees started, after criminal delays caused by the East Prussian Nazi party functionaries, it completely overwhelmed the available shipping capacity. Because of the irresponsible shortage of escorting vessels and due to the super secret material recovered by the Soviets from U-250, especially the maps of the German minefields and the minefree shipping channels to Germany, over 33,000 people drowned during these evacuations. The transports were terribly overloaded and took place in bitter cold, way below freezing point weather.

On the 30th of January 1945, the liner WILHELM GUSTLOFF sailed from Gotenhafen (Gdingen) with 10,582 persons aboard, including 918 men of the 2nd U-Boat Training Division, 373 female naval auxiliaries and a civilian crew of 173. The Soviet submarine S-13 torpedoed her and 9,343 persons died, most of them women and children. More than six times the number of people drowned than when the TITANIC hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic in 1912.

On 10th of February 1945, the liner GENERAL von STEUBEN, used as a hospital transport ship for military wounded being evacuated from Latvia, was torpedoed and 3,608 soldiers and medical staff drowned.

Then on the 17th of April 1945, the freighter-transport GOYA, already damaged by bombing attacks of Soviet airplanes, got torpedoed and further 6,666 persons drowned, all civilian refugees.

Thanks PETER. This shines more light on the losses of these ships in the closing moments of World War II. When our Sharkhunters were in the Russian Naval Museums, there were paintings of these ships – GUSTLOFF particularly, with swastikas painted all over them and guides told how 6,000 highly trained U-Boat crewmen died with the sinking. There were green crosses, not swastikas, on the ship and the victims were not the U-Boot men. But it made good propaganda………..