« Volker Hassemer on Dieter Kosslick and Berlinale 2008 | Home | 18th Tromsö International Film Festival 2008 »
Die Gustloff – Greatest Ship Catastrophe in History
By Dorothea Holloway | August 21, 2008
Die Gustloff (Germany, 2008), a UFA Filmproduktion aired as a two-part ZDF telefeature, chronicled the greatest ship catastrophe in history. It happened in the winter of 1945. Thousands of refugees from eastern Germany – women, children, old people, wounded soldiers – are fleeing westward in the bitter cold. Their rescue: to get on board the famous ocean liner Wilhelm Gustloff.
The Gustloff was anchored in the harbor at Gotenhafen – today Gdynia in Poland – and was assigned to bring soldiers across the Baltic Sea to Kiel. At the last minute, life boats were brought on board – although hardly enough! Only one protective torpedo boat accompanies the Gustloff! The passengers, hoping to be rescued, were doomed – a refugee tragedy, a true anti-war film.
Joseph Vilsmaier succeeds in his two-part ZDF telefeature to chronicle, in fully unheroic terms, the panic and chaos on a sinking ship. We feel the fear of the victims, the horror of the moment, then the suffering, the agony of drowning, the freezing cold, altogether nightmarish and shocking. Camera: Jörg Widmer. Vilsmaier relates how the ship’s officers could not reach agreement on who should command the ship! So what happens – in the middle of the voyage, the navigation lights are turned on. And in the depths of the sea lurks a Soviet submarine ready to fire its torpedoes.
The Wilhelm Gustloff, overloaded with some 10,000 passengers, sinks on 30 January 1945 and more than 9,000 die. The few who were rescued were awaited in Kiel by the military police, the so-called “Kettenhunde,” who were looking for men and young boys to recruit for the last days of the war – and this in 1945! As for the surviving officers, they saved their own skins – a bitter film! All the actors give exceptional performances.
The documentation by ZDF historian Guido Knopp and his team offers a convincing reconstruction of the tragedy. Back in 1959, Frank Wisbar shot a feature film on the sinking of the Gustloff, Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen (Darkness Fell on Gotenhafen). Other documentation and reports exist on the last voyage of the Gustloff. But it wasn’t until 2002, when Günter Grass described the catastrophe in his novella Im Krebsgang (Crab Walk), that the German public became aware of the tragedy again.
– Dorothea Moritz
Topics: Film Reviews | Comments Off on Die Gustloff – Greatest Ship Catastrophe in History
Comments are closed.