In Tramore for many years there lived a man named Paul Vollrath, a German-born veteran seaman who washed up in Ireland after the second World War, found a wife here, and stayed. The sea featured in a couple of letters he wrote to this newspaper back in the 1980s, including one that complained of conditions on Sealink ferries in and out of Rosslare.
But Vollrath had seen worse things in his time than the Rosslare ferry. As a wartime merchant marine officer, he lost no fewer than five ships to mines, torpedoes, or gunfire. And thanks to the last of them, 70 years ago today, he also witnessed the worst naval disaster in history, with a human cost several multiples greater than the Titanic's.
The ship in question was the Wilhelm Gustloff, a former cruise liner that by war's end was deployed towards the evacuation of Germans from the "Polish Corridor", as the Red Army closed in. It was designed to carry 2,000 passengers and crew. By the time it left the port of Gydinia on January 30th, 1945, however, it had 10,000 on board, many of them children.
They were nine hours out to sea when three Russian torpedoes struck. The ship listed almost immediately, making it impossible to launch most of the lifeboats, and it sank within an hour. The exact death-toll is still debated. But barely 800 survived, 90 of them in an overloaded vessel piloted by Vollrath, the ship’s senior second officer.
In a 1981 account, for the international maritime magazine Sea Breezes, Vollrath recalled the disaster in vivid pen pictures; from the feverish atmosphere in Gydinia – a "humming beehive" of refugees – to the horrors of guiding his lifeboat to safety while thousands died around it in the icy Baltic Sea. Given his record, he had been fatalistic about the Gustloff commission – a late appointment when the incumbent second officer fell ill. But you didn't need to have lost ships before to know this was a perilous voyage.
Flotilla
As he put it, in plotting a course to their intended destination of Kiel, the ship’s officers essentially had a choice between “mines and torpedoes”. In the event, they opted for a mineswept channel where, to minimise exposure, they sailed without lights. Even so, their flotilla was soon spotted by a Soviet submarine.
Along with its civilians, the Wilhelm Gustloff was carrying guns and military personnel. Under the rules of war, it was a target. And the torpedoes carried a message of revenge, literally. Each had its own inscription: the first reading "For the Motherland"; the second "For the Soviet People"; the third "For Leningrad".
His previous misfortunes probably helped save Vollrath, and those he in turn rescued. He had just retired to bed – fully dressed, as usual – when the missiles hit. After that, although shaking with nerves, he knew what to do. He even lit a cigar amid the unfolding panic and, later, spotting a female acquaintance in the melee, asked for and was granted “a kiss”.
Of those he tried to save, some refused help, preferring to stay on the high side of the ship rather than the low, from which he launched the boat. In any case, his final complement was 30 more that the lifeboat’s official capacity. And such was the agitation on board, he had to threaten passengers with a revolver to encourage calm and keep them all afloat.
To take any more would have been dangerous. But like all survivors, Vollrath was haunted by those left behind. The siren that accompanied the ship’s final descent was like the “last cries of a dying animal”, he recalled. And even as it disappeared, watching from 50 yards, he saw someone standing on the side of its giant chimney funnel, at sea level.
Paul Vollrath died in 1996, still in Tramore. More recently, in 2012, the Vollrath family was the focus of a personal tragedy, with the death in a local nursing home of his widow Vera. She had been very ill. But the circumstances led to her son Gerard pleading guilty to attempted murder, before a High Court judge found that he had acted from compassion and suspended the prison sentence.
As for the great human catastrophe of the Wilhelm Gustloff, that is now largely forgotten outside Germany, where its memory can be divisive. When Günter Grass made it the subject of his 2003 novel Im Krebsgang ("Crabwatch"), one of his motives, he explained, was to rescue the subject from extreme right-wingers: "They said the tragedy of the Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It was terrible, but it was a result of war".
@frankmcnallyIT