Looking down at national Geographic on the magazine rack at Wal-Mart I stared in disbelief at the cover picture. a wreck on its side and the words NAZI GHOST SHIP FOUND. it seems that for 60 years this luxury liner was on the bottom of the baltic it held 5000 refugees fleeing the Red Army and was torpedoed by a Russian sub, 4000 of the people on board were wounded German soldiers from the eastern front the remaining 1200 were civilians all died with just a few survivors that is about triple the count of dead in the HMS Titanic
i saw it on the tv last week, but one thing that up set me why it was called nazi? the victims were civilians and refugees! and i think the soviets just commited a big murder attacking civilians ships, they were 3 ships sunk
And two more ships sunk by RAF. Sure, it was wartime and germans weren't boyscouts either. But still, this kind of catastrophes happened and nobody cared about them. A what if -question: What if these ships were french and they were sunk by germans with same amount of lost lives, would those sinkings considered one of most evil crimes of WW2?
The majority of fatalities from General Steuben were military personnel. You can't use the ship as a military transport, then claim it's a civilian target.
You said it, Tiornu. When you use a ship as a troop transport, it becomes a legitimate military target.
I was under impression that most of these military personnels were wounded soldiers. If this is true, then Steuben could be technically considered a hospital ship. But ofcourse then ship must be marked accordingly. Anyway, how about those four other ships, Goya, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona and Thielbek?
Yes, you're right about that, GS was transporting wounded soldiers but lacked markings. In Gustloff's case, it's even more confused because (if memory serves) she actually had served with hospital ship markings earlier in the war but not at this time.
Recently I saw a documentary about the Gustloff. In that documentary the commander of the german destroyer rescuing the survivors said that the Gustloff was a legitimate military target and that had he been in place of the soviet submarine commander he would have done exactly the same thing. Apparently on Gustloff there was an U-boat training school of the Kriegsmarine so I guess that makes it a legitimate target.
Absolutely. I'm always amazed at how angry people can get over incidents like the STEUBEN sinking when the ship involved was, in fact, a legitimate target. Had any of these vessels been sporting proper hospital ship markings, mind you, that would have been different. But the fact remains that they didn't.
