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Operation Hannibal was aGerman naval operation involving the evacuation by sea of German troops and civilians from theCourland Pocket,East Prussia,West Prussia andPomerania from mid-January to May 1945 as theRed Army advanced during theEast Prussian andEast Pomeranian Offensives and subsidiary operations. The operation was one of the largest evacuations by sea in history.
Planning for Operation Hannibal started in late 1944, although it was done quietly sinceHitler opposed such measures. The coordination of the evacuations was entrusted toRear AdmiralConrad Engelhardt [de]. By the end of 1944, Engelhardt had assembled a fleet of 22 former passenger liners, each weighing over 10.000 tonnes (11.023 short tons). Overall responsibility of the operation went toAdmiralOskar Kummetz. In early 1945, the Germans had two Escort Divisions in the area, the9th [de] and the10th Escort Divisions [de]. (German:Sicherungs-Division)[1] The 9th Escort Division mainly consisted of lightly armedminesweepers.
TheEast Prussian Offensive by theRed Army's3rd Belarusian Front under GeneralIvan Chernyakhovsky commenced on 13 January 1945 and, with MarshalKonstantin Rokossovsky's2nd Belorussian Front, subsequently cut off East Prussia between 23 January and 10 February 1945. German Grand AdmiralKarl Dönitz ordered Admiral Kummetz, as Naval High Commander, Baltic, and Rear Admiral Engelhardt, head of theKriegsmarine's shipping department, to plan and execute theRettungsaktion (evacuation operation).[2] Dönitz radioed a message toGotenhafen inoccupied Poland on 23 January 1945, to begin evacuations to ports outside the Soviet area of operations. The operation was codenamed "Hannibal".[3]
On 19 February, the Wehrmacht had managed to open up a corridor fromKönigsberg toPillau, which allowed thousands of refugees to escape and wait for ships in Pillau, which would eventually transport them west of thePolish Corridor. Refugees also came fromCranz,Heiligenbeil,Elbing andPreußisches Holland [de]. By 8 April as many as 450,000 refugees were in Pillau.[4]
The flood of military personnel and German civilians eventually turned the operation into one of the largest evacuations by sea in history, even larger than the far more widely knownBritish evacuation of Dunkirk five years earlier. Over a period of fifteen weeks, somewhere between 494 and 1,080 merchant vessels of all types, including fishing boats and other craft,[5] and utilizing Germany's largest remaining naval units, carried between 800,000 and 900,000 German civilians and 350,000 soldiers[6] across theBaltic Sea to Germany and German-occupiedDenmark.
Operation Hannibal commenced on 23 January 1945.[7] At first, only 14 liners were available along with twenty-threefreighters of more than 5,000 tons and many other smaller ships. On 30 JanuaryWilhelm Gustloff,Hansa, and the whaling factory shipWalter Rau left the harbor atGotenhafen in occupiedPoland, bound forKiel.Hansa was forced to return to port with mechanical trouble, but theGustloff, overcrowded with more than 10,000 civilians and military personnel aboard, continued. She was torpedoed and sunk by the Soviet submarineS-13 off the Pomeranian coast, with possibly as many as 9,500 deaths, the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history. Those onWalter Rau eventually reachedEckernförde.
On 9 February theSS General von Steuben sailed fromPillau with between 3,000 and 4,000 mostly military personnel on board, heading forSwinemünde. She was also sunk byS-13, just after midnight, with 650 survivors.
In early March, a task force composed of theGerman cruiserAdmiral Scheer accompanied by threeGerman destroyers and theElbing-class torpedo boatT36 were giving cover to a German bridgehead nearWollin. During that operation, naval small craft evacuated over 75,000 soldiers and civilians who had been isolated in that area. They were taken to larger warships and other transports lying offshore. While a number of these transports were sunk, large liners such asSS Deutschland got through and carried up to 11,000 soldiers and civilians each.
During the night of 4–5 April a flotilla of small boats and landing craft evacuated over 30,000 soldiers and civilians fromOxhöfter Kämpe and took them toHela. It is estimated that nearly 265,000 people were evacuated fromDanzig (modern Gdańsk) to Hela during the month of April alone.[8]
On 15 April another large convoy consisting of four liners and other transports left Hela with over 20,000 soldiers and civilians. On 16 April theGoya was torpedoed and sunk byL-3, with the loss of over 6,000 lives; 183 survived.
Initially, on becoming Reich President on 1 May, Dönitz was determined to continue the war, going so far as to instructGeneraloberstCarl Hilpert that combat troops would have priority in evacuation to Germany from theCourland Pocket. It was not until the afternoon of 6 May, with British troops practically on his doorstep, that he gave up on that plan.[9]
From 1 to 8 May, over 150,000 people were evacuated from the beaches of Hela. At 21:00 on 8 May 1945, the last day of the war, a convoy consisting of 92 large and small vessels left theLatvian city ofLiepāja (German:Libau) with 18,000 soldiers and civilians.[10] While several hundred of those who had boarded small ships on the last day of the war or after were captured by Soviet MTBs, evacuations to the west continued for at least a week after all such movements were prohibited by the terms of theGerman surrender.
The collapse of German industry in the later years of the war meant shortages of food and medicine; the evacuation could not be properly supplied and so authorities rationed what they had. Military personnel were given priority, while the elderly, young children, and the sick were fed last. Consequently, there was a high rate of mortality among old and young refugees.[7] Other shortages included only a three-week supply ofcoal provided for the sea transports and only a ten-day supply for rail transports to move troops to the front, with fuel being at its lowest levels since the war began.[7]
In addition to theGoya,Wilhelm Gustloff, andGeneral von Steuben, 158 other merchant vessels were lost during the 15-week course of Operation Hannibal (23 January – 8 May 1945).[11]