The Wilhelm Gustloff: History's Deadliest Shipwreck

Everyone knows the Titanic. Almost no one knows the Wilhelm Gustloff, and it killed roughly six times as many people. In the freezing final months of World War Two, a German ship crammed with nearly ten thousand refugees and wounded was struck by Soviet torpedoes in the Baltic Sea and went down in under an hour. It remains the single deadliest maritime disaster in human history, and most people have never heard its name.

In this episode of Six Feet of History, August Mercer tells the full story of the Gustloff, the desperate evacuation that filled her far beyond capacity, the night she sank into the ice, and why a catastrophe this enormous slipped out of popular memory. Six Feet of History is a daily true history podcast digging up the dark, forgotten, and untold stories of the past. New episode every day.

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