We all already know about the Titanic and the tragedy that forever marked humanity, but also the world of film.
1,500 people died on the Titanic in 1912, but this is not, by any means, the greatest maritime catastrophe of all time.
On April 15, 1912, the Titanic was headed for New York on its first and last voyage, wrongly considered “indestructible” and “unsinkable”. 2224 passengers boarded the ship, and 1514 of them perished.
However, few know that this was not the biggest tragedy in its niche.
On January 30, 1945, the story of the Titanic would repeat itself, this time taking on much larger proportions.
The Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy: the story of the fateful evening in which more than 9,000 people died
In early 1945, the ship Wilhelm Gustloff sank in the Baltic Sea after an attack by a Soviet submarine while carrying around 10,000 passengers.
In an absolutely bizarre way, this tragedy would be linked to the name of a Romanian, and we will immediately tell you how.
The vessel in question, named the Wilhelm Gustloff, was built in the Blohm & Voss shipyard, measuring 208.5 meters in length, 23.59 meters in width and displacing 25,484 tons.
From the moment she was built, she was supposed to be a cruise ship and nothing more, with a maximum accepted capacity of 1,400 passengers.
However, given the situation, the German navy quickly changed its utility, turning it into a hospital ship, in the context of the Second World War.
As the war drew to a close and it was evident that the Nazi troops were beginning to lose more and more ground, the vessel was used to evacuate German troops, as well as civilians in East Prussia, out of the way of the Soviet army. Obviously, it quickly became a military target.
In desperation, thousands of refugees flocked to the Gustloff, the ship leaving the port of Gdynia, Poland, on January 30, 1945, with more than 10,000 people on board, mostly old people, children and women.
Around nine o’clock in the evening, a Soviet submarine launched three torpedoes, under the command of the Romanian Alexandru Marinescu, also known as Aleksandr Marinesko.
On that fateful evening, the crew members met their end either killed on the spot or trapped below deck as the vessel sank into the icy waters of the Baltic Sea. Everything happened extremely quickly, taking only one hour for the ship to reach the bottom of the sea.
About 10,000 passengers were on board, but unfortunately only 1,200 could be saved, resulting in 9,000 deaths.
Who was, in fact, Alexandru Marinescu, the one “who condemned them all to death”
According to what history can tell us, it seems that the attack against the ship Wilhelm Gustloff happened under the command of Alexandru Marinescu, at that time the captain of the Soviet submarine S-13.
Aleksandr Marinesko, under his non-Romanized name, was born on January 15, 1913, in Odesa, in the family of former Romanian military sailor Ion Marinescu, who settled in Ukraine in 1893.
After graduating six grades, he became an apprentice in the navy. Having received good grades, he was immediately enrolled in a maritime school for children.
It is important to know that he attended the Maritime College in Odessa, graduating from this educational institution in 1933. Obviously, he quickly rose through the ranks, as the young man showed a special talent in his job, being also ambitious beyond measure.
As soon as he graduated, he was assigned to serve aboard several ships in the Black Sea as a sailor.
In 1940 he was promoted to the rank of captain-lieutenant, and in 1944, a year before the tragedy, he successfully attacked the German ship Siegfried and was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner.
