During January of 1945, the Gustloff was once more put into service, this time as a part of the largest planned naval evacuation operation in history. Headed by Admiral Donitz himself the rescue and transport of millions of refugees, soldiers, sick, injured and others fleeing from the advance of the Soviet forces in east. After years of stale fighting the Nazis had underestimated the strength of the Russian force and their advance and looting onto Russian soil had turned face. The eastern front had broken down and the Russian Red army now forced back into ground rightfully theirs. The advance sent a wave of panic across Nazi occupied pockets, Red Army soldiers had previous laws lifted, from what was a crime punishable by death, raped! was now justified. They burned all in their path revenge was theirs for the taking women and children were horrfically and brutally murdered as were all those who were left behind in the evacuation. As Soviet military units overtook columns of German civilian refugees fleeing to the west, they behaved in a way previously mentioned which has not been seen in Europe since the Mongol invasions of the Middle Ages. Often the men, most of them farmers or Germans who had been engaged in other essential occupations and thus exempted from military service, were simply murdered on the spot. The women were, almost without exception, gang-raped. This was the fate of girls as young as eight years old and old women in their eighties, as well as women in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Women who resisted rape had their throats cut or were shot. Very often women were murdered after being gang-raped. Many women and girls were raped so often and so brutally that they died from this abuse alone.
Sometimes Soviet tank columns simply rolled right over the fleeing refugees, grinding them into the mud with their tank treads. When Soviet Army units occupied East Prussian villages, they engaged in orgies of torture, rape, and murder so bestial that they cannot be described fully on this program. Sometimes they castrated the men and boys before killing them. Sometimes they gouged their eyes out. Sometimes they burned them alive. Some women after being gang-raped were crucified by being nailed to barn doors while still alive and then used for target practice. This atrocious behavior on the part of the Communist troops was due in part to the nature of the Communist system, which had succeeded in overthrowing Russian society and the Russian government in the first place by organizing the scum of Russian society -- the losers and ne'er-do-wells, the criminals, the resentful and the envious -- under the Jews and setting them against the successful, the accomplished, the refined, and the prosperous, promising the rabble that if they pulled down their betters then they could take the place of the latter: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

The Wilhelm Gustloff would set sail from Danzig Bay with an estimated 10,000 people crammed aboard, soon after her leaving time she would be sent to the bottom of the Baltic sea by a Soviet Submarine. The sinking would be earmarked as one of the most haunting atrocities of maritime disaster in history. Aboard the ship as she sank panic in its truest form set in, witnesses among those fighting their way to the other decks reported hearing the crack of pistol shots from the other side of the watertight doors. It seems only too likely that anyone with a firearm in those parts of the ship would have preferred to shoot himself and his loved ones rather than wait for a slower and more horrifying death by water. Heinz Schoen, who interviewed survivors during the 1950’s, reported one such incident in a lower deck cabin. A sailor ran down one corridor forcing open jammed doors. He heard a shot in one of the cabins and broke down the door. On the floor lay the bodies of women and a small child. In the centre of the cabin was a naval officers holding a still smoking pistol while a terrified 5 year old boy clutched his fathers leg. “Get out!”ordered the officer, staring vacantly at the sailor. And there was no doubt in the mind of the sailor that he had intruded on a family suicide pact. With all cabins occupied and passengers jammed into passageways, the GUSTLOFF got underway at 1230 on January 30th for Kiel and Flensburg in western Germany. There were over 6,000 passengers--more than three times above capacity. Most were women and children, elderly men and about 1,200 wounded soldiers. Last to come aboard was the mayor of Gotenhafen and his family. Hitler had never stepped aboard the ship, and they were given the suite that had been reserved exclusively for him. It had never been occupied in the ship’s seven year history. As the ship left port it is reported that many other people aboard small escorting vessels scrambled up nets draped over the sides of the ship, in total it was estimated that approx. 10,000 people were aboard the ship although based on this information a true figure will never be know.

At the end of the War, (Admiral Doenitz who masterminded Germanys Dunkirk the evacuation to the west of 2 million Germans from the Eastern Provinces) the operation proved to be a huge success, in light of the crushing and total defeat of Germany, in so far that over 2,000,000 people were rescued from areas of the Soviet advance. Had these 2,000,000 refugees not been rescued, as has been well documented elsewhere (As in the volumes "Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central-Europe), the plight of many of the refugees was likely to have been grim. Out of the total number rescued, about 25,000 to 30,000 lives were lost, the majority with the sinking of the Gustloff and the Goya with a combined total of over 15,000 deaths. Considering the number of people transported and the conditions and time of the transport (January - May, 1945), the number of lives lost versus the number rescued remains to this day a stark reminder of the size, scope and determination of the massive German sea rescue.