Surrender didn’t end Germany’s Dunkirk
We often commend ourselves for our “Dunkirk spirit”.
Successfully evacuating the British Expeditionary Force and their allies from the beaches as Germany overwhelmed France certainly epitomised stoicism in a difficult situation.
And the Germans experienced their very own “Dunkirk” not in the opening period of the Second World War, but in its final stages.
Beginning in January 1945, Operation Hannibal was a naval operation involving the evacuation of German troops and civilians from Courland, East Prussia and the Polish Corridor, areas which had been cut off by the advancing Red Army.
Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of the Kriegsmarine, had ordered a “Rettungsaktion” or evacuation operation to be planned and on January 23 he gave the order to begin evacuation to ports outside the area under Soviet control.
In his post-war memoirs, he stated his aim had been to transport as many people as possible away from the Soviets.
Right until his suicide at the end of April, Adolf Hitler insisted the war go on, and when he became Reich President after the Fuhrer’s death Doenitz initially followed suit as he insisted combat troops be given priority over civilians, so they could be deployed elsewhere.
But the flood of military personnel and civilians eventually turned Operation Hannibal into one of the largest seaborne evacuations in history.
Over 15 weeks, an estimated 800-900,000 civilians and 350,000 troops were ferried across the Baltic to Germany and occupied Denmark.
This was more than three times the number of people evacuated from Dunkirk five years earlier.
But, just as in that operation when “the Little Ships” were pressed into action and every available vessel was pressed into action to bring British soldiers home, here anything between 500 and 1000 vessels of all types from fishing boats to whaling ships and the liner Deutschland, the pride of the German merchant marine, worked alongside the Third Reich’s remaining warships.
However, more than 150 vessels were sunk, involving huge loss of life.
On January 30, the former liner Wilhelm Gustlof was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine with the loss of 9500, and 6000 more died when the freighter Goya was torpedoed on April 16.
The evacuation continued even after the German surrender.
On May 8, the last day of the war, a convoy left the Latvian city of Liepaja with 18,000 soldiers and civilians and many Germans arrived in ports already occupied by British troops, bringing things full circle from Dunkirk.