Guenter Grass - Crabwalk

On the subject of this conference and the subsequent one in Potsdam, which took place when Roosevelt was dead and Truman president, I found hate pages on the Internet and a sort of throwaway comment on my know-it-all son's Web site: “This is how they dismembered our Germany,” along with a map of the Greater German Reich, with all the lost territories marked. He then speculated on the miracles that might have occurred if the young sailors, almost finished with their training, had safely reached their destination of Kiel on the Gustloff and been successfully deployed, manning twelve or more U-boats of the new, fabulously fast and almost silent XXIII Class. His wish list bristled with heroic deeds and special victory announcements. Konny didn't go quite so far as to invoke the final victory retroactively, but he was sure that these young U-boatmen would have experienced a better death, even if these miracle vessels had been destroyed by depth charges, than proved their lot when they drowned wretchedly opposite the Stolpe Bank. His opponent David agreed with the comparative weight assigned to these ways of death, but then tossed some reservations into the Net: “Those young fellows really had no choice. No matter what, they had no chance of surviving to adulthood…”

Photos are available, collected over decades by the pursers assistant after he survived the disaster: many small passport-sized ones and a group photo showing all the sailors who would normally have undergone four months of training with the 2nd Submarine Training Division. They are lined up on the sundeck, having saluted Lieutenant Commander Zahn and now, after the command “At ease!” standing there in a more relaxed posture. On this wide-angle photograph, showing over nine hundred sailor hats, which get smaller and smaller toward the stern, individual faces can be made out only as far back as the seventh row. Behind that an orderly mass. But from the passport-sized photos, one uniformed man after another gazes out at me. These youthful faces, although they may all be different, have the same unfinished quality. They must be about eighteen. Some boys, photographed in uniform during the final months of the war, are even younger. My son, seventeen by now, could be one of them, although, because of his glasses, Konny would hardly have qualified for submarine duty.

They are all wearing their admittedly becoming sailor caps, with the band that reads german navy at a cocky angle, usually tilted toward the right. I see round, narrow, angular, and chubby-cheeked faces on these death candidates. Their uniform is their pride and joy. They gaze out at me, their solemnity prophetically appropriate for this last photograph.

The few photos available to me of the 375 girls of the naval auxiliary make a more civilian impression, in spite of their little two-pointed service caps, also worn at an angle, with the imperial eagle bent around the point at the front. The young girls' neat hairdos — many no doubt achieved by means of permanent or water waves — fall in the curls fashionable at the time. Quite a few of the girls may have been engaged, only a few married. Two or three, who make a coolly sensuous impression on me with their straight hair, remind me of my ex-wife. That is how Gabi looked back in the day when she was a fairly dedicated education student in Berlin and made my heart drop to my knees the moment I saw her. At first glance almost all the naval auxiliaries are pretty, even cute; some of them show early signs of a double chin. They have a less solemn expression than the boys. Each one gazing out at me smiles unsuspectingly.

Because not even a hundred survived of the far more than four thousand infants, children, and youths aboard the doomed ship, only a few photos turned up; the refugees' baggage, with family photo albums from East and West Prussia, Danzig, and Gotenhafen, went down with the ship. I see the children's faces from those years. Girls with braids and bows, the boys with hair slicked down, parted on the left or right. There are hardly any pictures of infants, who in any case have a timeless appearance. The photographs of mothers who found their grave in the Baltic and of the few who remained alive, mostly without their children, were “snapped” (as Mother would say) either long before the disaster or many years later on family occasions; of Mother there is not a single photo from that era — or of me as a baby.

By the same token, no likeness remains of those old men and women — Masurian peasants, retired civil servants, merry widows, and tradesmen — the thousands of elderly people, distraught from the horrors of their flight, who were allowed on board. All men in their middle years were turned back on the Oxhöft dock because they were eligible for the last Landsturm call-ups. Among those saved from going down with the ship, thus, were hardly any men or women of advanced years. And no picture preserves the memory of the wounded soldiers from the Kurland who lay packed onto cots in the Bower.

The few older people who were rescued included the ship's captain, Petersen, a man in his mid-sixties. At nine o'clock in the evening all four captains were standing on the bridge, arguing over whether it had been right to carry out Petersen's order and set running lights, an order given merely because shortly after six that evening a convoy of minesweepers had been reported by radio to be approaching in the opposite direction. Zahn had opposed the move. The second navigation captain likewise. Petersen did allow some of the lights to be turned off, but kept the port and starboard lights on. With only the torpedo boat Löwe serving as an escort, and with no lights indicating its height or length, the darkened ship continued on course through diminishing snowfall and heavy swell, approaching the Stolpe Bank, marked on all nautical maps. The predicted moderate frost registered — 8 °Celsius.

We are told that it was the first officer of the Soviet U-boat S-13 who spotted running lights in the distance. Whoever reported the sighting, Marinesko promptly made his way to the tower, as the submarine moved along above water. Apparently he was wearing, along with his fur-trimmed cap, or ushanka, not the lined coat that was standard issue for U-boat officers but instead an oil-smeared sheepskin slung over his shoulders.

During the boats long underwater cruise, which was powered by its electric engines, the captain had received reports only of sounds from small ships. Near Hela he had given the order to surface. The diesel engines came on. Only now did a ship with twin propellers become audible. Heavy snow that set in suddenly protected the submarine, but reduced visibility. As the snow subsided, the outlines of a troop transport, estimated at twenty thousand tons, and an escort vessel came into view. The submarine was on the ocean side, looking toward the transports starboard side and the Pomeranian coastline, whose presence could be dimly sensed. For the time being nothing happened.

I can only speculate as to what induced the captain of S-13 to increase the boat's speed and, still above the surface, circle the ship and its escort from behind and then try to find an attack position on the coastal side, in water less than thirty meters deep. According to later explanations, he was determined to strike, wherever he could find them, the “fascist dogs” who had treacherously attacked his fatherland and devastated it; up to now he had not had much luck.

For two weeks his search for prey had yielded nothing. He had not got off a single shot, either near the island of Gotland or in the Baltic harbors of Windau and Memel. Not one of the ten torpedoes on board had left its tube. Marinesko must have been starved for action. Besides, this man whose competence manifested itself only at sea must have been haunted by the fear that if he returned empty-handed to port in Turku or Hangö, he would be immediately hauled before the court-martial that the NKVD had called for. The charges were not limited to his most recent drinking bout and the overstayed shore leave he had spent in Finnish whorehouses; he was also under suspicion of espionage, an accusation common in the Soviet Union since the mid-thirties as the pretext for purges, and impossible to refute. All that could save him was an incontrovertible success.