'Hitler's Titanic' carried a treasure of 64 chests of gold?

The Nazi cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff, sunk during World War II, is believed to have been carrying 64 chests of gold or the Amber Room, but the story remains unsolved.

Nazi cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff. Photo: eutopress.

On January 30, 1945, three torpedoes fired from the Soviet submarine S-13 sank the Nazi cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff as it was carrying civilians and Nazi soldiers fleeing Gdniya, then called Gotenhafen, a city in East Prussia.

More than 9,300 people died in the attack, which is considered the largest shipwreck in maritime history, according to the International Business Times.

Nicknamed "Hitler's Titanic," the Wilhelm Gustloff was a Nazi recreation ship operated by the Strength Through Joy organization. Workers loyal to the Nazi Labor Front were often rewarded with trips aboard the ship to Spain and Norway. During World War II, the Wilhelm Gustloff served as a hospital ship and transported Nazi submarine crews.

Decades after the Wilhelm Gustloff disaster, rumors began to circulate about a secret cargo aboard the ship when it sank. Heinz Schoen, assistant treasurer of the Wilhelm Gustloff and a survivor, wrote several books about the sinking, one of which mentioned the boxes being loaded onto the ship before it set sail.

The mysterious chests

The ship Wilhelm Gustloff when it was sunk. Illustration: wilhelmgustloff.com.

While working as a diver in Germany in the late 1980s, Philip Sayers, author of the book "Baltic Gold", met Rudi Lange, a radio technician on the Wilhelm Gustloff, who claimed to have seen the boxes being loaded onto the ship.

"He told me the story of this sinking and it sounded like the Titanic. He had to survive in the ocean and swam for a long time around the dead and dying people. He burst into tears as the memories of the victims and the dying children came back to him," Sayers said.

"He explained to me that on the night the Wilhelm Gustloff set sail, a convoy of trucks loaded with cargo appeared at the docks as the ship was about to set sail and he witnessed a group of Nazi soldiers carrying small but heavy boxes onto the wharf," Sayers recounted.

Speculation about the contents of the boxes continues to this day. Mr. Schoen believes they contain panels from the famous Amber Room, looted from the Catherine Palace by Nazi soldiers during the siege of St. Petersburg. The Nazis are believed to have taken the Amber Room, worth an estimated $400 million, to the city of Koenigsberg (later renamed Kaliningrad), near Gdniya.

However, Rudi Lange said that the above hypothesis is doubtful because the chests he found were small in size. Moreover, Lange also confirmed that he discovered what the chests actually contained.

Lange revealed to Sayers that he had met one of the Nazi soldiers who had loaded the mysterious boxes onto the ship at a memorial event for the victims of the Cap Arcona shipwreck held in the town of Neustadt, Germany, in 1972. The Cap Arcona was a Nazi transport ship that was sunk by British fighter planes in May 1945, killing around 5,000 people on board, mostly prisoners from German concentration camps.

“The boxes did not contain the Amber Room walls. The soldier said he had transferred 64 boxes of gold bars from the Reichsbank in Koenigsberg to the Wilhelm Gustloff,” Lange told Sayers. The estimated value of the boxes of gold was more than $125 million, based on current prices.

The soldier said the boxes of gold were placed in a special room on the Wilhelm Gustloff, reserved for Hitler only. The plan was to transfer them to small boats and take them to a secret location, but unfortunately, the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk.

However, some experts do not believe the rumors about treasure on the Wilhelm Gustloff.

American reporter Cathryn J. Prince interviewed many survivors of the Wilhelm Gustloff disaster for her book "Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff".

"None of the survivors I spoke to nor any of the documents gave a description of the boxes that were loaded onto the ship. I spoke to people who worked on the Wilhelm Gustloff before they started taking in refugees and they said they didn't see any boxes. Every inch of the ship was packed with people," Prince described.

Regarding the hypothesis that the Amber Room was taken on board the ship, Prince shared: "Historians I spoke to said that such a treasure is more likely to be hidden in mountain caves or mines." Prince said that it is unlikely that the Nazis would entrust such valuable cargo to a cruise ship carrying desperate refugees.

The wreck was ransacked?

The Amber Room was reconstructed in Russia. Photo: Reuters.

To test the rumors, Sayers and a fellow diver dived to the wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1988. The ship lay at a depth of 50 meters and about 60 kilometers off the Polish coast. However, upon arriving, the pair discovered they were not the first to find the wreck.

"It's clear that someone has dived down here and rummaged through the wreck. They may have been looking for the Amber Room," Sayers said.

According to Sayers, the Soviets destroyed the wreck to eliminate the risk of other ships colliding with it. The remaining pieces of the Wilhelm Gustloff lay scattered on the seabed in piles. Some parts of the ship appeared to have been blown apart.

"You could clearly see holes in the hull and parts where they had to use high-powered cutters. It looked to me like the ship had blown up with explosives," Sayers said.

Sayers and his colleagues removed a charred porthole from the medical bay and brought it ashore. However, upon returning to port in Kiel, Germany, they were arrested and charged with stealing the wreck.

They were eventually released and shortly afterwards, at the request of the German government, Polish authorities established a no-go zone around the site of the Wilhelm Gustloff's sinking, declaring it a war grave. Divers were only allowed access to the area with special permits.

Mike Boring, the diver Prince spoke to, surveyed the wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 2003. He confirmed that the ship had been cleaned up. But what was even more puzzling was the lack of human remains.

Legends of the whereabouts of secret Nazi gold reserves still fascinate many explorers. For Prince, the tragedy of the Wilhelm Gustloff and the mysterious fate of the Amber Room will continue to attract speculation, perhaps for a long time to come.

According to VNE