On 14-15 April 1912, the mighty, unsinkable, Titanic struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. It took just 2 hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to sink. 1,500 lives were lost. But the size of that maritime disaster was dwarfed on 30 January 1945, when the Germans were carrying out the largest seaborne evacuation in history – 2 million people fleeing the onrushing Russian forces.

One of the ships taking part in this evacuation was the luxury cruise liner, the Wilhelm Gustloff. Built to carry 1900 people, on this night it was carrying 10,582 people, 5,000 of them children. Most of the passengers were refugees. 9,343 of them perished in the icy waters of the Baltic when the Wilhelm Gustloff sank in 90 minutes after being torpedoed at night by a Russian submarine. This is the tragic story of the greatest maritime disaster ever …

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