father's blast concussion injury, his rage and how we grew up. they go on and on. i think the captain's message to me and i quote him, if we thought about that before we went to war, we would go to war less often. this is not an antiwar guy at all. >> let's leave it there. thank you for your book, your research, and your generosity here. thank all of you. thank you, steve. thanks also to the price of the nation institute which cosponsored this, promoted a little bit. there is material about, and books, books to buy and get signed as the staff is radically pointy. please buy them. please get them signed. please support great journalism,

great writing. thank you. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author or book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at the booktv@c-span.org. or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> cathryn prince recounts the sinking of a former cruise ship turned escape vessel in world war ii. the wilhelm gustloff was transporting close to 10,000 german children, women, elderly and wounded soldiers in the baltic sea on january 30, 1945. the author writes the ship was torpedoed by a soviet submarine causing the deaths of over 9000 people. this is about 50 minutes. >> good afternoon, and it's a real honor and privilege to be speaking with you here today.

several years ago, my father told me about a german ship sunk at the end of world war ii. he didn't know much about it, other than its name, and that it was incredibly devastating. and so i decided to look that up. and what i discovered, it was, in fact, the worst maritime disaster in peace or war. more than 9000 people died on january 30, 1945, when a soviet submarine attacked the wilhelm gustloff, which was a former cruise liner turned escape ship. so to put that into context, that's about six times more than those who died when the titanic sank after hitting an iceberg. during the initial research into this incident, i found a few

people outside of the military took note of the sinking in the immediate aftermath. and as the years went on it would gain mentioned in certain histories of world war ii, but there've been nothing was explained in depth. and so because of that, little is known about the wilhelm gustloff. and initially i could find no information and no explanation, why did so little exist. that actually piqued my curiosity even further. i wanted to know more about the sinking and i wanted to know more about the people who were aboard the wilhelm gustloff that night because to me the story of the wilhelm gustloff is not only the story of a ship sinking, it is the story of how people came to the aboard this ship. it's about what it was like to come of age in the part of nazi

germany that until the early 1940s had remained in some ways isolated from what was happening closer to berlin. the first survivor that i found was a man who grew up in prussia and today he lives about three hours north of toronto. he was a 10 year old boy at the time of the sinking. so i traveled to canada to meet him. the sinking naturally still haunts him. he thinks about it every day. though the loss of life was massive, and as desperate as the conditions were that forced him to flee, stories like is have remained largely unknown. and i spent a few days with him, but after, i'm after the very first hour of meeting him at a store and the start of the other survivors needed to be told.

and so this book is the story of what i found. it's the result of interviews with survivors and time spent in the archives including the national archives in washington, d.c. i was fortunate enough to spend time at the u.s. holocaust memorial museum as well as obtain records from the federal archives in germany. in early 1945, the end of the war in europe was in sight. the americans and british were closing in from the west and the soviets were closing in on berlin from east. many civilians and some soldiers chose to abandon these volatile areas of europe by any possible. especially for those civilians living in east prussia at the time. they knew exactly what awaited them when the soviets were approaching. they knew that the same acts of barbarism, the same massacres would happen to them as had

happened to the russians as the german army had advanced in its invasion of the soviet union in 1942. however, they were under orders, they were not permitted to leave until the very end of january 1945. the nazi government forbade anyone to leave or to do so would've shown signs of defeatism, and acknowledgment that they were going to lose the war. well, finally hitler agreed and gave the apple permissiopermissio n to start evacuating these civilians. that's operation hannibal was born which did ultimately save about 2 million civilians. so at this point the refugees are starting to amass on harbors all along the baltic sea, and it is part of poland. so in the final days of january,

january 27, 28th, 29th, these refugees are trying to get aboard the ship. and the wilhelm gustloff is one of them. nearly 10,000 german refugees and wounded soldiers attempt to escape across the baltic sea, about a 12 hour trip. as you know they met a tragic end. sometime before daybreak at january 30, 3 torpedoes from a soviet submarine struck the boat causing at a stop the damage and throwing passengers into the frozen waters of the baltic sea. it was about 12 nautical miles off the banks which lies off the coast of present-day poland. those aboard the train for include primary women and children, elderly and some income but also included members

of the german navy and also wounded soldiers aboard the gustloff. because history is defined by much of what becomes part of the official record is what is left unrecorded, if you know the story. in this case, german censorship, soviet suppression and western indifference inspires to bury the gustloff story. refusing to let the flaming third reich heard o of the fee, hitler prohibited officials from reporting the sinking. the soviet union suppressed the story partly because it doubted the integrity of the very submarines who fired on the gustloff. and also to talk about the gustloff might've passed light on their own atrocities. in the west, the events remained very do, first because of -- and was overshadowed by the cold war. so for nearly seven years the

story has been relatively hidden as the victims -- 70 years, little sympathy as to their role and the country's role in world war ii. these maps are of world war ii, perhaps more than any other war in recent history it still portrayed in stark lines of black and white. last winter i was on a family trip and we stopped at gettysburg, and being a reporter i was drawn to the newspaper coverage of the battle. and they came across one quote that really resonated with me because of what had been dropping -- working on, because of the gustloff. the quote was every name is a late stroke to some part, and falls a long black shadow upon some parts done. and the recent this quote resonated with me because the story of the gustloff have been

quiet for so long. and as i mentioned, it's victims felt, number one, unable to talk about it because of war guilt, and number two in the west, there was definitely in the immediate years little sympathy for those civilians of this part of the world. but to me every name the board the gustloff that perished was a lightning stroke to some hard, and the story of the gustloff with all its drama not only resurrects history but raises provocative questions about loss, survival, and that those impacted continue on year after year and decade after decade. so now i would like to turn your attention to some slides that will tell you the story of the gustloff and some of those survivors that i was fortunate enough to interview. >> so the wilhelm gustloff was

launched on may 5, 1937, just one day before the german passenger airship hindenburg crashed and burned at the naval air station in lakehurst new jersey. the gustloff was a 25,484-ton ship and do a 684 feet long. it was the pride and joy of germany's fleet. by way of comparison again, the titanic was actually much larger at 46,000 tons and 882 feet long. well, the hindenburg as you know, fire and was destroyed after it failed to dock, and there were 97 people aboard the hindenburg, and 36 died. when the soviet submarine torpedoed the gustloff, more than 9000 died and both ships were launched with great fanfare. both struck very different chord

in our collective memories. the airship also coming from the same government does not carry the weight of nazi germany, the same way the gustloff does. and for good reason. the gustloff was built expressly to symbolize the strength and power of the third reich. it was named for wilhelm gustloff who was the assassinated leader of switzerland trying to party, and wilhelm gustloff was also a close personal friend of adolf hitler. when hitler decided after gustloff was assassinated in 1936 that he could use this assassination for political purposes, for propaganda, and so he decided that one of the ships in his fleet would be named for gustloff, but it would also be the biggest. piggy would also be the best. until than most people in germany did not know the name of

wilhelm gustloff, if this was a way to rally the people. it's all difficult to make out at the bottom of this slide, but what looks a little sort of like fuzzy little tops are really the heads of hundreds of thousands of people who had massed to see this ship be launched from the shipyard and held berg -- in helm of berg. this is the menu for its maiden voyage. so initially they kgf program was a way to deliver japanese -- to the people. and acadia program started in the mid 1930s but it was a large scale social program. it was part of the german labor front, and it was after they abolish trade unions. so all the people who took cruises aboard the gustloff were

members of the german labor front, and mind you this is not a -- you're forced to join and you're forced to pay dues. but in return they kdf offered at sporting events, operas, harvest festivals, it celebrated hitler's birthday so is a very political organization. and the cruise liners were lost. that was part of because until the most germans had never traveled outside of their own country. it was just something really for the wealthy. it was not something a favorable the most. -- it was not something available to most. so along the coast of africa, scandinavia it would go up around norway in the mediterranean, and here it's just off the coast of portugal, and you can see the people walking in the street in

costume. and i've been told by one gentleman whose mother remembers him she grew up in norway, insured member of the gustloff coming up in those early years, and people were very upset because one, what it represented but also, too, they said the germans aboard would spend no money in these towns. they came off and looked around and then were back on their boats. but the idea behind this, there was no first or third class. the idea on board as online at the time was -- or one people, one empire, one leader. so the gustloff became a very effective propaganda tool. it was used also come a facility of a a rescue of english crew after a very creates bring storm. interestingly a paper in

australia, they were so impressed. in 1938, the gustloff sales and it is used as a -- [inaudible]. so they took a german citizens living in london at the time to come to the gustloff to be will to see the and even before during dinner, the menu essentially told people you will vote yes. it was very clear how they were to vote. well, by 1939 the gustloff is no longer a cruise ship. in september, after september 1 after the start of world war ii, the government quickly decided it's going to become a hospital ship for the sick and wounded. and so it becomes, it's dock, it's tethered and docked in the shipyard and will not leave the shipyard until 1945. at that point a wide band was

painted across its hull and there are red cross symbols painted on the deck and stack as well. but by 1940, it's decided that the gustloff will serve as an accommodation ship for u-boat training. and so what you're seeing in this slide our officers eating aboard the gustloff, during its time as the accommodation ship. it's a floating dormitory in some sense. the sailors are learning survival skills in the swimming pools, and it stays in that capacity until 1945, until the start of operation hannibal. so this photo is a photo of a street in east prussia which, of course, is today stalingrad russia. the furniture store, one of the

women that i was able to meet and interview for the book and she had this photo of her family's furniture showroom and factory. well, just three weeks after hollywood showed the "wizard of oz," world war ii begins on september 1, 1939. on the 10th, chairman ground forces are marching in from the west and the russians are coming in from the east. and east prussia, most of them come from that area, remain somewhat isolated. and it wasn't until a little bit later in the early '40s that nazi policies truly going to affect. and at that point the nazis requisitioned they take whatever they want. the factory is no exception. help to explain to me, they

turned into a uniform factory and her family was no longer able to come in and out at will. they had asked for permission so their home and factory. they forbade anyone to leave. they toyed with the idea of leaving but they knew their neighbor across the street had been executed for trying to leave so they would not be allowed to leave. and how do we tell the story housing is that they were russian pows being forced to work in the factory, and her father was able to get all of it of a garden in the backyard, not visible. and some chickens and rabbits, and he would make two soups every day. you're supposed to make just a very watery version for those pows, and, of course, a better, more nourishing soup for any of the officers, nazi officers. they were stationed there but he would try to sneak in a little bit of meat into the soup, a little bit of vegetables into that soup. esso helga just remembers just

about once a week, every 10 days or so her father was being brought down to the police station for this display of resistance. so her parents were obviously very worried about what was going to happen. here's a picture of helga. she's on the left in the polkadot swimsuit, and her older sister, india, on the right. they are pictured on one of their summer vacations on the baltic sea. it was something note forward to it every year as did thousands of these prussians. for them the baltic sea was so, most people place to go. what's amazing at these photographs is that helga still has them. she told the story of how when it was finally allowed for she and inga to leave, inga was the older sister and held had asked her father to be in charge of

money in the identification papers, and her father said, that will be inga's job, a little older, a little more responsible than you. esso helga thought, she wanted somsomething from home so she tk some photographs in her back pocket from her father's cautious but it had a pocket with a button to secure. and amazingly these photographs survived the sinking and survived the years afterwards. she was nice enough to provide me copies of these. and this here as a model of the gustloff. the gustloff could comfortably transport just about 1500 persons altogether, so that would be passengers and a full complement, full crew. these are in the days when it cruises along the mediterranean

and scandinavia. and as you can see the lifeboats, there were 22 lifeboats on the gustloff. each lifeboat was designed to hold 70 people. so as i mentioned before, there were upwards of 10,000 people on the day that it sank. they were crammed into every space a manageable. into the closets, underneath the stairwells. there are a tax on the gustloff, and most of the refugees below the promenade deck, which was glass enclosed were trapped there after the torpedoes struck. i did not, well, yeah, there were clearly not enough lifeboats and it is clear they were not enough lifevest and it was certainly not enough lifevest that were large enough for the numbers of children aboard. but the fact is the gustloff sank and just left -- in less than 90 minutes. even if there were more

lifeboats, it was not like the titanic that took a long time to sink. it was a very difficult for people that were able to even make their way to a lifeboat. those who did make their way to a lifeboat, that was also no guarantee of survival because it in one of the coldest winters on record. so many of these lifeboat just snapped and plummeted right into the sea. they capsized. someone found only half a hull, then those who tried to swim and get into a lifeboat, new, some of them were beaten back by people already in the lifeboats that were crowded. so the scene as you can imagine was chaotic to say the least. is helga today. helga was in las vegas -- lives in las vegas and. helga was one of the survivors i was able to get into lifeboat.

although she actually, it was close is either going to get tossed or maybe she would go down in the water and she was able to get in a lifeboat. there were some boats in the area that night that heard the distress call. they were able to get a distress call out that night, and the admiral, they picked up most of the survivals -- survivors but there was no organized operation. those who survived like helga were taken to an island in the baltic sea. the island was itself another strength through joy project. it was very that hitler and robert latta, the head of the labor can come in vision is very massive hotel, and would have no luxury accommodation versus sort

of just what we see as economy today. there were cost overruns and was never completed, however, the german red cross was set up there to help the survivors initially. they were essentially processed and sent on their way. helga's story takes another turn in the remarkable in that she finally gets on the train to start heading towards the west. the idea was that these refugees wanted to end up in allied hands. they were hoping to make to the british or the american lines. she was on a train during the dresden firebombing, but she does eventually make it to california where she finally arrived in about 1948. and here is an actual official boarding pass for the gustloff. most people aboard the gustloff of course didn't have any official documentation. those were handed out in a very first days of the boarding when it was still somewhat orderly,

and that would've been around again the 27th and 28th of january, 1945. after that the situation just comes out of control and people are just pushing their way onto the ship. so because of that most people at them and, of course, many of them are destroyed in the sinking itself. this one was not, and it's dated and download, but you still have that. and so now we're going to go to latvia. this family had a bakery in latvia. you can see the press goal hanging from the corner. irene and her sister are two other survivors that is able to get to know. they grew up in latvia, and in 1939 because of the nonaggression treaty, it was

decided they were discord. anyone with any german ancestry at that point was deported from the baltic states and they were known as the baltic germans and their sent to east prussia primarily to colonize this region that has now been rid of jewish people of polish people, of other slavic people. but the girls, you know, identified very much with the russian heritage, their mother was russian, and they spoke no english. and so it was very confusing for them. in the beginning when he arrived in east prussia and they are told that they have to learn german, they have to join the hitler youth, and all of this is very confusing to the two of them. and they are just two of the hundreds of thousands of people placed in these early years of world war ii.

so this is irene and ellen today. they live in tecumseh, ontario. they're holding a coke book with them. and the reason for this is that this is one of their treasured recipes that came with them later after the war when the able to reunite with their father. a cookbook that he took with him. because after the war ended and food was scarce, and they were fortunate enough to make it to the american lines, and until these first care packages start arriving they can remember just being so hungry. and so at night they would sort of flipped through this book and look at its recipes and really just tried to keep their hunger pains at bay. and their story is also very sad. their cousin was with them on that night, and their mother was in charge of the three girls. and their cousin did not survive

that thinking. and the reason there and wasn't with him, she was very ill, and so afterwards they remember their mother having to go knock on their aunts door to tell them that her daughter did not survive. and their uncle, their uncle and cousin spent three years in a siberian forced labor camp after the war, as did many of the men who had been conscripted into the german army after the war. so took along time for many of these families to be reunited. this photo shows the baby in this photo is inga, and with her mother and her grandmother, rosalie. inga has the distinction of being perhaps one of the youngest survivors on the gustloff that night. so naturally she doesn't recall it. she was just about two years old the night of the sinking, but

she does remember that when her mother was alive, the two often spoke about that day. and the time that followed. and milled wrote a very long detailed letter to inga as well that explained why they ended up on the gustloff and what happened, during the sinking the and inga who now lives in australia tells me that one of her greatest hurts was that people laugh at the notion that she had survived a world's worst maritime disaster. and they dismiss the idea that a young mother and her baby girl just were aboard the wilhelm gustloff at all. in this picture, of course roy, the baby with his grandparents who also lived in east prussia. in meeting him he had a very warm feeling for his early childhood years. you remember his mother putting

them on the train with a sign around his neck to go meet his grandparents. he remembered very little about those early years of the war but he did reversed soldier started to march in the streets. but then you remember when people started talking about the russians are coming and the red army is coming, and his mother just getting more and more frantic. but yet they were not allowed to leave. and by this time, the late '40s, his father is of course off fighting. one of the last things he does, they finally get permission, a hitler youth boy comes knocking on the door and says, you are allowed to go do. so there's not much warning and they grab what little they could, and he took his uncles jackknife within. he just kind of swipe -- his uncle was off fighting, and this act of his childhood impulse of ms. will end up saving his life, his mother's life, and safety of

the people or a lifeboat with them. of course, i go into the details in the book, but suffice it to say that the knife comes in very handy on the boat for them. this is the captain of the s-13. the start of the war, there's not that much soviet submarine activity in the baltic sea. the german u. boats are pretty much having their way, just as they were in the very early part of the battle of the atlantic. the soviet submarines go through several changes. in the late '20s that started a new class of submarines that were modeled after british boats and they had some technical assistance from germany. by the 1930s they introduced another class of larger and

faster submarines that are now armed with torpedo tubes. most of the submarine officers are drafted from the ranks of the merchant marine. and these officers, they could prove what they had what it took and they could successfully -- they would get their own command. but even still finding officers with adequate experience during world war ii was a challenge for soviet leaders. that also goes back again, jump back to moment to the 1930s with the communist party purchase. so many of those leaders have been forced out and executed from the soviet navy. so it wasn't until the latter part of the war at the russians seemed to be able to step up their operations a little bit in the baltic sea. alexander very much wanted to be

the ideal russian naval officer, and he's responsible for firing on the gustloff. only he was not the ideal officer. he had a drinking problem. he was a womanizer, thank you very much was a subordinate. is cruz love them. he earned their never ending respect. but shortly before the gustloff, he'd been caught fraternizing with a swedish woman and what will diplomatically call a restaurant of repute. so he is threatened with court martial but again, it's very difficult to find someone with experience so they just leaving the. but he eventually gets his orders to fire on anything german, which he broadly interprets. and the gustloff becomes a target of opportunity for him.

the soviets at this point in late 1945 as they're closing in, they are in albania, east prussia. they do know that the civilians are trying to get out. they're very aware of the civilians aboard ships like the gustloff. but for alexander, this was a target he could not resist it and again, because of the, these animosities are an understatement between germany and the soviet union at that time. this is for him what he considered a legitimate target. this is another captain, one of four captains aboard the gustloff. y. four captains? well, there are military aboard and so he is in charge of them. then there are all the civilians, and so the civilian captain is peterson. the two of them do not agree on anything.

except perhaps their destination. john wanted to travel as fast as possible. he was pushing you to 50 knots per hour. peterson wanted to hold back. he was concerned that the gustloff which had been in dry dock for almost five years at this point wouldn't really be able to withstand going so fast. they disagreed on what route to take. they disagree, should a zigzag osha they follow the coastal route, to avoid submarines. because there actually have not been many reports of submarines in the area operating there, but they did note that the baltic was now filled with mines. they argued whether or not have navigation lights on. they ended up having navigation lights on because they were concerned there was a german minesweeper operating. said they were worried about collisions that night as well. all of this enabled the captain

to do what was decidedly risky maneuver, he kind of site of the in between the ship and the coastline and strikes. after the war -- star, not after the war but after the incident, not long after the incident, he is calling for a board of inquiry and he testifies about what happened. and so all of this came to light. and he plays a lot of blame on the crew, just that were hired, a lot of the lower officers and people. he said we didn't have any german is really most of them were yugoslav and he just goes around pointing fingers. but in the end really nothing would have likely saved them from him. it's difficult to know whether choosing lights on foreign flights off would have helped

them. two divers have visited the wreck. mike is one diver who did get a permit from the polish government, and i got to know mike through writing this book. he shared the following slides with me. it rest in about 150 feet of water. what's very striking, you can see, the seats from the deck and the stern and bow our very much impact. the midsection of the boat has very much collapsed in on itself. and it seemed to him scab which. they do know, people do know that the soviets in the years after the war repeatedly dove this wreck. what it was taking no one really knows. there's a lot of history, a lot of rumor what they were looking

for. there's speculation by some that believe that the amber room was aboard the gustloff but if those who don't know, the amber room was from the palace in st. petersburg and today there is a reproduction of the amber room of there. there are some who said that there was a band rocketry being carried aboard the gustloff, and there's are the same there was even more advanced things up for the gustloff. none of that has been substantiated, that any of that was aboard. but because of the lack of remains where you would expect to see human remains, there are none. much of the machinery, all of the workings has been stripped and taken away. i think that will just really remain a mystery. this here is a stairwell, and and i just sort of imagine, you can just imagine that night after the torpedoes strike of

any of those passengers who were below deck trying to make their way up these very narrow, crowded stairwells, make their way to lifeboats, you know, stepping over people who just lacked the energy at some point to go, who gave up, who had died in the initial attack. and so it's really a remarkable fact that any did survive this. because the ship went down in less than 90 minutes. and the last slide that i will leave you with here shows side-by-side the wilhelm gustloff, the letters you can see in the upper left corner, and there is divers just in front of the letters now, sort of scraping away a little bit of the growth on those letters but they are still very much intact today. so with that i will conclude my

presentation. i would love to take some questions. [applause] >> do you know how many survivors there were? >> there are, again, because the numbers are so difficult to actually pin down, but they were a little more than 1000 survivors. >> [inaudible] >> no. there was no warning. the reason that they chose, they didn't accept that there were submarines in the area. the civilians had no idea. the civilians were doing anything to rush out. someone that i talked with sort of tried to make the comparison of at the end of the vietnam war with people just trying to get

out of saigon, the fall of saigon. that's how desperate people were to flee east prussia at that point. people looked at the gustloff as come it was safety for them. they felt relieved to be a board it. >> i noticed that the last pictures referenced hamburger as being a location to this. now, were there any of the people on shore that were there during this experience? do they contribute to your book at all? >> there were people at the point that people were -- it wasn't, the shipboard that was billed was out of hamburg, but to answer your question, in the german federal archives i was able to get documents and transcript of people who have been on shore. for instance, as a mentioned it

was the women's naval auxiliary and they all died. they were in the swimming pool which had been emptied. and many of the remains, some of, some of the bodies were recovered, and so some of the people on shore afterwardafterward s have the duty to try to identify. but most of the identification was would for any other military personnel aboard. so the civilians who were on board, many of them are lost to history. i've heard people say i think, i grew up there, i think my great uncle was aboard but i don't know. and it's very difficult to be able to find that out. yes, ma'am. >> [inaudible]? >> know, there was no charge to go on board. you had, they went initially to have some documentation and tickets to go board, but they were really giving them only to initiative within the elderly or mothers with children. and because of that, couples who

were eventually showing up or some single with their child, they were passing babies back and forth to try to use to get aboard. yes, sir. >> the submarines, were there naval surface ships that were fighting on the baltic? >> yes. so that was two of the rescues, for example, they were out that night and they had heard the distress call and they were some of the first to arrive on scene to help. yes, sir. spent what happened to help his sister and her parents? >> help his sister did not survive the sinking. so the two of them went over together. they made the decision to grab on a rope and sort of shimmy down. inga did not survive. her father did not survive the

war, and she later does find her mother before, they eventually are able to get visas to the west. yes, sir. spent you said it had red cross markings on the ship prior before they made it to a training ship. what markings were honored that my? >> it was painted with the colors, they never repainted it afterwards. any of the ships that were requisition for operation hannibal were pretty much as he is. so they might have been common in the, as i mentioned, they were using some of these military ships to transport surveillance. didn't have much in the way of large ships that could take a lot of people at once. >> in 1945, the germans were not so welcome in the united states. how did they get there? >> that's a good question. many of them were in cans and is

you are with them who might've been in west germany. and they applied for visas, and says many of you may know, there were quotas. and so they were able, some are able to get to the states, some end up in canada, some end up in the uk. inga's family, the one who was the baby, they end up in australia. that came through first for them. so it was tough though in the beginning. ellen remembered much later, maybe 20 years after the war, she had never talked about her story. most of them just didn't want to talk about this story because they knew the political climate and they didn't have a lot of sympathy, and coworkers said, you had been and can develop on, it said something to the effect of it was a tough during the war, we had to use margarine.

so ellen was just about the sort of tell them her story, and with that she decided this was not something to speak up with people. yes, sir. >> how many ships or buses were used in operation hannibal from beginning to in? >> so, it started in just that last weeks of january, and it went on through almost the end of the war. the land routes, by the time that people are going aboard the gustloff, were almost close. it was almost impossible. and in terms of the ships, there were hundreds that were to be involved. but they could be anywhere from a small sort of pleasure boat but not too many of those, so the idea was they're just going to go back and forth across the baltic sea. they would still be in germany. they would still be in german territory but the idea was to get them as close to the american and british lines as possible. yes, sir.

spent can you talk about the investigation after the sinking of the ship, whether it was classified as a war crime and any liability of the russian government? >> yes, sure. it never was classified as a war crime. there was the inquiry outward, the board of inquiry, but that was internal. that was german navy itself. initially what happened though, mehran esco was hoping to get hero of the soviet union, the highest military honor. but if osha as i mentioned, his track record didn't serve him well. there had been another incident where get fired on a boat and he exaggerated his report the soviet this history of the action was responsible for torpedoing another ship a few weeks after this. so he does not get the recognition that he craved. the soviet government doesn't, you know, moves on and they

don't want to talk about it again because that would -- the same with some of the soviet liberators of concentration camps, their stories also were not told, which was a positive story for them but because of what was going on with all these forced labor camps. it's not until gorbachev comes in the power, and he is long dead that he does get hero of the soviet union. and today where many of these victims and survivors come from, there's a huge statue of him today. so he is slowly becoming, considered a hero in the soviet union for this. so it's one of these where if you believe that this was a legitimate target because of military personnel on board, to

me the fact is the numbers of civilians far outweigh that, but these are people very much caught up between two madmen, hitler and stalin. yes, sir. >> hitler had a yacht. i understand -- [inaudible] did you ever run into that? >> i did not. actually hitler never visited the transport either. -- never visited the transport either. [inaudible] >> the baltic was icing over at that time. many of the tracks that people took to get to the harbor themselves, they were shallow lagoons in each pressure that people could go ice skating on occasionally. they were iced over, and as they

were going, russian planes were scraping them. said they were targeting the civilians all along the way. it was like minus four celsius. the water was frigid again is like an understatement to me. many of them also died of exposure until they were rescued. thank you very much for listening. thank you. [applause] >> we would like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/the booktv. >> and now from raleigh, booktv sat down with ansley wagner to explore artificial limbs during and after the war. sort of to answer my own question, i started my first job

in the archives of history was as an archivist but we were to find a project to work on and it had been from the time i started a series of about five boxes at the bottom of the shelf is an artificial lens collection. pulled out those boxes. they were basically a range loosely alphabetical by turning. i thought this is great. here are records that are arranged by people's names. they are confederate veterans and the record start in about 1866. the federal government had already been doing a similar program so was that we came up with this on our own, that during the war in fact the federal government was providing amputees with artificial limbs. we were the first of the former confederate states to pass legislation to get a program for artificial limbs for confederate veterans. what happened after that is the stipulation of the resolution

was the shares in each county were to go out and count named veterans in the county to so there were more but they also decided at the time the arms were not that useful to other going to really focus on the legs because the importance, the government's drive was to get people back to work and they felt that getting people legs to walk on was more important than an arm that wasn't all that useful. so the focus initially was just legs. the state chose -- not the best like after, a fine like that another citizen in the state to purchase a leg from the jewish company wrote to the governor and said, well, there's this guy from new bern to work for the company and he wants to come home. he would they really willing to

come and set up an office in raleigh and manufacture things here. by putting the book out, a few of those limbs have service. duncan from red springs wrote in a letter, if you can come to the archives to do your research, you can write our correspondents archivist and say i would like, i would like for my grandfather, robert alexander and the, and i got his leg if anybody cares. so mr. hand did not have access to e-mail. i wrote him a letter and told him that i cared, and you know, i didn't really know if he would be able to take pictures and e-mail it to me or anything like that. but a few weeks passed and i got an e-mail one day that just said, that title was duncan hannah, no message at all him and is just a series of photographs taken in the feed store. so it was his leg and all these

feedback and you can see somebody's hand holding it. and it was just a variety of angles and it was finally one picture that showed the bottom of the foot. and i could see the screw holes and i knew how the patent work and the new with the cables went and i knew it was one of the patent likes to the stump that people had were so ragged. and painful that put in a good wooden leg on it to get around was often not desirable for them. they were hot. they hurt the stumps. they just came up with something, or walk around with a couple of coaches. the state pay for them. they had two options going into. they could've purchased the patent and then purchased the kids, the wood blocks and everything will that last. the most cost effective thing

was what they did and that was just having somebody from the factory compound and that they send $5. if you thought that work for you or if you say you lost your leg from too far down in your leg, what we had commercial available wouldn't work for you. you could just take the money. the lakes today versus the legs then, some of them are really high-tech. obviously, i think everybody has instantly walking down the street with a metal $6 million looking contract that is a high-tech. if you didn't know differently you wouldn't know that they were and amputee. they're walking comfortably with a leg that might seem a little stiff but offers some very natural gait and comfort. it's lightweight. not everybody has access to a leg like that. when an application is done today, and they're able to do a few flaps of skin that are sewn

together, really during the civil war the surgeons did have a lot of time for reconstructive surgery. the skin tucked under and sewed and bone still fairly close to the surface. it made it very hard for them to utilize artificial limbs. the phantom pain which is obviously the name of the book has to do with the pain of a missing leg or missing arm. it's universal, almost all a b-52's since being in a that is been amputated. it just, that people ask, the anti-cheat support group described it, you wake up in the middle of the night and your leg hurts and it's not there that it's excruciating. it makes, it makes the recovery really difficult. and again, the state sort of, it was trying to fix these people.

and at the time people thought that if you could get these injured veterans back to work that it would relieve this pain. so the book of genesis was at this list of every person who contacted the state related having lost a limb or the use of a limb during the war. it's the names of the veterans, company and regiment, what county they were from and then edward you can find a document related to their correspondence with the state. the front of the book is a brief history of amputation, sort of the state of medicine at the time, what type of surgery they might have encountered. a history of the states programs, a little bit of an overview of what the other former confederate states were doing. people would understand what the ancestor, just people would understand what their ancestors experienced. >> for more information on booktv's recent visit to raleigh, north carolina, and the many other cities visited by our local content vehicles, go to

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has a very contemporary very, i feel, on the debate about how we