Screams of the Drowning: From the Eastern Front to the Sinking of the Gustloff

Klaus Willmann

apr, 2021 · Greenhill Books

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The WWII memoir of a young German conscript who survived the Eastern Front and the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff.

Born in Munich in 1926, Hans Fackler was conscripted into the Wehrmacht at the age of seventeen. He became an infantryman on the brutal frontlines of the war in Russia. But after suffering a grievous injury from a grenade explosion, he could no longer fight.

Hans was given morphine onboard the controversial Wilhelm Gustloff, an armed military ship which operated under the guise of transporting civilians. When the ship was sunk by Russian torpedoes, drowning more than 9,000 passengers, Hans was among the lucky few rescued by a German freighter.

Hans recuperated in a military hospital near Erfurt in the Harz, which subsequently fell into the Russian zone. He escaped and undertook the arduous task of walking almost 200 miles back home to Bavaria. Screams of the Drowning is Hans’s extraordinary first-person account of his wartime experiences, as told to Klaus Willmann.

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Klaus Willmann is a forester and customs officer by profession. He discovered writing as a new vocation and has since published a number of books, including The 188 U-Boat and Death March Through Russia. Willmann lives in Grafing, near Munich.Roger Moorhouse is a historian of the Third Reich. He is the author of the acclaimed Berlin at War and Hitler's Third Reich in 100 Objects and has been published in more than twenty languages. He has contributed to He Was My Chief, I Was Hitler's Chauffeur and With Hitler to the End (all Frontline Books). He is also a tour guide, a book reviewer and a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Warsaw. You can follow him on Twitter at @Roger_Moorhouse.Eva Burke grew up in Vienna and then Zug, Switzerland. She graduated from Brandeis University, Massachusetts with a BA and MA in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Studies. She translated and helped research The True Story of the Christmas Truce (Greenhill Books) and I Somehow Survived (Greenhill Books). She lives in London with her husband, four children and three grandchildren.