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|title=Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff

|author=Cathryn J Prince

|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan

|date=April 2013

|summary=A definitive, gripping yet flawed look at one of the lesser known but major stories to come from WWII.

}}

There is no pun intended when I describe the ship ''Wilhelm Gustloff'' as stern. It just seems from looking at her hard and rigid lines that if you were to design a ship that the Nazi party would use as an ideological tool, to take their favoured workers on pleasure cruises around the Mediterranean, you would naturally end up with something that looked like her. However fate had it that within years she became a hospital ship, and it wasn't much longer after that that she was stationed in the northern Polish port now known as Gdynia, ready to help in a major evacuation of thousands of desperate, starving and fevered people fleeing the advancing Soviet army. All they wanted to do was to avoid the perilous snowy overland route to get a few miles along the coast, but they weren't to know that within hours of sailing the ''Wilhelm Gustloff'' would be torpedoed, and many thousands would perish in the near-frozen Baltic waters.