A thorough search of three daily Swedish newspapers from November 1944 until March 1945 failed to disclose any reference to the Gustloff tragedy; not a single word! Two conclusions can be drawn from this discovery. I will for the moment mention only the first such conclusion, keeping the second one for the end of this chapter. It will however, by that time, have become obvious! The first conclusion one arrives at is that the Gustloff disaster was not known at all to Swedish News Media, at least until April 1945. During the same period, the papers reported other disasters which took place in far away places such as the USAF attack on a Japanese convoy at the Bay of Leyte and that at least 14000 japanes soldiers had been killed.

The papers also published a front page report on the Hansa disaster complete with a photo of the Hansa painted in "war suit" and headlined "Act of Piracy...hundred deads ..!". But not a word on the Gustloff!

After much research, a short article was in fact found! Indeed, on page 6 of Sunday the 18th February 1945 edition appeared a short, one column article placed in the centre of the page. Once a week, Stockholm's Tidningen published a page in Estonian language listing a summary of the latest news. The article in question was a shortened version of that which is featured at the St. Petersburg Naval Museum. Nothing further on the subject was ever found. A further search of the newspapers as far as February 26th failed to produce any mention of the Gustloff disaster. Following is a translation (Estonian/English) of the complete article:

Wilhelm Gustlow to the bottom. 7000 Germans drowned. The German 25.000 tons ship Wilhelm Gustlow was torpedoed last Thusday. Out of 8000 only 988 people wERE saved. 3700 trained U-Boat men and officers plus 4000 refugees perished. Ten minutes after the torpedo hit - the ship turned over and sank in 5 minutes. The ship was owned by KdF and had visited Stockholm in June 1939 with the German Athletic Troop who were then participating in the "Lingiaden" (Gymnastics) in Stockholm.

Some questions come to mind... 1. Who hides behind the source? 2. Why give out the day of sinking nearly three weeks after it had actually taken place? 3. Why was the name spelled that way? I could not have foreseen the possibility that they had written the date and created a news of a more or less authentic historic matter.

It is worth mentioning again that none of the other big newspapers printed in Stockholm took any notice of Stockholm's Tidningens short article during that period.

Dobson had made a mention in his book that neither the newspaper name nor the date of publication had appeared with the article. There is a valid explanation as to why he would have missed those facts. Indeed, the article had appeared in the center of the page and was printed in a very small typeset. If you took a picture with a camera of the article, the name Stockholm's Tidningen, the date etc, would have been outside of the picture! This is the first time since Dobson wrote the book that the date of the article is known.

Stockholm's Tidningen either used their own correspondence (from readers) or their own news agency source, because every article was always identified as to their sources ((Reuter, Asociated Press etc etc) Also worth mentioning is the fact that this Wilhelm Gustlow article in question was the only article quoting such a source as no other article sported a "Private to Tidningen" byline in nearly 30 issues checked.

After having read a great number of various Swedish Newspapers covering the period Jan - Feb 1945 one can see they all mainly used same source. The content which differs between different newspapers is the `local news' --- family news, special `local' articles, etc. Any news covering international incidents is found in all papers without exception.

For instance: A small vessel from Denmark disappeared with 7 men aboard in the Southern Baltic Sea during the first week of February 1945. This was mentioned with a small article in all papers researched. In the same week of that year, a Russian U-boat made daily torpedo attacks on the passenger ship s/s Gute and her heavy escort. This news was on the first page of all newspapers with some of them offering an additional 3-page coverage of the incident. Although the Swedish Naval Force had given the largest escort granted a passenger ship, the U-boat still attacked.

Also of great significance, none of the papers had a word on the evacuation from East Prussia simply because that was classified information from the German side. And in addition, no one outside of Germany had any knowledge of the massive evacuation (Operation Hannibal) then taking place in the Danzig sector when such an operation was indeed great news material. Therefore, no one outside of Germany were even aware of the existence of the Gustloff, the Goya, the General Steuben and so many other ships which met a watery grave. More research will be done to discover if anything was ever printed on the Goya or on the Cap Arcona but I still believe all of them belonged to the same kind of classified information then in force in Germany.

The Russians knew about the Gustloff, the Stueben and the Goya but did not trust information received from U-boats.

The R.A.F knew about the Cap Arcona but hesitated to tell the world they had shot prisoners from the Kz Camps.

As for the USA and France, they had no part in any of these disasters and knew nothing about them.

There were no other thirdparty witnesses to these disasters as I know of.

So in those trying days, where did the Reuter Press News obtain the information they were selling to Newspapers?

The many Swedish Press editions published during the stated perion contained several other stories coming from Völklicher Beobachter and Hamburg Allgemeine in Jan/Febr 1945 which proves that newspapers where printed in Germany even near the end of war. But they did not print anything about the Gustloff as this information was classified Secret at that time.

The above information helps answer the one question I posed at the very beginning when I began this feature as to why the sinking of the Wilhelm Gutloff was the "best kept secret" of WW II.

What I still do not understand is why the Soviets printed this `modified' article at all! And gave it such prominence within the rather limited display devoted to the S 13 and Captain Marinesko at the Naval Museum in St. Petersburg? And, lastly, who was the real source of this article?