“Of course, all that would have been bad enough, but after the unencrypted message that Hennig forced Irmela to send on an open radio channel, there were already three Russian submarines heading for the area when the Gustloff set sail. At the submarine base in the Finnish port of Turku, they’d heard the same open-microphone message regarding the Gustloff and the Amber Room as the Russian Baltic naval headquarters in Kronstadt, and confusion now reigned about exactly what to do next. Eventually, the captain of one Russian submarine, the S-13, sighted the Gustloff lit up like a Christmas tree, radioed HQ for further instructions, and was ordered to shadow the ship but hold fire. Because it was night, the S-13 felt safe enough to surface, and then awaited clarification regarding the Gustloff and its priceless cargo from Kronstadt HQ, which had itself been desperately seeking a final decision from the Kremlin. Finally, the Kremlin responded: At all costs the Gustloff was not to be sunk.

“Unfortunately, the captain of the S-13 was a drunk named Alexander Marinesko, who was already facing a court-martial for a previous bender. He was probably drunk when he decoded the message from Kronstadt, and in the decryption of his orders it seems that he must have made a fatal flaw, probably omitting the word ‘not’ from his plaintext message. Minutes later, at eight forty-five p.m. on January thirtieth, nineteen forty-five, he ordered four torpedoes loaded into the S-13’s forward-firing tubes. At nine fifteen he gave the order to fire, and three of the torpedoes hit their target.

“I can hardly imagine what it must have been like. The snow, the cold, the freezing water, the high seas, the dark. All of the naval auxiliary women, including Irmela Schaper, were quartered in the empty swimming pool on the ship’s lowest deck, and they were probably killed instantly by the second torpedo. Others were not so lucky. Thousands of passengers were drowned inside the ship as water flooded in through the damaged hull. Thousands more jumped into the water and were drowned or quickly succumbed to hypothermia and died. The ship sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea less than an hour after the torpedoes hit, with the loss of over nine thousand lives, making the Gustloff the largest single loss of life in maritime history. Eight thousand of them were women and children. By contrast, just fifteen hundred people were lost on the Titanic.”

“Good God,” said Maugham. “I had no idea. I mean, I’ve never even heard of the Wilhelm Gustloff.”