In January 1945, a major refugee crisis developed throughout eastern Germany with probably probably around five million people trying to get to safety by the end of the month. Terrified by Goebbels rhetoric about Red Army crimes, either real or imaged, the civilian population wanted to get out. The Nazi authorities did have some evacuation plans in place in the event of limited Soviet incursions, but those that existed had been rendered useless by the speed of the Soviet advance. In addition, Gauleiters like Erich Koch in East Prussia showed their total disregard for the population calling for perseverance and withheld the evacuation orders for the general public whilst ensuring that their own escape routes were clear. But now there was no holding back. Women, children and old men left everything behind and made their way west whilst males aged from 16 to 60 were forced into the Volkssturm, the Nazi version of the Home Guard.
"The German people are now going through the test of their worth, and they must pass it if they don't want to lose their national existence at all" - this is how Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels described Hitler's position on the refugee catastrophe in his diary on 25 January 1945 from the comfort and warmth of his luxury villa.
After the war, the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz boasted that two million people owed their lives to him personally: "Rescuing people from the East German provinces was a priority in the spring of 1945,’ he repeated in many interviews he gave. Many believed him including the organisation of people who had once lived in East Prussia which treated him as a hero. However it is not true, indeed it is perhaps the reverse of the truth. The proof was then available if anyone had looked for it, in the war diary of the Naval War Staff.
On 22 January 1945, the Führer Adolf Hitler agreed to Doenitz's suggestion that the Navy's scarce coal reserves be allocated for military tasks alone, not for the "removal of refugees."
On 23 January 1945, Dönitz radioed a message to Gdynia in occupied Poland to begin evacuations to ports outside of the Soviet area of operations. I think his later claims of trying to help the population of East Prussia to escape is based on this radio message, however evacuations were to be of wounded military personnel and equipment.
The aim was to do everything possible to ensure that the surrounded troops could continue fighting.
Above all, however, the Grand Admiral wanted to secure control of the eastern Baltic Sea as a training area for the new submarine types. Dönitz, no less certain of final victory than his Führer, believed that with this miracle weapon he could still force a turn in the naval war against the West. Therefore tens of thousands of people died because of his fanciful belief that a training area for a new submarine could change the course of the conflict.
Thus, in the spring of 1945, all Baltic shipping was subordinated to military objectives: continuing the fight in the surrounded pockets of Courland, East Prussia and Danzig . In addition, up to the last few weeks, the Navy had been transporting weapons and vehicles that were damaged with no hope of repair in the west, taking up space that could have been given to refugees.
Even civilian ships were increasingly denied to the waiting people. The Hamburg Gauleiter and Reich Commissioner for Maritime Shipping, Karl Kaufmann, stated succinctly that "the requirements of Army Group North for supplies and returning equipment largely claimed my Baltic Sea tonnage".
Nontheless as early as January 1945, the Baltic Sea Naval Command had used large Hapag-Lloyd steamers such as the Hamburg, the Deutschland and the Pretoria to evacuate refugees. Terrible tragedies ocurred. On 30 January 1945, a Soviet submarine torpedoed the Wilhelm Gustloff, a steamer operated by the Nazi travel organization Kraft durch Freude; within minutes the ship sank in the icy sea. The number of victims is not known, but in all probability it was the worst maritime disaster in history with between 5,000 and 9,000 people being killed. On 16 April 1945, the Goya met the same fate, once more the numbers are not known but around 7,000 died. Thousands also drowned in the sinking of the Karlsruhe , the Steuben, the Moltkefels , and other ships. In this way up to 20,000 people died in the Baltic Sea in the spring of 1945. The numbers of the dead are not known as in the chaos no-one was counting the number of people on the ship.

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