THE SINKING OF THE WILHELM GUSTLOFF

1/30/1945 - Desperate to return to Germany as the Soviet Union's Red Army sweeps westward into Poland, in the final year of WWII, thousands of German civilian refugees, soldiers and Nazi officials crowd aboard the Nazi transport ship Wilhelm Gustloff at the port of Gotenhafen (now the Polish city of Gdynia, the 12-largest city in the country), headed for the naval facilities at Kiel, Germany as part of Gross Admiral Karl Doenitz's evacuation plan known as "Operation Hannibal."  The transport's first night on the Baltic Sea will also be the ship's last.  Torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, the ship will go down roughly fifty minutes later, taking the lives of roughly 9,600 men, women, and children ... the worst loss of life during a single ship sinking in the history of the world (by comparison, the death of the passenger liner RMS Titanic in 1912 costs an estimated 1,500 individuals their lives, 1.029 people die when the paddle steamer General Slocum catches fire on New York City's East River in 1904, 1,198 travelers perish when the passenger ship RMS Lusitania is torpedoed off the coast of Kinsale, Ireland in 1915, and 1,177 United States sailors lose their lives when the battleship USS Arizona is blown up at anchor on the waters of Oahu, Hawaii's Pearl Harbor naval base in December of 1941).  

Tragedy In The Baltic Sea

Keel laid down at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany on August 1, 1936, and launched less than a year later on May 5, 1937, the doomed transport is originally to be named Adolf Hitler, after the Third Reich's dictator, but before going to sea, the ship is instead christened Wilhelm Gustloff to honor a leader of the Nazi Party's Swiss branch that is assassinated by a Jewish medical student from Croatia named David Frankfurter in 1936 (surrendering to authorities immediately after pumping five bullets into the Nazi official's head, neck, and chest, Frankfurter will spend all of WWII locked up in a Swiss jail cell ... sitting next to Gustloff's widow at memorial services for the murdered Nazi, Hitler himself will decide on the name change that takes place).  The craft created (at a cost of 25 million Reichmarks) measures 684 feet and one-inch long, is 77 feet and five-inches wide, has a height of 183 feet and nine-inches spread over eight decks, has a draught of 21 feet and four-inches, has a tonnage of 25,484 GRT, is powered by four 8-cylinder MAN diesel engines driving two 4-blade propellers (traveling at 15.5 knots, the vessel has a range of 12,000 nautical miles), and is built to accommodate a crew of 417 and 1,463 passengers (there are 248 two-bed and 241 four-bed passenger passenger, fifty bathrooms, a hundred showers, and 145 toilets, twelve watertight bulkheads, and twenty-two lifeboats each with a capacity of carrying 95 individuals).  The first ship built under the Third Reich's Strength Through Joy program, with the idea that a happy worker works harder, the Wilhelm Gustloff is originally made to provide German functionaries and workers with low-cost recreational and cultural activities that include concerts, cruises, and special holiday trips while serving as a public relations tool for Nazi party.  With over 50,000 people on-hand, including Gustloff's widow, Hedwig (she will christen the new ship with a bottle of champagne), German dictator Adolf Hitler, Dr. Robert Ley (head of the German Labour Front), Rudolf Blohm (head of the shipbuilders, Blohm & Voss), and other top Nazi officials, the ship is launched on May 5, 1937 (she will not be completed though until March of 1938).

Gustloff

Building The Wilhelm Gustloff

Off To Sea

Happy Passengers

Finally ready to start taking German citizens all about the ports of Europe, the Wilhelm Gustloff, after completing trials in the North Sea, is turned over to it's owners for her maiden voyage on March 16, 1938.  Passengers boarded, the ship's first occupants consist of Austrians that the Third Reich is hoping to influence into voting for Germany's annexation of Austria.  Her second voyage, a three-day cruise, rewards workers and their families that built the Wilhelm Gustloff.  The vessel's third voyage is to be another North Sea reward cruise that also includes the German liners Der Deutsche, Oceania, and Sierra Cordoba.  Separated when a spring storm hits the fleet (winds will reaches 62-mph), the Wilhelm Gustloff (commanded by Captain Carl Lubbe finds herself the nearest ship that can provide help to the SOS calls that come in when the 1,836 gross tonnage freighter Pegaway (commanded by Captain G. W. Ward) begins to flounder.  First try a failure when the oar-powered lifeboat sent to help the Pegaway also begins to sink, Ward will launch a second lifeboat which is motor operated (Lifeboat No. 6, the launch is crewed by ten men that are commanded by Second Officer Schurmann of the Wilhelm Gustloff) that helps rescue the twelve sailors of the first lifeboat, and then manages to successfully haul to shelter the dog-paddling 19-man crew of the drowned ship.  The Wilhelm Gustloff's next journey takes the liner to the shores of England (she is kept in international waters, three miles from the port of Tilbury) where the ship serves as polling place for Germans and Austrians in Great Britain that want to vote in the plebiscite that ends up unifying Germany and Austria into one country (1,172 Germans and 806 Austrians are ferried to vote and cast 1,968 votes for and 10 votes against the unification).  Returned to Hamburg, the Wilhelm Gustloff's next voyage is an Easter holiday voyage to Portugal's Madeira Islands (accompanied again by Der Deutsche, Oceania, and Sierra Cordoba), but with a new captain after 58-year-old Lubbe suffers a fatal heart attack while captaining his command from the ship's bridge (his replacement will be Captain Friedrich Peterson.

Hitler & Captain Lubbe Inspect The Crew - 3/29/1938

Pegaway Going Under

War clouds gathering, instead of giving cheap cruises to designated workers and government personnel, after General Francisco Franco's Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War, Wilhelm Gustloff's next assignment is to help carry back to Germany (along with seven other vessels) soldiers, sailors, airmen and service personnel of the Third Reich's victorious Condor Legion (from Vigo, Spain to Hamburg, Germany takes the Wilhelm Gustloff five days).  And then the vessel is back to taking assorted Germans on vacation cruises, and between 3/14/1938 and 8/26/1939 (WWII will begin on September 1st), the Wilhelm Gustloff will take over 80,000 passengers on sixty voyages of European waters.  Bottled up in the Baltic Sea when war arrives, no Germans available for cruising for the foreseeable future, the Wilhelm Gustloff is converted into a hospital ship and rechristened Lazarettschiff D.  As such, she will begin treating the wounded in September of 1939, with her first patients being 650 Polish soldiers wounded and captured defending their country.  The first Germans to be cared for by the Lazarettschiff D are ten crew members of the minesweeper M-85, sunk on October 1st when she hits one of the mines she is trying to remove from the waters near the port of Danzig, East Prussia.  Then, when the war turns hot as Germany invades Norway, the hospital ship will dock in Oslo, Norway to support Third Reich fighters in their campaign to conquer the Nordic country (she will return to the port of Kiel with 750 wounded Germans on board).  In all during her duty as a hospital ship, the former Wilhelm Gustloff will treat 3,151 souls, make 1,739 X-ray examinations, and transport 1,961 injured individuals to Germany.

Removing A Wounded German

Converted

The submarine war against the Allies ramping up, now stationed at the port of Gotenhafen (she will reside there for the next four years and two months), the Lazerettschiff, on November 20, 1940 begins another conversion and takes back her original name, with her hospital coloring of white with a large stripe of green circling the entire craft buried under this buckets of grey camouflage paint, this time becoming a barracks ship for 1,000 cadets being schooled to serve in Germany's submarine force (the trainees belong to the 2nd Submarine Training Division and are under the tutelage of Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Zahn (command of the ship itself is now the responsibility of Captain Bertram, but for the ship's final voyage, Captain Friedrich Peterson will take over again), a 33-year-old U-boat captain with experience piloting the submarines U-56 and U-69, known in the naval service as the man who nearly sunk Winston Churchill (for a 1939 incident in which he hits the battleship HMS Nelson, carrying Churchill, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes, and First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, with two torpedoes that fail to detonate).  For the most part, the Wilhelm Gustloff  has a boring WWII at Gotenhafen, sustaining only minor damage when B-24 bombers from the American 8th Air Force attack the harbor on 10/9/1943 (a near miss tears a four and a half foot gash in the ship's starboard side and bends the ship's right propeller shaft ... both wounds will be rapidly repaired).  The calm before the storm, on 1/30/1945, the German liner will be front and center among the tragedies ending WWII.

In Profile As A Barracks Ship

Zahn

What brings the Wilhelm Gustloff front-and-center back into the war is the Soviet offensive from the east that quickly cuts off escape routes for German citizens and Nazi officials in East Prussia and Poland, making a sea escape into a viable option.  Dubbed "Operation Hannibal," the head of the German Navy's massive evacuation from ports around the Gulf of Danzig (it will be the last coordinated operation of the German Navy during WWII), Gross Admiral Karl Doenitz cobbles together a "Dunkirk-style" plan using everything still afloat in the region, freighters, luxury liners, warships, and civilian costal vessels to move refugees from the immediate danger coming out of the east, to the relative safety of Third Reich ports in northern Germany and Denmark.  And so, once more the Wilhelm Gustloff is transformed, this time becoming an evacuation vessel.  Built to carry a maximum of 1,900 passengers and crew, as thousands of desperate Germans flood into the Gotenhafen harbor (over 100,000 will flood into the harbor area), exact counts and possession of tickets is waived to the extent that over 10,500 people will be allowed to board the liner ... a crew of 173 (there will be four naval captains aboard when the vessel leaves port, Peterson, Zahn, and two commanders from German's merchant marines who will serve as senior bridge officers, Carl Kohler and Heinrich Weller), 918 officers, NCOs, and sailors from the submarine school, 373 female naval auxiliary helpers (surrounded by tile mosaics, the woman are put in the drained swimming pool area of the ship's E-Deck), 162 wounded soldiers, and 8,956 other passengers that includes civilians, Gestapo personnel, members of Organization Todt (the civil and military engineering arm of the Third Reich, named after its founder, Fritz Todt), and Nazi officials and their families (on board will be between 4,000 and 5,000 children), occupying the Adolph Hitler Suite series of rooms reserved for the dictator for the first and last time are the mayor of Gotenhafen and his family.  Zahn supervises the loading of fuel and supplies (among them are several unmarked crates protected by armed guards that are placed in the hold of the ship, rumored to be the priceless panels of the "Amber Room" of the Russian Czar's Leningrad palace that are never seen again after reaching Gotenhafen), and oversees the installation of 11 anti-aircraft guns.  Everyone gets a life jacket coming aboard, but sadly, when the Wilhelm Gustloff leaves port, she is carrying only 12 of her already inadequate complement of 22 lifeboats.

Doenitz

Readying For Disaster

Pool Area

The Czar's Amber Room

Evacuation orders received, the Wilhelm Gustloff is to be accompanied on her voyage by the Hansa (originally the SS Albert Ballin, but renamed when Nazi officials discover that Ballin was a Jew, an refugee overloaded luxury liner of the Hamburg-American line that has a capacity of carrying 1,650 passengers) and two armed escorts (the torpedo boat TF-1, and the Sleipner-class destroyer, Lowe), but the Hansa and TF-1 both experience engine troubles and are unable to join the Wilhelm Gustloff (and the Lowe will soon discover that her guns are frozen to her deck).  There will be no air cover for the voyage.  With her officers arguing over how to get the ship to Kiel (Zahn wants to run slowly, close to shore, where Russian submarines cannot operate, but Peterson rejects the proposal, fearing the mined area and the length of time the Wilhelm Gustloff will take reaching the safety of Germany with thousands of freezing refugees aboard), Peterson decides to run full speed (instead of zig-zagging as is the usual policy in submarine waters) through mine-swept shipping lane No. 58 with her green and red navigation lights on (to prevent running into a convoy of German minesweepers also using the channel, making the liner stick out like a sore thumb as she moves westward).  Fate sealed with Peterson's decisions, with snow and hail falling on the cold winter (it is blustery 0 degrees outside) day of Tuesday, January 30, 1945, the Wilhelm Gustloff leaves the Gotenhafen harbor's Oxhoft Pier at 12:30 in the afternoon for her rendezvous with the bottom of the Baltic Sea, for waiting offshore for the liner is the Soviet submarine, S-13, commanded by naval veteran, 32-year-old Captain Alexander Marinesko.

Hansa

Lowe

S-13

Keel laid down in October of 1938, launched in April of 1939, and commissioned into the Soviet Union Navy on July 31, 1941, the S-13 is 255 feet and 3 inches long, has a beam of 21 feet, has a drought of 14 feet and 5 inches, has two diesel engines and two electric motors, can travel at 19.5 knots surfaced and 9 knots submerged, can dive to a depth of 330 feet, carries weaponry consisting of one 100mm gun, one 45mm cannon, and twelve torpedoes (fired from 4 forward tubes and 2 aft tubes), and is crewed by fifty officers and men (only three of the boats produced, S-13 being one of them, will survive WWII).  Commanding the S-13 is Alexander Marinesko, the Odessa, Ukraine son of a Romania sailor (Ion) and a Ukrainian woman, Tatiana Mihailovna Koval.  Trained in the Soviet Merchant Navy and the Russian Black Sea Fleet (he begins his career at sea as cabin boy on a freighter), the young sailor is transferred to the Baltic Fleet before WWII breaks out.  In March of 1936 he is promoted to ensign, in November of 1938 he is advanced to senior lieutenant, and in the summer of 1939 he is given command of the new submarine, M-96 (considered to be the best sub in the Soviet's Baltic Fleet), and in 1940, he receives a gold watch and promotion to captain-lieutenant (the equivalent of a Lt. Commander in the U.S. Navy).  Though he has not sunk a single vessel, he impresses his superiors with his knowledge of the sea and his ability to run a tight ship ... and he is loved by his crew.  In 1944, he receives an even larger submarine to command, the S-13.  But in January of 1945, Marinesko is a troubled commander ... a tea-toddler at sea, on land the captain is often three-sheets-to-the wind.  Stationed in Turko, Finland and in-port when 1944 becomes 1945, Marinesko jumps into the harbor's New Year's celebrations with both feet and goes on a three-day binge of boozing and canoodling with prostitutes so bad that he misses his boat's scheduled 1/2/1945 patrol date (the patrol is to be made in the company of three other subs of the Soviet's Baltic Fleet).  Missing, his crew tears the town apart looking for their lost leader and finally finds him in a dive bar sucking down vodka and beers.  Removed to a sauna to quickly sweat out the liquor in his system, Marinesko makes it back to base a day late for his patrol, and is immediately grabbed by NKVD security forces (the precursor of the KGB) and placed under arrest.  Interrogated for days, the hungover captain escapes court-martial and being shot for treason only because the Soviet Union does not have enough trained submariners to go around (and the powers that be do not want to have to deal with his crew mutinying over the matter).  Released with a myriad of threats and warnings, with Marinesko at the helm, the S-13 begins it's patrol of the waters of the Baltic Sea on January 11, 1945.

Hunting Ground

Marinesko

After three weeks at sea, still looking for a first enemy ship to attack and something to get him out of the doghouse with his superiors, Marinesko, while cruising the S-13 on the surface on the night of January 30, 1945, finally spots a luscious target 25 miles off the Polish coast, lit up and silhouetted against the shore ... the Wilhelm Gustloff.  Positioning his sub to fire on the liner from 1,000 yards away, stalking his prey from its starboard side for two hours, Marinesko moves around the stern of the liner and sets up between land and the ship, on the port side of the Wilhelm Gustloff.  At roughly 9:00 in the evening, the order is given to fire four torpedoes at the Wilhelm Gustloff (each weighs 4.5 tons) ... the first, wearing the crew's greeting, "For the Motherland," hits the ship's bow on the port side (it causes the watertight doors to close, trapping sleeping off-duty crew members), the second, stating "For the Soviet People," strikes the port area near the ship's pool (sending murderous bits of broken tiles flying through the air, along with the glass ceiling transforming into a rain of deadly shrapnel, filling the pool briefly with body parts, corpses, and buckets of blood, killing all but three of the 373 female auxiliaries stationed there), the third, bearing the message "For Leningrad," blasts into the Wilhelm Gustloff's midship engine room, immediately knocking out the liner's power, lights and most of her communication systems (the fourth torpedo, wearing the salutation, "For Stalin," fails to leave it's tube and has to be gently disarmed by S-13's crew).  Three fatal wounds received, the Wilhelm Gustloff lists to port and begins settling into the sea by her bow ... with her radio operator, Rudi Lange (as if rewarded for staying at his post, he will be one of the disaster's lucky survivors), sending frantic SOS messages the entire time (with minimum power available, only the escort Lowe receives the message, but she in turn will forward it off to other vessels in the area) will take roughly fifty minutes for the ship to go under, her running lights snapping back on briefly as if saying goodbye when her boilers explode and restart the liner's generators.  

First Strike

Down By The Bow

Moving out to sea, with snow, hail, and winter winds keeping almost everyone inside, those aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff are crammed into every available space on board the liner.  Packed into the ship like human sardines, the restroom facilities soon flounder and put excrement and seasick vomit on to the floors of the liner, forcing the passengers to relief themselves wherever a bit of open space can be found as they try to endure the stomach churning smells the interior of the ship fills with (for those that can stomach it, soup, sandwiches, and other snacks are available, as is for a lucky few, shots of cognac).  And crammed together, the heat and humidity inside causes many passengers to seek a modicum of comfort by shedding their life vests.  And in a horrible bit of irony, on the 12-year anniversary of taking power over Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler makes his last radio address to his shrinking empire, a speech which is broadcast throughout the doomed ship in which the dictator demands more sacrifices from the German people.  Minutes after the speech concludes, the passengers and the crew of the Wilhelm Gustloff will test the lethal definition of what "more sacrifices" can truly mean when three Russian torpedoes strike the liner's port side and chaos ensues.  Death comes over and over on the ship and in the cold water the liner begins sinking into (she will come to rest about 150 feet below the the Baltic), taking men, women and children (there is no "children and women first" policy aboard the ship, instead it is everyone for themselves and unsurprisingly, all four captains aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff will manage to survive the tragedy) in a horror of people being trampled to death, bodies being crushed (a sliding piano in the Music Hall will crush several people to death) and torn apart by explosions and falling debris (life boats frozen to the ship have to be broken free before being lowered, and in some cases they fall on swimmers in the water or capsize... in one case a life boat is launched with only 12 sailors aboard, and when loaded boats do make it down to the water, they have to fight off desperate swimmers trying to come aboard, drownings, murder-suicides (one Nazi official will try to save each of his family members the agony of drowning or freezing to death by shooting each in the head, and then out of ammo for himself, he throws away his life vest and jumps into the sea, another, after shooting his family finds out he doesn't have the will to end his own life  and has a soldier do the dispatch work for him), hundreds take shelter in the glass-enclosed upper promenade deck waiting to be rescued, only to discover when the ship lists over on its side that the area was no refuge at all, as on it's side the glass breaks and passengers are sent crashing into the sea, where hypothermia after about ten minutes in the Baltic's icy waters (the sea temperature is estimated to be a balmy 4 degrees Celsius) claims them.  And it is all accompanied by the hysterical tearful screaming from the ship and the sea (and some quiet praying too), sounds and sights that survivors will remember for the rest of their lives.  No accurate final count of the dead possible with the way people were loaded on to the liner before venturing out to sea, rounded off, most historians believe that 9,600 people perish in the disaster, the worst loss of life from a single ship sinking in all of history.  For weeks to follow, the frozen bodies of men, women, and children will float ashore in the area. 

Wilhelm Gustloff

And yet, among all the chaos and death, miracles and moments of sublime grace take place too.  An older women saves a teenage girl by pushing her into an alcove and giving the girl her fur coat.  A girl from the Women's Auxiliary is saved when a burley sailor shoves men out of his way to place her in a not yet filled lifeboat.  Though thousands die in the tragedy, 1,252 people will survive the ordeal due to the rescue operation the Germans launch.  First on the scene to try and help is the German cruiser, Admiral Hipper.  Carrying her full crew and over two thousand refugees herself as part of Operation Hannibal (although over 10,000 individuals will perish in the operation, Hannibal is considered a success from saving over two million people from revenge-minded rape and pillage Russians advancing on Germany), and worried that the Russian sub that torpedoed the Wilhelm Gustloff might still be in the area, she pauses briefly nearby, then decides she can do nothing for the distressed vessel and continues on to Kiel.  Behind her though, other rescue vessels offer more succor to the victims of Marinesko's attack; torpedo boat T-36 rescues 564 individuals, the Lowe gathers up 472 souls, the minesweeper M387 is able to pluck 98 people from the sea, the minesweeper M375 saves 43, the minesweeper M341 grabs 37 survivors, the steamer Gottingen saves 28, the torpedo recovery boat TF-19 rescues 7 people, freighter Gotenland finds two survivors, and seven hours after the liner has gone to the bottom, the patrol boat V1703 will rescue a single infant wrapped tightly in a woolen blanket from a lifeboat filled with corpses (the hero is Petty Officer Werner Fick, who jumps into the lifeboat with his flashlight and discovers the baby boy ... Fick will also adopt and raise the orphan boy).

Disaster Strikes

1960 Movie Recreation Of The Sinking

Except for those directly involved in the tragedy, with the Third Reich only a few months away from its dissolution, fearing a major blow to the morale of the German people, the tragedy soon becomes secondary to the European end to WWII.  Zahn will go before a naval board of inquiry five days after the Wilhelm Gustloff goes under, but before it can reach an outcome on his conduct other events in the Reich cause the spotlight of war to point elsewhere.  Not found innocent or guilty, Zahn nonetheless will have his career at sea ended by the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff.  Captain Peterson also draws an overwhelming degree of ire for the decisions he makes on 1/30/1945, and he will also never command a ship again.  As for Marinesko, the Russian submariner keeps hunting for easy triumphs to save his career, and on February 10, 1945, he finds another refugee ship for his torpedoes, this time the 14,660-ton General von Steuben.  Hit by two torpedoes from the S-13 fourteen seconds apart on it's starboard bow, the ship, carrying roughly 5,200 passengers and crew (again, some boarding the vessel are never registered as voyagers), goes under in twenty minutes, killing 4,500 more people.  Returning to Finland and then the Soviet Union, expecting to be declared a "Hero of the Soviet Union" (not considered fit to be a full blown hero, Marinseko is instead awarded the "Order of the Red Banner"), the alcoholic commander instead finds his triumphs are not at first believed and so he spends the next fifteen years fighting for his service to be recognized (for many on both sides he is considered nothing more than a war criminal that should be hung or shot), but only antagonizes his foes and makes even new enemies as he continues to drink and spend time in various brigs.  Eventually he is downgraded to the rank of lieutenant and in October of 1945, dishonorably discharged from the Soviet navy.  In 1960 though, with the long war in almost everyone's rear-view mirror, the Black Sea sailor will reinstated as a third class captain and granted a full pension, and in 1963 he finally receives the ceremony normally bestowed on a Soviet submariner returning from a successful patrol.  Three weeks later he passes away from cancer in Leningrad at the age of 50 (in 1990, rehabilitated, he will posthumously by made a "Hero of the Soviet Union" by Mikhail Gorbachev, and his name now graces a street in St. Petersburg, the St. Petersburg Museum of Russian Submarine Forces, and there are memorials to him in the towns of Kaliningrad. Odessa, Kronstadt).  

Some Of The Dead

Operation Hannibal

As for the Wilhelm Gustloff itself, she rests about nineteen nautical miles offshore, to the east of the Polish town of Leba and to the west of the town of Wladyslawowo.  Classified as an official war grave, the liner is protected from miscreants taking souvenirs by diving on the wreck by the Polish Maritime Office in Gdynia.  No diving is allowed within a 1,600 foot radius of the wreckage, though a handful of objects have been salvaged from the sunken liner by the Polish government.

Wilhelm Gustloff Porthole

Stern Of The Sunken Ship

January 30, 1945 ... the Wilhelm Gustloff is sent to the bottom of the Baltic Sea ... rest in peace to all those that perished on the sea that night.

Death Of The Wilhelm Gustloff

  

        

      

    
 

   

       

                      

POE'S STRANGE, SHORT LIFE

1/19/1809 - Beginning a tragic life that will only last forty years, future writer, poet, editor, and literary critic, the legendary Edgar Allan Poe, is born to American actor David Poe Jr. (his grandfather, David Poe, emigrates to America in 1750 from County Cavan, Ireland) and English born actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Poe - 1849

Bad times begin early for Poe ... in 1810 his father abandons his family (Poe will have an older brother, William, and a younger sister, Rosalie) and in 1811, his mother dies from consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) at the age of twenty-four.  Following Elizabeth's death, young Edgar is taken in by the family of a friend of his mother, a wealthy Richmond, Virginia merchant (he dabbles in cloth, wheat, tombstones, tobacco, and slaves) named John Allan and his childless wife, who will alternately spoil and harshly discipline the youth.  A foster family of sorts, the Allans will never formally adopt Poe as their own, but they do give him his middle name of Allan, see that he is baptized into the Episcopal Church in 1812, provide food and a roof over the future writer's head, and give him a base for the classical education he receives in Virginia, and between 1815 and 1820, schooling in England and Scotland.  Returning to America, in 1824, Poe serves on a youth honor-guard that welcomes Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette, to the city of Richmond.  Already well off, the Allan family becomes even wealthy in 1825, when Allan's uncle and business benefactor dies and leaves real estate and money to his nephew ($750,000 which today would have a market value of $18 million).  Considered a fine young prospect, before beginning his matriculation at the University of Virginia studying ancient and modern languages, in 1826, Poe becomes engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster (neighbors, the relationship begins in 1825 when Poe is sixteen and Royster is fifteen).

Allan

Royster

A relatively new university in 1826, started by Thomas Jefferson, with strict rules about gambling, horse races, guns, tobacco, and alcohol, Poe takes only a year to run afoul of the college's rules, estranges his foster father with demands for money and his gambling debts, and is horrified to discover that in his absence from home, Royster has married a man named Alexander Shelton.  Feeling unwelcome back in Richmond, Poe transplants to Boston in April of 1827 using the name Henri Le Rennet as he tries to make ends meet laboring at the jobs of clerking and writing for a local newspaper.  Unable to sustain himself with the work he finds available, claiming to be 22 when he is actually 18-years-old, using the new pseudonym of Edgar A. Perry, Poe enlists for five years in the United States Army on May 27, 1827 and begins his military career as a private at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor, earning a whole five dollars a month.  As part of his regiment, at the end of the year the writer is next stationed at Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina where he is promoted to "artificer" (an enlisted tradesman who readied shells for the artillery) and has his salary doubled.  Transferred to Fortress Monroe at the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay, not happy with the work (despite attaining the rank of Sergeant Major for Artillery, the highest rank that a non-commissioned officer could attain at the time), after two years of overseeing the priming of shells, Poe decides to get out of his remaining three years of service by jumping even deeper into military service by furthering his education at West Point, New York's United States Military Academy.  Confessing his subterfuge to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard agrees to release Poe if he can reconcile with Allan and provides a substitute to finish the three years of service he owes the army.  Substitute found (his own service over, a friend of Poe's from his days of artillery duty, Sergeant Samuel "Bully" Graves, agrees to take Poe's place for $75, but only receives $25 of the agreed to total) Poe eventually gets Allan to support his plans to become an officer (Allan appears to soften after the death of his wife in 1829, but the men's reconciliation is brief).  Before leaving for West Point in 1830, Poe moves back to Baltimore for fifteen months of readying himself for the challenges of university life and doing more writing (a published author by this time of a 40-page book of poetry entitled "Tamerlane and Other Poems" by a "Bostonian," before going off to West Point he has a second book of poetry published in 1829 called "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems"), staying at the home of his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, her daughter and his first cousin, Virginia Eliza Clemm, his brother, Henry, and his invalid grandmother, Elizabeth Carnes Poe.      

Fort Independence

Fort Moultrie

Virginia Clemm

At West Point, though Poe is good in his classroom subjects (especially French) and popular with the other cadets (his witticisms and poems make the way about the school on an almost daily basis), the writer once again chaffs at the military academy's disciplinary rules (he also can't stand the college's notorious long marches and stomach churning foods) ... and continues to war with Allan over money issues and gambling debts (he also questions Allan's choice of a second wife and pricks the man's guilt over the children he has produced out of wedlock) to the extent that his foster father sends him a letter noting his embarrassment (motivated in part by a letter Sgt. Graves sends Allan requesting he make good on Poe's debt of $50), disowning him, and wanting no further discourse with the youth.  And Poe reacts extremely poorly to Allan's cord cutting, deciding to double-down on his foster father's embarrassment by getting expelled from the academy.  His plan put in motion (his two roommates at West Point, Thomas W. Gibson of Indiana and Timothy Pickering Jones of Tennessee will also be kicked out of the school), between July of 1831 and December of the same year, the cadet accrues 44 offenses worth 106 demerits, before becoming even more undisciplined with the start of 1832, receiving during the month of January 66 more offenses, as he becomes a mythic rule breaker that skips classes less than he attends them, is constantly drunk, and even shows up for formation in his birthday suit.  Successfully failing (he delights in letting his fellow cadets believe he is the grandson of Benedict Arnold), Poe is court-martialed for gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders for refusing to go to class, attend formations, or attend church on Sundays, and found guilty, is sent packing, leaving West Point on February 19, 1832, but not before receiving donations from fellow cadets to publish a third volume of his poetry (his subscribers give seventy-five cents and Poe takes away a total of $170 from the academy), but it is another flim-flam from the 22-year-old, when the book comes out it is mostly filled with already published poems (expecting works mocking West Point and it's instructors, the cadets are not happy when they receive "Poems" and many will toss the work into the waters of the nearby Hudson River).             

West Point

Back in Baltimore after finding a publisher for his poems, Poe takes the death of his older brother on August 1, 1831 as a sign that he should become serious about his writings.  Prose instead of poems his writing for the time being, Poe spends time rotating between Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and Richmond, writing, seeking publishers for his stories, and working for literary journals and periodicals as an editor and literary critic.  He also finds time to fall madly in love with his 13-year-old cousin (he is 26!), Virginia Clemm.  In 1835, he receives a license to marry the youngster and on September 22, 1835 (a witness will falsely testify to Virginia's age as being 21), the pair will begin a wedded life that lasts 11 years, ending on January 30, 1847, when she dies in Bronx County, New York, with Poe and her mother by her side, of tuberculosis at the age of only 24 (the first signs of the disease show up in 1842 when Virginia is singing and playing the piano and starts bleeding out of her mouth).  During this period in time, Poe will also be fired from his job as assistant editor at Richmond's Southern Literary Messenger for showing up for work drunk (he will win the position back with promises to remain sober), has his novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (about the adventures of a stowaway on a whaler, it is considered to be an inspiration for Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"), published in 1838, has his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" published in 1839 in two volumes (Volume 1 contains "The Fall of the House of Usher") while holding down an assistant editor job with Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (a Philadelphia monthly magazine), and next becomes a writer and co-editor of the already successful Philadelphia monthly, Graham's Magazine (during his stint working for George Rex Graham, Poe will write and have published in the magazine "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," considered to be the first modern detective novel, and "The Mask of the Red Death").  In 1840, he tries to start his own monthly in Philadelphia, called The Stylus (he originally calls the magazine The Penn), but for lack of funds the project falls apart before any issues make it into print (in 1842, Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum" is published, as is his tale of murder and madness, "The Tell-Tale Heart").  Seeking a steadier income than his writings provide (in 1843 he wins a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper for writing "The Golden Bug" ... it is also the year that sees the publication of "The Black Cat" in the Saturday Evening Post), Poe attempts to secure a position within the Whig administration of President John Tyler at the Philadelphia United States Custom House, but experiences another failure by missing an interview for an open position (he will claim he has a cold, others will insinuate his drinking has done him in again).

Murders In The Rue Morgue Illustration

Graham

President Tyler

Fame without the fortune, on January 29, 1845, the New York Evening Mirror publishes what will become Poe's most well known work, the narrative poem, "The Raven" (for which Poe will be paid a miserly $9).  Soon other publications also publish the poem and Poe becomes somewhat of a national celebrity.  But soon, he is again forced to deal with failure and loss.  After Poe takes over the New York City based Broadway Journal in June of 1845, based on lack of sales and alienated other writers by publicly accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, the journal goes bankrupt and shuts down after publishing its final issue on January 3, 1846 (Poe's caustic reviews of the writings of others will earn him the sobriquet, the "tomahawk man").  And things go rom bad to worse when he moves into a cottage with his ailing wife near what will become Fordham University.  There, a year later, on January 30, 1847, Virginia passes away (during her final period of illness, Virginia will also unwittingly supply another body blow to the writer, when she shows her love a letter written by Louisa Patterson, his foster-father's second wife, in which the woman admits to purposely causing the rift between the two men) and a depressed Poe once more tries to escape his bitterness with life by hitting the bottle (getting hammered on his favorite drink, brandy eggnog) ... hard.  And it doesn't help his deposition at all that hours after Virginia dies, a distraught Poe realizes that he has no image of his love and commissions a watercolor portrait of his wife that is painted using Virginia's corpse as the model for the work (now in the possession of the family of Virginia's half-sister Josephine, the wife of Neilson Poe).  Finally able to begin functioning again, in the last years of his life, Poe will continue to write poems, short stories, critiques, and essays (though nothing as memorable as "The Raven" or "The Tell-Tale Heart, his lecture "Eureka," a transcendental explanation of the universe is considered a masterpiece by some scholars, and pure nonsense by others), relocates to Providence, Rhode Island to court poetess Sarah Helen Whitman (there is a brief engagement that soon ends because of his continued drinking), has intense platonic relationships with Annie Richmond, young poetess Susan Archer Talley, and Sarah Anna Lewis, and with a return to Richmond, renews his interest in the now the widow, Mrs. Shelton, his former sweetheart, Elmira Royster.   

The Fordham Cottage

Virginia's Bedroom

The real-life mystery surrounding Poe's death, begins a week before his demise, when, on September 27, 1849, he leaves Richmond headed north, to take care of editing a volume of poetry by Philadelphia poetess Marguerite St. Leon Loud and to make arrangements in New York City to close down his home there and officially move back to Richmond, where he intends to make Elvira his bride.  Unknown as to why, he instead shows up in Baltimore, Maryland and never leaves the city.  On October 3, 1849, a cold and wet Wednesday election day in the city (for Congress and the state's House of Delegates), Joseph W. Walker, a typesetter for the Baltimore Sun, finds a delirious man dressed in shabby, second-hand clothing, laying in the gutter outside a public house called Gunner's Hall that includes a drinking establishment known as Ryan's Tavern (the site is the polling place for the city's 4th Ward).  Recognizing the man as the writer, Edgar Allan Poe, Walker gets the briefly lucid 40-year-old to give him the name of someone in Baltimore that might come to his assistance, and so a note is sent to Joseph E. Snodgrass (Snodgrass describes Poe as being the "worse for wear," "in great distress," and "in need of immediate assistance"), a magazine editor friend of Poe's with a modicum of medical training.  A few hours later, Snodgrass and Poe's uncle-in-law, Henry Herring, show up at Ryan's Tavern, put the poet in a buggy and take him to the nearby Washington College Hospital where he is placed in a prison-like barred window room in a section of the building usually reserved for drunks, under the care of hospital's resident, 29-year-old Dr. John Joseph Moran (who bans visitors from seeing the ailing Poe and spends the rest of his life talking about Poe's last days, changing his tale repeatedly).  In a state of fevered delirium, hallucinating, unable to answer the simplest of questions as to what has occurred (according to his doctor, when told he will soon be well and enjoying the company of friends, Poe responds by stating, "... the best thing a friend could do was to blow out his brains with a pistol ..."), calling out the name Reynolds (no one can ever identify who this individual is), asking after his wife in Richmond (his wife is dead and he has yet to marry Elvira, though she has accepted his proposal) and wanting to know what has happened to a trunk of his belongings (it will later be located in a Richmond tavern), the writer finally perishes after five days at the hospital from what Dr. Moran will call phrenitis, a swelling of the brain, at 5:00 in the morning of October 7, 1849.  According to Moran, Poe's last words are, "Lord help my poor soul."  Gone, but then the questions that can't be answered as to the cause of death begin (all medical records and documents relating to the death, including Poe's official death certificate are now lost).

Poe A Month Before His Death

Washington College Hospital

Among the many theories as to the cause of Poe's death that surface, there will be admirers and haters that believe he perishes after being beaten by Baltimore ruffians and robbed, that the writer is roughed up enough to die after being grabbed by a cooping gang (thugs hired to elect a political candidate that do so by having their victims vote more than once after name changes and changes in wardrobe ... and he is found right next to a polling site on an election day in ill-fitting clothing), his alcohol imbibing got the better of him (he is said to become a roaring drunk after a single glass of wine or champagne, let alone hard liquor, but the problem is that Poe, readying for his upcoming wedding, has joined a temperance society and has vowed never to drink alcohol again ... and testing of his hair when his body is moved years later proves he made good on his pledge), he accidentally poisons himself writing in a closed environment that accumulates toxic levels of carbon monoxide (again, his hair will not bear out this theory), mercury poisoning brought on by doses of mercury calomel taken during a cholera epidemic that hits Baltimore in the summer of 1849 (again, Poe's hair says "GO FISH!"), his hallucinates and fever are brought on by a fatal case of rabies, he is done in by a brain tumor no one knows about, he takes ill and succumbs to a bad case of the flu, he is murdered by members of the Shelton family that don't want the poet marrying their sister, Elmira, and there is talk of the death being the result of Poe having an epileptic attack, dying from syphilis, another theory has him dying of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), medicating his pains with too much laudanum, and there are claims the death comes from an enzyme deficiency, apoplexy, delirium tremens related to his drinking, and a case of meningeal inflammation. No one knows!

Memorial Plaque

What is known is that Poe's funeral takes place on October 8, 1849 at 4:00 on a drearily cold Monday afternoon in Baltimore at the Westminster Presbyterian churchyard.  Officiated by Reverend W. T. D. Clemm (who decides not to give a sermon seeing how few people are on hand), the cousin of Poe's wife, Virginia, and is attended by Poe's uncle, Henry Herring (who supplies the funds for the writer's simple mahogany casket which lacks handles, any nameplate, clothing lining, and a pillow for Poe's head to rest upon, the shroud covering the coffin is sewn by Dr. Moran's wife), his cousin, Neilson Poe (who supplies the hearse), Snodgrass, former University of Virginia classmate and friend, Baltimore lawyer Zaccheus Collins Lee, Poe's first cousin, Elizabeth Herring and her husband, and Poe's former schoolmaster, Joseph Clarke.  The ceremony lasts only three minutes.  Poe's second planting comes on November 17, 1875, when he is moved to a site (the wrong body, 19-year-old Maryland militiaman, Philip Moser Jr., is at first dug up in error), at the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground that is now part of the University of Maryland's School of Law in Baltimore (his wife and his wife's mother are both reburied next to him).  More of a deserved sendoff and an acknowledgement of the talents of the man being buried, at Poe's second funeral he will be put beneath a simple sandstone block with "No. 80" on top (the headstone of white Italian marble that Neilson Poe pays for is destroyed when a train derails and plows through the monument yard the headstone is being stored at, the "No. 80" headstone will in turn be replaced by a monument designed by architect George A. Frederick, built by Colonel Hugh Sisson, with a medallion of Poe created by artist Adalbert Volck, from funds raised by Baltimore schoolteacher Sara Sigourney Rice and Philadelphia publisher George William Childs, a sum of just over $1,500), and among the crowd of mourners is once again Neilson Poe (he will give a speech describing his cousin as "... one of the best hearted men that ever lived ...") and Snodgrass, and this time around, Maryland educator Nathan Covington Brooks, southern composer John Hill Hewitt, and legendary poet Walt Whitman (and though not in attendance, English poet, Lord Alfred Tennyson will honor Poe with a poem that is read at the ceremony which reads, "Fate that once denied him, And envy that once decried him, And malice that belied him, Now cenotaph his fame.").

1875 Reburial

Original Burial Spot

The New Memorial

Sadly, Poe's enemies and rivals use his death to also assassinate his character, with the first calumnies provided in the New York Tribune obituary by jealous poet Rufus Wilmot Griswold (hiding behind the alias "Ludwig") that portrays the writer as a talented wordsmith, but also a degenerate drunk and drug addict (friends like Sarah Helen Whitman, Charles Frederick Briggs, and George Rex Graham will all protest the fictions, but to little avail as the public comes to accept the idea that only someone with deep dark problems could write the prose that comes from Poe's pen).  But all the mud slung at Poe after his death is not enough to negate the genius of the man's writings, or his influence on the prose that follows ... the creation of his fictional detective, Auguste Dupin will influence Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he creates Sherlock Holmes (noting Poe's place in the genre, The Mystery Writer's of America name their annual writing awards the "Edgars"), horror writer H. P. Lovecraft will credit Poe for being his "God of Fiction," Jules Verne's will note Poe as being an influence on his fiction writing (as will H.G. Wells, Henry James, B. Traven, David Morell, and Vladimir Nabokov), and he will serve as an inspiration to lyric poetry of French writer, Charles Pierre Baudelaire (who in turn will be one of Doors singer Jim Morrison's influences).  And the influence doesn't stop with other writer's, legendary film thriller director Alfred Hitchcock will one day note that he begin making suspense movie because of his love of Poe's writings, legendary silent film director, D.W. Griffith will film "Edgar Allen Poe" in 1903, Universal Studios will use the works of Poe for vehicles for their horror stars, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and studio head Roger Corman will line his pockets in the 1960s and 1970s, creating "Poe" films for American-International Pictures (many starring Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Peter Lorre), there will be classical music composed off of works of Poe (among the many, Russian Sergei Rachmaninoff will compose a choral symphony from Poe's poem, "The Bells" in 1913, and American composer Philip Glass will write music for a 1978 libretto of "The Fall of the House of Usher"), as well as oodles of popular works by artists that range from Noel Coward to Frankie Laine to Bob Dylan to The Smithereens to Queen to the Yardbirds to Tangerine Dream (as examples, Poe appears on the famous cover shot for "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Band," the Alan Parsons Project will release a 1976 album, "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" based on Poe stories and poems, Lou Reed will release a two-disc concept album called "The Raven" in 2003 featuring music and spoken-word performances of actors Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, and others, pop singer Britney Spears will name her 2001-2002 concert tour after the Poe poem, "A Dream Within a Dream," and Stevie Nicks and Waddy Wachtel will put the poem, "Annabel Lee" to music for Nicks' solo album, "In Your Dreams").  Poe and Poe's works also appear in numerous comic books, theater dramas, works of fiction by other writers (2022 features Poe as a young cadet helping solve a series of murders at West Point in Netflix's "The Pale Blue Eye"), non-fiction (in 2017, PBS will release as part of it's American Masters series, "Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive), and television that range from the Gothic soap opera, "Dark Shadows," to the hit cartoon series "The Simpsons." There are also numerous homes, landmarks, and museums, far too many to list, around the country dedicated to or celebrating Poe's life and works. Poe also is one of the first individuals to come up with aspects of what will become the "Big Bang" theory of the creation of the universe ... 80 years before anyone else in his poem, "Eureka."  And Poe's love of cryptography and secret codes will influence WWII U.S, Army cryptographer, William Frederick Friedman (the man that leads the team that breaks Japan's PURPLE cipher).  Over a hundred years after his demise, the genius of Poe can still be found all over the place ... not bad for a supposed out-of-control drunk and drug fiend.   

1934

1962

The Poe Museum In Richmond, Virginia

Happy Birthday, Sir, yours was a one-of-a-kind, uniquely American saga!

Poe