Operation Hannibal

Operation Hannibal was a German naval operation involving the evacuation by sea of German troops and civilians from Courland, East Prussia, and the Polish Corridor from mid-January to May, 1945 as the Red Army advanced during the East Prussian and East Pomeranian Offensives and subsidiary operations.

The Soviet East Prussian Offensive by 3rd Belorussian Front under Army General Ivan Chernyakhovsky commenced on January 13, 1945 and, with Marshal of the Soviet Union Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front, subsequently cut off Prussia between January 23 and February 10, 1945. German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz ordered General Admiral Oskar Kummetz, as Naval High Commander, Baltic, and Rear Admiral Konrad Engelhardt, head of the Kriegsmarine's shipping department, to plan and execute the Rettungsaktion (evacuation operation). Donitz radioed a message to Gdynia in occupied Poland on January 23, 1945, to begin evacuations to ports outside of the Soviet area of operations. The operation was codenamed "Hannibal". Dönitz stated in his post-war memoirs that his aim had been to evacuate as many people as possible away from the Soviets.

Right up until his suicide, Adolf Hitler insisted that the war go on. The flood of military personnel and refugees eventually turned the operation into one of the largest emergency evacuations by sea in history. Over a period of 15 weeks, somewhere between 494 and 1,080 merchant vessels of all types, including fishing boats and other craft, and utilizing Germany's largest remaining naval units, would transport between 800,000 – 900,000 refugees and 350,000 soldiers across the Baltic Sea to Germany and German-occupied Denmark. This was more than three times the number of people evacuated at Dunkirk.