Anita Saul, the granddaughter of a Prussian Contessa and with Jewish lineage, was in a perilous position as the rise of Nazism crept over the Germanic states of West and East Prussia. Worse still for the family, Anita’s brother supported and even joined the Nazi party when he was just 18 yrs old.
Aspirations of a musical career were dashed with a pregnancy outside of wedlock. Anita married the father of her child and the man that she loved Herbert Tollkühn and after the birth of their daughter they settled in their apartment in Königsberg, the capital city of East Prussia.
Anita was skilled in making money and took over an old house in a seaside resort turning it into a successful Hotel. They lived between Cranz on the coast and Königsberg where Herbert held down a job working in the water treatment centre for the city.
In the early days of the rise of Hitler, Anita foresaw impending disaster would befall her nation. Her daughter Inge even met Hitler at school and was forced to shake his hand, her mother proclaimed that her hand would drop off as a result as she had shaken hands with the devil.
The Nazi party slowly began their tyranny over the Jewish people in their country, many fled early on, others stayed at their peril. After her father died, Anita needed to ensure that her mother remarried to rid her of her Jewish surname, so a marriage was agreed to that she no longer carried the name of Saul.
Her husband , Herbert, was forced to join the Nazi’s, a responsibility he despised.
The war escalated and culminated in the Russian advance. Shortly after she heard that her husband had fallen, they were told to leave their home as the Russians were twenty minutes away. Anita knew that would mean certain death if they remained and so she took her family across a snow covered beach to head west as fast as they could.
The intention was to reach the last ships that were sailing from Gotenhafen and Danzig to sail to the relatively safer shores of Germany.
After three or four days they reached the last ships to leave. They boarded ‘The Wilhelm Gustloff”, a Cruise liner build to carry 1,700 people. Over ten thousand people boarded the ship. They made camp in the empty swimming pool ready to set sail the next day.
That night Anita had a dream and decided they were disembarking the ship. Inge protested but her mother was adamant. At Noon the ship set sail and later that evening was hit by three torpedo’s from a Russian submarine the S-13, the second went straight into the swimming pool. Only around 960 souls survived the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff , the worlds worse maritime disaster that so few know about. Most of the victims were women and over 5000 children.
Finally they reached Hannover, where Inge met an English soldier Dennis Hopper, he was one of the first English soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen. They moved to England and had two children, Marianne and Dennis. Dennis Hopper junior is my husband and our two sons interviewed and videoed my mother in laws account of what happened, just three years before she died in 2015.
