Oh, he's cute. Mr. I can never sleep when I'm traveling. He's hugging his pillow like a sloth on a branch.

He couldn't sleep before. Now listen to him. Sounds like an elephant with a chest infection.

Well, they call him a dreamer. And now they're right.

All aboard, Mr. I can never sleep when I'm traveling. Find all the comfort you need in the quiet lounge.

Piando Ferries, there is another way. Hello I'm James Rogers and this is the history hit World Wars podcast in this episode first

recorded for Dan Snow's history hit Dan talks with Roger Morehouse the fantastic

orator historian of the Third Reich and the Second World War,

and the author of the Devil's Alliance, Killing Hitler and Berlin at war.

In this particular episode, which I find fascinating.

Dan and Roger discussed one of the worst maritime disasters in history, the sinking of the

Wilhelm Gustav in 1945. Now this ship started out as a sort of pleasure cruiser, a kind of benefit for those

who bought into Hitler's Nazi Germany. But as Roger explains, it becomes Hitler's titanic. This is really one of the most extraordinary stories. Let's talk about the ship itself and then we'll get on to the

tragic circumstances of its loss at sea. Was this a particularly enormous ship was it or were there

lots of people? Not especially enormous it was I think 26,000 tons off the top of my head which is about roughly half the displacement of the Titanic. So it's not massive, it's a good size cruise cruise ship, had space for a complement of about 500 crew and 1,500 passengers,

so it was a good size, would be a good size even by modern standards.

And what does it do? So it's launched in 1937.

It then spends the next few years doing what?

What's peculiar about its early history? We know, those that know anything about the Guislov

will know broadly the circumstances of its sinking,

which we'll talk about in a minute.

But what I wanted to do with this e-book

is to try and look at the sort of the history of the

...