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. Over a period of 15 weeks, somewhere between 494 and 1,080 merchant vessels of all types, including fishing boats and other craft, and utilising 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. Read more