The
tragic WWII story of how the RAF attacked and the CAP ARCONA maritime
tragedy, the loss of life in the CAP ARCONA sinking is among the highest
in maritime history. For weeks after the sinking, bodies of the victims
were being washed ashore, where they were collected and buried in a
single mass grave at Neustadt in Holstein. For nearly thirtynine years,
parts of skeletons were being washed ashore, until the last find, by a
twelve-year-old boy, in 1971.
There are several versions of what happened and why the RAF sunk the ship:
(1) One
version of the story is that the boarding of the prisoners with the
knowledge that the ships would be attacked by Allied aircraft was a
cynical trick by the German police authorities to have the prisoners
killed.
(2) Another version is that Count Folke Bernadotte, the Vice
President of the International Red Cross had arranged for the transfer
of prisoners to Swedish hospitals and that this was the purpose of the
CAP ARCONA’s last tragic voyage. Such transfers had previously taken
place.
(3) To this day, the responsibility of the German and British
participants in the tragedy near Neustadt have not been judicially
examined since the circumstances are not entirely clear. It is said that
Red Cross radio operators attempted to warn the English against
attacking the ships and to have notified them of the true situation on
board.
(4) The last word is that the RAF has sealed all records
connected with the attack on the CAP ARCONA until 2045.
CAP ARCONA, named after Cape Arkona on the island of Rügen, was a large
German ocean liner built for the HAMBURG SÜDAMERIKANISCHE
DAMPFSCHIFFAHRTS-GESELLSCHAFT (HAMBURG-SÜD / HAMBURG-SOUTH AMAERICA
LINE). She
carried passengers and cargo between Germany and the east coast of South
America, to Rio de Janeiro and had its final port in Buenpos Aires, and
in her time was the largest and one of the fastest ship on the
route.
In 1940 the Kriegsmarine requisitioned her as an
accommodation ship. In 1942 she served as the set for the German
propaganda feature film Titanic. In 1945 she evacuated almost 26,000
German soldiers and civilians from East Prussia before the advance of
the Red Army. On 30 March 1945 CAP ARCONA finished her third and
last trip between Gdynia and Copenhagen, carrying 9,000 soldiers and
refugees. However, her turbines were completely worn out. They could
only be partially repaired and her days of long-distance travel were
over. She was decommissioned, returned to her owners HAMBURG-SÜD and
ordered out of Copenhagen Harbour to Neustadt Bay.
During March
and April 1945, concentration camp prisoners from Scandinavian countries
had been transported from all over the Reich to the Neuengamme
concentration camp near Hamburg, in the White Bus programme co-ordinated
through the Swedish Red Cross - with prisoners of other nationalities
dispaced to make room for them. Eventually Himmler agreed that these
Scandinavians, and selected others regarded as less harmful to Germany,
could be transported through Denmark to freedom in Sweden. Then between
the 16 and 28 April 1945, Neuengamme was systematically emptied of all
its remaining prisoners, together other groups of concentration camp
inmates and Soviet POWs; with the intention that they would be relocated
to a secret new camp, either on the Baltic island of Fehmarn; or at
Mysen in Norway where preparations were put in hand to house them under
the control of concentration camp guards evacuated from Sachsenhausen.
In the interim, they were to be concealed from the advancing British and Canadian forces; and for this purpose the SS
assembled a prison flotilla of decommissioned ships in the Bay of
Lübeck, consisting of the liners CAP ARCONA and DEUTSCHLAND, the
freighter THIELBECK, and the motor launch ATHEN. Since the steering
motors were out of use in THIELBECK and the turbines were out of use in
CAP ARCONA, ATHEN was used to transfer prisoners from Lübeck to the
larger ships and
between ships; who were locked below decks and in the holds, and denied
food and medical attention. On 30 April 1945 the two Swedish ships,
MAGDALENA and LILLIE MATTHIESEN, previously employed as support vessels
for the White Bus evacuations, made a final rescue trip to Lübeck and
back.
Amongst
the prisoners rescued were some transferred from the prison flotilla.
On the evening of 2 May 1945 more prisoners, mainly women and children
from the Stutthof and Mittelbau-Dora camps were loaded onto barges and
brought out to the anchored vessels; although, as the Cap Arcona refused
to accept any more prisoners, over eight hundred were returned to the
beach at Neustadt in the morning of 3 May, where around five hundred
were killed in their barges by machine-gunning, or beaten to death on
the beach, their SS guards then seeking to make their escape
unencumbered.
The order to transfer the prisoners to the prison
ships came from Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann in Hamburg. Marc Buggeln has
challenged Kaufmann’s subsequent claim that he had been acting on orders
from SS Headquarters in Berlin; arguing that the decision in fact
resulted from political and business pressures from leading
industrialists in Hamburg, who were already at this stage plotting with
Kaufmann to hand the city over to British forces undefended and
unharmed, and who consequently wished to whitewash away (literally so in
the case of the Neuengamme concentration camp) all evidence for the
prisoners’ former presence within the city and its industries.
By
early May however, any relocation plans had been scotched by the rapid
British military advance to the Baltic; so the SS leadership, which had
moved to Flensburg on 28 April, discussed scuttling the ships with the
prisoners still aboard. Later, at a war crimes tribunal, Kaufmann
claimed the prisoners were intended to be sent to Sweden; although as
none of the ships carried Red Cross hospital markings and nor were they
seaworthy, this was scarcely credible. Georg-Henning Graf von
Bassewitz-Behr, Hamburg’s last Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF),
testified at the same trial that the prisoners were in fact to be killed
“in compliance with Himmler’s orders”. Kurt Rickert, who had worked for
Bassewitz-Behr, testified at the Hamburg War Crimes Trial that he
believed the ships were to be sunk by U-boats or Luftwaffe aircraft. Eva
Neurath, who was present in Neustadt, and whose husband survived the
disaster, said she was told by a police officer that the ships held
convicts and were going to be blown up.
Loading 60lb RP-3 rockets onto a Typhoon
On 2 May 1945, the British Second Army discovered the empty camp at
Neuengamme, and reached the towns of Lübeck and Wismar. No. 6 Commando,
1st Special Service Brigade commanded by Brigadier Derek Mills-Roberts,
and 11th Armoured Division, commanded by Major-General George P. B.
Roberts, entered Lübeck without resistance. Lübeck contained a permanent
Red Cross office in its function as a Red Cross port, and Mr. De Blonay
of the International Committee of the Red Cross informed Major-General
Roberts that 7,000–8,000 prisoners were aboard ships in the Bay of
Lübeck. In the afternoon of 3 May 1945, the British 5th reconnaissance
regiment advanced northwards to Neustadt, witnessing the ships burning
in the bay and rescuing some severely emaciated prisoners on the beach
at Neustadt, but otherwise finding mostly the bodies of women and
children massacred that morning.
On 3 May 1945,
three days after Hitler’s suicide and only one day before the
unconditional surrender of the German troops in northwestern Germany at
Lüneburg Heath to Field Marshal Montgomery, CAP ARCONA, THIELBECK, and the passenger liner DEUTSCHLAND were
attacked as part of general strikes on shipping in the Baltic Sea by
RAF Typhoons of 83 Group of the 2nd Tactical Air Force. Through Ultra
Intelligence, the Western Allies had become aware that most of the SS
leadership and former concentration camp commandants had gathered with
Heinrich Himmler in Flensburg, hoping to contrive an escape to
Norway. The western allies had intercepted orders from the rump Dönitz
government, also at Flensburg, that the SS leadership were to be
facilitated in escaping Allied capture—or otherwise issued with false
naval uniforms to conceal their identities—as Dönitz sought, while
surrendering, to maintain the fiction that his administration had been
free from involvement in the camps, or in Hitler’s policies of genocide.
The aircraft were from No. 184 Squadron, No. 193 Squadron, No. 263
Squadron, No. 197 Squadron RAF, and No. 198 Squadron. Besides four 20 mm
cannon, these Hawker Typhoon Mark 1B fighter-bombers carried either
eight HE High Explosive “60 lb” RP-3 unguided rockets or two 500 lb
(230 kg) bombs.
None of the ships were Red Cross marked (although the DEUTSCHLAND
had previously been intended as a hospital ship, and retained one white
painted funnel with a red cross), and all prisoners were concealed
below deck, so the pilots in the attacking force were unaware that they
were laden with concentration camp survivors. Swedish and Swiss Red
Cross officials had informed British intelligence on 2 May 1945 of the
presence of prisoners on ships at anchor in Lübeck Bay, but the
information had failed to be passed on.
The RAF commanders ordering the
strike believed that a flotilla of ships was being prepared in Lübeck
Bay, to accommodate leading SS personnel fleeing to German-controlled
Norway in accordance with Dönitz’s orders.”The ships are gathering in
the area of Lübeck and Kiel. At SHAEF it is believed that important
Nazis who have escaped from Berlin to Flensburg are onboard, and are
fleeing to Norway or neutral countries”.
Equipped with lifejackets from locked storage compartments, most of the SS guards managed to jump overboard from CAP ARCONA. German trawlers sent to rescue CAP ARCONA‘s crew members and guards managed to save 16 sailors, 400 SS men, and
20 SS women. Only 350 of the ~4,500 former concentration camp inmates
aboard Cap Arcona survived. From 2,800 prisoners on board the
THIELBECK only 50 were saved; whereas all 2,000 prisoners on the
DEUTSCHLAND were safely taken off onto the ATHEN, before the DEUTSCHLAND capsized.
RAF Pilot Allan Wyse of No. 193 Squadron recalled: “We
used our cannon fire at the chaps in the water … we shot them up with 20
mm cannons in the water. Horrible thing, but we were told to do it and
we did it. That’s war.”
Severely damaged and set on fire, Cap Arcona eventually capsized. Photos of the burning ships, listed as Deutschland, Thielbek, and Cap Arcona,
and of the emaciated survivors swimming in the very cold Baltic Sea,
around 7 °C (44.6 °F), were taken on a reconnaissance mission over the
Bay of Lübeck by F-6 Mustang (the photo-reconnaissance version of the
P-51) of the USAAF’s 161st Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron around 5:00
pm, shortly after the attack.
On 4 May 1945, a British reconnaissance plane took photos of the two
wrecks, THIELBECK and CAP ARCONA, the Bay of Neustadt being shallow. The
capsized hulk of CAP ARCONA later drifted ashore, and the beached wreck
was finally broken up in 1949.
As a light rain began to fall on the afternoon of May 3,
1945, British soldiers of 6 Commando, 1st Special Services Brigade,
searched the beaches of Neustadt, Germany, on the Baltic Sea for
survivors. The bodies of men, women, and even small children lay by the
hundreds on the sands. Offshore, under a gray, smoke filled sky, the
soldiers could see the the still-smoldering hulk of the former luxury
liner, CAP ARCONA, and scores of other damaged ships. A highly
effective RAF bombing and rocket raid had destroyed the fleet and killed
over 7,000 concentration camp inmates who had been imprisoned on the
ships.
One soldier found a girl of about seven clutching the
hand of a woman beside her. He presumed she was the girl’s mother. Both
bodies were clad in black-and-white-striped wool garments of
concentration camp prisoners. The heads and shoulders of floating
corpses were visible just offshore, as victims of all ages drifted in.
Even a full year later, the bodies were still washing up.
It’s a story no one would tell. The British government
ordered the records to be sealed for 100 years. The sinking of one of
the most glamorouse ocean liners of the early twentieth century just had
it’s 62nd anniversary, appears in no history books. The governments of
Germany and Great Britain continue to to refuse either to discuss it or
release pertinent records. So another war atrocity remains mostly a
secret, like several other sinkings during the time period. 7000 dead is
an awfully lot to not even be able to mention it.
This is a brilliant post! I never got a summer glow this year,which I don't mind but great post for those who want to keep it!
ReplyDeletePersonalized blue Caps online