A Brief History
On May 3, 1945, five squadrons of Hawker Typhoon fighter aircraft attacked three ships in Lubeck Bay, Northern Germany and sunk all three. The ships were prisoner ships carrying thousands of inmates from concentration camps.
Digging Deeper
The ocean liners Cap Arcona and Deutschland and a smaller companion ship, Thielbeck attempted to leave Lubeck.
The destination for the 3 ships is a contended point, with some claiming the ships were headed for Sweden, while other claim they were to be sunk after the crews and SS guards got off the ships. Either way, several other passenger carrying ships with civilians or prisoners on board had been sunk late in the war with terrific loss of life. The captain of the Cap Arcona was only too aware of the danger, and he shot himself on February 20, 1945 rather than make another run while the Reich collapsed.
British troops had entered Lubeck and were informed that the 3 ships in the bay were carrying prisoners. For some reason, that information was never passed on to higher command, and the RAF targeted the ships thinking they were carrying SS and Nazi officials to Norway or Sweden to avoid capture. Cracked fact: On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler had committed suicide and the war was clearly over. In fact, the German surrender came on May 7, 1945.
In spite of the impending end of the war, the RAF sent their latest fighter bombers, the Hawker Typhoons, armed with 20 mm cannons, 60 lb rockets and 500 lb bombs to attack the ships. All three ships were sunk, with thousands of people going into the cold water. Incredibly, the fighter planes began strafing the survivors, shooting them up as they tried to swim to safety. Apparently this act was not spontaneous, but part of the orders they had received for the mission! The hapless prisoners were weak and emaciated anyway, but the surviving SS men and women (perhaps 500 or more) pushed them away from lifeboats and makeshift rafts. Rescue boat made no attempt to save prisoners.
Certainly more than 7500 prisoners died in the attack, perhaps even close to 10,000. Only around 400 prisoners survived, and bodies and bones washed up on shore in huge numbers, the last bones of which were found in 1971. Cracked fact: Nazi Germany made a movie about the Titanic during World War II starring the Cap Arcona as the Titanic.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: Was this incident a tragic mistake or a war crime perpetrated by a lust to kill as many Germans as possible before the war ended? The answer is debatable. What do you think happened?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Jacobs, Benjamin and Eugene Pool. The 100-Year Secret: Britain’s Hidden World War II Massacre. The Lyons Press, 2004.
