Final Voyage (16 page)

Some had survived five years in various camps, including Auschwitz, so the terrible conditions on board the Nazis' hellships were nothing new.

On 30th April, Hitler committed suicide. The prisoners in the Bay of Lübeck learnt of it from their guards on 2nd May following new leader Admiral Karl Doenitz's radio address. Naturally, word spread through the ships in a matter of hours, along with (accurate) rumours that the
Red Army had taken control over most of Berlin. But the war wasn't over yet. Unrestricted warfare continued under Doenitz as he tried to engineer it so that Germany would surrender to Britain and the United States rather than the Soviet Union. At 2.30pm on 3rd May, the ships' captains were given the order to leave on their mission. Though the prisoners on board did not know it, British military columns were now only miles from Lübeck.

The RAF was also close to achieving air supremacy over the Baltic. The British policy of attacking all ships, military or otherwise, continued based on intelligence reports that the Germans were using unmarked civilian ships to transport large numbers of troops, SS personnel and key Nazi Party figures to Norway. A surveillance plane flying over the
Cap Arcona
and
Deutschland
reported seeing only soldiers on deck, and had to evade anti-aircraft fire. The ships became a legitimate target.

Only the
Athen
avoided the subsequent attack. Her captain had returned to the quayside to pick up more prisoners. When a squad of Hawker Typhoon bombers began their assault on the ships anchored out in the bay, he ran his vessel into the quay and raised a white flag. Doing so saved the lives of the 1,998 aboard.

For some of the bomber pilots, the raid on the Bay of Lübeck seemed like their last opportunity to take revenge on Nazis whose evil crimes were only now being fully revealed, Bergen-Belsen having been liberated a fortnight before. The pilots, one of whom was Jewish, did not learn of the ships' true cargo for almost thirty years. In an attack that lasted an hour, they scored direct hit after direct hit, over 60 rockets being fired and all of them hitting their stationary targets.

Struck by a combination of rockets, other bombs and machine gun fire, the
Thielbek
, carrying almost 3,000 prisoners, caught on fire and began to list to starboard. She sank before her attackers had completed a second attack run on the
Cap Arcona
, but the waters in the bay were so shallow she did not disappear entirely below the surface. Only 50 survivors escaped before she went down.

Prisoners on the
Cap Arcona
began to suspect the Germans were scuttling the ship, intending to slaughter them all and hide the evidence underwater.

Prisoners on the
Cap Arcona
thought she had been struck by a torpedo at first, but as she was struck again and again, others began to suspect the Germans were scuttling the ship, intending to slaughter them all and hide the evidence underwater. As fire began to spread through the ship and their guards fled, prisoners stampeded through the ship's slanting passageways, not knowing which way to go. People tried to escape up the ship's burning stairwell, but the flames were too widespread, the smoke too thick. Water poured into the ship and the lights went out, but the sirens continued to wail in the darkness. Ropes were lowered into the lavatory block for those trapped on the lower deck to climb up, but in the panic, desperate people pulled at each other and climbed over others, fighting to get up. Only a few were saved before fire swept in minutes later.

As smoke and fire enveloped the top deck, those who managed to make it up there began jumping into the water. They could see the shore, barely 2 miles (3.5km) away. Many thought they could swim it. Plenty of them drowned before they reached the beach, half-starved and weakened by their captivity. For those who made it, massacre
awaited. SS personnel rescued from the
Cap Arcona
by German trawlers summarily executed as many as they could, leaving the bodies on the sand to be discovered by the approaching British Army in the next few days.

Those who remained on the
Cap Arcona
found most of the lifeboats damaged beyond use by the attack. When the RAF planes returned for their second attack run on the
Cap Arcona
, they also came with orders to shoot at people trying to escape. Prisoners waved their striped caps in the air and pointed to their striped clothes, but these would only become emblematic later. Despite being fired upon themselves, many cheered the RAF for bombing a German patrol boat. Survivors still waiting on deck as well as those in the water thought it had come to rescue them. Instead it seemed like the helmsman was deliberately running over people in the water to kill them with the propeller. The British pilots thought the boat was trying to rescue survivors so bombed and sank it.

Less than 24 hours later, Germany surrendered unconditionally.

The
Cap Arcona
eventually rolled onto her side and sank, though like the
Thielbek
part of her hull remained above the waterline. She had taken much longer to sink than the
Thielbek
, meaning that most of the estimated 4,500 prisoners who died would have burned to death or been asphyxiated by smoke long before they had a chance to drown. The
Deutschland
took even longer to sink – about four hours – so many managed to escape. A small fishing boat picked up some survivors from the water, leaving them in the shallows to swim ashore whilst returning to save more. In total only 350 prisoners from the
Cap Arcona
survived.

Less than 24 hours later, Germany surrendered unconditionally. In the jubilation of victory – or for many in Europe, including Germany, simply the relief of peace – the tragedy was quickly forgotten by everyone except survivors and those who lived on the Bay of Lübeck. The locals saw the heads of floating corpses bobbing in the water just offshore for days afterwards, and bodies washed up on the beaches for weeks. Bones were still being found as late as the 1970s.

At a later war crime trial the head of Hamburg's Gestapo revealed that Himmler intended all of those on board the ships to be killed, which added to the speculation that the SS planned to scuttle the ships, and also gave birth to the theory that the Nazis used the Allies to do their dirty work. As with the
Lancastria
sinking, the British government sealed all of its records regarding the disaster for a hundred years.

The
Cap Arcona
's burnt-out wreck eventually drifted onto the shore, where it was broken up in 1949. That same year both the
Deutschland
and the
Thielbek
were raised. The
Deutschland
was scrapped, but the
Thielbek
was considered salvageable. The human remains found aboard were interred in Neustadt, north of Lübeck, and the ship was repaired and renamed
Reinbek
. Later renamed twice more, first to
Magdalene
and then
Old Warrior
, she sailed under a Panamanian flag until she was finally scrapped in 1974.

Between 1941 and 1945 Germany and the Soviet Union had fought a war within a war, an ideological conflict
marked by unmatched carnage, the essential aim of each side annihilation of the other, and which resulted in the majority of the casualties of the Second World War. An uneasy peace existed between the two nations following the non-aggression pact that saw them both invade Poland in September 1939, but after Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's attempted invasion of Russia in June 1941, the former allies began engaging in largely unrestricted warfare on land, in the air and at sea. With naval vessels, troop transports, merchant shipping and hospital ships all considered fair game, over the next four years the two countries inflicted many of the deadliest maritime disasters in history upon each other.

Between 1941 and 1945 Germany and the Soviet Union inflicted many of the deadliest maritime disasters in history upon each other.

Initially the Russo-German war went very much in Hitler's favour, with nearly 4 million men advancing over 1,000 miles into the Soviet Union, and only being checked at the gates of Moscow by a harsh Russian winter. As the German land forces swept along the coast of the Black Sea in November 1941, the Russian navy conscripted merchant ships to help evacuate personnel from the Crimea. One of these vessels was the
Armenia
, one of the first passenger ships built in the Soviet Union. Despite only having capacity for less than 1,000, up to five times that number may have boarded at Sevastopol for the relatively short voyage across the Black Sea to Tuapse, which was safer from the German advance. However, after leaving Sevastopol, the captain was ordered into Yalta to pick up even more. By the 6th, Yalta had been under siege for a week, all the roads had been cut off, and the city was
expected to fall to the Germans within hours. In the panic at the quayside, no names were taken, no heads were counted. As the
Armenia
headed out into the Black Sea, she probably carried between 5,000 and 7,000 people, many of them wounded soldiers, but also refugees, including hospital staff. Doctors in Yalta had urged many of the weakest to get on the ship, and then joined them on her. If contemporary Soviet propaganda was to be believed, the
Armenia
had in excess of 8,000 on board.

Had the ship not stopped at Yalta, the thousands who boarded her at Sevastopol would probably have made it safely to Tuapse. Instead the delay meant she left Yalta as the Luftwaffe secured dominion over the Black Sea's airspace. The
Armenia
was only a few miles from Yalta when a Heinkel He-111 dropped two torpedoes into the water. Eyewitnesses on shore claimed they could still see the red crosses painted on the ship's sides at that distance, so they knew the pilot must have seen them too. The first torpedo missed the
Armenia
, but the second hit her prow. Splitting in two, the ship went down in less than 5 minutes. People on shore heard the explosions and screaming. Most of those on board didn't have time to escape, but many of those on deck jumped overboard and tried to swim back to the shore. Being wounded and weakened, hardly any of them made it. The true death toll will never be known, but there were only 8 survivors.

After the disastrous battle for Stalingrad from summer 1942 to early 1943, the tide of war on the Eastern Front turned against the Germans, and in 1944 another maritime disaster in the Black Sea mirrored the loss of the
Armenia
three years before, and perhaps provided the Russians
with a satisfying sense of vengeance. By April 1944 the Red Army had retaken enough territory to cut the Crimea off from the rest of Ukraine, trapping almost a quarter of a million German and Romanian soldiers on the peninsula. On 10th May, the captured Hungarian cargo ship
Totila
, and another vessel, the
Teja
, docked at Khersones, not far from Sevastopol. It's possible over 9,000 soldiers, both German and Romanian, boarded for the voyage across the Black Sea to Constanta, Romania, which was still under Axis control. The Soviet airforce now controlled the skies above the Black Sea, and the ships came under attack from dozens of A-20 planes. Three bombs struck the
Totila
, and she sank fast. Neither the
Teja
nor the ships' escort vessels stopped to pick up survivors because that would make them easy targets. Nevertheless, in the second attack wave the Soviet planes hit the
Teja
anyway, and she also sank quickly. This time the escort vessels did stop, but they only rescued 400.

By January 1945, Admiral Doenitz had accepted that Germany was going to lose the war. Realising that the pace of the Soviet advance on the eastern front would leave millions of Germans cut off, he put Operation Hannibal into effect. Hitler was determined to fight until the end, so Doenitz may have managed to make Operation Hannibal look like a strategic repositioning, not retreating but fortifying the fatherland. Ultimately the operation became the largest evacuation by sea in history, transporting up to 2 million people – more than double the number the British evacuated from Dunkirk, Le Havre and St Nazaire – from
the east, across the Baltic, to safer ports deeper inside Germany. For the most part, it was a success, the last success of the military machine that between 1939 and 1941 had seemed unstoppable.

Operation Hannibal became the largest evacuation by sea in history, transporting more than double the number the British evacuated from Dunkirk.

Over 1,000 vessels may have been involved at some stage, from small fishing boats up to luxury liners like the 550ft (168m)
Steuben
. The
Steuben
had sunk once before, in 1930. The first German liner to sail to New York since the end of the First World War, she was docked there in July when a fire broke out in a paint locker, spread to a storage hold and then caused an explosion. Raising and repairing the ship became one of the largest salvage efforts in history. In 1944, having been requisitioned as a troop transport, she carried thousands of men eastward. Less than a year later, on 9th February 1945, she docked at Pillau (now Baltiysk, the westernmost town in Russia) to pick up evacuees heading westward. She had cabin space for 793 but could carry about 1,800. Some 2,800 wounded soldiers boarded her at Pillau, along with at least 1,400 other refugees. Naval officers on board reported only 3,600 passengers, but merchant navy officers helping out claimed there had to be at least 5,200.

The next day, as the
Steuben
passed the Stolpe (now Słupsk) Bank, only 40 miles from the German coast, she came into the sights of Soviet submarine S-13. The Russians fired two torpedoes, which hit her broadside below the bridge and split open her hull. Water rushed in so fast that when divers explored her wreck in 2004 they found
everything inside that was loose had been swept away, and fittings had even been torn from the walls. As the
Steuben
sank, the passengers who were able surged toward the stern, hoping the bow would hit the seabed in the shallow waters and that the rear of the ship would stay propped up above the water. Instead the
Steuben
rolled onto her side after less than 20 minutes, sinking too fast for the thousands of injured men on stretchers still waiting below to be carried up on deck. In the near-freezing waters, most of those who had been on deck when she went under did not survive long. Only a few hundred survivors were picked up by an escorting torpedo boat.