Qualla: SS Cap Arcona

SS Cap Arcona: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. For twenty-six years after the war, the Baltic kept handing them back. Bones came ashore on the beaches between Neustadt in Holstein and Timmendorfer Strand, a few at a time, usually after storms, and the last were found in 1971. They belonged to prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, locked in the holds of a liner called the Cap Arcona three kilometres off this shore on 3 May 1945 — three days after Hitler shot himself, one day before the German forces in north-west Germany surrendered. British aircraft set the ship burning. The pilots did not know who was aboard.

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Image: Public domain

SS Cap Arcona: The Pride of the South America Run

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA 3.0. She went down the ways at Blohm+Voss in Hamburg on 14 May 1927: 27,561 tons, 205.9 metres long, three funnels, and a full-size tennis court behind the third one. On 29 October she sailed for Buenos Aires, briefly the largest and fastest ship on the Hamburg-South America Line's ro...

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Image: Rept0n1x | CC BY-SA 3.0

SS Cap Arcona: Grey Paint, and a Film About Another Ship

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr. Karl-Heinz Hochhaus, CC BY 3.0. The Kriegsmarine took her in 1940, painted her overall grey and moored her at Gotenhafen — now Gdynia — as an accommodation ship. In 1942 she was dressed up again, this time as the Titanic, her funnels and hull partly repainted in White Star colours for the exteriors of the Nazi ...

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Image: Dr. Karl-Heinz Hochhaus | CC BY 3.0

SS Cap Arcona: The Flotilla in Lübeck Bay

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit original by Christian Ganzer; changes by de:user:JD, CC BY-SA 3.0. Between 16 and 28 April 1945 the SS emptied Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, along with others, and moved the prisoners towards the coast ahead of the advancing British and Canadian armies. In Lübeck Bay they assembled a flotilla of ships that could no longer sail: the...

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Image: original by Christian Ganzer; changes by de:user:JD | CC BY-SA 3.0

SS Cap Arcona: The Afternoon

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Huddyhuddy, CC BY-SA 4.0. British intelligence had been told. On 2 May, Swedish and Swiss Red Cross officials passed on that large numbers of prisoners were aboard ships anchored in Lübeck Bay, and in Lübeck a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross told Major-General Philip Roberts...

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Image: Huddyhuddy | CC BY-SA 4.0

SS Cap Arcona: What the Shore Returned

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roland.h.bueb, CC BY 3.0. British reconnaissance troops reached Neustadt that afternoon, watched the ships burning offshore, and pulled a few emaciated survivors off the beach. Most of what they found there were the bodies of the women and children killed that morning. For weeks the dead came in on the ti...

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Image: Roland.h.bueb | CC BY 3.0