Built in 1927, the German ocean liner SS Cap Arcona was the greatest ship since the RMS Titanic and one of the most celebrated luxury liners in the world. When the Nazis seized control in Germany, she was stripped down for use as a floating barracks and troop transport. Later, during the war, Hitler’s minister, Joseph Goebbels, cast her as the “star” in his epic propaganda film about the sinking of the legendary Titanic.
Following the film’s enormous failure, the German navy used the Cap Arcona to transport German soldiers and civilians across the Baltic, away from the Red Army’s advance. In the Third Reich’s final days, the ill-fated ship was packed with thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Without adequate water, food, or sanitary facilities, the prisoners suffered as they waited for the end of the war. Just days before Germany surrendered, the Cap Arcona was mistakenly bombed by the British Royal Air Force, and nearly all of the prisoners were killed in the last major tragedy of the Holocaust and one of history’s worst maritime disasters.
Prolific author Robert Watson returns as my guest for the second time in three weeks! He is the author of “The Nazi Titanic: The Incredible Untold Story of a Doomed Ship in World War II”.
More about the author and his work at his website: http://robertwatson.net/
Interview Transcript
Erik:
Welcome everyone to another episode of the Most Notorious Podcast. I’m Erik Rivenes. Well, it is so great to have Robert Watson back. He is an award-winning author, American History Professor at Lynn University and a prolific author with over 40 books under his belt, including one that I’m sure rings a bell Escape: The Story of the Confederacy’s Infamous Libby Prison and the Civil War’s Largest Jailbreak, the subject of our recent interview. At the end of that interview, he talked about the two other books that form his trilogy, including the Nazi Titanic: the Incredible, Untold Story of a Doomed Ship in World War II, and he graciously agreed to a second interview and we promptly set it up. So thank you for joining me yet again.
Robert:
Erik, it’s a real pleasure. I enjoyed our last program and I’m becoming a fan of the podcast.
Erik:
Thank you, and I’m a fan of your books. So you write that you first came across the story as you were planning a book about the final few days of World War II, right?
Robert:
That’s correct. So at the beginning of my career I decided I didn’t want to be in a story and that wrote about only one year, one event, one person, one battle. That would get stale. And I actually made a big list of all the things I wanted to write about, from, you know, the Revolution and George Washington to Lincoln and the Civil War. But I always wanted to write a book on World War II and the Holocaust. This book would be a two-for-two and one without me knowing it. So I thought and that was on the backburner, Erik, for years actually. And at the end of the year, every year I sit down and make a list of possible projects, and that was on my list as a possible project for years World War II, a book on the Holocaust. But the problem is so many books have been written on World War II and the Holocaust I didn’t know what I could do. That would be unique. And then finally it came to me.
I guess it was about seven years ago and that would be this the last week of the war in Europe. You know, the Nazis were meticulous about their record keeping. We have video, we have all sorts of records, as were the Brits, which is a treasure trove for historians. We’ve all watched on various channels all this incredible footage, but what we don’t know much about is that last week the first week in May, basically, of 1945, the Nazis were too busy dying, committing suicide, running for their lives, the British and the Allies were too busy racing toward Berlin and it was absolute chaos, as Berlin was literally reduced to rubble and government offices that had all this information were blown up and destroyed. You know, so that last week was chaos. So what I thought I would do is try to get a sense of what happened at the very end of the war. But to personalize such a huge topic, my thought was I would write a book and make each day in that final you know, from April 30th when Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, until, you know, a week plus later when the Nazis surrendered I would make each day a chapter and I was trying to find stories of love and loss and triumph and tragedy. And, you know, maybe someone got out of the camp and was reunited with a loved one, maybe a couple got married at the end, maybe a baby was born in the last few days, maybe a Nazi had one final act of inhumanity or one final act of contrition or empathy. That’s what I was looking for. So I decided that would be my book and I was digging around trying to find compelling and powerful stories in that last week.
And by dumb luck and I’m sure you’ve touched on this a number of times in your podcast and your work and I certainly do in history, science, history and detective work often happens by dumb luck. By dumb luck, a needle in a haystack I found a letter wasn’t even looking for it by a major in the British army named Noel Till, and Noel Till described that in North Central Germany, the Southern Baltic, in the final hours of the war, he saw something that he said I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. It was the most horrendous thing I’d ever seen, when thousands and thousands of POWs and Holocaust survivors all died gruesomely. So I had that letter and I thought what on earth is he talking about? I’ve never heard of that. So what I do, like you do in your podcast, I go to the source. I contact the authors and experts. I contacted World War II and Holocaust museums and experts and asked them what is this event where thousands and thousands of POWs and Holocaust survivors died in the final. You know, hours, days of the war, and everybody said it didn’t happen. And I thought I didn’t. I said, yeah, I didn’t think it did, but the letter sure appeared to be legitimate. You know, Erik, if you want the oil changed in your car, I’m not your guy. But you have some really old letters I’m so your guy. That’s the only thing I’m good at. So I put the letter aside, I go back to my work and by dumb luck again, so lightning struck twice, by dumb luck again I find a letter from a general.
His name is Mills-Roberts. He’s a special forces to sixth commando general in Britain. So this is a guy that spent a lifetime in uniform and as a special forces general he’s seen everything. And his letter says the same thing as Tills that in his whole career in uniform he’s never seen anything as horrific as this. So now I can put my evidence together. I knew Till’s unit. I knew General Mills-Roberts’s unit. I knew it was on the southern Baltic coast of north central Germany. I knew it was in the final days of the war.
So again, I called people, started doing my work and I couldn’t find. I found some old obituaries and you know, maybe a short essay and a newspaper in Australia or Germany. But I couldn’t find anything, I guess scholarly or cited or footnoted. So I started calling the Imperial War Museum in Britain, the Royal Archives in Britain, us National Archives and I couldn’t get through to anyone. I couldn’t get anybody to take this seriously that one of the major events of the war in the Holocaust is largely unknown and occurred right at the end.
Then, by dumb luck, again I’m lecturing in France for the 70th anniversary of D-Day. I’m at the D-Day Normandy landing beaches you know, with some World War II vets and a large group that I was leading a tour for them and there I meet an Academy Award winning filmmaker named Deborah Oppenheimer and I was all excited because I saw her movie. It’s about the Holocaust and I show it to my students and they love it. It brings them to tears and it starts a great conversation and she’s asking amazing questions and she’s an intriguing and interesting woman. So we decide we’re going to have you know dinner together and talk further. And I told her I hope you don’t mind, my you know kids are along. And she said I hope you don’t mind, my parents are along and she’s about my age, which is to say an extremely youthful, early 60s. So, at any rate. So we meet, and we meet for dinner and in walks, her parents.
And here it turns out, I know Eric and Gloria, her parents. They live in my hometown and they come to this weekly lecture series I host for a huge audience every week for years. So I go, Eric and Gloria, what on earth are you doing here? They said we’re here for your cruise, your lecture, your tour. And I said oh my gosh, you never told me your daughter was an Academy Award winner. What kind of parents are you? Right, if my kid won the Academy Award, I you know, I put it on a printed on a t shirt and send it to you.
But so we sit down and we talk and I tell her about the letters and she says Well, let me help out. I’m friends with the head of the Imperial War Museum, the Royal Archives. I know Prince Charles, I know I know Dame Judy Dench. So after I picked myself up off the floor she says I’ll make a phone call. Two days later I get a phone call from the head of the Imperial War Museum, one of the world’s greatest war museums in England, and the director says Debbie called, what can I do for you? And I wanted to say you know I’ve been calling for months but I didn’t. I bit my tongue and I told him the story and he said I’ll put an archivist on it. You ready for this, Erik?
Two days after that phone call, I get a call from them. They say Eureka, we found about 750 pages of top secret classified documents stacked away in the archives. And it showed that this event really happened, that this German ship, the so called Nazi Titanic, was blown up in the final moments of the war, causing perhaps the world’s worst maritime disaster, the last tragedy of World War Two and the bloodiest hour of the entire Holocaust. And it had been locked and sealed away. And they said we’re going to release everything and we’ll send everything to you. So I said look, I’m booking my seat myself on the next flight to London and send me everything you have. And they did, and that’s where the book came from.
Erik:
Wow. What is your theory on why this isn’t well known? It seems like it should be.
Robert:
Absolutely so. I have a couple of theories and I’ve talked with these and talked about these with you know, people of importance and everybody agrees. Number one the Allies were so appalled by just the death toll in the final moments that they ordered everything to be sealed top secret. Not only was it classified and locked away in England, but get this it was to be sealed for 100 years, not to be open until the year 2045, making it the 100 year secret. So that’s why people didn’t know. Number two Britain has a national secrets law, kind of like our Freedom of Information Act, and after about 30 years they released documents. Well, a few of these documents were released, but most were not why?
Well, do you remember that final scene in Indiana Jones, raiders of the Lost Ark? You know, when they take the Ark of the Covenant and they have it in a crate and a guy with you know, a forklift is down in basement, number 17, subsection 35 of some building. That makes you know Costco looks small. (Both laugh) Well, yeah, if you go to the Royal Archives, if you go to the National Archives, you know what they display to the public is like point zero, zero, one percent of their holdings. There are millions of artifacts. Now imagine the end of World War Two the papers, the pistols, the, the you know dog tags, the Nazi stuff that they confiscated. I mean millions of things were brought, you know, by ship from continental Europe back to Britain at the end of the war and probably some 20 year old who missed his girlfriend and mom is driving the truck and just kind of loaded it up and they sealed it and there it sat.
Number three the people on the ship. Almost all of them died. In other words, you know, like an old pirate film, you know, dead men tell no tales, so there were so few people left to write their story. And number four you know most people that suffered through the Holocaust or horrors of prisoner of war camps didn’t talk about it. They probably had post traumatic stress and back then we we really didn’t understand it and weren’t as sympathetic as we are today. You know a lot of Holocaust. I interview Holocaust survivors, world War Two vets, all the time. I’ve taped their stories. A lot of them had trouble talking about it and still do, understandably so.
Elie Wiesel, you know, the award winning Holocaust survivor and author, didn’t write his, his incredible book Night until around 1960, 61. Only then did it seem to become okay if not, you know, appropriate for people to tell their stories. So people just didn’t tell their stories. And the last theory is, you know this was the world’s worst war. 60 plus million people perished. It was global. Every family suffered. I mean, the Europe was still in ruin. You know. Bridges, roads, boats, ships everything had been destroyed. People were trying to rebuild. The last thing we wanted to do after the war was dredge up one of the worst stories of the war. Instead, we all remember the iconic image of the, the soul sailor, you know, kissing the girl in Times Square in New York. You know she’s bent back. You know everybody wanted to celebrate and forget this. So, for all those reasons and more, this story was forgotten.
Erik: Right, yeah, so tell us about this ship. When and why was it built?
Robert:
Got it. So the name of the ship is the CAP CAP Arcona A-R-C-O-N-A. It’s named for Cape Arcone, which is a cape in the Southern Baltic Sea off Germany’s coast I believe Germany’s only cape, at any rate. It was built in the 1920s, it was Christen, launched in 1927. It was an ocean liner and she was a beautiful ship. She looked just like the Titanic, except she had three funnels and the Titanic had the four big stacks on the top. You know the seven course dinners, the grand lobby, the, an orchestra on board, the creme de la creme, the European monarchs, a-list Hollywood actors sailed on her. So she looked like and harkened back to the Titanic.
It was built by Blohm and Voss, one of the world’s greatest shipbuilders, out of Germany. The slip was in Hamburg. It was operated by Hamburg, South America, orHamburg Süd, with an umlat above the U, and they’re still in business. One of the world’s great shipping companies. And Germans love their ships, Erik, sort of like Americans with the big cars of you know, in the James Dean days, the 1950s. They love their ships.
So World War I was difficult for Germany because their ships were sunk or confiscated. Germany’s economy was in the toilets. In the 1920s the victors hit Germany with war, reparations, deindustrialization, demilitarization perhaps rightfully so, because they were the belligerents, but perhaps a bit too rough and that would allow for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis who needed to blame someone. But one of the ideas was launch the world’s greatest ocean liner that looks like the Titanic and that will get Germany back into the shipping business and also for national pride, to help lift the people up. And boy, she was a beauty. The ship was called the Queen of the South Atlantic all sorts of immaculate names. She sailed over 90 voyages. She specialized, as the name would say, with Hamburg, south America and going to South America. She’d sail down the European coast and then go to Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. There was even a tango in Argentina named after the ship.
And the ship was so famous that in fact I was giving a lecture when the book came out to a couple hundred people. I think it was at Penn, University of Pennsylvania, and a man came up to me and probably 90, a very distinguished fellow and started crying. He said oh my gosh. He said when I was a little boy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, my mom used to take us to the dock whenever the ship would come in and we’d stand behind the fence and look at the new Titanic and all the rich people getting on and off. And he said I’d forgotten that. It’s just that your talk about the book just brought back that memory. There was even playing cards, like a jack, queen, king, ace playing cards, but instead of those pictures they had the pictures of all the officers on the ship. So this was a famous, famous ship. If you and I were having this conversation in 1929, 1930, of course we would know the ship.
Then, of course, world War, Hitler rises to power in 1933. It turns out Hitler loves the ship because he likes big, shiny things and you know he uses it as a source of Nazi power and prestige. He tasks Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, to propagandize the ship by saying to the world your Titanic sunk but ours is still afloat. We make the best ships and look A-list Hollywood actors in European monarchs sail on our ship. So that was sort of the story through the 30s until, of course, September 1, 1939, when, with the Blitzkrieg invasion, Nazi Germany invades Poland and World War II begins.
Most German ships, merchant and otherwise, are painted with a type of nautical camouflage. Some machine guns and artillery pieces are put on the ships, you know, and they continue to try to function, but not this ship. This was too important to Hitler, too important to Germany. So they took her to the north-central German coast on the southern Baltic. She was put, actually in Poland, at a place called the Germans, called Gatenhofen, formerly near Gdynia Gdansk, and the Pomeranian coast of Poland, and there she was mothballed. The Germans didn’t want her to be sunk, and that north-central sort of Poland-Germany-Southern Baltic, that would be one of the last places in Europe to be destroyed during the war. So the ship was safe there she was. All the paint was stripped off of her, all the fancy Persian carpets and chandeliers and gold and silver. Everything was taken out of the ship, the art, and she was used as a naval training barracks, as she was moored there off the coast and there she sat for several years during the war.
Erik:
And she was pretty much past her prime at this point. Her hull was rusting. She was becoming less seaworthy too, right?
Robert:
Absolutely. And of course, with a global war and with Germany fighting a war on multiple fronts North Africa, the Western Eastern Front, the barbarous of the invasion of Soviet Union there was no effort, no ability, no resources, no paint. No, the engines were rusting out, the ship was rusting out and, of course, without upkeep that happens. And she’s not a young ship, she’s now. She was launched in 27. So she’s sitting there rusting and kind of obscure and forgotten. We will be right back and we have returned.
Erik:
And it takes some brainstorming between Hitler and Goebbels who are bonding over one of their favorite things in the world – watching films.
Robert:
Hitler and Goebbels loved movies. They loved Hollywood films. They considered themselves connoisseurs of fine film. Basically Germany, Siskel and Ebert for any members of your listenership that are over 30, 35. So what they would do? I found that it was not uncommon for Hitler and Goebbels to, on a weekend, to watch two or three Hollywood blockbusters back to back to back, with with the translator standing over their shoulder, simultaneous. You know interpretation, translation, and they love these films. They love the sort of the action, drama, romance hybrids. They loved Gone with the Wind. They watched that a lot. They loved King Kong they watched that a lot and, believe it or not, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They like the Disney movie. You know I have a daughter. She’s grown now, but when she was little we watched that all the time and if memory serves, it was set in the Black Forest in Germany, so they watched these movies all the time.
The movie they hated was Casablanca. Goebbels, you know, ranted about the film. Why? Because Casablanca had good direction, good acting, good script, good cinematography. It was an action drama, romance hybrid, but it was essentially an anti-Nazi propaganda film and a blockbuster. So that movie they hated. Once it appears based on Goebbels’ surviving diary and a lot of it survived the war and is in English translation today. I read it that they were watching a movie once, but unfortunately he didn’t write what movie. It was some blockbuster and at the end of it they were speechless. They were so moved by the power of this Hollywood film that they just sat there rather than debating the cinematography like they usually did, and the two of them thought they knew everything. They just sat there quietly. I remember watching Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan and literally sitting in my seat for 15 minutes after the movie, unable to talk and unable to stand up. I was so emotionally drained. That happened to them.
But that’s when Hitler got an idea. Goebbels said that he kicked over all the seats, the chairs in the studio, and he said the idea is this you know, Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, went belly up, thank God. The North Africa campaign went belly up for the Nazis, thank goodness. Operation Sea Lion, the attempted invasion of the British Isles, went belly up. So they were losing. They needed something drastic.
So Hitler’s idea was to task Goebbels with opening up a new propaganda front to try to make the world like the Nazis and hate the Allies. Now what was that propaganda front? Hitler wanted Goebbels to build Hollywood on the Rhine and he wanted him to make the world’s greatest propaganda movie. Now, what movie would that be? They didn’t know. But later Goebbels and Hitler learned that a script writer a Nazi script writer by the name of Bratt, was working on a script for the Titanic. So they took that and they decided they would make the Nazi Titanic. And of course they had a star for the movie, the Cap Arcona. Hitler refers to this great ship as the Nazi Titanic. She’s already famous.
So they decided to make the movie and Hitler and Goebbels authorized an unlimited budget. It would be the world’s most expensive propaganda film ever made. This is 1942-43. And they hired the best cinematographers, the most handsome matinee actors, the most beautiful German models, the best set designers, spare no expense, even though they’re in the middle of the war, which, by that point that was turning against them. They had entire units of the Wehrmacht, that’s the army and the Kriegsmarine, the navy, reassigned to be extras for this movie. If your audience is of a certain age, Erik, they’ll know the name Cecil B DeMille. What they wanted was a Cecil B DeMille-esque cast of thousands, greatest story ever told, blockbuster. So they went to the Baltic coast and they repainted the ship, put all the opulent silver gold, everything back in the ship to be the star of the movie, and they went about trying to make this movie.
The problem they had was they didn’t have a director. It turns out, of course, that all Germany’s great directors, most of them Jewish, had either fled or were in concentration camps. They found a guy named Herbert Selpin, S-e-l-p-i-n. Nicknamed “The Hedgehog”. He was a famous director. He was kind of artsy-fartsy-difficult, but a great director. In some ways he made a lot of sense to direct this movie because he specialized in action, drama, romance, hybrids, things like Casablanca, things like King Kong, Gone with the Wind.
I went back and watched one of his movies. I think it was called Peterson and it was basically Indiana Jones. You know about a dashing professor and Erik, aren’t they all?
Erik: (laughing)
Yes, of course.
Robert:
Thank you for saying yes, the dashing professor who goes to Africa, fights the locals, finds the treasure, gets the girl, lives happily ever after, so that kind of stuff. That’s what Hitler and Goebbels wanted. In some ways Selpin was an odd choice, however, because he wasn’t a very loyal Nazi. But they don’t have much choice, so they hire him to make the movie For realism.
He wants, you know, the sink. To ship at night you have to have all the big lights. The problem is Germany’s under a mandatory blackout. But Hitler and Goebbels give the green light. The set is bombed. One of the actresses gets pregnant from one of the soldiers, or sailors. The sailors are getting drunk and wrecking the set. Just everything’s going wrong and the movie is way behind schedule, way over cost. Goebbels is breathing down Goebbels’s neck. Where’s my movie to win the war? Goebbels is breathing down the director’s Selpin’s neck. Where’s my movie to win the war? Selpin’s breathing down everyone’s neck. One day Selpin loses it. He’s drunk on set. He curses Hitler, Goebbels and the Nazi party and the military. Now you know you can’t do that in Nazi Germany. There’s eyes and ears everywhere. He gets summoned to Berlin to meet with Goebbels and they hang him and kill him. Goebbels says he committed suicide. So they have to find a guy named Klinger to sort of a B-movie director to finish the film. So there’s the world’s great propaganda film.
Erik:
Yeah, it was really interesting reading about Selpin. He was not unlike what I imagine Hollywood directors from this era to be. He had lots of talent, but he also had a big ego and a short temper and, like you said, he just kept asking for more and more and more. It was pretty incredible that he was allowed to get away with it as long as he did.
Robert:
Selpin is brilliant, he’s talented but difficult, prima donna, you know, and again I think you said it’s sort of like the stereotype. He even wore an ascot and forrated around set. You know, he’s sort of the stereotypical, difficult but genius director I guess you could say. And yeah, his demands just just war and war and war on Goebbels and Hitler. But the movie was too big, they invested too much, they were too desperate, so they kind of put up with it. But then you know, you can’t curse out the military. And he seemed to.
We don’t know a lot about it. One of his former friends, who a cinematographer that worked on movies with him, is the one that ratted him out. But you know, there were eyes and ears everywhere in Nazi Germany. But he is almost fatalistic, Erik, by this point he’s drinking, he’s had it with the Nazis, he’s had it with the war. Imagine the I mean anybody living in Germany or in Europe at the time. I couldn’t have been but overwhelmed with grief about what was happening. So he appears to not have apologized when he’s before Goebbels and appears to have been ready and willing to suffer the punishment. So you know the movie after all that Goebbels takes a look at the movie and he’s appalled.
All this brilliance and work. There is Nazi propaganda in the movie, but there’s also some covert anti-Nazi propaganda, giving the director Selpin the last laugh. Goebbels realizes that the movie is about a fanatical captain, aka Hitler, who leads his ship into an iceberg aka Germany, in the you know, world War II and people perish, people perish. So the parallels are too many and too many families had lost loved ones, you know, as German ships were sunk. So after all that, he bans the movie, so it’s never shown to a wide audience. Fortunately, pirated copies of the movie make it out to Prague and Paris, so you can find it today. You can even watch it on YouTube with, you know, english subtitles. I’ve watched the movie probably three times over and it’s difficult to watch because you know what it is. But it’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
Selpin introduces new cinematography. It’s a remarkable and a powerful film, but disgusting at the same time. Obviously, if you want a good bit of a sidebar trivia here, I love the James Cameron movie Titanic. Of course everybody did. But there’s an old British film, A Night to Remember. Off the top of my head I’m thinking 1959, and I love that movie. It’s a great. I remember seeing it as a kid, in black and white, late at night. It’s a great Titanic film. One of the things that makes it great is the English director took all the old Nazi footage from the propaganda film and uses it. So whenever you see the Titanic or people drowning or lifeboats, it’s the actual Nazi footage. After all, Goebbels and Selpin no longer had copyright. Yeah, so that’s the tragedy of this crazed idea of this propaganda film. After the movie, the Nazi Titanic ship is taken back to the Polish coast and dry docked there once again.
Erik:
So when people think of the Titanic the ship that sank they don’t typically think of Germany. So to get their message across to German audiences, they create a German character the hero of the movie who tries to save the ship.
Robert:
Yeah, they did. The movie has a lot of scenes whereby the wealthy Americans and the English crew they say the ship is invincible, like us, and they’re arrogant. There were some of that, but it’s the ship sinking. They don’t care about the poor folks below. It’s the wealthier stepping on one another to get off the ship. But there’s a German officer and he’s the one who warns everybody about icebergs and in fact it’s kind of comical. He has an encyclopedic command of icebergs. He’s like a scholar of icebergs and he’s the one who wants to run below decks and save the poor folks. He even finds a little girl with pigtails and a puppy dog and that kind of a thing and he’s testifying we needed to save people.
So it was trying to make the German character look good and make the British and Americans look bad. So that was the idea. I don’t know how that could possibly flip public opinion and help them to win the war. But again, Hitler and Goebbels didn’t always think straight. They were megalomaniacs who thought they knew more than all the generals and everybody. They were narcissists. They were just strange birds. So then they were living a false reality. So I guess that’s why they thought this movie could turn to tide of the war. Of course it did not. It wasn’t shown widely.
Erik:
So by January of 1945, the German Navy was running out of ships and that is why the Cap Arcona was reactivated, to be a transport and take Germans to other German occupied countries, correct?
Robert:
That’s right. That’s right, probably the largest maritime evacuation in history. You know I’m not a maritime historian, but probably this occurred then in the winter of 1945. What’s happening is the Soviet Union, the Red Army, is marching in from the east, taking over all of Eastern Europe which the Nazis had gobbled up, and hitting Poland and threatening Germany itself. And it’s payback time. The Soviets are absolutely inhumane and monstrous. The Russian soldiers are committing just positively medieval crimes. They’re raping everybody from five to 50 and they’re sort of crucifying farmers on the barn doors and shooting them. They’re throwing farmers with the pigs who haven’t eaten and they get eaten alive. I’m just disgusting, it’s just unimaginable. And they’re slaughtering. They’re not only killing the German soldiers but they’re killing civilians. They’re just a swath of terror.
So all able-bodied people, German and otherwise, civilian and soldier, are rushing to the Baltic coast to be evacuated. So any ship sort of like Dunkirk you know the British and Churchill’s orders during World War II from the French coast, anything that would float, the Germans were rushing to the coast of Poland to try to evacuate people. So the Nazi Titanic was used for that. It’s operational, but she has a small crew and she’s back to rusting and her motors aren’t working so well. But she’s so big, she can put thousands and thousands of people crammed on board to evacuate them to Copenhagen, which was still in Nazi hands, at Denmark, and she makes three trans-Baltic crossings filled with 10,000 to 20,000 refugees. But then all the refugees are sharing these stories about how they suffered during the war, the crimes that the Nazis committed and the crimes that the Soviets, the Russians, were committing, and the captain of the ship hears that, puts a gun in his mouth and blows his head off. You know, this is kind of what was going on.
So it’s chaos. The Nazi Titanic is racing at night from the Polish coast with other ships, and the other ships are being targeted by Soviet submarines and sunk. Then, when the ship sinks and people are jumping over and lifeboats are lowered, the Soviet subs surface and they machine gun everybody, even if they’re civilians or the wounded soldiers, and they try to hit the Nazi Titanic. But she’s too big, too fast, her halls are too sturdy, you know. Basically a torpedo bounces off the hall and subs can’t keep up with her engines, even though they’re old and rusted. So, yes, she helps to evacuate thousands and thousands of folks from the coast, but she has one more role to play, one more task.
Erik:
So on March 19th of 1945, Hitler gives one of his final orders eliminate all evidence of the Holocaust, and with that you introduce a very important character to the story. He’s a Swedish diplomat. Could you tell us more about him?
Robert:
Right. So, yeah, Hitler – most historians refer to this as his liquidation decree. Kill everybody in the camps, destroy all the paperwork to camps, don’t leave any evidence, don’t let them fall into Allied hands. And so in the winter, early spring of 45, it’s just a bloodbath of carnage, as Nazi commandants just kill everybody in the camps. So it’s a horrific time. At this time there’s a Swedish diplomat named Folke Bernadotte. He’s the nephew of the King of Sweden and he has an idea that a lot of Swedes are in Germany. What it was was Goebbels and Hitler, Himmler were obsessed with this idea of Aryan racial superiority. They bought into all this racialism, this phrenology, this sort of bunk about racial superiority, that the Germanics and the Scandinavians the tall, blonde, blue-eyed, lean, muscular people that look just like Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels that they were, yeah, a knot, that they were somehow lords on earth. They were the Übermensch. So what happened was a lot of these German officers went and grabbed Swedish women to marry them. There were even these I don’t know kind of horrendous birthing camps where, according to the Nazis, ideal Swedish women would have children. In fact, the one singer from the group ABBA came from one of these camps where her mother was in the camp. So all these horrible things were happening.
And Bernadotte goes to save the Swedes. He meets with Heinrich Himmler and he basically tells Himmler you know and I know the war is ending and you’re going to lose, and you and I know that you’re either going to be torn limb from limb by the public or you’re going to be butchered by, you know, the military, or you’re going to be put on trial and hanged. So it would do you a lot of good to work with the Swedes and me. As a neutral country. Sweden and Switzerland were neutral, as was Spain and Portugal, although they were led by fascists, Salazar and Franco, who were aligned with Hitler. You know, a neutral country, Sweden, I can put in a good word for you after the war. So he plays Himmler like a guitar and Himmler buys into this and allows him to go into the camps. So Bernadotte goes into the camps to rescue a couple hundred Swedes. But of course when he’s in the camps he sees you know the horrors of the concentration camps and the Holocaust. So he comes back and says well, I also want women, any woman, french women, he starts with and he plays Himmler again and Himmler lets him do it Eventually. He wants everybody.
So Bernadotte is bringing ships and trucks. They call it the White Bus Campaign. They put a red cross on the top of a white bus. He evacuates somewhere on the order of 26,000, if memory serves, people from the camps and is trying to take them back to Sweden. He’s in a race and he sees the Nazi Titanic ship on the coast and he hears that people are being loaded up on the ship. So he rushes back to Sweden and he tells everybody save the people on that ship, I’ll be back to rescue them. What he’s having to do by this point is bribe the Nazi guards. So he goes back to get his personal fortune, art, gold, whatever he can. But by the time he gets back the ship is blown up and destroyed, you know, along with thousands, of thousands of people.
Erik:
Doesn’t Bernadotte’s tell Himmler that he knows Eisenhower?
Robert:
Yeah, he tells Himmler. He says I can hire friends, I know Churchill, I know Montgomery, I mean he’s lying through his teeth and Himmler takes everything hook line and sinker. Bernadotte, tragically, is killed right after the war. He appeals to Harry Truman, who does great things for the fledgling state of Israel and for Holocaust survivors and people in displaced persons camps. Truman is trying to help create the modern state of Israel and help people. Bernadotte goes over to help Truman but Bernadotte is shot by a far right wing nationalist Jewish group and he’s assassinated, which is he’s risking his life to save people. It’s quite ironic. It’s a, it’s a rabid right wing nationalist group. Right before he was killed he wrote his memoir and he gives details of his meetings with Himmler. Yeah, he lied through his teeth, but Himmler bought it, thank goodness, and it allowed him to save Jews, French, Swedes, women, a lot of people from the camps.
Erik:
Right. So where does this idea come from to turn the Cap Arcona into basically a floating concentration camp?
Robert:
So, Himmler, you know, over working with the Gestapo and the SS and the camps, Himmler gets this idea. You know Hitler wants to liquidate everything, of course, as per the order that you correctly mentioned. But Himmler sends a sort of a countermanding order. It’s sort of cryptic, he can’t come flat out and say it. In fact, later Hitler finds out about this and sends two assassins to kill Himmler, but they they don’t catch him in time. He’s caught by the Allies and he commits suicide. But what Himmler says is OK, I’ll get the Nazi Titanic, we will dock it on the north central coast and we will make it a floating concentration camp. Now one, the ship is too big. It’s in a place called the Bay of Lübeck, L-u-b-e-c-k, in a town called Neustadt, which means New City in German. The ship’s so big it can’t dock, so they have to drop anchor three kilometers out at sea. So in late April and early May, as the war is literally ending, thousands of people are being told by Himmler. Anybody not killed in that liquidation order is marched to a camp in Hamburg called Neuengamme, n-e-u-e-n-g-a-m-m-e, and that was a brick making concentration camp. And they’re marched there and then from there. They’re taken by train, by boat and by foot All the way. It’s about I don’t know 60 kilometers-ish from the coast. They’re taken to the coast to Neustadt and they’re put on board the Nazi Titanic.
Now here’s where the wrinkle is, and this is one of the reasons Himmler was cryptic and Hitler wanted to have him killed. It’s not just a floating concentration camp. Hitler’s plan is to board the Nazi Titanic and sail with it to meet with Churchill or Montgomery or Eisenhower or somebody and negotiate a conditional surrender whereby his life is saved, and in exchange he will give them these thousands and thousands of POWs and Holocaust survivors loaded into the ship, crammed into the ship. So that’s the crazy plan. Hitler never gets on the ship. He has to go on the run before he has a chance.
April 30th, Hitler commits suicide. His new bride, longtime mistress Eva Braun, commits suicide. He kills his favorite German shepherd, Blondie. Joseph Goebbels and his wife killed themselves and their six kids. Everybody’s killing themselves. It’s chaos.
So the ship sits there, filled with prisoners and Holocaust survivors we don’t know exactly how many because nobody’s keeping accurate records at the time. And what you have, Erik, is this macabre scene from Dante’s Inferno or something where, from the coast, gray skies, early in the morning, a launch is sent out to the ship with 100 or 500 or 50 prisoners and they’re loaded on the ship, and then they bring 50 or 100 corpses back and they’re buried in a shallow grave. Then it goes back with another 125 prisoners. Then the ship throws 75 dead Holocaust survivors into the Baltic Sea and then sends the launch back. So, day after day, the scene’s repeating itself, where hundreds are taken out, hundreds are brought back, hundreds are taken out, a dozen’s brought back. People are thrown overboard. Literally, the coastline is littered from the waves washing corpses offshore. This is what’s happening in May ’45, as the war is ending.
Erik:
And there’s kind of a hierarchy of who the Germans think are important, reflected in where they quarter on the ship. The officers sleep in the suites at the top, and then the farther you go to the bottom of the ship, the more miserable the conditions are.
Robert:
Absolutely, you know. So the guards and officers are in the top floors. Now the ship was opulent at one point, but by this time the ship is smelling of death and sewage, you know, and there was no place for feces and urine and vomiting. So even the top decks were no longer luxurious and the smell was making everyone sick.
Those at the very bottom of the pecking order, Jews and Soviet soldiers. They’re down in the deep dark holds below decks, you know, kind of the engine room, if you will, and they’re down there in pitch black dark for days. Of course it’s already starved, enduring the Holocaust, enduring the death march to the coast, soviet soldiers, enduring the deprivations of the war, the Soviet Union running out of food. There’s skeletons by the time they arrive. So countless hundreds, if not thousands, are already dead on board in pitch black dark. One young boy named Berek Jackubowicz, who’s Polish, who survived multiple camps in the death march, he described being, you know, ankle deep in urine and feces and having to pile up dead bodies to sleep on top of them and surviving only because he had, I guess, a dry biscuit and hidden some food in a pocket and he’s a teenager, so he’s a little healthier. He described being in pitch black, dark with you know just hell, with all these corpses and people dying and the agony and not knowing what was happening. So, yeah, the ship itself was hell.
Erik:
And then, even more ominously, the life jackets are locked up. They start punching holes in the lifeboats.
Robert:
Yeah. So the captain of the ship, Bertram, he actually feels sorry for the prisoners and he asks his crew -now they have a skeletal crew, he means probably a 10 to 20 percent of the crew that he needs to operate the ship. He thinks they’re going to sail. Little does he know. You know they’re a big target and the motors are probably not capable of sailing at this point. He tells his crew to treat the prisoners well. However, the SS boards the ship and with a gun to his head, Heinrich Bertram, the captain, is told let us board and stop taking care of the prisoners. Then the SS go around and put holes in all the life jackets and the lifeboats. So just when you think it can’t get any crueler, just when you think you’ve seen everything through the Holocaust and the war and there could be no additional acts of inhumanity or you know, things just get worse and worse and worse, and so it’s hopeless and there’s a fatalism is apparent on everybody on the ship as they wait for what they don’t know.
Erik:
Yeah. Would you tell us how the ship was attacked?
Robert:
Yeah, so it’s May 3rd. So this is right before, just days before the surrender, the unconditional surrender, in the end of the world’s worst war. What’s happening is there are rumors that the allies intercept, that the Nazis are going to try to flee. They’re going to go to a mountainous place in Austria or to Norway by sea and use the mountains you know the cold weather, the geographic isolation, the deep fjords for one last stand, kind of a final readout. And after the war they did find U-boats, nazi U-boats in the fjords of Norway. So maybe there was something to the rumor.
So what the British are doing is they’re trying to deny the Nazis the ability to sail away by blowing up German ships all along, you know the Baltic, and they’re also mopping up the last vestiges of resistance. So the Royal Air Force to British, has these Mark 1B Typhoon bombers. Now, it’s not a large bomber like an American B-17 or B-24 or the British Halifax or Lancaster, if anybody out there knows their World War II planes but it’s not a small, fast fighter like an American Mustang or the British Spitfire. It’s kind of a medium size. It’s a hybrid, it can bomb and fight and it specializes in taking out tanks and trains and ships. So squadrons of these Mark 1B, these Typhoons are flying up and down the coast, hitting any ship.
On May 3rd, they’re sent to Neustadt, where the Nazi Titanic is, and they arrive in the morning from their bases and it’s like pea soup, it’s cloudy, weather’s horrible, they’re running low on fuel, they can’t see, so they return to base, they refuel and the clouds dissipate a bit. So they set back out that afternoon at 14.30, 2.30 pm they fly into the Baltic and the Neustadt in the bay, and there they see four ships, two freighters, the Athen and the Thielbek, and they see two ocean liners, the Deutschland and the Nazi Titanic, the Cap Arcona. So these pilots see the biggest ship they’ve ever seen and it’s low in the water, which means it’s probably full of passengers and full of fuel. So they mistakenly think the Nazis are trying to sail away and it’s friendly fire, Erik. The British, the Royal Air Force, six squadrons of these Typhoon bombers open up on the Nazi Titanic dropping 500-pound bombs, strafing the ship and those in the water with twin machine guns on both wings and six squadrons. You usually have eight planes per squadron. By the end of the war they’re operating with five, six or seven. But through the math there’s a lot of planes. They come in and they unload everything they have and the ship is now a ball of an inferno. It’s a flame. It’s the first blast that hits the engine room and the ship is loaded with fuel, not the sail. The Nazis were cruel. They wanted it to burn because they were thinking about blowing it up, but the British did it for them and the ship is lifted up.
It’s rolling over like a big beached whale. On its side, no decks. A gaping hole is torn into the ship and it fills with water. The Baltic Sea is a frigid 42 degrees Fahrenheit at the time, so people are dying instantly of hypothermia or drowning. There are no conditions to swim.
As the ship rolls, the big giant smokestacks, the funnels break off and, like a couple ton bowling ball, it crushes people on the deck. People are jumping overboard, the suction’s pulling them under the ship. They can’t swim. They’re dying of hypothermia and a frigid Baltic. And then these typhoon bombers come by and they strafe with their machine guns anybody floating in the water or holding onto a desk or a table or something. So it’s just an hour of carnage, and we don’t know the numbers, but thousands and thousands are killed by friendly fire. They even go down the port strafing with their machine guns people at the port, and then they sail back to their bases Saying that they had destroyed an ocean liner that was going to be used for the evacuation and in fact friendly fire killed thousands of POWs and Holocaust survivors.
Erik:
What percentage of the people on board survived, would you guess?
Robert:
So we don’t have a firm number. I did my darnedest, my best to guess based on some of the records that did survive, based on some of the accounts of people who did survive, and my guess would be that somewhere between 4,500 and 7,500 died on the ship, probably 2,000 on the other ship, the Deutschland, and probably another 1,000 or 2,000 on the small freighters, probably another 1,000 or so at the port and probably several 1,000 on the death march. We know several hundred were in a train and the Nazis, after they arrived, with all these prisoners and Holocaust survivors in the train, they never unlocked the doors, they just ran for their lives and people sat in the train until they all died. So hundreds more. So there’s the accounts. So somewhere between 4,500 and 7,500 died on the ship. My guess is 250 to 350 survived, actually escaped, I guess you could say a floating prison break, and so that’s not very many, a small percentage.
One of them to escape was I mentioned him earlier his name was Berek Jakubowicz, the Pole. He was a teenager and his brother Josek. They survived camps, including Auschwitz. They survived that death march to the coast. They survived days below the ship. He wrote that when the ship was hit the explosion lifted the ship out of the water and turned it on its side and it lit at a flame, that a hole was torn in below decks and the water came rushing in. Those still alive all drowned immediately. He and his brother, Josek, treaded water, but as the water filled to the ceiling the hatches were closed above them. So they’re just gonna have to take a deep breath and then drown. But miraculously, at the last moment the hatch opened up.
Some of the Holocaust survivors on the top decks risked their lives to go below decks and save their comrades. So they go running through the ship, swimming underwater, running around where it’s on fire just as harrowing escape this prison break to get off the ship. Finally they’re stuck. There’s nowhere to go. But there’s a vent above them. So the boys, the Jakubowicz brothers, one gets on the shoulders of the other and they pull off the vent and climb up. But as they reach down to give hands to lift up the rescuers, the rescuers are burned and the fire. So the boys go to the top deck and as the ship’s rolling over, Berek says we have to get off the ship. But Josek can’t swim. So they give their brotherly goodbyes.
Josek takes his chances on the ship. Berek goes overboard. He’s picked up by a German fisherman. It’s fisherman so afraid of the Nazis, he won’t give Berek his name. Tried to find out the name so that Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, could list him as among the Righteous, you know Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews. But he won’t tell him his name.
He takes Berek and some others to a bakery in the town of Neustadt and there they there’s nothing to eat, he’s naked, he’s freezing. So they wrap up in the burlap sacks that the flour came in and they like the ovens to keep warm. In the morning the door of the bakery has kicked open and fortunately it’s the British and they rescue Berek. They take him to the hospital in clothing and treating, and when he’s in the hospital, guess who? He finds his brother, Josek. What happened was the night before the British and boats went out to the burning Nazi Titanic and Josek was sitting on the side of the ship, which was now the top of the ship because it rolled halfway over. The ship was bigger than the Baltic, is deep at three kilometers out, so the ship didn’t fully go under. That’s how big this like the Titanic. So Josek sitting on the side and he’s got burns all over him from the molten metal, you know, and the ship is on fire. But he’s alive and Berek and Josek are rescued and they moved to Boston where, I’m happy to say, they live long lives and are successful. They marry. I talked to Berek widow years ago. He had passed when my book first came out.
Another one that survived, I’ll give you one more. His name was Francis Akos. A-K-O-S. He was a kid, he was a violinist in the Hungarian Jewish Orchestra. He’s captured. He survives multiple camps, he survives the death march. He goes in the water. He and a lot of others are picked up by Germans and boats but when they see that they’re Jews or prisoners they throw them back in the Baltic. These folks somehow swim three kilometers in freezing water. Michael Phelps couldn’t do this. So the will to live among these prisoners of war and survivors, I think, is something we underestimate and understate. That story isn’t fully told. How people managed to survive when they should never have survived. They swim three kilometers to the shore. When they get to the shore, make it freezing. There’s Hitler Youth and Naval Cadets, young Nazis killing people on the shore. In fact, when they run out of bullets they use the butt of their guns to bash heads in.
And as Akos and others are ready to be killed. These young Nazis are aiming their guns at them. They hear a machine gun fire and the young Hitler Youth and Naval Cadets crumble to the ground. It’s General Mills-Roberts. That was the second letter I found back at the beginning of this podcast I told you about, and this British special commando wipes them out and saves this guy. He moves to Chicago and becomes a part of the Chicago Philharmonia. The symphony becomes the first chair, violinist and concertmaster. I talked to him and his daughter. He was, sad to say, in the early stages of dimension has since passed. So, yeah, there were some survivors who managed to escape this floating concentration camp, this inferno, this hell and the Nazis and the bombs and everything else, the Hitler Youth, and actually make it so, but probably only 250 to 350.
Erik:
Wow, yeah, Speaking of General Mills-Roberts, he is so furious about what he has witnessed that he confronts a German field marshal, right?
Robert:
He does. And he takes the field marshal’s riding-crop and bashes – he beats him with it. And his men in the 6 Commando -so these are British special forces. This must be like our Navy SEALs, our 82nd Airborne. These are tough guys, the toughest of the tough. When they find some of the Hitler Youth Naval Cadets and some Nazis. He said “I wasn’t an officer and a gentleman”. He told him just tear him limb from limb. We’re not taking prisoners. He had had it. Imagine what he had seen during the war and imagine, as the war is ending on the shoreline, witnessing the ship being blown up and all the bodies and hearing the stories. So yeah, he loses his temper. He loses it. Understandably. So who could not? I mean, who would not, I would and beats the field marshal and has his men just kill the Nazis there’s take no prisoners time.
Erik:
Yeah, and then he forces the field marshal to accompany him to the beach to see the carnage up close.
Robert:
Yeah, I mean just the scene of the shoreline, and this big, u-shaped, massive shoreline is just littered with bodies, two, three deep, everywhere. And they come across the woman and presumably a daughter, a little girl. They’re still holding hands, they’re dead on the shore, people were burned, there’s still bodies floating in the water, the ship is still on fire and you know, Mills-Roberts does what I did. You know, he makes the locals bury some of the dead and he drags the field marshal over, basically, you know, sticking his face in this death of what they had done, and Mills-Roberts not one to be messed with. So, yeah, what a gripping and powerful scene that must have been.
You know, in writing this book and doing my research, Erik, there were many nights where I’m someone. I don’t need a lot of sleep. I’m a workaholic. I stay up late at night writing. I pull all nighters less all nighters at my age now, but I still work late. But there were many nights where I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was so emotionally draining.
I remember contacting a friend of mine named Alan Berger, who’s a Holocaust scholar an outstanding one and asking him you know how did you spend four decades writing about this? You know I’m doing one book and I can’t. I don’t think I can write another one. It was so emotionally draining. But when I came across those kinds of stories about the little girl and Mills-Roberts, it was just… I was drained and just…you know, when they wrote about the records of the train, they smelled it. The soldiers smelled the death from the train before they saw the train. So I don’t know how many hundreds of yards or miles away you know they smelled the death and they get to the train and open it up and it’s filled with dead bodies who have been rotting in there that the Nazis never opened it up. I mean, just one thing after another. This was I can’t imagine anything more hellish.
Erik:
Yeah, it’s just heart-wrenching, devastating. The horror is just overwhelming, page after page. So I did want to ask you about this. So Bernadotte did notify British command that there were prisoners aboard these ships, but the message apparently never made it to the pilots, right?
Robert:
Correct. So Count Bernadotte. He is on the coast where the ship is rescuing people running back and forth to Sweden. He notifies the British fighter command excuse me, bomber command of the exact coordinates, longitude and latitude of the ship, gives a description, says there’s civilians, POWs, Holocaust survivors. Now, bomber command in any army, has good intelligence. You have to. You know you’re flying it, you know whatever, 10,000 feet, you know when you lower it and you bomb. You have to have good intel and that the navigator has to be a mathematician. He did notify bomber command.
However, in a regrettable, unfortunate bureaucratic snafu, bomber command was so overwhelmed with the end of the war that they transferred this mission to fighter command. Thus the hybrid mid-level, mid-sized planes, the Typhoons, and Johnny Baldwin was the commanding officer of the six squadrons of Typhoons that flew in. He was only 23. He was the old man they give you a sense of, you know, the British were putting 19-year-olds in the cockpit at the end of the war. He wasn’t given the intel. So somebody did not pass along the info from bomber command to fighter command, to the commander, Johnny Baldwin, that day. And just an unbelievably regrettable bureaucratic snafu. So they went in thinking you know, and in the rain and the elements, that they were doing good work. They didn’t realize it was civilians.
Let me give you one example. There was a Frenchman on board who his record was in that you know those documents that I found in the archives and what he said was two days earlier he was flying with a Typhoon in Kiel, the port of Kiel, up the coast, and he was being shot at by anti-aircraft guns and it blew a hole in the tail of his plane large enough to kick a football through we would say soccer ball. So they were expecting to be fired at. So what happens?
It’s young guys. They’re scared to death. Many of them are very green. They’re not, you know, experienced veterans. They come roaring out of the clouds at a low level, and you never want to be at a low level because you’re vulnerable to anti-aircraft guns. You see the biggest ship you’ve ever seen in your life that’s low in the water. You just open up on that ship and get away. You know and I’m not excusing it by any stretch but – the “fog of war”. There’s never been a battle or war where there aren’t civilian or, you know, casualties or collateral damage, and this was just the most heinous example of it.
Erik:
Yeah, without question. So what eventually becomes of the Cap Arcona? What’s left of it at the end?
Robert:
Yeah, part of the reason why this has become, you know, the ghost ship, the lost ship, a mystery, unknown, it was forgotten part of the reason is there’s nothing left of the ship. So the ship never went, sunk fully below the waters because it’s too big. So it sits half in half out of the water, three kilometers out, from 1945 until I believe it was 1949. And it’s, you know, it’s in the channel, it’s blocking sea traffic. So finally, the Soviets, who gobble up Poland and Eastern Europe after the war, the Iron Curtain, they dredged the area and they salvaged the ship. So they tear the Cap Arcona apart and they use the metal and different aspects of the ship for Polish freighters. So the Cap Arcona scrapped and bits and pieces of it are put on various Polish freighters who are sailed through 1950, through about the 70s, and then they’re all scrapped. So there’s, we don’t have the bell, we don’t have the anchor, we don’t have the wheel from the bridge. Those would make great museum exhibits and people could go see them and it would be a powerful reminder to see the bell.
But it was all scrapped, salvage from the Soviets and then put on Polish freighters and the you know the Soviets and then later the Russians. They’re never cooperative, they never, they never do the right thing. Their records were inconclusive and then those old Polish freighters were just stripped apart and dumped. So there were diving expeditions that found bones and spoons and bits and pieces. So there’s a few little artifacts. There’s one really small sort of a mom and pop, at best like run out of a garage type of museum on the Baltic coast there at Neustadt, and a small memorial that it says 7,500 and has the 20, some countries where all the dead were from. That’s it. So it’s like this ship disappeared and then of course it was classified. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s forgotten.
Erik:
Wow. So I so appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to do this. And I have to say that I read this not long after reading your Libby prison break book and I definitely understand why you put them together in a series.
Robert:
Yeah, I oftentimes try to do them in trilogies three books in a series. The third one’s the Ghost Ship of Brooklyn. But yeah, it’s just. It’s very powerful and it’s an honor to be on your show. Erik, thank you for what you do and and bringing all these interesting and intriguing stories to a wide audience. To keep up the good work and I’m always happy to come on again.
Erik: Thank you so much, thank you.
Again I have been speaking to Robert Watson. He is the author of the Nazi Titanic: The Incredible Untold Story of a Doomed Ship in World War II.
