by Mark Leshkevich
| Because it was a nasty, ugly war and soldiers are not emotionless automatons? |
According to recently declassified FSB documents, the British airstrike killed between 7,000 and 12,000 people. Most of them were Soviet prisoners of war.
These ships were used to "evacuate" prisoners ordered by the SS from Germany to Nazi-controlled Norway in the final days of the war. Despite the Allied command being informed of the prisoners on board, the attack was carried out anyway.
"THEY ACTED LIKE FASCISTS"
The FSB archive contains a letter that Vasily Salomatkin, a former prisoner of the Neuengamme concentration camp who miraculously survived the raid on Cap Arcona, sent to the Office of the USSR Council of Ministers Commissioner for the Repatriation of Soviet Citizens. It states, among other things:
"The prisoners who were on the deck took off their undershirts (they were white) and began waving them, making a sign to the English pilots that the ship was surrendering, accepting capitulation, but the English pilots, like the fascist pilots... continued to bomb the ships. The bombing took place at a very low altitude. The English pilots saw all the horrors of their bombing and continued to do it even more, not paying attention to any pleas from the people."
After the second bomb hit the deck of the liner Cap Arcona, Salomatkin "threw himself into the water along with other Russian prisoners." Not far from the site of the Cap Arcona's sinking, English torpedo boats appeared, having left Lübeck, which was occupied by the British.
"When we saw them, we rushed to swim towards them, thinking that they would pick us up and save us. It turned out to be the opposite. The soldiers on the boats stood and shot the floating prisoners with machine guns."
Salomatkin was washed ashore by the tide and woke up in a hospital set up by the British. There he learned that "out of 12,000 prisoners, only three hundred were saved."
And after leaving the hospital, the recent prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp was convinced: German prisoners of war feel at ease under British occupation power. They walk the streets of Lübeck, attack "Untermenschen" and even threaten them with reprisals. According to a survivor of "Cap Arcona", the English commandant of the city ignored the complaints of the Russians.
Red Army Lieutenant Vasily Filippovich Salomatkin was lucky - already in 1945 he returned from the British occupation zone to his homeland, passed the SMERSH counterintelligence check without any problems, and was discharged into the reserve in October 1945. After the war and until his retirement, this holder of the Order of the Red Star and the Order of the Patriotic War worked as a teacher in his native Krasnoslobodsk (now the Republic of Mordovia).
The USSR MGB considered Salomatkin's testimony credible. The report that the special service sent to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September 1949 noted that the words of this former concentration camp prisoner were confirmed by several other eyewitnesses.
“Thus, the witness V.D. Kozulya, a former commander of the Soviet Army aviation detachment, who was interrogated on September 15 of this year, testified: “On May 3, 1945, at approximately one o’clock in the afternoon, I and other prisoners who were in the Cap Arcona cabin saw three Hawker Hurricane aircraft approaching our ship and then dropping bombs on it.”
Interrogated on September 14, 1949, “witness Strandberg E. N. testified: “English planes flew over the ship at low altitude several times and shot at people on the upper deck with machine guns. The Tilbek soon sank.”
Soviet authorities recorded the testimonies of 14 survivors who confirmed the mass extermination. The MGB stated that the attack was carried out on unarmed people, and that the survivors were subjected to violence after the tragedy.
A tragic mistake – this is how British historians interpret the sinking of three non-military ships in May 1945. They say that at the time of the storming of Lübeck, the Royal Air Force could not allow ships on which Nazis might have fled to pass through the Baltic. But, logically, the British should have known who exactly was being transported on the Cap Arcona, Thielbek and Deutschland.
CONCENTRATION CAMP ON A SHIP
With the beginning of spring 1945, when the prisoners of the remaining concentration camps were about to be liberated, the Nazis began to herd prisoners on death marches in a futile attempt to evade the advancing Red Army and Allied forces. This was also the case in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, home to the cities of Flensburg (the seat of the last Nazi government led by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz ) and the port city of Lübeck. Prisoners from the Hamburg concentration camp Neuengamme, where Vasily Salomatkin was a prisoner, were also herded here.
But since the Lübeck Gauleiter and the local SS leadership panicked, many of the SS "personnel" of the remaining camps and prisoners were "evacuated" closer to May 1945.
Neuengamme was the largest concentration camp in northwest Germany.
All these manipulations were known to the British advancing on Lübeck - both aerial reconnaissance and information from the ground helped.
Intelligence on May 2 saw that the ships were not heading for Norway, as was later claimed to justify the attack. The ships were stationary, not moving, and were not under steam.
Information about the prisoners was passed on May 2 to Major General George Roberts, commander of the 11th Armoured Division advancing in the Lübeck area, according to a report compiled in June 1945 by Major Noel Till. It also states that for unknown reasons the information was not passed on to other units of the British Army advancing there and aimed at capturing Lübeck and other centres as quickly as possible. Roberts also failed to inform the Air Force command.
The British had the opportunity to prevent the attack on the Cap Arcona by taking into account at least three reports provided by the Red Cross. But they did not do so.
Meanwhile, the ships had left the shore. The Cap Arcona, which had received the most prisoners, was overcrowded: initially planned to accommodate about 2,200 people, but in the end the number of prisoners exceeded 8,000. This led to unbearable overcrowding and lack of space. The conditions on board were unbearable.
Surviving prisoner Shmuel Pivnik (after the war, the renowned British Holocaust researcher Sam Pivnik) called the ship a "floating hell." Prisoners were locked in cramped quarters, and the bodies of the dead were thrown overboard, where they floated in the water like garbage. Food on the ship was given out extremely irregularly, sometimes without anything.
The prisoners were placed on the ship according to racial theory - people of Western European descent received better conditions, while Russians and Jews found themselves in the lower holds without light, air or water. In fact, the structure of the Neuengamme camp was transferred to the ship, including the organization of life, supervision and abuse. But the prisoners did not know that a real "hell on water" awaited them ahead.
On the morning of May 3, Dr. Hans Arnoldsson of the Swedish Red Cross informed the British command about the prisoners on the ships. Later, the officers promised to "take action" - but the bombardment had already begun.
POLITICAL REASONS
The main question remains: why did the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy attack ships – albeit German, but obviously not military? There was a version that the SS officers who led the “evacuation” planned to sink the “Cap Arcona”, “Tielbek” and “Deutschland” with all the prisoners. This was stated, in particular, during interrogation by Georg von Bassewitz-Behr, the last head of the SS and police in Hamburg. But then the British should have stopped this atrocity, and not committed it “for the Nazis”.
Part of the explanation can be found in the testimony of Vasily Salomatkin: he reported that by the time the German garrison of Lubeck capitulated, the ships were 6 km from the city of Neustadt. At that moment, the British demanded that the ships' crews surrender.
"The SS command of the ships rejected the capitulation. Then the English air force took off in large numbers and began bombing the ships we were on," explained Salomatkin.
But in any case, the question arises: why did the British sink ships on which the vast majority were not SS men, but concentration camp prisoners? Why were the unfortunates shot from boats?
The most logical version seems to be that in the chaos and haste during the capture of Lubeck, the Air Force and Navy, as well as some part of the ground force, were “forgotten to convey” intelligence and Red Cross information. And the haste, confusion and fuss were caused by purely political reasons and a phobia called “the Russians are coming!”
The agreements between Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, reached in Yalta, implied, among other things, the division of Germany into occupation zones. But the Allies, until the last moment, tried to draw the borders of their zones and the Soviet one in their own way, fearing our attack on the West.
At meetings with the member of the House of Commons, future Prime Minister Anthony Eden, regarding the creation of these zones, Churchill emphasized that “our arrival in Lübeck before our Russian friends from Stettin (arrive) will save us from many disputes later.”
The Western Allies emphasized the urgent need to reach Lübeck before Soviet soldiers could occupy Denmark (especially since our troops actually landed on the Danish island of Bornholm on May 9). The primary need to reach the Baltic coast and stop a hypothetical Soviet advance to the West led to panic in the top leadership of England. And this panic was transmitted "through the chain of command," right up to General Roberts.
Then the case began to be hushed up - the British military command's report from 1946 did not make any strict conclusions. The investigation was conducted in a hurry, without involving the testimony of surviving prisoners.