No less dreadful was what happened to the prisoners of Neuengamme in Hamburg – hardly the most notorious of the camp complexes – which encompassed 57 satellite camps and had roughly 50,000 prisoners in its clutches (including some 14,000 in the main camp) when its evacuations began at the end of March.
Prisoners were sent off on hastily organized railway transports or on foot to ‘reception camps’ – 9000 to the prisoner-of-war camp at Sandorstel near Bremervörde, 8000 to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen and 5000 to the satellite camp just established at Wöbellin near Ludwigslust. Many perished or were shot by guards on the way; many more died of hunger and disease after they arrived at the reception camps. (Some 1000 died at Wöbellin and 3000 at Sandborstel; the number of the Neuengamme prisoners who died at Bergen-Belsen is unknown.)
However, the most terrible fate was reserved for the last 10,000 prisoners from Neuengamme. After the camp was finally closed on 19 April, the remaining prisoners were either taken by rail or marched by the SS to the Lübeck Bay, where (together with some other prisoners who had been evacuated from Auschwitz and Stutthof) they were loaded onto ‘floating concentration camps’: the freighters Athen and Thielbek in Lübeck harbor and the former luxury liner Cap Arcona berthed at nearby Neustadt.
Due to overcrowding and lack of food or water, conditions on the ships were terrible in the extreme, but worse was to come. On 3 May, the Royal Air Force, assuming the ships to be troop transports, bombed them. The roughly 2000 prisoners on the Athen were lucky; the boat suffered only minor damage. However, the Thielbek with roughly 2800 on board and the Cap Arcona with its 4600 prisoners were hit.
Only 450 of the prisoners on the two ships survived. The remaining 7000 either burned to death on board, drowned, or were shot while trying to escape the inferno – only days before they would have been liberated by the advancing British Army.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Murder and Mayhem.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 52. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Hermann Kaienburg, ‘Funktionswandel des KZ-Kosmos? Das Konzentrationslager Neuengamme 1938-1945’, in Herbert, Orth and Dieckmann (eds.), Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. I, pp. 270-271.
Detlef Garbe, ‘Institutionen des Terrors und der Widerstand der Wenigen’, in Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (ed.), Hamburg im “Dritten Reich” (Hamburg, 2005), pp. 550-551, 554.
Wilhelm Lange, Cap Arcona, Dokumentation (3nd ed., Eutin, 1988).
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