May 3, 1945: The Nazis had their own version of the Titanic. And guess what: It sank.
Unlike the original, it wasn't just due to incompetence. It had "help."
The SS Cap Arcona was launched in 1927. It was named after Cape Arkona on Rügen, Germany's largest island, on the Baltic Sea. It weighed 27,561 tons, compared to the 46,329 of the original RMS Titanic. It was 679 feet long, compared to the original's 889 feet. Cruising speed was close, 23 miles per hour to Titanic's 24. In other words, it was big, but not as big as the Titanic, the world's largest cruise liner when it first and last sailed in 1912.
Cap Arcona was the flagship of the Hamburg-South America line, and sailed between Hamburg, Germany's 2nd-largest city and largest port, and the east coast of South America. In 1940, the Kriegsmarine, the Nazi navy, took it over. In 1943, it was "cast" in the title role in Titanic, a Nazi propaganda film, designed to show that the British were incompetent because they built the "unsinkable," ill-fated Titanic. It had 3 smokestacks, instead of the 4 that Titanic had. But it was still big enough to be plausible.
In 1945, Cap Arcona became a prison ship, as the Nazis, aware that they were losing the war, and that the Allies had begun to liberate the concentration camps, began to evacuate their camps in occupied Norway and Denmark. On May 3, 3 days after Hitler killed himself, Cap Arcona was sunk off the coast of Neustadt -- fittingly, by Britain's Air Force -- and over 5,000 prisoners were killed.
*
May 3, 1945 was a Thursday. This was also the day that American poet Ezra Pound was arrested for treason in Italy. I have a separate entry for that event.
The only sport in season at the time was baseball, and no major league games were scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.
No comments:
Post a Comment