Neuengamme and the Cap Arcona

On 4 May 1945 British troops reached the Neuengamme concentration camp on the south-eastern edge of Hamburg. War chronologies record the day as the camp’s liberation, yet the British liberated no one there. The huts were empty: the SS had evacuated the camp in the second half of April, and the last SS men had left on 2 May after destroying the evidence. The prisoners – only a few weeks earlier there had been tens of thousands of them here and in the subcamps – had been sent off on death marches and in transports to other camps, or shut up aboard ships anchored in the Bay of Lübeck. The day before, on 3 May, British aircraft had sunk two of those ships, the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek. Some 7,000 people died – about 7,100 according to the Neuengamme Memorial, including some 6,600 prisoners.

The end of Neuengamme is therefore the story not of a single day but of three weeks: of evacuation, of crimes committed at the last moment, such as the murder of twenty children in the school on Bullenhuser Damm, and of a catastrophe that came on the eve of the surrender of the German forces in north-west Germany.

A camp on the Elbe

Neuengamme was founded in December 1938, when the SS moved a detachment of a hundred prisoners from Sachsenhausen to a disused brickworks in Neuengamme, one of Hamburg’s rural districts on a branch of the Elbe. The city, which wanted to rebuild its Elbe waterfront in monumental style, needed bricks; the SS needed cheap labour for its own enterprises. In early summer 1940 the camp became an independent concentration camp. The prisoners dug a canal and a harbour for barges and made bricks, and in time worked above all for the armaments industry.

Around the main camp grew a network of nearly a hundred subcamps and external work detachments, from the shipyards of Hamburg and Bremen to factories in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. At the end of 1944 the whole system held some 49,000 prisoners, about 12,000 of them in the main camp and 37,000 in the subcamps. In all more than 100,000 people passed through Neuengamme – some 106,000 by certain estimates. Estimates of the death toll vary: the memorial speaks of at least 42,900 documented deaths in the main camp, the subcamps, during the evacuation and in the Bay of Lübeck; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum of more than 50,000; and some studies of as many as about 55,000.

The commandants were Martin Weiss (1940–1942) and then Max Pauly, formerly commandant of Stutthof. In 1942 several hundred Soviet prisoners of war were gassed at Neuengamme, and pseudo-medical experiments were also carried out there. The best known were conducted from 1944 by the SS doctor Kurt Heissmeyer, who infected prisoners with tuberculosis.

Poles in Neuengamme

The largest national group were citizens of the Soviet Union – prisoners of war and forced labourers. The second were Poles: an estimated 17,000 people. They arrived from 1940 onwards as political prisoners, as forced labourers punished for “offences” and as members of the underground. A particularly large group was brought in the autumn of 1944 after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising: men driven out of Warsaw were sent through the transit camp Dulag 121 at Pruszków to camps in the Reich, several thousand of them to Neuengamme and its subcamps. For many of them – people seized in the street, wholly unprepared for camp life – the last winter of the war proved fatal. A monument to the Poles deported after the Warsaw Uprising stands on the camp grounds today.

One of the Polish prisoners was the reserve officer Bogdan Suchowiak (PL), who survived the sinking of the ships in the Bay of Lübeck and after the war became one of the camp’s first historians.

The White Buses and the evacuation

In the spring of 1945 Neuengamme was also the scene of one of the few rescue operations at the end of the war. Count Folke Bernadotte, vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross, obtained the consent of Heinrich Himmler to gather at Neuengamme the Scandinavian prisoners – Norwegians and Danes – scattered across the camps of the Reich. From March onwards convoys of white-painted vehicles, later known as the White Buses, brought them to a separate section of the camp, and in April took them through Denmark to Sweden. The operation had a dark side: to make room for the Scandinavians, the SS moved sick prisoners of other nationalities from that section to subcamps, and many of them did not survive the journey – some had to be transported by the Swedish vehicles themselves. Bernadotte’s talks with Himmler also had a second, political dimension, which led to Himmler’s offer to the Western Allies.

As British forces approached Hamburg in April, the SS set about liquidating the camp. The subcamps had been evacuated from the end of March. Transports went chiefly to the reception camps at Sandbostel and Wöbbelin and to Bergen-Belsen, where prisoners died in their thousands of hunger and typhus – the scene the British found there on 15 April, at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. On 8 April at Celle Allied bombers hit a train carrying prisoners from Neuengamme subcamps that was standing in the station beside military trains; more than 2,000 people were killed, and those who escaped from the burning train were hunted down and killed by SS men, soldiers, policemen and local residents. Prisoners from other camps met a similar fate in those weeks – the most notorious crime was the Gardelegen massacre.

On 19 April the order was given to evacuate the main camp. Between 20 and 26 April more than 9,000 prisoners were taken by train and on foot to Lübeck, and from there to the ships lying in the bay. About 700 prisoners were kept in the camp to the end to remove the traces: they burned records, dismantled equipment and cleaned out the huts. They left with the last SS men.

The children of Bullenhuser Damm

Among the traces the SS wanted to erase was a group of twenty Jewish children aged five to twelve, brought from Auschwitz in November 1944 for Heissmeyer’s experiments. The doctor injected them with tuberculosis bacilli and then removed their lymph nodes for examination. Fourteen of them came from Poland, the rest from France, the Netherlands and Italy. On the night of 20–21 April 1945 SS men took the children and four prisoners who had been looking after them – two French doctors and two Dutch orderlies – to a disused school on Bullenhuser Damm in the Hamburg district of Rothenburgsort, which served as a subcamp. There they were hanged. That same night at least twenty-four Soviet prisoners of war were also murdered in the school.

After the war some of the perpetrators were convicted: in 1946 a British military court passed death sentences on, among others, the SS doctor Alfred Trzebinski and the SS man Johann Frahm. Heissmeyer, who after the war practised medicine in Magdeburg, was unmasked and in 1966 sentenced to life imprisonment in East Germany. The proceedings against Arnold Strippel, who according to investigators had supervised the murder, were dropped by West German prosecutors – still regarded as one of the most shocking examples of how the Federal Republic dealt with Nazi crimes.

The ships in the Bay of Lübeck

At Lübeck the prisoners were loaded onto barges and ships. The largest was the Cap Arcona, a luxury liner built in 1927 for the Hamburg Süd line, which before the war had sailed to South America and which in 1945 – after evacuation voyages from East Prussia – lay immobilised with damaged engines. Anchored beside her were the freighter Thielbek and the smaller Athen; nearby lay the liner Deutschland, being fitted out as a hospital ship, with no prisoners aboard. The Cap Arcona’s captain, Heinrich Bertram, protested against taking thousands of people aboard a ship with no water, no food and no sanitation, but gave way under threat of being shot. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than 4,500 prisoners were put aboard the Cap Arcona (other sources give higher figures) and about 2,800 aboard the Thielbek. They included Russians, Poles, Frenchmen, Germans, Dutchmen, Belgians, Danes and Jews from many countries.

The SS’s intention has never been established beyond doubt. Some historians believe the ships were to take the prisoners to Sweden or somewhere else beyond the Allies’ reach; others, citing witness testimony, hold that they were to be scuttled with the prisoners aboard so as to leave no witnesses. All that is certain is that the people crammed into the holds were dying of hunger, thirst and disease even before 3 May.

The attack of 3 May

On 2 May British forces reached the Baltic near Wismar and Lübeck, while ships were gathering in the Bay of Lübeck on which the Germans were evacuating soldiers, refugees and – so British intelligence believed – dignitaries and SS units fleeing to Norway. Aircraft of the RAF’s Second Tactical Air Force were ordered to attack all shipping in those waters. On the afternoon of 3 May several waves of Hawker Typhoon fighter-bombers from RAF squadrons including Nos. 198 and 263 attacked the ships off Neustadt in Holstein with rockets and bombs. The crews did not know that concentration camp prisoners were aboard. That information – passed on, according to some researchers, by the Swedish Red Cross – either did not arrive in time or was not passed on to the combat units; the matter remains disputed.

Hit by rockets, the Cap Arcona caught fire and after several dozen minutes capsized onto her side in shallow water. The Thielbek sank within a quarter of an hour or so. Prisoners locked in the holds died in the fire and smoke; others jumped into the icy water. According to survivors’ accounts, some of those in the water were shot at from boats and from the shore by SS men, sailors and members of the Hitler Youth. The Athen, which had earlier put into Neustadt harbour, survived with nearly 2,000 prisoners aboard; the Deutschland, by contrast, sank, though her crew managed to save themselves. An estimated 350 or so prisoners survived from the Cap Arcona and about 50 from the Thielbek; the Holocaust Memorial Museum gives a total of some 600 survivors from the two ships.

According to the Neuengamme Memorial, about 7,100 people died in the Bay of Lübeck, including some 6,600 prisoners; other sources speak of about 7,000. That same afternoon soldiers of the British 11th Armoured Division entered Neustadt and found survivors and corpses on the beach. The sea went on washing bodies ashore for many weeks, and victims’ remains were still being found in the bay in the 1970s. Together with the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and the Goya, the disaster ranks among the greatest maritime tragedies in history.

The empty camp

Hamburg surrendered without a fight. Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann, defying orders to defend the city to the last, came to terms with the British, and on 3 May British troops entered the ruined city. The next day, 4 May, soldiers reached Neuengamme. They found tidy, emptied huts, the crematorium and the workshops; much of the documentation had been burned. Neuengamme was one of the few camps in Germany whose buildings survived the war almost intact – precisely because the SS had left methodically rather than in panic. That same evening, on Lüneburg Heath, the surrender of the German forces in north-west Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark was signed.

For many Neuengamme prisoners the end of the war came elsewhere: at Bergen-Belsen; at Wöbbelin, liberated by the Americans on 2 May; on the roads of Mecklenburg and Schleswig-Holstein, where the guards abandoned the marching columns. The last prisoners, held on ships and barges at Flensburg, were not freed until 10 May.

Reckoning

The British held a series of trials of the Neuengamme staff in Hamburg, in the Curiohaus building. In the main trial, which ran from 18 March to 3 May 1946, the military court sentenced the commandant Max Pauly and ten other defendants to death; Pauly was executed at Hameln in October 1946. Further trials dealt with the subcamps and the crime at Bullenhuser Damm. Moral and political responsibility for the evacuation of the camps and its consequences lay above all with Himmler – he is credited with the order that no prisoner should fall into enemy hands alive – and with the authorities of the Reich’s last days, who to the end did not hand the camps over to the Red Cross.

The attack on the ships itself long remained in the shadows. In Britain it was rarely spoken of for decades, and the documents concerning what the command knew about the prisoners aboard are still disputed today. In Germany and in the prisoners’ home countries the Cap Arcona disaster became a symbol of the cruelty of the war’s last days: people who had survived years in the camps died at a moment when the war was all but over, as a result of a criminal decision by the SS and a fatal Allied error. Cemeteries for the victims were laid out in Neustadt and other towns around the bay, and at Neuengamme a memorial now occupies the whole of the former camp grounds, following the closure in 2003–2006 of the prisons that had operated there.

Place in the history of the war

The end of Neuengamme closes the spring series of camp discoveries in western Germany – from Ohrdruf, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen to Dachau – but differs from them fundamentally. There the Allies found thousands of dying people and heaps of corpses; here they found an empty camp, while the crime of which its prisoners were victims took place several dozen kilometres away, at sea, and had no single perpetrator. The story of the Cap Arcona shows what the policy of “evacuating” the camps meant in the last weeks of the war: moving prisoners to places where they could die out of sight of the approaching armies. On 4 May the surrender of the German forces in north-west Germany was signed, taking effect on the morning of 5 May, and on 8 May the war in Europe came to an end – for thousands of Neuengamme prisoners a few days too late.