When first encountering this book’s title, an observer might wonder if the Third Reich had an ocean liner that sank with large loss of life in a tragic accident; a story that, somehow, must have escaped attention all these years since World War II. Personally, the first thing that came to my mind was the Wilhelm Gustloff —a German cruise liner-hospital ship-floating Kriegsmarine barracks. The Gustloff was torpedoed and sunk while on evacuation duty on January 30, 1945, resulting in the largest loss of life caused by the sinking of a single ship in history—9,000 by one estimate.
But the ship in the center of Watson’s new book is even more obscure than the little-known Gustloff . It’s the Cap Arcona ; a German ocean liner built in 1927, well before the Nazis took power. By all accounts, it was a gloriously beautiful ship, making many successful trips between Hamburg and Buenos Aires before the war. Like so many large civilian ships, it was requisitioned for war service, but mainly just sat in harbor as storage space for the navy. The Titanic connection is a valid one for a very strange reason: The Cap Arcona was used as that famous liner’s stand-in for an anti-British propaganda film—Nazi Germany’s most expensive and ambitious such undertaking up to that point. Near war’s end, unlike the tragic Gustloff , the Cap Arcona successfully evacuated thousands of Germans from the Baltic Sea coast before the advancing Red Army.
The Cap Arcona ’s fate was tragic, however, nonetheless. Within days of the end of the war in Europe, she was sunk while enroute to Norway—or so the British pilots targeting her thought. It turned out that she had been packed with concentration camp survivors, not Wehrmacht and SS officials thought to be aboard. About 5,000 lives were lost in the worst incident of friendly fire ever. Why this whole sad episode seems to have fallen through history’s cracks is well examined by Watson in his assiduously researched book.
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The Nazi Titanic is actually much more than the story of Arcona itself. Oh, there certainly is that, in great detail, but the book’s origins as a more generalized account of the final week of the war does show in the many side stories told. The book’s focus thus shifts from time to time somewhat far afield from the eponymous vessel. Even so, Watson shows us in a compelling way that even a subject as thoroughly studied as World War II can still offer up its secrets, its cover-ups, its long untold stories, its lessons for us today.
