Once the Nazi’s had finished packing it with concentration camp victims, Johnson estimates that the Cap Arcona, which had been designed to accommodate 1,325 passengers, held 4,600 prisoners (other estimates suggest five thousand or more16). They were crammed below deck “with the sick at the very bottom (with no medicine or bandages) and the Russian prisoners in the banana storage hold (with no light, no air, and for the first three days no food); the dead were piled up on deck. The ship stank of the dead, of the disease and shit of the living — a putrid heap and not even moving”. The Thielbeck was similarly packed and, although Johnson doesn’t mention them, there were also Dutch barges near the Cap Arcona which had been filled with prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp before the ladders were removed, and they were towed along the coast from Danzig.
The situation was never anything but murderous. “It took longer to die here than in the gas chambers”, so Johnson writes “but it wouldn’t be long before they were all dead”. It is considered very likely, indeed it would be admitted in the later war crimes trials, that the Nazis intended to scuttle or torpedo these ships with their occupants.
In the event, however, it was thanks to the British that, some four days after Hitler had killed himself in his Berlin bunker and only hours before the surrender of German forces in northern Germany, “Freedom came across the bright sunny bay on May 3 in the shape of a squadron of British bombers”. Ignoring the German submarines that were on the surface, allegedly preparing to send the three ships to the bottom of the sea, Hawker Typhoon fighter bombers from four RAF squadrons beat them to it with their rockets. These planes, whose crews may not have been among those who were trained to use Typhoons in this way at Shellness on the Isle of Sheppey, “started in on the Athen”, on which a white flag was hoisted after three direct hits. The planes then turned to the ships in the outer bay. They sank the Deutschland, a liner that was empty and being refitted as a hospital ship. The Thielbeck, which was packed with prisoners, rolled over on her side and sank without trace after twenty minutes. The Cap Arcona, which is said soon to have had the captain’s bedsheet tied to the mast, “took an hour, then it tipped onto its port side, slowly, faster and faster, until it was lying on its eighty-five-foot side, twenty-six feet of it above water”. Meanwhile, as Johnson’s Gesine Cresspahl tells her daughter Marie, “death was proceeding more quickly, and in various forms. The prisoners could die in the fire, in the smoke (the fire hoses had been cut), from the German crew’s rifles (the crew had life jackets), jammed in by hoarded food supplies, crushed in the panicking crowd, from the heat of the glowing Cap Arcona, in the lifeboats plummeting into the water, from jumping into the water, of cold in the water, by being hit or shot at by German minesweepers, and on land from exhaustion. The saved numbered 3,100, the dead somewhere between seven and eight thousand. At around five in the afternoon the English took Neustadt, so it was in the British zone, same as Jerichow, and contact was permitted between the two places, and that’s how we knew about it”.
*
The sinking of the Cap Arcona stands among the worst maritime disasters ever. Why did it happen? The British military authorities would long be reluctant to face that question, which to this day challenges the version of the war installed in official remembrance or, for that matter, in the manoeuvres of those veteran-hunting bodysnatchers, from Farage to Patel, who have recently conscripted the memory of the Second World War into their appeals for Brexit. It is largely accepted that urgent warnings had been received by the British the day before the attack — from the Swedish Red Cross or the Swiss delegate in Lübeck, who had learned there were prisoners on board from a message placed in a matchbox and thrown at him from the Thielbek. Either this information wasn’t passed on or it fell victim to a situation in which intelligence, like reconnaissance, was secondary to a policy of destroying shipping that might be used to service Nazi withdrawal to an imagined “northern redoubt” in Norway, and of finishing the war come what may before the Russians grabbed even more German territory.17 Much later, eyewitnesses were still mortified by the consequences. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, published on 18 March 1982, a troubled F.G. Parson, who had been aide-de-camp to General Sir Evelyn Barker (commander of the VIII Corps), described what he had seen walking along the Trave to the beach at the “pretty little holiday resort” of Travemünde: wrecked ships, stranded Dutch barges filled with dead prisoners from the east, and “thousands” of bodies including many, some of them children, who had obviously been shot or clubbed to death as they tried to come ashore.18
And it was not just at Travemünde that pale sands had been darkened. As Gesine Cresspahl remembers in Anniversaries, “The dead washed up on every shore of Lübeck Bay, from Bliestorf to Pelzerhaken, from Neustadt to Timmendorf Beach, into the mouth of the Trave, from Priwall to Schwansee and Redewisch and Rande, even into Wohlenberg Cove, as far as Poel Island and the other Timmendorf. They were found almost daily”.
Johnson pulls this dreadful harvest into the heart of the remembered world of Anniversaries III:
Too many washed up on the coast near Jerichow — the finders couldn’t bury them all secretly in the sand. The British occupation authorities had issued orders that all corpses from the water be reported, and they insisted that these orders be followed. The British took a truck and rounded up men who had been members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. These men were driven along the beach, and wherever a black lump lay on the white sand the British stopped. The Germans were given no gloves for the loading, not even pitchforks or shovels. The British drank their whisky right in front of the Germans, despite this medicine, they too had to threw up. The British created no special cemetery for the dead from this watery camp. When the truck was full, they drove the load far inland, all the way to Kalkhorst, even Gneez. When they drove into Jerichow, they lowered the sides of the truck. The MPs made the Germans leave their houses to look at the cargo as it was driven down Town Street to the cemetery at a walking pace. Slower than walking. The cargo was not easy to recognize. It had been damaged by bullet wounds, charring, shrapnel blows. It was recognizable by the faded, split, clinging, striped clothes. The individual pieces of human being were often incomplete. There were limbs missing, or there were limbs on the truck bed without a torso, one day there was nothing but a piece of head. The fish had eaten a lot of that one. The British made the people of Jerichow gather on Market Square. In the middle lay the first load of bodies. The commander handed over to the Germans the Germans’ dead. He made them their property. He allowed them to place the mortal remains from the sea into coffins. They were permitted to close the coffin and carry them to the cemetery. After the dirt had been shovelled onto the mass grave, the British fired a salute into the air. At the cemetery gate stood a sergeant, holding a box in front of him, and on this box he stamped the ration cards. Anyone who had not accepted the dead would not eat”.
Gesine’s recollection of these events prompts the following exchange:
Marie: “And you still want to swim in the Baltic?”
Gesine: “We ate fish from the Baltic. The Germans eat fish from the Baltic to this day. There are almost three thousand prisoners lying at the bottom of the Baltic”.19
For Marie, listening in New York City, this episode is the starkest outrage. “It was their own dead”, she says. “Those English are utter scoundrels!” To the child that Gesine was at the time, it was indeed the British who had “made dead people public in Jerichow”. And, once the British had withdrawn from the area, it was the Russian Military Commandant K.A. Pontiy who had gained her respect by putting an end to “the education of the German people by means of the overland transport of bodies”. He had ordered that from now on “this particular flotsam had to be collected in the cemeteries of the coastal villages, outside the territory under his command”. Gesine handles Marie’s accusations more reflectively as she describes how the disaster was hidden under a blanket of silence:
- The British dropped the
bombs. They saw the prisoners’ camp uniform and fired at them anyway. That’s the truth.
- The British didn’t want that truth. You could be thrown in jail for less than that. There were German U-boats above water all around the ships, and none of them were hit — that was too dangerous even to whisper.
- But you Jerichowers knew.
- It wasn’t new information. You could already see prisoners in striped clothing in Mecklenburg (maybe not in Lübeck) — but they weren’t to exist in language.
Gesine goes on to remark that the bombing of Lübeck Bay is not mentioned in the five volumes that the British went on to publish about the air war against Germany.20 “Official history. Stiff Upper Lip”, scoffs Marie, prompting Gesine to point out that it is also “official history that the British arrived before the German submarines had time to sink the prisoners themselves”.
Johnson notes that the sunken ships remained in the water until the British authorities gave permission for salvage operations. The Thielbeck was raised, cleared of bones, and repaired: “Let’s call the old tub the Reinbek and have her run till 1961, until it’s worth selling her. Today if you happen to see a Magdalena flying the Panamanian flag, that’s the Thielbek of May 1945”. In 1946, the Athen motor launch, which had not been sunk, “became the Soviet General Brusilov”. The wreck of the Cap Arcona, part of which had remained highly visible above the water, was scrapped in 1950. Only the bell remains, and that, as Johnson wrote, could be inspected at the Museum of Danish Resistance, in “Churchill Park”, Copenhagen.
For years, the British authorities would remain content to combine their stiff upper lip with secrecy as thick as the Thames silt that never really blanketed the SS Richard Montgomery. The relevant military archives were closed for a century, and it was, reputedly, not until 1980 that the British pilots themselves were informed of the true nature of their targets or, for that matter, of the identity of the people they had returned, as ordered, to shoot up in the water. More than a decade after that, the Imperial War Museum in London would record interviews with British witnesses, including a medical nurse who visited Travemünde while on relief from Belsen, and remembered the shock of finding himself swimming among corpses.21 As recently as 2004, one by this time American survivor of the Cap Arcona reiterated the claim of a German historian who had deplored the fact that “none of the important British books on RAF activities in World War II — books such as Max Hastings’ widely known Bomber Command — mention the incident”.22 Benjamin Jacobs (born as Bronek Jakubowicz in western Poland), who had earlier survived in Auschwitz by working as an incompletely trained dentist, did what he could to fill the silence, offering his own account of the operation, and also of the young British pilots: men like the flying ace Johnny Baldwin DFC — “a dashing figure with curly brown hair, a clipped moustache and a wry grin”, who was the first in Squadron 198 to dive on the Cap Arcona.23
Grave of 16 unknown victims of the Cap Arcona and Thielbeck sinkings, in the Old Cemetery, Klütz, Mecklenburg.
We may register that gap in British official memory, even while also respecting the conclusion of the Dutch resistance leader Piet Ketelaar, who also survived the Cap Arcona attack and, in 1987, would employ the laconic phrase “tough luck” to suggest that the disaster was “one of those things that happens” in wars.24 By that time some if by no means all RAF veterans were joining the English nationalists who would use various symbolic instruments including, in 1992, a new statue of Arthur “Bomber” Harris to redeclare the memory of the Second World War against both “Europe” and the limited domestic achievements of post-war social democracy in Britain. There was no place for the Cap Arcona in that simplified version of the remembered war, which, in 1989, would find its slogan in Saatchi & Saatchi’s poster for the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition of Prince Charles’s “Vision” of British architecture: “In 1945, the Luftwaffe stopped bombing London. Two years later the Blitz began”.25
As we think of Johnson standing at his Sheerness window in 1979, we should know that it was not only in West Germany that survivors of the Cap Arcona tried to sustain the memory and understanding of the disaster across Cold War frontiers. Long before Goguel and Johnson published their versions, news of an earlier attempt had reached Britain from the GDR. On 24 February 1965, a Scottish journalist named Jack Nicholls described a “call from behind the Iron Curtain” in his “Bon-Accord Gossip” column in the Aberdeen Evening Express. Quoting from a GDR publication named the Democratic German Report, he announced that the East German communist and actor Erwin Geschonneck (already well known for his films and his earlier stage work with Bertolt Brecht among others), was planning to make a film about the Cap Arcona disaster. Having himself been among the concentration camp prisoners crammed aboard the ship, he was now hoping to contact British witnesses: the RAF Typhoon pilots, to be sure, but he was most interested in finding a man he remembered as Captain Pratt of the 11th Armoured Division, who had appeared to be in charge of operations when the British arrived in the area shortly after the sinking and who, as Russian and German survivors attested, had done “all they could for both the living and the dead”. Whatever the result of his appeal, the project did not go ahead on this apparently conciliatory basis. Years later, Geschonneck would eventually make a television film entitled The Man of the Cap Arcona, transmitted in the GDR in 1982, but Captain Pratt never stepped into its light.
The Richard Montgomery, meanwhile, continues to interrupt Sheerness’s sea view even four decades later. It proved a useful hazard for those who campaigned against Boris Johnson’s determination, announced when he was Mayor of London in 2008, to see a new international airport built in the Thames estuary directly to the north-east of the Isle of Sheppey. This idea, which quickly gained the name “Boris island”, was to prove as fanciful as the Mayor’s other vanity project, the “Garden Bridge”, and the risk of detonating the Richard Montgomery was a strong card in the hand of those who successfully opposed it. It would be wrong to identify the memory of this defeat, rather than the risk of further collapse on the disintegrating wreck, as the primary cause behind the Ministry of Defence’s subsequent offer, announced in 2020, to pay £5 million to any contractor prepared to remove the already trimmed and streamlined masts from the ship.26 We may, however, still be tempted to see this new development (“poetically”) as a reflection of the “Beast of Brexit’s”27 preferred form of government: it is easier, after all, to adjust the appearances — for Uwe Johnson, the three masts were spines of memory, history and unvarnished truth — than to address the underlying problem. This, however, wasn’t at all how it looked to many of the islanders who read John Nurden’s report on this recent development. Some may have regretted that the proposed action would deprive both Sheerness and Southend of a valued “talking point” for tourists. Others declared themselves well up for doing the job with a dingy and a hacksaw.28 Surely not, though, after Beirut.
34. TRIUMPH OF THE SHEERNESS WALL
By October 1982, when the new Thames Barrier upriver at Silvertown was first raised against a high tide threatening London, Johnson knew that the lesser rampart outside his window was a decaying and inadequate thing. In “An Unfathomable Ship” he had coupled the weakness of Sheerness’ sea defences with the vast wave threatened by the exploding Richard Montgomery to produce a fable in which the little people are repeatedly betrayed by heedless national governments. Johnson did not affirm the estuarial conspiracy theory claiming that the Thames Barrier was constructed with the covert purpose of protecting London from the coming explosion of the Richard Montgomery. He was, however, sympathetic to the suspicion that it proved the willingness of the metropolitan elite to defend the capital while abandoning downriver communities to face the increased risk of inundation caused by their new contrivance. By the end of 1982, however, and as he explained in a letter to Burgel Zeeh at Suhrkamp, Johnson would have preferred a bit more neglect so that he could get on with writing the long-awaited fourth and final volume of Anni
versaries.
[THE HOUSE TO THE WEST OF THIS ONE]
There is a saying in vogue here, which runs: “I’m all right, Jack (pull up the ladder)”. Jack here is the person in a safe boat who hangs out the rope ladder for his fellow shipwreckee. Once the latter is safe on board, he does not need to care who else might be swimming down there in the cold misfortune, so he says: I’m all right, Jack.
…
I have, no doubt, let fall a word or two about the inexorable pollution and impoverishment of the city of Sheerness. Now I am obliged to add the fact, impossible to make up, that the offices of Southern Water intend to protect this grimy, insignificant locale by raising the flood wall even higher in front of this row of houses. Preceding this undertaking must necessarily come the removal of the existing embankment with all its garages, storerooms, and the concrete wall on top, that is, a to and fro of heavy machinery from excavators to the wading crane with its fat cement noggin. As a result, Southern Water has sent representatives of a sworn surveyor’s firm into every house to determine and record its architectural condition in anticipation of the claims they expect from residents as a consequence of the demolition and reconstruction. In other words, we have to reckon with the chance of collapsing walls, likewise of cracking windows. I mention all this in no way expecting that it will make me feel better to complain (a hypothesis all too amply disproven), but merely to discourage you for a time, say two years or so, from asking how I’m doing. You will know the answer already: Aggrieved.
[Letter to Burgel Zeeh, 26 August 19821]
Siegfried Unseld read Johnson’s letter, in which he also complained about Martin Harris’s building works in the house next door, to his secretary with impatience rather than amusement. Perhaps, he replied, it was time for Johnson to sell the house, repay the loan to Marianne Frisch and quit Sheerness for good.2 Then again, as Unseld also said rather sourly, it was possible that his writer might, in some strange way of his own, actually relish the prospect of all this disturbance. The situation wasn’t going to get any easier for Johnson, who declined the suggestion, pointing out that the loan still had years to run and he would not be in a position to finish Anniversaries if he were out on the street.
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