The friendly fires of hell
By ROBERT J. WHITE-HARVEY
Talkbacks for this article: 22
On May 3, 1945 - in the worst friendly-fire incident in history - Britain's Royal Air Force killed more than 7,000 survivors of Nazi concentration camps who were crowded onto ships in L beck harbor, Germany. The ragged masses that had survived the Holocaust stood no chance against the guns of their liberators.
This tragic mistake occurred one day before the British accepted the surrender of all German forces in the region. Reports of the incident were quickly hushed up - as a jubilant world prepared to celebrate the Allied victory in Europe.
Despite the bitter irony of dying in hellish fires on sinking ships just hours before liberation, the tragedy was quickly forgotten or resolutely ignored. The anniversary of this dark day will soon pass by again - largely unnoticed or unmentioned.
By early May 1945, the rumors of Hitler's suicide had rekindled hope for beleaguered prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. The Red Army had just conquered Berlin, the British held Hamburg and Americans were in Munich and Vienna. After surviving unspeakable horrors and deprivations for years, the battered prisoners could finally dare to hope that their day of deliverance was at hand.
In the closing weeks of World War II, thousands of prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, the Mittelbau-Dora camp at Nordhausen and the Stutthof camp near Danzig were marched to the German Baltic coast. Most of the inmates were Jews and Russian POWs, but they also included communist sympathizers, pacifists, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, prostitutes, Gypsies and other perceived enemies of the Third Reich.
At the port of L beck almost 10,000 camp survivors were crowded onto three ships: Cap Arcona, Thielbeck and Athen. No one knew what the Nazis were planning to do, or what plans the Allies had already set into motion.
Although the final surrender was imminent, British Operational Order No. 73 for May 3 was to "destroy the concentration of enemy shipping in L beck Bay." While thousands of camp prisoners were being ferried out to the once-elegant Hamburg-Sud Amerika liner Cap Arcona, the RAF's 263rd, 197th, 198th and 184th squadrons were arming their Hawker Typhoon fighter-bombers with ammunition, bombs and rockets.
At 2:30 p.m. on May 3, at least 4,500 prisoners were aboard the Cap Arcona as the first attack began. Sixty-four rockets and 15 bombs hit the liner in two separate attacks. As the British strafed the stricken ship from the air, Nazi guards on shore fired on those who made it into the water. Only 350 prisoners survived.
The Thielbeck - which had been flying a white flag - and the poorly marked hospital ship Deutschland were attacked next. Although Thielbeck was just a freighter in need of repairs, it was packed with 2,800 prisoners. The overcrowded freighter sank in just 20 minutes, killing all but 50 of the prisoners.
In less than two hours, more than 7,000 concentration camp refugees were dead from the friendly fire. Two thousand more would have died if the captain of the Athen had not refused to take on additional prisoners in the morning before the attack.
MOST WHO were familiar with the Cap Arcona disaster believed that the Nazis intended to sink the ships at sea to kill everyone on board. Hundreds of prisoners had already been killed on the forced marches from the camps. In this case, however, RAF Fighter Command did their killing for them.
In the Cap Arcona/Thielbeck/Athen disaster, the tragic deaths of so many who had suffered so much for so long were quickly forgotten. After years of unprecedented bloodletting and destruction, the nations involved were in shambles, their populations numbed by suffering and death. The unfortunate victims who perished at the close of history's worst conflagration were quickly lost in the fleeting euphoria of peace.
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In 1945, at the close of the war in Europe, the victorious British and their American allies did not want a media disaster overshadowing their V-E Day celebrations. When the extent of the friendly-fire incident became known at Westminster, the British government and Allied Command effectively prevented most news of the disaster from spreading from Germany.
Beyond war-weariness and postwar jubilation, other factors conspired to ensure that the valiant prisoners who died at the threshold of freedom would not be given much attention in the world press. In a war in which the British had paid so high a price to defeat the Nazis, to even criticize their forces was tantamount to siding with the devil. Then postwar Germany quickly became one of the "good guys" as an important frontline ally in the Cold War against communism. As such, most Germans preferred not to draw attention to their own war atrocities.
Millions of Jews, Russians, Serbs, Poles and others had already been killed by the Nazis. Tens of millions more were homeless refugees, with many near starvation. The memory of 7,000 or 8,000 concentration camp survivors killed by mistake would soon wash away in the tide of history in a violent age. Britain has never officially apologized for its tragic mistake at L beck Bay, nor has it honored the innocent victims with a proper memorial.
The RAF records of the disaster are sealed until 2045, one century after the attack. No British government document has referred to the estimated 7,500 victims of its mistake.
In May 1990, Germany opened a two-room museum dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Cap Arcona tragedy in the small port city of Neustadt-in-Holstein. A memorial monument was erected on the beach nearby at Pelzerhaken, where many of the bodies washed ashore and were buried. Other monuments were erected along L beck Bay and at the Neuengamme Camp Memorial southeast of Hamburg.
Much has been written in German about the tragedy, but surprisingly little about the Cap Arcona has made it to the English press.
On a recent visit to the memorial, a helpful resident of Neustadt said to me: "So your family is German?" I said, "No." "Oh, then you are Jewish?" Again I said, "No."
My new acquaintance looked puzzled. Eventually he asked: "Well how could you possibly know about this?" I asked myself: "Why did it take me a half century to find out?"
A Jewish dental student, Benjamin Jacobs, gives a firsthand account of the friendly fire attack in The Dentist of Auschwitz (University of Kentucky Press, 1995). Along with Eugene Pool, the Boston dentist also wrote The 100 Year Secret: Britain's Hidden World War II Massacre (Lyons Press, 2004). Documentaries on the subject, such as Lawrence Bond's Typhoons' Last Storm, have had only limited publicity.
According to legend, Pheidippides was an Athenian herald who ran from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens 2,500 years ago. After announcing the Greek victory over the Persians, he allegedly died on the spot. The tale has been widely propagated by organizers of modern athletic events.
Surviving the horrors of concentration camps - one day at a time - is in many respects like a marathon run. Mere survival under such brutal conditions surely tested the endurance of both body and spirit. And like the mythical runner, thousands of inmates made it all the way to the end of their agonizing journeys only to perish at the finish line. A half-century after the ill-fated air raid, we still know very little about the Jews, the Russians and other prisoners who survived so much before dying on the finish line in May 1945.
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By the time British records are unsealed in 2045, all children and most grandchildren of the victims will be gone. Historians will pore over the tragic details of the Cap Arcona disaster with the same level of detachment that we now feel for events such as the Franco-Prussian War or the siege of Sevastopol.
There is no question that the friendly-fire fiasco was a tragic error made during a routine military operation. Despite the terrible consequences, few reasonable people would condemn the British for their ill-fated raid. Some Hitler apologists have even attempted to use such mistakes to blame the Allies for monstrous crimes committed by the Nazis. Yet the continued avoidance of criticizing friends does not justify shunning all mention of the innocent victims of the attack. Whether embarrassing or not, the 7,500 Cap Arcona victims deserve to be remembered.
Risking Their Lives to Survive Poverty
Without Safety Gear or Ventilation, Young Boys Work in Dangerous Bolivian Mine
By JEFFREY KOFMAN
POTOSI, Bolivia, April 4, 2008
While most 15-year-old boys are on their way to school in the morning, Julio Cesar Gutierrez is on his way to work.
04.04.08: Dangerous mine in Bolivia has young workers risking their lives.
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He toils inside the Cerro Rico, or "rich mountain" of Potos�, for the fabled Bolivian silver that looms at the peak at the Andes mountains, dominating every view of the highest city in the world. It is the oldest mine in the Americas and one of the oldest working mines in the world.
It is also one of the most dangerous.
The entrance to the mine is muddy, with a sloping ceiling. At 15,000 feet above sea level you have to work to take in each breath.
Gutierrez took ABC News into the mine with his older brother Luis Alberto and some other boys. It was a daunting tour inside what truly is a hell on Earth. An estimated 20,000 people work each day, including 1,000 children.
Inside there are no lights except for the workers' head lamps, and there is no ventilation, or safety equipment. Often there is just one exit; if a shaft collapses there is no way out.
Gutierrez began working outside the mine when he was just 6 years old; he's been working inside since he was 12.
"I hate it," he said in Spanish. "It's very dangerous for children."
The Mountain That Eats Men
Potos� may be the most important place in the history of the modern world that most people have never heard of. The Spanish discovered silver in Potos� in 1545. The mine was so rich that historians say its wealth single-handedly fueled the Spanish conquest of the Americas. They call it "The Mountain That Eats Men."
It is estimated that 8 million American Indian and African slaves died in forced labor at the mine. Amid the colonial remnants of what was once a magnificent city sits the massive Spanish royal mint, now a museum that shows just a fraction of the mother lode that made this remote mountainous place the largest city in the world by the year 1650. And the richest.
And yet all that is left behind is poverty, a poverty of such extreme desperation that it sends men and boys into the 400 mines burrowed into the mountain's belly to scratch out the most meager of livings.
While technically the mines are owned by private companies, in reality there are no owners. They are run as cooperatives.
Fernando Vasquez, director of social management for Bolivia's Cooperative Mining Sector, told ABC News the coops need a lot of investment to improve safety conditions.
In this, the poorest country in South America, there are no safety inspections of mines. The government does, however, provide guidelines and seminars to promote safety.
In the end, Vasquez says safety is solely the responsibility of each mining company or cooperative, which is why what we saw inside looked almost medieval: no safety gear, no power, no ventilation.
The boys told us to run through one section with broken beams overhead, knowing it could collapse at any moment. We heard the distant sound of drills as we wound our way through the snaking tunnels and narrow shafts.
'It Makes Me So Sad to See Him Working There'
John Trew, senior technical adviser on child labor at the charity CARE USA, traveled to Potos� to talk to us about CARE's work there. He has traveled the world studying child labor and trying to improve conditions for children, and he is horrified by what he sees here.
He says it is "by far the worst" of the child labor conditions he has seen. "It is truly one of the worst hazardous experiences of the environment, which children can be faced with -- not just from the short-term hazard that they face but the long-term health consequences."