Victims' families remember Nazi ship sunk with prisoners on board
The Cap Arcona, a Nazi ship, was attacked by British Royal Air Force planes near the end of World War II. Thousands of prisoners died as the ship sank in the horrific and little-known disaster.
Updated on: August 30, 2026 / 7:00 PM EDT / CBS News
This is an updated version of a story first published on Oct. 20, 2024. The original video can be viewed here .
Everyone knows the story of the Titanic, the opulent British ocean liner that struck an iceberg and sank. But it's likely you have never heard of the Cap Arcona, a German version of the Titanic. Before World War II, the vessel was a cruise ship for the well-to-do. By the end of the war, the Nazis had transformed it into a floating concentration camp. Packed with prisoners, the Cap Arcona was anchored in Lübeck Bay in the Baltic Sea when an aerial attack just hours before liberation killed nearly everyone on board. As we first reported in 2024, the ship's improbable journey from luxury liner to death trap is one of the most horrific and little-known war stories we have encountered.
On sunlit days, Germany's Baltic coast looks idyllic. But this beauty masks an unthinkable horror, one that's etched in the local memory and on this beachside marker bearing the name Cap Arcona and the German words for fear, panic, and grief.
Bill Niven: It's so calm, so peaceful. And yet out there is a graveyard. You can come to a place like this and just feel the weight of the history.
British historian Bill Niven has spent much of his career studying the Holocaust. We met him at Lübeck Bay, where the memory of the Cap Arcona and a smaller cargo ship bombed on May 3rd, 1945 … still haunts this shore.