Journalism
8. BRITISH PILOTS KILLED 12,000 CAMP INMATES
The
'Titanic' earned an entire literary epic, a few films, glamorous
productions and the greatest actors. There exists an ongoing
famed legend surrounding the giant ship that could not sink
but however went down on its very first voyage, in April of
1912, together with 1503 travellers. However, although being
the most notorious naval catastrophe of the century, it is
certainly not the biggest one. A certain peculiar, completely
different story, which arose recently from the bottom of the
Baltic Sea, is bound to stir up the public worldwide. American
film director Lawrence Bond succeeded to realise the documentary
film titled 'The Typhoon's Last Storm' telling the story of
how British R.A.F. pilots, during the very last few hours
of WWII bombed and killed some 12,000 concentration camp prisoners,
considering them to be enemy soldiers in a runaway attempt.
The drama occurred on 3rd May, 1945, three days after Adolph
Hitler committed suicide, on the Baltic seas in front of the
German harbour of Lubeck in Neustadt Bay. There, Germans attempted
the transfer of 12,000 camp inmates from the concentration
camp at Hamburg-Neuengamme to Denmark. Those 12,000 people
were embarked on four prison ships and after repeated attacks
by British aviation only 256 internees remained alive.
An attempt to suppress this disastrous mistake of the British
air force
subsisted for decades. Post-war winners' historiography
will not give deserved position to this tragedy. A documentary
film by American Parisian Lawrence Bond that had its first
US run during last month includes shocking testimonies of
the rare survivors telling how two R.A.F. squadrons kept coming
back in order to kill people that survived the first attacks
and were already in the sea. R.A.F. pilots only recently learned
that most of these people killed were camp inmates and not
Nazis, as they believed at the time.
Amongst survivors of the camp inmates there are two of our
fellow citizens, both from the Croatian Littoral. One of them
is Rijeka citizen, Rude Paskvan
who is 77 years old, while other, Zivko Orlic from the island
of Krk is 74 years old today. On that baleful day, they were
both inside the attacked ship 'Thillbeck'...
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