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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