No, not the Titanic, that anniversary was yesterday, the 110th. This sinking was far deadlier.
From History and Headlines:
April 16, 1945: One of the Worst Maritime Losses of Life in World War II!
....Digging Deeper
The Soviet submarine L-3, while on a mission of laying mines around German held ports in the Baltic Sea, spotted a large easy target.
MV Goya, a freighter stolen from Norway by the Germans and converted to a transport ship for people, was about 475 feet long, 57 feet wide, and displaced about 5230 tons, an average sized ship of its day, about the size of an American Liberty ship. On the fateful day she was carrying about 7000 passengers, German civilians and wounded German soldiers being transported away from advancing Soviet troops to Western Germany.
The Soviet captain picked the Goya as his target out of a small convoy of ships heading west. One torpedo was enough, and the Goya went under in less than seven minutes! Built as a freighter but jam packed with people in every available space, the Goya was not equipped for surviving a disaster as a true passenger ship would have been. Of the 7000 people aboard, only 183 were rescued, the rest either going down inside the ship or freezing and drowning in the cold water....
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This was one of three very deadly sinkings during the last months of WWII.
Here's a post from last year:
"If I Sleep For An Hour Thirty People Will Die"I was asked why there was no April 15 post noting the 1500 people who died in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.The reason was, I was thinking of the April 16 sinking of the MV Goya in 1945 with the loss of ~6500 - 7000 lives, making it the second deadliest maritime disaster in history, second only to the 9300 souls, half of them children, lost when the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk eleven weeks earlier.
So why didn't I post anything on the MV Goya?
Because fully 25% percent of the Jews killed in the six years of World War II, 1.47 million people, were killed in one bestial ~100 day period: August, September, and October, of 1942. 445,700 murders per month. What the Holocaust scholars refer to as Hyperintense Kill Rates.
And sometimes you can only take so much of the death and destruction before losing it.
Two Goya's per day for three months.
Ten Titanic's per day, every day for 100 days.
So instead we will tell the story of two forgers.....
And the third? The Royal Air Force killed 7000 concentration camp inmates, 5000 on one ship, the week the war ended.
WWII: For nearly 39 years, parts of skeletons were being washed ashore – SS Cap Arcona was carrying around 5,500 concentration camp inmates
The tragic WWII story of how the RAF attacked and sank the Cap Arcona maritime tragedy, the loss of life in the Cap Arcona sinking is among the highest in maritime history. For weeks after the sinking, bodies of the victims were being washed ashore, where they were collected and buried in a single mass grave at Neustadt in Holstein. For nearly thirty years, parts of skeletons were being washed ashore, until the last find, by a twelve-year-old boy, in 1971.
There are several versions of what happened and why the RAF sunk the ship: (1) One version of the story is that the boarding of the prisoners with the knowledge that the ships would be attacked by Allied aircraft was a cynical trick by the German police authorities to have the prisoners killed. (2) Another version is that Count Folke Bernadotte, the Vice President of the International Red Cross had arranged for the transfer of prisoners to Swedish hospitals and that this was the purpose of the Cap Arcona’s last tragic voyage. Such transfers had previously taken place. (3) To this day, the responsibility of the German and British participants in the tragedy near Neustadt have not been judicially examined since the circumstances are not entirely clear. It is said that Red Cross radio operators attempted to warn the English against attacking the ships and to have notified them of the true situation on board. (4) The last word is that the RAF has sealed all records connected with the attack on the Cap Arcona until 2045.....
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A final bit of grim irony. The Cap Arcona was used in the making of the German film of Titanic in 1943.—Encyclopedia Titanica
