THE MAIDEN VOYAGE WAS a roaring success, garnering for the ship instant notoriety as one of the world’s premier ocean liners. The Cap Arcona soon appeared on postcards and in magazine stories throughout Europe. It was, after all, a romantic period for cruising, a time when the captains of luxury ships were household names in Germany and such magnificent vessels were celebrated around the world.
However, by the 1930s the Cap Arcona and its sister liners also emerged in Germany as prominent symbols of a new and dangerous form of ultranationalism. One of the many admirers of these grand ships was a former corporal from World War I and radical politician named Adolf Hitler. And he had big plans for the celebrated ocean liner.
German emigration and tourism to South America peaked in 1929. Although the alarming rise of National Socialism in the country and increasingly disturbing news coming out of Germany deterred some Europeans from cruising out of German ports or on German ships, a vigorous travel and trade business continued somewhat unabated during the initial years of Hitler’s reign, which began in January 1933.
Within Germany the Cap Arcona’s popularity grew. While other industries were increasingly brought under state control, the führer allowed the Cap Arcona and other luxury liners to operate freely, as they had done before the Nazis swept into power. For example, because of Hitler’s passion for these huge ships, their captains and owners were not required to “sign off” with the Nazi high command regarding the details of their voyages, nor were they prohibited from visiting ports around the world or booking non-Germans in first-class cabins. On the contrary, Hitler held these liners up as symbols of German power.
Just about the only change occurring with the operation of the Cap Arcona when Hitler assumed power was that the well-respected commodore of the ship, Ernst Rolin, resigned his command. Rolin had been sailing with Hamburg-Süd for forty-three years. On October 20, 1933, Richard Niejahr, the first officer who had been with the company since 1910, assumed command of Hamburg-Süd’s flagship. He would be promoted to commodore in 1937. Heinrich Bertram, who would soon figure prominently in the tragic story of the Cap Arcona, was promoted to Niejahr’s second in command.
By 1936 reports around the world began surfacing of the growing fanaticism inside Hitler’s regime. News of the shocking details of the Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews, combined with negative publicity generated by the ominous display of ultranationalism during the Berlin Olympics, deterred prospective passengers from around the world. Bookings on the Cap Arcona declined precipitously by year’s end. The Nazi regime compounded their own problems by placing prohibitions on their citizens’ ability to travel outside of Germany. Nazi ideology also began discouraging such “frivolities” as vacations, instead maintaining that Germans should be hard at work for the fatherland.
One exception to these new Nazi policies was the “leisure vacation” for German workers. German industrialists were therefore encouraged to both reward productive workers and celebrate nationalism by sending their most loyal laborers on Nazi cruises. Led by Dr. Robert Ley, a Nazi politician and head of the German Labor Front, ships were rented for the purpose of accommodating workers on vacations to Norway and the Baltic, Italy, Madeira, and Yugoslavia. The Nazi regime, through its Strength Through Joy initiative, subsidized these affordable vacations while subtly indoctrinating workers on the cruises. The problem for companies like Hamburg-Süd was that these leisure vacations competed with the South American cruise business. Ships were diverted from their previous, vastly more profitable, routes to accommodate German laborers.
Nevertheless, at the start of 1939, Hamburg-Süd was, despite the competition from Nazi Party leisure vacation bookings, still operating fifty-two ships with a total capacity in excess of 385,000 tons. Impressively, 57,859 passengers had traveled aboard the Cap Arcona across the South Atlantic, helping to position the company as one of the world’s leading cruise and shipping lines. However, all that was about to change.
As summer approached in 1939, emotions ran high on the Cap Arcona. Commodore Richard Niejahr had taken ill with a serious bout of typhus, business had slowed, and rumors swirled among sailors and shipping executives alike that German liners and commercial ships were being reassigned to the German navy. However, good news arrived to temporarily lift the spirits of the Cap Arcona’s crew. Commodore Niejahr returned that summer from a leave of absence to inform his crew that the ship had been assigned a new cruise—its ninety-second—and that Hamburg-Süd planned to build a sister ship to the Cap Arcona. The announcement from the ship’s parent company came on August 21, a mere ten days before the start of World War II. The ship embarked on its scheduled cruise, but that ninety-second excursion would never occur.
The appearance of business as usual only temporarily cloaked the reality of the coming war. Of the ship’s many passengers traveling to Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil on that round-trip voyage, only two of them had booked their cruise all the way back to Hamburg. The rest were disembarking in France prior to the ship’s return to Germany. It was clear to the captain and crew that the public no longer viewed Germany as a safe or desirable place. Sure enough, the voyage would be the Cap Arcona’s last as a passenger ship.
After disembarking most of the passengers, the Cap Arcona sailed from France en route to Hamburg. On the evening of August 24, Commodore Niejahr turned command of the massive liner over to a junior officer and retired to his cabin to sleep. But in the wee hours of the morning, the worst fears of the captain and crew were realized. As the ship was approaching Hamburg, a radio message marked “urgent” was delivered to the captain.
Commodore Niejahr called a meeting of his senior officers. Those present were the first and second officers, the ship’s physician, head engineer and second engineer, steward, chef, and purser/paymaster. The officers likely suspected the worst. In compliance with the order, Commodore Niejahr removed from the ship’s safe an envelope. Grimly, he informed the crew that the envelope was marked “Special Orders for the Event of War for Cargo Vessels.”
Over the next few days, a series of radio messages arrived. Message QWA 7, on August 25, ordered “No transmission to all stations” and that all ships must “deviate from scheduled routes by 30–100 nautical miles as security precaution.” Message QWA 8 ordered all ships to camouflage their hulls and avoid sailing through the English Channel. On August 27, message QWA 9 required them to return to their home harbor within four days. The Cap Arcona raced to Hamburg. Ships were to avoid the ports of several countries, one of which was the United States, which was permitted to be entered “only in cases of extreme necessity.”
Over the next several days, Commodore Niejahr received three more of the urgent QWA messages. They notified the officers of the outbreak of war with France and England; advised ships to return to Germany by Norway and Shetland, preferably at night and without using lights; and established the protocol for going to war. Niejahr announced to his men that he would pray.
When the ocean liner returned to its home port, noticeably absent were the usual fanfare and cheering crowds gathered at the docks. Very few people were visible anywhere near the harbor to greet the returning ship. Nazi officials ordered the crew and two passengers off the ship. Commodore Niejahr’s protestations of “What will happen to my ship now if we have war?” were met with stony silence. Despite his earlier hopes and prayers, his beloved ship was ordered to be placed under the command of the German navy, the Kriegsmarine.
ONE OF THE MANY affectionate nicknames that emerged for the Cap Arcona during the 1920s and 1930s was, ironically, the “Lucky Lady.” However, the ship’s fate, along with the course of world history, changed on September 1, 1939, when Hitler’s army marched into Poland.
In a coordinated lightning strike by land and air, tanks, artillery pieces, and warplanes stormed across the border. The Polish army, which attempted to fight German tanks with men on horseback, was crushed in a matter of days. The formal surrender came on September 27, marking the first domino to fall in the führer’s mad game of global domination.
Nearly every German vessel afloat was officially reassigned in 1939 to the Kriegsmarine as a naval accommodation ship. The Cap Arcona was placed in the service of the Nazis’ “Fortress Command” and sent to the occupied Baltic port of Gotenhafen, site of present-day Gdynia on the northern Polish coast, near Danzig. The port city had been taken by the Nazis in 1939 and was now a bustling naval base. Military operations at Gotenhafen flourished during the first few years of the war when the base was largely spared from Allied bombing. As a result, a number of warships and other converted accommodation or “help” ships soon joined the Cap Arcona in port. Hamburg-Süd was ordered to close the file on its highly profitable flagship.
In 1941 control of the former luxury liner was again transferred, this time to the Nazi “Coastal Control Office for the Mid-Baltic.” Nearly all its officers and crew were ordered off the ship. Commodore Niejahr experienced additional health problems and took another leave of absence. He briefly returned to “command” the rusting hulk moored on the Polish coast on February 11, 1942, but died of his malady on April 4. That September an interim captain was appointed to the ship. However, he was “voted off the ship” exactly one year later by the officers of the naval base. The first officer took command of the Cap Arcona for the remainder of the month. In October 1943, a new captain finally assumed command. His name was Johannes Gerdts, and he would preside over one of the most tragic periods in the ship’s remaining history.
The once-proud ocean liner would spend most of the war—from November 29, 1939, until January 31, 1945—in port, docked at Gdynia quay. Its new role: a floating barracks for naval personnel and an ad hoc training platform for naval exercises. It was quite a demotion for the pride of Germany. Its dining rooms now functioned as a mess for sailors in uniform. Many of its luxurious furnishings were stripped from the ship, and the “Queen of the South Atlantic” was painted military gray, although the name “CAP ARCONA” remained in large white capital letters on the stern of the ship. Its glory days were gone.
But the monotony of serving as a floating barracks for the Kriegsmarine during the war was soon to be interrupted. The Cap Arcona had caught the attention of Hitler’s propaganda minister and one of Germany’s greatest movie directors. They wanted to cast the ship in the starring role of an epic Nazi propaganda film.