[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

5/3/1945 German ocean liner SS Cap Arcona, laden with prisoners is sunk by the Royal Air Force in the western Baltic Sea, killing 5,800. One of the largest maritime losses of life in World War II.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Cap_Arcona

Cap Arcona's final use was as a prison ship. In May 1945 she was heavily laden with prisoners from Nazi concentration camps when the Royal Air Force bombed her in the western Baltic Sea, killing about 5,000 people; with more than 2,000(7,800??!) further casualties in the sinkings of the accompanying vessels of the prison fleet, Deutschland and Thielbek. This was one of the largest single-incident maritime losses of life in the Second World War. The capsized hulk of Cap Arcona later drifted ashore, and the beached wreck was finally broken up in 1949. For weeks after the attack, bodies of victims washed ashore, where they were collected and buried in mass graves at Neustadt in Holstein, Scharbeutz and Timmendorfer Strand. Parts of skeletons washed ashore over the next 30 years, with the last find in 1971.
The prisoners aboard the ships were of at least 30 nationalities: American, Belarusian, Belgian, Canadian, Czechoslovakian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourger, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swiss, Ukrainian, and possibly others.