I've heard of the sinking of the Hell ships. Did not know of the Gustloff

CanyonAg77 said:

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Oddball fact: Cap Arcona stood in for Titanic in the 1943 Nazi propaganda movie of the same name, for the exterior shots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_(1943_film)

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And her sinking killed nearly 5 times as many people as the actual Titanic.

People had a much higher tolerance for "collateral damage" back then.

Yes, there were a lot of these. The Russians torpedoed several. Google Worst Maritime Diasters of all time and the Wikipedia has five or six from this time bigger than the Titanic.

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People had a much higher tolerance for "collateral damage" back then.

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I lose patience with these liberal types who freak out whenever there's a war and we're "bombing brown people again." First of all, most middle Easterners aren't truly "brown" and secondly, collateral damage is usually 8 or fewer, vs. when we were bombing good ol' white guys and gals in Hamburg, we could fry 40,000 in a night and no one batted an eye.

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Yeah, guess that is why I got a D in the 4th quarter of German and I believe Dr. Puppe did me a favor.

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Ah, Dr. Puppe. This takes me way back, since my undergrad was in German. Puppe was from an extraordinary background: His dad was a German official, I think in the Department of Finance, and his mom was Jewish. Around 1942 or so, they basically told dad to reject his German wife or they would all go to the concentration camp together. Dad said no, I'm not abandoning my wife and kid, and the whole family was shipped to the camp. Only young Puppe survived, if I remember right. Later, he became a US Citizen and was drafted into the Korean War. He volunteered for detail burying the dead because he said bodies didn't bother him at all like they did everyone else, since he had seen far worse in the camps.

I never had him for a class, but we did a study abroad program in 1992 and he went along with us. In every museum we went to, he was like an encyclopedia. He could tell you everything about every artist and sculptor. A really smart guy, but kind of an absent-minded-professor kind. One of our other chaperones had to go back to the US for a family emergency and A&M didn't trust ol' Puppe organizing things, so they sent over another prof to join him. But Puppe was just fun all around.

Slightly related:

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RMS Lancastria

In June 1940, following the evacuation of Dunkirk and Le Havre, HMT Lancastria was sent to France to take part in Operation Aerial. This was the code name given to the continued evacuations of civilians and British forces from Western France.

On 17 June 1940 Lancastria anchored off the coast of St Nazaire and began to board thousands of troops and civilians. The situation was chaotic. The ship was designed to carry 2,200 passengers but there were at least 5,000 people on board, possibly as high as 9,000. Although full, Lancastria was told to wait until other ships had finished boarding to leave together with escorts.

A fresh air raid began at 15:50 by Junkers Ju 88 bomber aircraft from Kampfgeschwader 30. Lancastria was hit by three or possibly four bombs. A number of survivors reported that one bomb had gone down the ship's single funnel which is most likely, given the speed with which the ship sank about 15-20 minutes.

There were 2,477 survivors, of whom about 100 were still alive in 2011. Many families of the dead knew only that they died with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF); the death toll accounted for roughly a third of the total losses of the BEF in France.

The immense loss of life was such that the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, immediately suppressed news of the disaster through the D-Notice system, telling his staff that "The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least". In his memoirs, Churchill stated that he had intended to release the news a few days later, but that events in France "crowded upon us so black and so quickly that I forgot to lift the ban"

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