SS Cap Arcona, named after Cape Arkona on the island of Rügen, was a large German ocean liner, later a ship of the German Navy, and finally a prison ship. A flagship of the Hamburg Südamerikanische Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft
("Hamburg-South America Line"), she made her maiden voyage on 29
October 1927, carrying passengers and cargo between Germany and the east
coast of South America, and in her time was the largest and quickest
ship on the route.^[​2]


In 1940 the Kriegsmarine requisitioned Cap Arcona as an accommodation ship. In 1942 she served as the set for the German propaganda feature film Titanic. In 1945 she evacuated almost 26,000 German civilian refugees from East Prussia before the advance of the Red Army.


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, killing about 5,000 people; with more than 2,000 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.