08/10/2025: The Cap Arcona and Jamie Lee Curtis

0:07The Cap Arcona was once a German version of the Titanic. It had its own tennis court. It had a heating swimming pool. It had the most wonderful restaurant where you could look out onto the sea. The most wonderful first-class cabins. It was a luxury cruise ship. It was a luxury cruise liner. It absolutely was. But during World War II, the Nazis turned the Cap Arcona into a floating concentration camp. Just days before liberation, the ship was bombed, killing thousands on board. Why was it targeted and who sent the warplanes? The answers might surprise you.

0:45Four decades after she cemented her place in Hollywood with the horror movie Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis is savoring a new wave of award-winning performances, playing a string of raw, volatile characters that suck the oxygen out of the room. Donna, the images in my mind of her buttering the bread with the nails and the eyelash on the cheek. The eyelash. That single eyelash, I think, won me an Emmy. I swear to God. Go. Go sit. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

1:35Everyone knows the story of the Titanic, the opulent British ocean liner that struck an iceberg and sank. But it's likely you have never heard of the Cap Arcona, a German version of the Titanic. Before World War II, the vessel was a cruise ship for the well-to-do. By the end of the war, the Nazis had transformed it into a floating concentration camp. Packed with prisoners, the Cap Arcona was anchored in Lubick Bay in the Baltic Sea, when an aerial attack just hours before liberation killed nearly everyone on board. As we first reported in October, the ship's improbable journey from luxury liner to deathtrap is one of the most horrific and little-known war stories we have encountered.

2:25On sunlit days, Germany's Baltic coast looks idyllic, but this beauty masks an unthinkable horror, one that's etched in the local memory and on this beachside marker bearing the name Caparcona, and the German words for fear, panic, and grief. It's so calm, so peaceful, and yet out there is a graveyard. You can come to a place like this and just feel the weight of the history. British historian Bill Niven has spent much of his career studying the Holocaust. We met him at Lubick Bay, where the memory of the Caparcona and a smaller cargo ship bombed on May 3, 1945, still haunts this shore. What is this place?

3:11This is a memorial, an honorary memorial, to the victims of the two ships that went down with a loss of some 7 ,000 lives. It recalls all the nationalities that were victims of the sinking of the ships. There were Americans on the ships. Yes. There were Greeks, there were Italians, and the Jewish people, of course, represented here by the Star of David. Most of the victims were on the Cap Arcona.

3:39Every year on the anniversary of the attack, a somber ceremony is held at this site to remember those who perished and those who suffered. My father was one of the survivors of the sinking of the Caparcona. Bruno Neurath Wilson came to honor his father, Willy, a political prisoner held on the Caparcona. Only about 400 prisoners survived the attack, including Bruno's father. What's it like for you to be in this place? When we go to the place where the Caparcona sank, I try to imagine what happened. I really cannot imagine what happened on the ship. No one could have imagined this end for the Caparcona.

4:27Launched with great fanfare in 1927, the ship became known as the Queen of the Atlantic, transporting well-heeled passengers from Europe to South America in two weeks. What was it like in its heyday? Well, it was one of the most beautiful ships the Germans had. It had its own tennis court. It had a heating swimming pool. It had the most wonderful restaurant where you could look out onto the sea. The most wonderful first-class cabins. It was a luxury... It was a luxury cruise ship. It was a luxury cruise liner. Absolutely was. The Cap Arcona traversed the Atlantic dozens of times. But in 1933, Germany underwent a sea change.

5:06Hulk! Adolf Hitler came to power. In 1939, as German troops invaded Poland, the Nazis commandeered the Cap Arcona to serve as a floating barracks in the Baltic. Ironically, on one of its last trips before the war, the ocean liner carried some German-Jewish passengers who had bought tickets to safety in South America. But most Jews had no way to escape. We were rounded up and sent to the concentration camp, just the three of us, my mother, I, and my younger brother. 95-year-old Manfred Goldberg was just 11 when the Nazis forcibly removed him and other Jews from his hometown of Kassel in central Germany.

5:56The cruel experiences during my young years between 11 and 15, they're firmly lodged clearly in my mind to this day. He would survive confinement in the Riga-Latvia ghetto and four different concentration camps. We lost our names. Each one of us was given a number instead. In the well-known camp of Auschwitz, people had the number tattooed on their arm, but we had to remember our numbers. My number, incidentally, was 56478. If you forgot it in the camps, you were usually punished for it. So I buried it in my mind so as never to forget it, and I won't as long as I live. In Nazi-held Latvia, Goldberg, his mother Rosa, and other prisoners were forced to repair bombed-out railroad tracks during the day.

6:52When they returned to camp one night, they learned the SS had taken Manfred's little brother Herman and three other children. They were never seen again. They just disappeared off the face of the earth. The next morning, both my mother and I had to line up and go to work as though nothing untoward had happened. What did that do to you and your mother? I had grown close to my brother because my mother packed some fairy tale books, stories for small children, and we would lie on the floor side by side and I would read to him because he couldn't read himself. As a result, we were very close to each other, so when he disappeared, I was nearly as heartbroken as my mother at the loss of her little baby, so to speak.

7:41He was seven when he went into the camps, and nine the day he disappeared. Goldberg and his mother ended up in the Stutthof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Another young boy, George Schwab, was imprisoned there too. The crematoria, burning of bodies all the time, gassing, terrible. Schwab is 93, but he was only 9 when German soldiers invaded his hometown of Liapaya, Latvia. Schwab's father, a prominent physician, tried to protect other Jews in town. He noticed SS trucks were approaching, and he waved for fellow Jews to disperse. and they arrested him, knocked out one eye, threw him down the cellar, and then killed him.

8:36Bruno's father, Willy Neureth, was not Jewish, but he actively opposed the Nazi regime. My parents belonged to the small minority of German people who fight against the Nazis. They didn't fight with weapons, of course. Fight with their words. Yes, fighting with papers, with printed papers. Willi was arrested for distributing anti-fascist flyers. They brought them to Buchenwald, and from Buchenwald they brought him to the concentration camp Neungamme by Hamburg. The Neungamme work camp mostly held political prisoners. Inside this massive warehouse, historian Bill Niven told us, prisoners like Willi Neurath made bricks.

9:19What does it feel like to walk in here? It feels like a factory of death. You can sense what went on in this place. But this was not a death camp. This was a work camp. It's a very, very slim distinction. In the course of this work, they die. They die in droves. Willie Neurath managed to survive. But as fate would have it, he, Schwab, the Goldbergs, and the Cap Arcona all would end up at Lubick Bay, one of the last Nazi defensive positions. In 1945, as the Allies were closing in, the Cap Arcona, now rusted and battered, was repositioned to Lubbock Bay. At the same time, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the evacuation of concentration camps.

10:07Why were they trying to clear these places up? There is an order by Himmler that no prisoner is to be delivered into the hands of the enemy alive. But I think the main concern was to get rid of evidence, because prisoners are evidence. They can talk, they can tell, they can speak to those atrocities that were committed by the Nazis. So getting rid of the evidence meant getting rid of human beings. Thousands of prisoners were sent to the Nazi holdout at Ljubik Bay. Willy Neurath was forced north from Neuengamme, about 50 miles. From Stutthof in the east, George Schwab, Manfred Goldberg, and his mother were sent to a nearby town aptly named Hell and put on barges.

10:50We had to sit down, spread our legs wide apart so the next person could sit between our legs so that their back was touching our chest. That way they could get the maximum number of people into that confined area of the barge. Four tugs appeared. The crews were SS people. Each one coupled themselves to one of the barges and they towed us out to sea. We had absolutely no idea what was planned, what was happening. People kept speculating that they would just sink us at sea to get rid of us. What were the conditions? Oh, terrible. Just beyond description. No toilet facilities, hardly any food. You could hardly sit.

11:42You can certainly not sleep. Sounds like hell. Hell. Hell on Earth. Absolutely. The barges, each packed with about a thousand prisoners, were towed by tugboat for six days, about 400 miles across the Baltic, to where the Cap Arcona was positioned. The Cap Arcona arrived in Lübeck Bay on April 14, 1945, two weeks before Hitler killed himself and three weeks before the end of the war in Europe. It was anchored out there, about two miles offshore. With its engines barely running and little in the way of food and water, the former Queen of the Atlantic, a playground for the rich and famous, was about to become a floating concentration camp.

12:28With nowhere to hold the amassed prisoners, SS guards jammed more than 4 ,000, including Willie Neurath, on to the Cap Arcona. And one must remember this is a ship that's meant for 1 ,500 people. It's not meant for 4 ,000 to 5 ,000 prisoners. So they were jammed. They were jammed like sardines. Do we know what the Nazis intended to do with the prisoners on the ship? I think they intended them to die. Prisoners already were dying on the barges fleeing Stutthof, carrying Schwab and the Goldbergs. You had been without food and water? Very little. Next to nothing. Very little. Once in the bay, the SS guards uncoupled the tugboats, leaving the prisoners adrift.

13:16And we were left on the high scenes in the barges alone. They just abandoned you? Abandoned. We were left alone, supposedly on minefields. Schwab and Goldberg told us, mixed in with the concentration camp victims, were a few prisoners of war. They had been better fed and better treated, and they seized the opportunity. They managed to prise loose some very long floorboards and began using these planks of wood as oars. And they rode in that manner into the night. Shortly before dawn, the barge ran aground, and anyone who still had an ounce of strength began clambering onto the top deck. It meant jumping into the water and wading through the water to shore.

14:03But there were a proportion of people on board. They were still alive. They were still breathing. But their mind had ceased functioning. They just sat there listlessly awaiting their fate. Norwegian prisoners on George Schwab's barge took advantage of the wind blowing toward shore. They came and collected the blankets that we had and made sails. And we managed to sail towards land. What was your condition? Terribly weak, terribly weak. You know, I was a walking skeleton. Like many on board, he was almost too weak to move. But a fellow prisoner, an acquaintance from his hometown named Yule, saw him and demanded he get up.

14:53Yule sort of dragged me. I begged him, leave me alone, I have no strength. No, no, no, no, no. With Eula's help, Schwab managed to climb out of the barge. The Goldbergs got out of theirs too, only to be intercepted by the SS and German troops on the beach. They, of course, were livid that we had moved the barge and had jumped off. So, in revenge, one part of them clumbered onto the barge and would hear a lot of shooting. Every one of these unfortunate people, who no longer knew what to do to save themselves, were shot because they were just sitting there listlessly. And we felt practically certain that we would be shot next.

15:40But instead, they lined us up into a column. We were told that we were going to be shipped to a liner by the name of Caparcona. And while we stood there, we saw quite a large number of bombers, airplanes, moving overhead. The Cap Arcona was in the bomber's sights. The war was nearly over, but the prisoners' ordeal was not. That part of our story when we come back.

16:20At the beginning of May 1945, the war in Europe was all but over. Adolf Hitler was dead, German forces were in retreat, and the Third Reich was crumbling. One of the last Nazi defensive positions was at Lubbock Bay in the Baltic Sea, where German ships fled seeking safe harbor, including the Cap Arcona, a luxury ocean liner commandeered by the Nazis for the war effort. As the Allies closed in, the SS evacuated concentration camps and packed thousands of prisoners onto the Cap Arcona. Around noon on May 3rd, 1945, 13-year-old George Schwab was ordered to line up to board the ship. But the Caparcona could not come close to shore because it was a large, big ship.

17:15So we were going to be transported to the Caparcona by another ship. I was in the back of the line. I was in no hurry. You purposely got to the back of the line. Back of the line. He was at a dock near this German naval base where Manfred Goldberg and his mother were lined up to. And it is while we stood there that we witnessed bombers and fighter planes coming along. Could you see any markings on the plane? No, we had no idea what nationality they were. You could see the planes coming in? Oh, we could see the planes, clearly. We could see the bombs dropping. Can you remember what it sounded like?

17:53There were some pretty powerful explosions, and there were quite a few. The Cap Arcona was hit. With more than 4 ,000 prisoners on board, the floating concentration camp became a fiery tomb. In a hard-to-believe turn of events, the attackers were British typhoon fighters like these, part of the Allied forces moving in to finish off the Nazis. The British came to liberate these prisoners. They did, yeah. And ended up killing thousands of them. It's like horror on top of horror. It is, and yet some of them did survive to remember it. Bill Niven is a British historian and scholar of the Holocaust.

18:37He told us the mistaken attack on the Cap Arcona and a smaller ship is one of the most wrenching tragedies of the war. The prisoners knew that the war was nearing its end. I think a lot of them probably had hopes that they would survive, and that gave them the strength and the courage to hang on. At the Cap Arcona Museum in the town of Neustadt by Lubbeck Bay, he described the attack. British typhoons struck in waves. The Cap Arcona was hit around 3 p.m. Do you have any idea how many bombs were dropped on the ship? Some people say 60 or over 60. You can imagine the panic and the horror that broke out when the bombs hit the ship, especially for those concentration camp prisoners who were in the very lower decks of the ship, and they were unable to get up to the top because of the flames.

19:25Is this the worst case of friendly fire in the Royal Air Force's history? Quite probably, yeah. Sebastian Cox recently retired as chief historian for Britain's Royal Air Force, the RAF. He blames the incident on the fog of war. Why was the Cap Arcona targeted? Because the Allies believed that there was going to be an attempt to flee by certain Nazi elements across the Baltic to Norway and essentially continue the war. Did the British military have any idea that concentration camp survivors were on the Cap Arcona? If you mean did the pilots have any idea, absolutely not. But other members of the British military did know.

20:15What we learn from the records, that the British were handed two opportunities very close to the 3rd of May in regards to the placement of prisoners on board the ship. Concentration camp prisoners on those ships. Indeed. Daniel Long wrote his Ph.D. history thesis on the attack on the Cap Arcona. We met him at the British National Archives in London, where he showed us these fragile war documents. This is the only official investigation that was carried out into the tragic sinking of the Cap Arcona. Shortly after the bombing, a British war crimes investigator interviewed the intelligence officer for the squadrons that attacked the Cap Arcona and other ships in the bay.

21:00The intelligence officer admitted on two occasions that a message was received on the 2nd of May, 1945, that the ships had been loaded with concentration camp prisoners. That intelligence came in the day before the attack. Which then leads to suggest that it was ample time to warn the pilots on the planes. That information did not make it to the RAF pilots? That's correct. The report does not say why the intelligence officer failed to inform the pilots, but it did blame RAF personnel for the error and called for further inquiry. The report strongly urged that there be a follow-up investigation.

21:41That has never happened, has it? Not to my knowledge. Why not? Attempting to, you know, conduct a detailed investigation would in many respects be a little pointless. What are you going to conclude? To find out what went wrong, what mistakes were made. We know what happened. The RAF made a mistake. An individual made a very tragic mistake, and we know the consequences. About 7 ,000 prisoners perished when the ships were bombed in the bay. Of the more than 4 ,000 on the Cap Arcona, only about 400 survived. Bill Niven told us several survivors later wrote accounts of the hell they endured at sea.

22:34prisoners were packed together like herrings. So they stretched their arms up and they cried out, I want out, I want out. This is really quite terrible to have to read this. The fire suddenly got more and more intensive and this was because the flesh of the prisoners was burning so strongly it made this intensity happen. It's distressing to read. Bruno Neureth Wilson's father, Willy, a political prisoner, was trapped on the ship when the bombs hit. My father managed to go to the back of the ship where it was not burning, and there he survived because he couldn't swim. He survived because he couldn't swim.

23:14He couldn't swim because he did not jump into the water. And prisoners who jumped into the water were shot by the SS. When the British realized their mistake, they dispatched rescuers who plucked Willie Neurath and others from the listing deck of the Cap Arcona, and took them to shore. This is the stretch of beach where your father came ashore? In this front of the beach, yes. Bruno told us in an improbable twist of fate, his mother Eva, a naval staff assistant, had been transferred to the naval base at Lubick Bay. When she saw the bombing, she was drawn to the beach. She had only one hope, to know where is my husband.

23:56Is he still living? And maybe my husband is on the ship. find each other. She came from this direction, and she saw a man coming towards her. She didn't recognize the one person she wanted to see. He must have been thin and weak. And dirty from the burning. But he came over to her and called his nickname he had for her, Muppel. What does Muppel mean? Muppel means something like, I love your round face. she recognized his voice by this one word, mupel. That ship was a graveyard for so many people, but yet it brought your parents back together. Yeah. I don't know if there are hidden meanings in life, but one meaning can be that I am alive now and can tell about the story.

24:49As for George Schwab, he pulled inspiration from the horror. This is a prize for having helped Latvia get into NATO. The native of Latvia moved to New York, earned a Ph.D. in political science, and had an illustrious career as an academic and peace broker. Here I'm with King Hussein, Bill Clinton. You know, Schwab, I think you knew everyone. Somewhat. Manfred Goldberg and his mother settled in London. She passed away in 1961. Goldberg married, started a business and a family. In 2017, he returned to the Stutthof concentration camp with the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. He has made it his life mission to share his story.

25:40I consider that part of my revenge on the Nazis. They wanted to exterminate us. And here we are, not only having survived, we are now great-grandparents. That's your revenge? My revenge on the Nazis, yes. The Cap Arcona lay half-sunken in Lubick Bay for four years before being dismantled. But the story has lain beneath the surface, little known beyond this Baltic coast. It's now tradition on the 3rd of May for families of victims and survivors to sail to the site where the ship was bombed.

26:23They want the world to remember.

26:31This past May, Manfred Goldberg returned to Lubbock Bay to commemorate the 80th anniversary of his liberation at the end of the war in Europe. He stood on the site where he witnessed the attack on the Cap Arcona and went to a Jewish cemetery to chant a memorial prayer.

27:01In Hollywood, it's not unusual for actors to try and fit the industry standard of beauty and marketability, plotting every outfit and career move with the prowess of a chess master. But Jamie Lee Curtis is not one of them. Candid and spontaneous, she fearlessly calls it as she sees it, even when it comes to herself. We met Jamie Lee Curtis in Los Angeles. And as we said when we first aired this story in May, at 66 years old, she is savoring a new wave of award-winning performances. We asked her about her decades-long career. She told us it was anything but planned. My life hinged on a couple seconds I never saw coming.

27:42I never thought I'd be an actor in my life. My teeth were the color of concrete. They were gray. I was cute but not pretty. And so I never saw that coming. She probably should have. Jamie Lee Curtis was born into Hollywood royalty, the daughter of Screen Idols Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, two of the biggest stars during the golden age of cinema. But Jamie Lee says she wanted to be a cop. She was home from college when a friend convinced her to audition for Universal Studios. I did the scene, and she said, that was very good or whatever. And I was like, okay, great, thanks. I said, listen, if this is going to work out, I need to know because I'm going back to college in like two days.

28:30Very practical. So like she laughed or whatever. And they called me the next day and they gave me a seven-year contract at Universal. And I quit college. Almost immediately, she booked the 1978 horror film Halloween. While I'm here tonight, I'm not about to let anything happen to you. Curtis was cast as the bookish babysitter, Laurie Strode, terrorized by an unrelenting killer. It was her first movie. She was 19 years old playing the lead. Were people saying, oh, she got the job because of who her parents are, because of the pedigree? I know. I guarantee you the fact that my mother was in Psycho was a determining factor that maybe that will get them a little extra publicity.

29:14Now, did it get me to that final two? No. My auditions got me to the final two. This was a$300 ,000 horror movie. This was not a job that a lot of people wanted. Halloween ended up grossing more than$70 million and became a cult classic. But it didn't exactly launch Jamie Lee Curtis's career. My big break after Halloween was I was on Love Boat with Janet Leigh. Beautiful Janet Leigh playing my mother. And then I was in a Charlie's Angels episode where I am Cheryl Ladd's best friend, pro golfer. So those are the two jobs I get post-Halloween. Were you thinking at this point, like, people aren't hiring me, they just want my mom around or the name?