Learning Something New (Almost) Every Day

"Jewdayo," maintained by Jewish Currents magazine, provides a daily dose of Jewish history. Sometimes, I'm familiar with the history that's presented there. But quite often, I find myself learning something that's at least partially, if not altogether, new to me.

Such was the case when I saw today's post on the Lubeck Harbor Tragedy, which took place on May 3, 1945:

On this date in 1945, more than 7,000 survivors of Nazi concentration camps were killed by Britain’s Royal Air Force in Lubeck harbor, Germany, in a tragic case of “friendly fire.” Almost 10,000 Jews, Russian POWS, and other “enemies of the Reich” had been marched by the Germans from several concentration camps to the German Baltic coast and crowded onto three ships, which were probably scheduled to be deliberately sunk. Instead, in the course of two hours of bombing and strafing, British planes, under orders to “destroy the concentration of enemy shipping in Lubeck Bay,” killed all but a few hundred of the survivors. The incident, which took place just a day before the British accepted the surrender of all German forces in the area, was hardly acknowledged and never memorialized, and RAF records about the disaster were sealed until 2045.

I never knew. Did you?