Shortly after noon on April 20, 1944, the Portuguese ship Alexandre Silva found three shipwrecked sailors from the Greek freighter Peleus on a raft.

The Peleus had been sunk more than a month earlier—on March 13—by the German submarine U-852.

The men—two Greek nationals and one Maltese—were landed at Lobito, in Angola, on April 27, opening one of the darkest chapters in the history of the German submarine service during World War II.

Antonios Lissis, Dimitrios Argiros, and Roco Said were the only survivors of a massacre carried out by the crew of the U-852.

The killings began just a few minutes after 7:40 p.m. on March 13, when the Peleus—sailing alone from Freetown to Buenos Aires—was hit by two torpedoes and sank. The commander of the German U-boat, Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, surfaced near the struggling survivors and questioned a Greek officer. He then gave the order to kill all of them.

In the hours that followed, all the crew members they found were eliminated with grenades and machine-gun fire. In the end, only four men survived by hiding on two rafts. Later, the castaways met and tied the rafts together, drifting for more than a month.

By the time the Alexandre Silva spotted them, one of the men had already died from wounds sustained during the explosion of a grenade thrown by the Germans.

The U-852 left the area of the attack and rounded the Cape of Good Hope toward the Indian Ocean. On May 2, 1944, it was attacked by a British aircraft near the coast of Somalia. The encounter caused severe damage, forcing the crew to beach the submarine. The Germans were captured, and when the wreck was inspected, reports were found describing the sinking of a ship on the same date and in the same area as the Peleus incident.

After the war, in October 1945, five members of the U-852 crew were tried for war crimes in the German city of Hamburg. The U-boat commander claimed he was protecting his vessel and crew, fearing that the survivors might alert Allied warships to their location.

The Allied War Crimes Tribunal was not convinced. Condemned to death, Eck and two officers were executed by firing squad in November of that year, going down in history as the only U-boat crew to be sentenced to death for war crimes during World War II.

Carlos Guerreiro