 Most of the Dodecanese Jews were murdered by the Germans; 1,700 members of the ancient Jewish community of Rhodes (of a population of about 2,000) were rounded up by the Gestapo in July 1944 and only some 160 of them survived the camps.Out of 6,000 Ladino-speaking Jews in the Dodecanese, about 1,200 people survived by escaping to the nearby coast of Turkey.Italian prisoners of war were transferred to the mainland by the Germans in overcrowded unseaworthy vessels, which led to several accidents, of which the sinking of the on 12 February 1944 was the most deadly.