The Empire Windrush – the passenger liner which brought one of the first groups of post-war Caribbean immigrants to the UK – was used by the Nazis to transport Jews bound for concentration camps, a new book has claimed.

Windrush: A Ship Through Time, written by Paul Arnott, explores the history of the ship, which transported thousands of people between 1931 until its sinking in 1954.

Before it was renamed HMT Empire Windrush by Britain, it was was allocated by Germany for military use during the Second World War – at the time known as MV Monte Rosa.

In it, Arnott claims that, five years before its voyage from Kingston, Jamaica, to the UK in 1948, the ship was used to transport Norwegian Jews to Poland, to be taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

He writes that it was also used by the Nazis “to board for rallies while at port in Argentina, as Goebbels had requisitioned Windrush as one of his ‘Strength Through Joy’ vessels”.

HMT Empire Windrush was revived in the British national consciousness last year during the Windrush scandal, centring on the government’s policy towards British subjects who had arrived to the UK before 1973 – particularly from Caribbean countries.

In some cases, UK residents were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation and – in at least 83 cases – wrongly deported by the Home Office.