SS Athenia, sunk 3rd September, 1939
First day of World War II in Europe
"It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany . . . . For our part we want the traffic — the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still."
- First Sea Lord Winston Churchill,
Telegram to the Chairman of the Board of Trade,
May 1915
A couple excerpts of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
Simon and Schuster, 1960 - hardcover
"The most gloomy German of any consequence in Berlin that Sunday noon after it became known that Britain was in the war was Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, Commander in Chief of the German Navy.
For him the war had come four or five years too soon. By 1944-45, the Navy’s Z Plan would have been completed, giving Germany a sizable fleet with which to confront the British. But this was September 3, 1939, and Raeder knew, even if Hitler wouldn’t listen to him, that he had neither the surface ships nor even the submarines to wage effective war against Great Britain.
Confiding to his diary, the Admiral wrote:
"Today the war against France and England broke out, the war which, according to the Fuehrer’s previous assertions, we had no need to expect before 1944. The Fuehrer believed up to the last minute that it could be avoided, even if this meant postponing a final settlement of the Polish question. . .
As far as the Navy is concerned, obviously it is in no way very adequately equipped for the great struggle with Great Britain . . . the submarine arm is still much too weak to have any decisive effect on the war. The surface forces, moreover, are so inferior in number and strength to those of the British Fleet that, even at full strength, they can do no more than show that they know how to die gallantly ..." 724
Nevertheless at 9 P.M. on September 3,1939, at the moment Hitler was departing Berlin, the German Navy struck. Without warning, the submarine U-30 torpedoed and sank the British liner Athenia some two hundred miles west of the Hebrides as it was en route from Liverpool to Montreal with 1,400 passengers, of whom 112, including twenty-eight Americans, lost their lives.
World War II had begun."
The survivors were met on the dock at Glasgow by Jack Kennedy, second son of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, US Ambassador to the Court of St. James.
Aka JFK.
Captain Fritz-Julius Lemp in discussion with Karl Dönitz
THE SINKING OF THE ATHENIA
There was one other decision agreed upon by Hitler and Raeder at the meeting on September 7. The Admiral noted it in his diary: ”No attempt shall be made to solve the Athenia affair until the submarines return home.”
The war at sea, as we have noted, had begun ten hours after Britain’s declara-tion of war when the British liner Athenia, jammed with some 1,400 passengers, was torpedoed without warning at 9 P.M. on September 3 some two hundred miles west of the Hebrides, with the loss of 112 lives, including twenty-eight Americans. The German Propaganda Ministry checked the first reports from London with the Naval High Command, was told that there were no U-boats in the vicinity and promptly denied that the ship had been sunk by the Germans. The disaster was most embarrassing to Hitler and the Naval Command and at first they did not believe the British reports. Strict orders had been given to all submarine commanders to observe the Hague Convention, which forbade attacking a ship without warning. Since all U-boats maintained radio silence, there was no means of immediately checking what had happened.∗
That did not prevent the controlled Nazi press from charging, within a couple of days, that the British had torpedoed their own ship in order to provoke the United States into coming into the war.
The Wilhelmstrasse was indeed concerned with American reaction to a disas-ter that had caused the deaths of twenty-eight United States citizens. The day after the sinking Weizsaecker sent for the American charge, Alexander Kirk, and denied that a German submarine had done it. No German craft was in the vicinity, he emphasized. That evening, according to his later testimony at Nuremberg, the State Secretary sought out Raeder, reminded him of how the German sinking of the Lusitania during the First World War had helped bring America into it and urged that ”everything should be done” to avoid provoking the United States. The Admiral assured him that ”no German U-boat could have been involved.” 750
At the urging of Ribbentrop, Admiral Raeder invited the American naval attache to come to see him on September 16 and stated that he had now received reports from all the submarines, ”as a result of which it was definitely established that the Athenia had not been sunk by a German U-boat.” He asked him to so inform his government, which the attache promptly did.†751
∗ The next day, September 4, all U-boats were signaled: ”By order of the Fuehrer, on no account are operations to be carried out against passenger steamers, even when under escort.”
† Apparently not in code. A copy of the naval attache’s cable to Washington showed up in the German naval papers at Nuremberg.
The Grand Admiral had not quite told the truth. Not all the submarines which were at sea on September 3 had yet returned to port. Among those that had not was the U-30, commanded by Oberleutnant Lemp, which did not dock in home waters until September 27. It was met by Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of submarines, who years later at Nuremberg described the meeting and finally revealed the truth about who sank the Athenia.
"I met the captain, Oberleutnant Lemp, on the lockside at Wilhelmshaven as the boat was entering harbor, and he asked permission to speak to me in private. I noticed immediately that he was looking very unhappy and he told me at once that he thought he was responsible for the sinking of the Athenia in the North Channel area. In accordance with my previous instructions he had been keeping a sharp lookout for possible armed merchant cruisers in the approaches to the British Isles, and had torpedoed a ship he afterward identified as the Athenia from wireless broadcasts, under the impression that she was an armed merchant cruiser on patrol . . .
I dispatched Lemp at once by air to report to the Naval War Staff (SKL) at Berlin; in the meantime I ordered complete secrecy as a provisional measure. Later the same day, or early on the following day, I received an order from Kapitaen zur See Fricke that:
1. The affair was to be kept a total secret.
2. The High Command of the Navy (OKM) considered that a court-martial was not necessary, as they were satisfied that the captain had acted in good faith.
3. Political explanations would be handled by OKM.∗
I had had no part whatsoever in the political events in which the Fuehrer claimed that no U-boat had sunk the Athenia. 752
But Doenitz, who must have suspected the truth all along, for otherwise he would not have been at the dock to greet the returning U-30, did have a part in altering the submarine’s log and his own diary so as to erase any telltale evidence of the truth. In fact, as he admitted at Nuremberg, he himself ordered any mention of the Athenia stricken from the U-30’s log and deleted it from his own diary. He swore the vessel’s crew to absolute secrecy. †
The military high commands of all nations no doubt have skeletons in their closets during the course of war, and it was understandable if not laudable that Hitler, as Admiral Raeder testified at Nuremberg, insisted that the Athenia affair be kept secret, especially since the Naval Command had acted in good faith in at first denying German responsibility and would have been greatly embarrassed to have to admit it later. But Hitler did not stop there.
On the evening of Sunday, October 22, Propaganda Minister Goebbels personally took to the air - this writer well remembers the broadcast - and accused Churchill of having sunk the Athenia. The next day the official Nazi newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, ran a frontpage story under the headline Churchill sank the ”Athenia” and stating that the First Lord of the Admiralty had planted a time bomb in the ship’s hold.
At Nuremberg it was established that the Fuehrer had personally ordered the broadcast and the article - and also that though Raeder, Doenitz and Weizsaecker were highly displeased at such a brazen lie, they dared not do anything about it. 754
This spinelessness on the part of the admirals and the self-styled anti-Nazi leader in the Foreign Office, which was fully shared by the generals, whenever the demonic Nazi warlord cracked down, was to lead to one of the darkest pages in German history."
∗ The italics are the Admiral’s.
† The officers, including Lemp, and some of the crew were transferred to the U-110 and went down with her on May 9, 1941. One member of the crew was wounded by aircraft fire a few days after the sinking of the Athenia. He was disembarked at Reykjavik, Iceland, under pledge of the strictest secrecy, later taken to a POW camp in Canada, and after the war signed an affidavit giving the facts.
The Germans appear to have been worried that he would ”talk,” but he didn’t until the war’s end. 753
I quote the Enemy :
"U-30 went to sea on 22 August 1939, before World War II began. Her active service career began on 3 September 1939, just 12 days after leaving Wilhelmshaven and only 10 hours after Great Britain declared war on Germany, she sank the 13,581 ton passenger ship SS Athenia about 200 nmi (370 km; 230 mi) west of the Hebrides while she was en route from Liverpool to Montreal in Canada.
The Athenia was the first ship sunk in World War II; out of 1,400 passengers, 112 of them, including 28 neutral Americans, died. After sinking Athenia, U-30 went on to sink two more vessels, Blairlogie and the SS Fanad Head.
Following the attack, the German Ministry of Propaganda checked incoming reports from both London and the German Naval High command. Having been told by Kriegsmarine that there was not a single U-boat in the vicinity of Athenia on the day of her sinking, the Propaganda Ministry promptly denied all allegations that any German U-boat had sunk Athenia. They claimed instead that the British had torpedoed their own vessel in an attempt to bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies.
In order to calm-down any American response to the sinking of Athenia, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, arranged a meeting between Grand Admiral Erich Raeder and the American naval attaché on 16 September 1939. During the meeting, Raeder assured the attaché that he had received reports from every German submarine at sea and "as a result of which it was definitely established that Athenia had not been sunk by a German U-boat". Raeder then asked the attaché to inform the American government. However, not every submarine had returned to port and all U-boats maintained radio silence while at sea.
[But the U-30 had been at sea since before the outbreak of war in August - it committed a unilateral Act of War under radio silence..?]
Once U-30 docked on 27 September, Admiral Karl Dönitz met Lemp while he was disembarking from the U-boat. Dönitz later said that Lemp looked "very unhappy" and that he told the Admiral that he was in fact responsible for the sinking of Athenia. Lemp had mistaken Athenia for an armed merchant cruiser, which he claimed was zig-zagging. Dönitz subsequently received orders that Athenia affair was to be kept a "total secret", the High Command of the Navy (OKM) were not to court-martial Lemp as they considered his actions in good-faith, and that any other political explanations about the sinking of Athenia were to be handled by the OKM who would deny any allegations that a German U-boat had sunk the vessel. In order to keep the sinking of Athenia a secret, Dönitz had U-30 's log altered in order to erase any evidence. It was not until the Nuremberg trials in 1946 that the truth about the fate of the liner was brought forth publicly by the Germans."
"U-110 was captured on 9 May 1941 in the North Atlantic south of Iceland by the destroyers HMS Bulldog, HMS Broadway and the British corvette HMS Aubretia. After depth charges forced the boat to the surface, where she was shelled, Lemp ordered the crew to abandon ship and open the vents in order to sink the crippled U-boat.
Lemp was not among the 34 survivors rescued by the Allied vessels, and one account of his fate has him swimming back to the submarine when he realized that the scuttling charges were not going to detonate and either being shot and killed by the boarding party or drowning in the icy water.
After the war the Germans claimed that Lemp had been shot in the water, either by Sub-Lieutenant Balme's boarding party from HMS Bulldog or from the Bulldog. Balme, however, assured German journalists that no shot had been fired at any time by his party.
Joe Baker-Cresswell, commander of the Bulldog, also denied that Lemp had been shot, and the official British explanation remains that Lemp committed suicide by drowning when he realized the consequences of his failure"
[NO WITNESSES]
The RMS Olympic [Titanic] leaving port in 1911.
The ship in the background is the RMS Lusitania.
Both ships would be sent to the bottom of the Atlantic with great loss of life by the scheming of First Sea Lord Winston Spencer Churchill, Studholme Lodge No. 1501.
SS Athenia was a steam turbine transatlantic passenger liner that was built in Glasgow in 1923 for Anchor-Donaldson Line, which later became Donaldson Atlantic Line. She worked between the United Kingdom and the east coast of Canada until September 1939, when a German submarine sank her in the Western Approaches.
Athenia was the first UK ship that Nazi Germany sank in the Second World War, and is Donaldson Line's greatest single loss of life at sea. 128 civilian passengers and crew were killed, and the sinking was condemned as a war crime. The dead included 28 US citizens, leading Nazi Germany to fear that the USA might react by joining the war on the side of the UK and France.
Nazi authorities denied that one of their vessels had sunk the ship, and the Kriegsmarine did not admit responsibility until January 1946.
On the same day, the German newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, a mouthpiece of the Nazi regime, carried the following headline on its front page:
Churchill Sank the Athenia
Page 3 of the same edition carried a picture of Athenia and the following article:
The above picture shows the proud 'Athenia', the ocean giant, which was sunk by Churchill's crime. One can clearly see the big radio equipment on board the ship. But nowhere was an SOS heard from the ship. Why was the 'Athenia' silent? Because her captain was not allowed to tell the world anything. He very prudently refrained from telling the world that Winston Churchill attempted to sink the ship, through the explosion of an infernal machine. He knew it well, but he had to keep silent.
Nearly fifteen hundred people would have lost their lives if Churchill's original plan had resulted as the criminal wanted. Yes, he longingly hoped that the one hundred Americans on board the ship would find death in the waves so that the anger of the American people, who were deceived by him, should be directed against Germany as the presumed author of the deed. It was fortunate that the majority escaped the fate intended for them by Churchill.
Our picture on the right shows two wounded passengers. They were rescued by the freighter, 'City of Flint', and as can be seen here, turned over to the American coast guard boat 'Gibb' for further medical treatment. They are an unspoken accusation against the criminal Churchill. Both they and the shades of those who lost their lives call him before the Tribunal of the world and ask the British people, 'How long will the office, one of the richest in tradition known to Britain's history, be held by a murderer?'"
NOTICE!
TRAVELLERS intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing in the war zone on the ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.
IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY
Washington, D.C., April 22, 1915.
- The British authorities were aware that a German submarine was in the path of the Lusitania, but failed to divert the ship to a safer route.
- They also failed to provide a destroyer escort, although destroyers were available in a nearby port.
- The ship was ordered to reduce speed in the war zone, for reasons that have been kept secret ever since.
- How did such a big ship sink so quickly from a single torpedo strike?
From the German propaganda film Titanic (1943)
There were no red emergency flares on board the Olympic [Titanic].
Her white flares were not taken seriously by ships using the same route, which may have contributed to the high death toll.
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