Athenia (ship, 1923)
 In the port of Montreal , 1933
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The Athenia (II) was a 1923 passenger ship of the Donaldson Atlantic Line from Glasgow, which was used in passenger and mail traffic between Great Britain and Canada . She was torpedoed by a German submarine on September 3, 1939, about 60 nautical miles south of the Rockall rock, and sank the following day. She was the first British-flagged ship to be sunk by a German submarine during World War II . 112 passengers and crew members were killed.
Passenger ship
The 13,465 GRT steam turbine ship Athenia was built at the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company in Govan near Glasgow . She was the identical sister ship of the Letitia (13,475 GRT), which was launched two years later at the same shipyard. Both ships were 163 meters long, 20 meters wide and each had a chimney, two masts and two propellers . They were the two largest ships that Anchor-Donaldson (a joint venture between the shipping companies Anchor Line and Donaldson Brothers ) ever put into service. The Athenia was the shipping company's second ship to bear this name. The first Athenia was put into service in 1904 and sunk north of Inishtrahull Island by a German submarine on August 16, 1917 , killing 15. The ship was managed by Donaldson Line .
The second Athenia was powered by six steam turbines based on the Brown-Curtiss system, with an output of 9,000 shaft horsepower (WPS) and a top speed of 15 knots. It had two double-ended and three single-ended kettles . The passenger accommodations were designed for 516 passengers in cabin class and 1,000 in third class. As with the Letitia , the hull was painted black and the superstructure was painted white. The ship was launched on January 28, 1922 and left Glasgow on April 19, 1923 on its maiden voyage via Liverpool to Quebec and Montreal .
The Athenia from then on went together with the Letitia from Liverpool to Quebec and Montreal in the summer months and to Halifax and Saint John in the winter season when the Saint Lawrence River was frozen . This was a joint venture in collaboration with the Cunard Line . In 1927 the ship was modernized and adapted to the changing conditions. The new price categories Cabin Class, Tourist Class and Third Class were introduced. The Athenia was equipped with 26 wooden lifeboats with a total of 1828 seats, 13 on each side. There were also 21 foldable life rafts with an additional 462 places and 1,600 life jackets . In 1936 the ship was transferred from the shipping company Anchor-Donaldson to the Donaldson Atlantic Line.
Downfall
On Friday, September 1, 1939, the Athenia, under the command of Captain James Cook, left Glasgow at around 12 noon on her last voyage in peacetime. On the morning of September 2, she arrived in Liverpool and took other passengers there. At 4.30 p.m., the lines were released three and a half hours late. The Athenia left Liverpool without an escort . The destination was again Quebec and Montreal.
There were 315 crew members and 1,102 passengers on board. Due to a special permit, the ship was allowed to take 200 more people than was officially permitted. The impending state of war had triggered a run on the ticket offices of the shipping companies in Great Britain. Thousands of people fled Europe, including foreign tourists and students, American business people and those persecuted by the Nazi regime . Mostly Canadians and Americans were on the Athenia , but there were also 77 Poles and 39 mainly Jewish travelers from Germany and annexed Austria .
In the early morning hours of September 3, 1939, the steamer passed the island of Inishtrahull on the north coast of Ireland. In the afternoon of the same day, the commander of the German submarine U 30 , Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp , discovered the ship, which was moving in a zigzag course. According to his own statements, he had difficulty identifying the ship clearly. In addition, shortly beforehand, an order had been received from the High Command of the Kriegsmarine warning of armed merchant ships ("Armed Merchant Cruisers"). Without being certain, Lemp viewed the Athenia as a troop transport and at 7:40 p.m. shot three torpedoes at the now dimmed ship , one of which hit the target in the stern.
When U 30 showed up half an hour later, Lemp noticed from the Athenia's emergency calls that he had torpedoed an unarmed passenger ship. Lemp recognized his mistake, immediately ran away from the scene of the accident without offering any assistance, and did not make a radio message either. He made “his men swear not to say anything about the attack, to anyone. They are not even allowed to reveal anything through facial expressions or gestures, should they ever hear the name Athenia . ”Only after his return did he report the sinking of the Athenia .
The Athenia sank around 10:40 the following morning. 112 people (27 men, 69 women and 16 children) were killed in the sinking, mostly British and Canadians, but also four German and 28 American nationals. Most of the casualties were caused by the explosion after the torpedo impact and by several lifeboats that had crashed. Others died a short time later of exhaustion or succumbed to their injuries. The Norwegian tanker Knute Nelson , the American freighter City of Flint , the British destroyer Escort and the yacht of the Swedish millionaire Axel Wenner-Gren , the Southern Cross, participated in the rescue of the castaways .
For fear of a repetition of the events surrounding the Lusitania in World War I and the subsequent entry of the United States into the war , the sinking was kept secret by the High Command of the Navy, which had previously denied the incident, as American passengers were among the victims of the Athenia found. On the orders of Karl Dönitz, Lemp had to remove the September 3 page from U 30's war diary and insert a new one on which a position 200 nautical miles to the west was entered.
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels blamed the British for the sinking and claimed that it was a "provocation". The Reich Foreign Ministry commissioned the former US and UK correspondent Adolf Halfeld to write a brochure that appeared in 1939 in the languages of the German allies Italy and Japan as well as in French, English, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Halfeld quoted in it “ Grand Admiral Dr. hc Raeder ” that the submarine at the point of sinking was 170 nautical miles away from the point of sinking at the time of the sinking of the Athenia. Halfeld claimed in his pamphlet that the downfall was caused by Winston Churchill .
It was only when a member of the submarine crew who had been taken prisoner of war in 1940 testified about the case after the end of the war that the truth came to light. The Athenia case was also part of the indictment against Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals .
Passengers
During the last voyage, a number of well-known personalities were on board the ship, including:
- Andrew Allan, Canadian broadcasting pioneer and head of CBC Radio , fiancé of Judith Evelyn
- Rudolf Altschul , German-Czech doctor and emigrant, with his wife
- Barbara Cass-Beggs, British-Canadian musicologist, teacher and author, later Vice President of the Canadian Society for Traditional Music
- Judith Evelyn , American stage and film actress ( The window to the courtyard )
- James A. Goodson, highly decorated fighter pilot
- Richard Stuart Lake , former Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan Province , with wife
- Prof. John H. Lawrence , American physicist and nuclear medicine specialist, brother of Ernest Lawrence
- Nicola Lubitsch, ten-month-old daughter of Ernst Lubitsch , with nanny
- Charles Wharton Stork, American author and essayist ( Day Dreams of Greece )
- Bill Gadsby , later Canadian ice hockey player and coach
- Margaretta Armstrong Drexel, American great-grandmother of Daniel Finch-Hatton, 17th Earl of Winchilsea
literature
- Audiobook Three Days in September - The Last Voyage of the Athenia 1939 by Cay Rademacher. audio media verlag GmbH: Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-86804-061-6 .
- Cay Rademacher : Three days in September - The last ride of the Athenia 1939. mareverlag, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-86648-099-5 .
Web links
- The sinking of Athenia
- Some technical and historical details
- Entry in the wreck database
- U-30 opened the submarine war with a catastrophic shot
Footnotes
- ^ Entry Miramar, accessed May 12, 2017.
- ↑ Cay Rademacher: Three days in September. The last voyage of the Athenia in 1939. mareverlag, Hamburg 2009, p. 180.
- ↑ See Cay Rademacher: Three days in September. The last ride of the Athenia 1939. mareverlag, Hamburg 2009, p. 290.
- ↑ GOEBBELS CONFERENCES - Bread rolls delivered free of charge, Spiegel number 44/1966
- ^ Peter Longerich: Goebbels: A Biography , p. 436, Random House, ISBN 978-1400067510
- ^ Adolf Halfeld: The "Athenia" case. England's real face . Berlin: People and Reich, 1939; 1940, p. 20; P. 40