Sinking of the SS Athenia

Launched in 1923, the British passenger liner SS Athenia sailed under the Donaldson Atlantic Line, with transatlantic accommodations for 1,000 passengers, and on the evening of September 1st, 1939—the same day Germany invaded Poland—the SS Athenia departed Glasgow Scotland for Montreal Canada, with a cargo of 1,103 relieved passengers, desperate to flee yet another war in Europe.

A Tragic Order

Making stops in Belfast and Liverpool to take on more passengers, on September 3rd—mere hours after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared a state of war with Germany—at 7:30 P.M., the 26-year-old captain of U 30, Lieutenant Fritz-Julius Lemp, gave the order to fire upon the unarmed passenger liner. During the slow, 14-hour sinking of the SS Athenia, the HMS Electra and two other destroyers were able to rescue the majority of the passengers and crew aboard the doomed ocean liner,

Many Dead

save for 93 passengers—including 85 women and children—and nineteen crewmembers, who were either lost in the initial explosion or died in mishandled lifeboats, making the SS Athenia the first British ship to go down in the Second World War. As the youngest captain in the Third Reich’s Kriegsmarine, Lemp had been trained to observe the German navy’s prize rules based on international law, which required U-boat commanders to forewarn merchant vessels of an impending attack.

False Testimony

Instead, Lemp would later claim that the SS Athenia had been acting suspiciously—employing zig-zag defensive maneuvers with her portholes blacked out. Soon after his order to fire upon the passenger ship, Lemp would discover the truth behind his blunder by listening to a BBC broadcast, further compounding his mistake by extending his patrol for three more weeks. After Lemp returned to base to confess in private to Kriegsmarine Commodore Karl Dönitz, Dönitz and other German war leaders accepted the fact that Lemp may have made an egregious error under the heat of battle, furthering their coverup by crudely inserting a fake page into the U 30s logbook regarding Lemp’s report of events on September 3rd.

A Killer Awarded

Not only did Lemp avoid court marshal for disobeying orders, but the German navy awarded the aggressive submariner with the Iron Cross 2nd Class medal and a promotion to lieutenant commander. Lemp later took the helm of U 110, which in May of 1941 was attacked by British warships and forced to surface. While Lemp went down with his ship, his surviving crew failed to scuttle their badly damaged U-boat, allowing a still-functional Enigma cypher machine to fall into Allied hands—a turning point moment which later allowed the Allies to intercept and decipher German radio commands, making the sinking of SS Athenia, the first innocent maritime casualties in a long and bloody war.