Throughout World War II, Germany’s Nazi government denied responsibility for sinking the British passenger ship Athenia on the first day of the war. Their denial initially hinged on the fact that no U-boat had reported any action at the time and place where Athenia had been sunk (see blog, Jan. 1, 2019).
Even after the commander of the U-boat that torpedoed Athenia, Fritz-Julius Lemp, returned two weeks later to his base in Germany and admitted his mistake, the denials continued. German Chancellor Adolf Hitler is reported to have made the decision to continue the lie rather than reverse the denials of the previous two weeks.
While few outside of Germany believed the Nazi position, the continued denials raised vague concerns in some people’s minds that perhaps their might have been some other reason for the sinking.
In 1946, as prosecutors prepared for the war crimes trials at Nuremberg following World War II, they discovered discrepancies in the war diary (logbook) of U-30, the German submarine whose combat patrol zone included the location where Athenia was attacked. The first two pages were a different quality paper than the rest of the book. On these pages the months were recorded in Arabic numerals, while Roman numerals were used for the months in the rest of the book. Also, Lemp’s signature was an obvious forgery. The new pages showed U-30 nearly 100 miles from the spot where Athenia was torpedoed Sept. 3, 1939. The alteration was part of an elaborate, if clumsy, subterfuge started within 24 hours of Athenia’s sinking to convince the world that Germany wasn’t at fault.
The suspicious war diary wasn’t the only damning evidence to come to light. A German sailor who was aboard U-30 on that fateful evening and saw the sinking Athenia, had been taken prisoner during the war. With the war now over, the sailor no longer felt bound to maintain the defeated Nazi’s subterfuge, and he testified to what he had seen.
During a deposition prior to trial proceedings, Karl Dӧnitz, the former German submarine fleet commander and later Grand Admiral of the Navy, was confronted with the evidence. He readily confirmed that U-30 had sunk Athenia on the first day of the war.
His admission was only a stepping stone for the prosecutors, who wanted to show Dӧnitz was an unrepentant Nazi, guilty of far worse crimes than covering up the sinking of a passenger ship. By then, the world was learning of the horrors of Nazi death camps and the cold-blooded execution of millions of Jews and others deemed undesirable by the self-proclaimed master race.
Against this ghastly backdrop, the Athenia dead became little more than a footnote to the Nazi’s unspeakable crimes.
In next month’s blog: Why American deaths did not bring the U.S. into the war.
