She worked between the United Kingdom and the east coast of Canada until 3 September 1939, when a torpedo from the German submarine U-30 sank her in the Western Approaches.

Athenia was the first British ship to be sunk by Germany during World War II, and the incident accounted for the Donaldson Line's greatest single loss of life at sea, with 117 civilian passengers and crew killed.

She had six steam turbines driving twin screws via double reduction gearing, giving her a speed of 15 knots (28 km/h; 17 mph).

[citation needed] By 1930 her navigation equipment included wireless direction finding,[2] and by 1934 this had been augmented with an echo sounding device and a gyrocompass.

The ships worked Anchor-Donaldson's trans-Atlantic route linking Liverpool and Glasgow with Quebec and Montreal in summer and with Halifax, Nova Scotia, in winter.

[7] Despite clear indications that war would break out any day, the vessel departed Liverpool at 13:00 hrs on 2 September without recall, and on the evening of the 3rd — the day of the British declaration of war on Germany — was 60 nautical miles (110 km) south of Rockall and 200 nautical miles (370 km) northwest of Inishtrahull, Ireland, when she was sighted by the German submarine U-30 commanded by Oberleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp around 16:30.

He sent the F-class destroyer HMS Fame on an anti-submarine sweep of the area, while Electra, another E-class destroyer, HMS Escort, the Swedish yacht Southern Cross, the 5,749 GRT Norwegian dry cargo ship MS Knute Nelson,[9] and the US cargo ship City of Flint, rescued survivors.

The German liner SS Bremen, en route from New York to Murmansk, also received Athenia's distress signal, but ignored it as it was trying to evade capture by the British as a prize of war.

Newspapers widely publicised the story, proclaiming "Ten-Year-Old Victim of Torpedo" as "Canadians Rallying Point", and set the tone for their coverage of the rest of the war.

[18] The German Navy was blindsided by Lemp's failure to report that he was in the vicinity where the "Athenia" was struck, had tracked the ship for hours, and sank her.

By then Lemp had been killed in action (1941) and Adolf Schmidt, a surviving witness, came forth to testify that he had been on the bridge after the torpedo hit the "Athenia", he had seen the ship foundering, and he had been sworn to secrecy.

A month later the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party's official newspaper, published an article which blamed the loss of Athenia on Britain, accusing Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, of sinking the ship to turn neutral opinion against Germany.

Herbert Hoover expressed his doubts, saying, "It is such poor tactics that I cannot believe that even the clumsy Germans would do such a thing", while North Carolina senator Robert Rice Reynolds denied that Germany had any motive to sink Athenia.

Lemp, who had claimed he had mistaken her for an armed merchant cruiser, took the first steps to conceal the facts by omitting to make an entry in the submarine's log, and swearing his crew to secrecy.

For example, one editor in Boston's Italian News suggested the ship had been sunk by British mines and blamed on German U-boats to draw America into the war.

Other items included granite curling rocks from Scotland, textbooks for the Toronto school system, a number of sealed steel boxes containing new clothes purchased in Europe by tourists, and watercolour paintings by passenger and English illustrator Winifred Walker, intended for her planned book, Shakespeare's Flowers.

[24][25][26] Excavations of Urartu antiquities by the American scholars Kirsopp and Silva Lake during 1938–1939 and most of their finds and field records were lost in the sinking of the ship.

This is a total of 278 Andrew Kay & Co. Excelsior Ailsa curling stones with handles and cases weighing nearly six tons with a 1939 value of £585.12 (equivalent to £45,822 in 2023).

Mearns located the wreck on Rockall Bank using sonar imagery that was scanned by the Geological Survey of Ireland to map the sea floor.

[31][32] No movie has been made of the full story of the sinking, but the film Arise, My Love (1940), directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Claudette Colbert and Ray Milland, had a sequence involving the torpedoing of the liner.

[citation needed] In John Dickson Carr's novel The Man Who Could Not Shudder, Dr Fell announces the end of story by showing his audience a newspaper bearing headline "LINER ATHENIA: FULL LIST OF VICTIMS".

The sinking of Athenia is also mentioned in Alyson Richman's novel The Lost Wife about pre-war Prague and how the dreams of two young lovers are shattered when they are separated by the Nazi invasion, their endurance and experiences during World War II and the Holocaust only to find one another again decades later in the United States.

Similarly, at the close of Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square (1941) the protagonist, George Bone, finds that the newspapers were "all about the sinking of the Athenia".