Richard Werner

wouldn't intentionally harm others but we do have such people out there and often in very important and powerful positions so what happened was step number one uh britain did this very officially it listed the lusitania as an auxiliary um naval military ship

And of course, as you can imagine, the German Imperial Army and Navy went by the book.

I mean, that's what one thing Germans are famous for.

And of course, the British knew this.

So the moment they would list it on their official list of what are our ships officially declared to be military ships, it was on there as an auxiliary military ship.

The Germans would, of course, target it.

Now, when the Germans then saw this German military, oh, well, hang on, isn't this a passenger ship?

Well, you can...

reuse you know of course passenger ships for warfare so that seems to be what they're doing

But then they realized, oh, actually, they're taking passengers in.

They plan to take passengers in in America.

And so partly they sort of half realized, well, this could be a part of a bigger plot.

That's not good, and we don't want to sink passengers.

On the other hand, it was listed there.

So in many ways, they had no choice.

What they did then was the German military command, they put out, and the German embassies implemented in America, they put out ads into American newspapers.

stating, and we have copies of these ads, warning people, don't board the Lusitania.

It is listed as a military auxiliary ship.

And it turns out that in some cities, the big newspapers refused to carry these ads because they were clearly

controlled by people that had the same views as the British side in this war and wanted America to join the war.