Richard Werner

So the ads weren't always published successfully everywhere, but quite a few were published.

So that's the situation.

Despite that, there were passengers on board.

No doubt some efforts were made to make sure certain groups, you know, you would have some people on there for sure.

Maybe you pay them to board even, who knows?

You know, we don't know these details.

We know the facts that there were passengers, American passengers on board, American citizens.

And the Germans had warned, we're going to sink this.

And it's not quite clear whether there was actually military equipment on there.

There seemed to be the indication that there was.

because you can imagine that the goal was really to make sure that the Germans will sink it.

So the best way then is to actually have military equipment on there and have some visibility when it's in the dock and something is loaded.

And we do have some indication that this is happening.

Of course, later this was denied,

But there's also various people looking at the sunken wreck.

And still, basically there is a good chance that there was military ammunition and other equipment on there.

Now, so that's one thing.

The other thing is, well, how would the captain of the ship handle this?

As he crosses with his passengers,

and potentially military load and of course he must have been aware that it's listed as an auxiliary military ship as he crosses the atlantic well the british at that time had actually broken the the secret code for encryption that the german military was using the enigma code and they therefore could read the messages between the u-boat submarines and headquarters and so on