102561 | GERMANY & GREAT BRITAIN. Sinking of the SS Athenia cast iron Medal.

102561  |  GERMANY & GREAT BRITAIN. Sinking of the SS Athenia cast iron Medal. Dated 1939. "Totentanz (Dance of Death) Redux" type (68mm, 105.20 g, 1h). By Guido Goetz.

 

4 SEPTEMBER 1939, Death, as a skeleton, holding torch and lit bomb decorated with Union Jack, seated right on prow of the SS Athenia // EIN MEISTER DER LÜGE (the master of lies), British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, holding imbalanced scale with two bombs, one decorated with Union Jack, the other with a swastika, seated facing on base inscribed VORS HÖLLEN–MASCHINE (pilot of the "hell-machine") and tagged "An Mr CHURCHILL." Edge: Plain.

 

Engstrom 3. PCGS MS-63. Deep charcoal gray surfaces. A haunting and scarce type from the hand of not Karl Goetz, but instead his son, Guido. The only example of the type in the PCGS census. Note: the difference in color in the images is due to the different lightining and editing between our image and PCGS's image. As can be seen in the video, the overall color is closer to our "deep charcoal gray" image as opposed to the "lighter tan-gray" image of the PCGS TrueView.

 

Carrying on the tradition of his father, Guido Goetz also had a career as a medalist, issuing some satirical pieces in the vein of the elder Goetz, Karl. Just as World War I and its aftermath were important to the work of the father, so too was that of World War II to the son, with a number of satirical medals designed with this backdrop. Drawing upon the skeletal approach of Walther Eberbach's Totentanz series, some of Guido's issues portray Death as a skeleton taking sadistic glee in the downfall of his enemies.

 

The SS Athenia was a passenger liner completed in early 1923 and utilized for transatlantic travel between the United Kingdom and Canada. In September 1939, she was hit by a torpedo from the German submarine U-30 and sank in the Western Approaches—an area in the Atlantic Ocean due west of the British Isles. This act, condemned as a war crime, represented the first instance of a British ship being sunk by Nazi Germany in World War II. 117 civilian passengers—including 28 Americans—were killed in the torpedoing and subsequent sinking of this ship. Coincidentally, a similar fate befell the Athenia's namesake, in that she was torpedoed in 1917 by the Germans off the coast of Ireland, this time during World War I.

 

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Upload: 8 October 2024.