Antoinette Flegenheim, also known as Berta Antonia Maria Wendt.
Antoinette 'Tony' Flegenheim was a passenger and survivor of the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
Early life[]
Flegenheim was born as Berta Antonia Maria Wendt on 11 May 1863 in Himmelpfort near Berlin, Germany. Her parents were Wilhelm and Pauline Wendt. In 1890, she moved to New York and married a fellow German, Alfred Flegenheim. Alfred died on 23 November 1907. Flegenheim was wealthy and possessed residences both in Berlin and Manhattan.
Titanic[]
Flegenheim was one of the 281 passengers who boarded RMS Titanic on April 10, 1912, when it took its first stop in Cherbourg, France. She travelled in First Class, taking cabin D-8. The vessel would take one more stop in Queenstown, Ireland before the ill-fated transatlantic crossing.
On April 14, Titanic collided with an iceberg on its Maiden Voyage in the North Atlantic Ocean.
At 00:25 A.M, Flegenheim departed Titanic with 27 others on lifeboat 7, the first to be lowered. The lifeboat was deployed without its plug and began to take on water which, as fellow lifeboat occupant Dorothy Gibson put it, was "remedied" by lingerie and garments being stuffed into the hole.
Flegenheim and the other occupants of boat 7 were rescued approximately four hours after they were lowered from Titanic by RMS Carpathia.
Later life[]
Soon after the sinking of Titanic, on 20 June 1912, Flegenheim married Briton Paul Elliot Whitehurst. She and Whitehurst lived in The Hague, Netherlands during the First World War. The two separated in this period.
Flegenheim died in Frankfurt, Nazi Germany on April 8, 1943.