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Last year a team of Polish divers discovered the wreck of the Nazi steamer Karlsruhe. The wreck was loaded with china, vehicles and other war cargo and the diving team will return in the coming days for further investigation. In particular, they are interested in some unopened boxes that went down with the ship. The team can even bring some items to the surface.
The shipwreck was found in September 2020 by a team from Baltictech, a diving company searching for several wrecks from ships involved in Operation Hannibal, one of the largest sea evacuations in history that involved the Nazis in front of Soviet forces on the Eastern Front fled. The Baltictech team photographed some of the Karlsruhe Wreck when it was discovered. Somewhat confusing that Karlsruhe was one of two Nazi ships of that name that were sunk during World War II. the Karlsruhe what Baltictech is investigating is a steamer found some 40 miles off the coast of Poland; the other Karlsruhe was a Nazi warship that Sunk off Norway in 1940. Both shipwrecks were found last fall.
The steamer was one of the last Nazi ships to leave the Prussian city of Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) when Soviet troops recaptured the city in April 1945. In addition to its 360 tons of cargo, the ship carried 150 soldiers from an elite Nazi regiment and around 900 civilians. Two days after the ship left Königsberg, it was sunk by Soviet planes, leaving 113 survivors behind. according to the Associated Press. “The Karlsruhe differed from the other ships involved in the operation in that they mainly carried cargo that refugees boarded at the last minute, â€said Tomasz Zwara, diver of the Baltictech team, in a press release to Gizmodo.
The wreck is now nearly 300 feet underwater and difficult to dive. Spending about half an hour at such depths requires two and a half hours of decompression. Since the ship was one of the last to leave the region, the Baltictech team believes it may be loaded with valuables that the Nazis tried to hold onto while they were on the run. Therefore the Unopened boxes on board the wreck are of great interest to the team.
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“We will dive and check what is in the boxes without destroying them,” said Tomasz Stachura, the president of the diving company SANTI and a technical diver who had previously visited the wreck, in an email to Gizmodo. The diving team can bring items to the surface if they deem them worthy of further investigation and will have a representative from the National Maritime Museum in Gdansk, Poland on board to advise.
The boxes, which had been unopened for three quarters of a century, could easily transport everyday items in Konigsberg. But they could also contain valuables that were looted by the Nazis during the war. Stachura hopes the wreck is the answer to what happened to the Amber Room, a luxurious, paneled room in St. Petersburg’s Catherine Palace that was looted by the Nazis and taken to Koenigsberg, where it disappeared during the war.
“We have no solid evidence that the Amber Room is there” [in the wreck], but no one has concrete evidence that Amber Room is elsewhere, â€Stachura said Atlas Obscura last year. “The truth is that the Germans who wanted to send something valuable to the West just got through it Karlsruheas this was her last chance [to get it out of Prussia]. “
Even if a treasure hunt may prove unsuccessful, the upcoming dive will give the team a better understanding of what is happening with the Karlsruhe and what it took with it on its last trip to the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
More: This protects shipwrecks from looters and hacks
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