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World war wreck in the North Sea: The last hours of outpost boat 812

2020-12-27T17:01:41.565Z


A shrimp fisherman finds the wreck of a WWII ship off the island of Baltrum. Together with amateur divers, SPIEGEL reconstructed the drama of the downfall. A SPIEGEL + best seller.


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V 812 on a photo from 1930

Photo: German Maritime Museum

Visibility is poor about 20 meters under water.

The beam of light from a diving lamp scans the many metal parts on the floor of the North Sea that once belonged to a ship and are now overgrown with algae.

Only the diver's breathing sounds and a bubbling can be heard.

A cancer scurries by.

He raises his scissors threateningly, as if to defend his wreck.

The scene comes from a video of East Frisian scuba divers.

The photos show the remains of a warship that lay undetected on the bottom of the North Sea for 75 years - before those hobby divers discovered it.

The group of eight men has been investigating wrecks in the North Sea for years; they call themselves tide divers.

You cannot complain about a lack of research objects.

In the past centuries, storms and wars tore hundreds of ships into the depths - and often the entire crew with them.

The tidal divers first explored the wreck off the coast of Baltrum in 2016.

But only now could they clarify his identity.

A crab fisherman friend had told the hobby researcher that his nets would get caught in a certain place again and again.

So they dived right down there.

Official registers located the wreck of an "unknown freighter" at the site.

But the divers quickly realized that that couldn't be true, that instead they had come across a sunken warship.

Just which one?

In order to clarify the question, they measured the entire wreck in several dives and compared the data with findings in international archives.

After three years of research, they were certain: They had tracked down the forgotten outpost boat 812 (V 812), which British warplanes sank on July 22, 1944.

SPIEGEL research in the Freiburg military archive following the find reveal the full extent of the drama that took place on the North Sea at the time.

Countless army files are stored in the eleven-story skyscraper, the oldest dating from 1867.

The story of V 812 is in a red, tattered flat file.

"Diary of the 8th Outpost Flotilla from May 1, 1944 to September 30, 1944," is written on the cover.

It contains dozens of yellowed pages, closely typed, on which members of the Wehrmacht report what happened on July 21 and July 22, 1944 on the North Sea.

A red "secret" stamp is emblazoned on some passages.

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Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2020-12-27

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