Hitler’s Lost Fleet Found

Posted by Christopher Eger Feb 18, 2008

The Black Sea was a pivotal German naval front in the First World War. The German Battlecruiser Goeben and her consort the light cruiser Breslau escaped their British pursuers in the Mediterranean by hiding in the Black Sea under the protection of Turkish guns. There they saw much more action and almost any comparable ships of the German navy during the war, being responsible for bringing Turkey into the war and arguably leading to Russia’s eventual collapse.

In World War Two Turkey stayed neutral for the bulk of the war, denying both German and Allied ships access to the Black Sea through the Dardanelles. Germany found away around this by transporting six old small U-boats by river, road and rail across Eastern Europe some 2000 miles to the Rumanian Black Sea port of Constanza. The trip took some six months and the boats took to the water in May 1942, forming the 30th U-Boat Flotilla. They took the Black Sea by storm, sinking dozens of Soviet ships and losing half of their own. When Rumanian left the war in 1944 the U-boats were trapped and scuttled themselves.

And after being lost for over sixty years, these lost U-boats have been found.