A recently discovered wreck may hold the key to a WWII mystery still unsolved 75 years after the end of the war.
Divers in Poland say they recently discovered Karlsruhe, a nearly intact German World War II ship that sank near the end of the war in the Baltic Sea.
Full of military vehicles, porcelain and sealed crates, the group is hopeful entombed inside the wreck is the infamous Amber Room, an ornate Prussian chamber from the Catherine Palace near Saint Petersburg.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, the Nazi’s looted the Amber Room’s amber-and-gold panels, packing the dismantled room into crates that disappeared near the end of the war. A replica of the chamber has since been constructed in the Catherine Palace, but no trace of the original Amber Room has ever surfaced.
The vessel sank after being bombed in April 1945 during Operation Hannibal, a sea evacuation that helped more than a million German troops and civilians escape East Prussia and the Polish Corridor as the soviets advanced. Of 1,083 passengers, roughly 113 survived.
“We don’t want to get excited, but if the Germans were to take the Amber Chamber across the Baltic Sea, then Karlsruhe Steamer was their last chance,” Baltictech, the diving association responsible for the discovery, said in a Facebook post.
As reported by the Associated Press, the dive team used Allied, German and Soviet documents to determine the approximate location of the ship’s final resting place. The team spent more than a year looking for it before locating the wreckage 290 feet below sea level off the Polish coast.
“All this, put together, stimulates the human imagination,” says diver Tomasz Zwara. “Finding the German steamer and the crates with contents as yet unknown resting on the bottom of the Baltic Sea may be significant for the whole story.”
Source: sport Diver
