German warship sunk in Second World War discovered near Norway

OSLO major German warship has been discovered off the coast of Norway some 80 years after it was sunk in a Second World War battle, Norwegian power grid operator Statnett and a maritime archaeologist said.

Identified this year from images and sonar scans of its hull and of details such as the position of gun turrets, the cruiser Karlsruhe was first detected in 2017 just 15 metres from a subsea power cable that has been operating since 1977.

Statnett, Live Science reports, had sent an underwater remotely-operated-vehicle (ROV), which was tethered to a separate support vessel, to examine the submerged ship.

“When the ROV results showed us a ship that was torpedoed, we realized it was from the war,” Ole Petter Hobberstad, a project engineer, told the outlet.

“As the cannons became visible on the screen, we understood it was a huge warship.”

Built in the 1920s, the Karlsruhe was later fitted with a Nazi-era swastika. That swastika was also captured in the subsea images taken by Statnett and its partners, and first televised by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.

Live Science reports that the Karlsruhe first saw combat in the Second World War on April 9, 1940, and was key to an attack on the southern port of Kristiansand, Norway, as Germany invaded.

The attack forced the Norwegian government and the king to flee to Britain, where they were exiled until Germany's capitulation in 1945.

Norwegian Maritime Museum archaeologist Frode Kvalø told Live Science by email: “The ship was an important actor at a crucial time of Norwegian modern history.”

But when it left Kristiansand soon after the attack, headed back to Germany, the Karlsruhe was attacked by Truant, a British submarine, and blasted open by torpedoes. Abandoned by its crew, the Karlsruhe was then forcibly sunk by the Germans themselves.

“You can find Karlsruhe's fate in history books, but no one has known exactly where the ship sunk,” Kvalø told Reuters.

Reuters, with files from

National Post staff

STATNETT / HANDOUT VIA REUTERS The sunken German warship cruiser Karlsruhe has been discovered off the coast of Norway.