Built in 1885 in the F. Schichau shipyard in Elbing (now the northern Polish city of Elbląg), the 33.5-meter steam-powered icebreaker had set sail for the besieged German city of Pillau (now the city Baltiysk in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad) on an evacuation mission.
However, it never made it that far. Spotted by Russian planes a mile off the Hel Peninsula, the Königsberg sank in the Bay of Gdańsk on April 20th, 1945, after being hit in the midship, exactly where the engine was. While three people were rescued, eight crew members went down with the boat.
Resting at a depth of 66-meters, for years the presence of the wreck had been known among the diving community, and it had even been christened Śruba (Propellor) on account of the large propellor that sat next to it. Only now, though, has it been formally identified as the Königsberg.
“It was a bit of a coincidence,” says diver Bartłomiej Pitala. “The original plan had been to scan a U-boat but the visibility was very, very poor.”
After resurfacing, Pitala was told of another “wooden” wreck nearby that was open to divers yet rarely visited.
“The decision was quick,” says Pitala. “We were here anyway, so we thought we’d give it a try.”
After descending to the bottom, Pitala says he quickly realized all was not as it seemed: “I immediately knew that this was not a small, wooden wreck,” he says. “After circling it, I was able to tell it was an old steamer, and even though the visibility was nearly as poor as by the U-boat—about two to three-meters—I knew I had to scan it so as to make a model of this wreck.”
Doing so took a total of over three hours of dive time, nearly 70 minutes of which were spent underwater.
“What I couldn’t understand was why the wreck was broken and destroyed around the midship section,” says Pitala.
Matters became clearer after Pitala spent “several dozen hours” creating his first 3D model of the vessel. “I realized there must have been some kind of explosion that had caused the huge hole,” he says. “With the model in front of me, I could see that there was a steam engine and steam boilers protruding from the gap.”
Putting two and two together, he called the historian Łukasz Orlicki who had recently told him about the story of the Königsberg.
“Łukasz sent me a photo of the ship from the 1944-45 book Rettungsaktion Ostsee and the shape of the bow and stern, plus the presence of a small crane on the bow, all suggested that this must be Königsberg,” says Pitala.
Confirming his hunch, though, would prove the most difficult aspect of all. “To be 110% sure, we needed to compare the dimensions of the ship with the dimensions of the wreck,” says Pitala, “but I couldn’t find any of these technical specifications.”
Fortunately, Pitala found himself saved by the internet. “After many hours of research, the power of the internet showed itself at its best,” he says. Happening upon a modelers forum, one post made mention of a book published in 1900 that contained technical details of 19th-century German icebreakers.
“It was a pretty old book to try and find in 2024,” says Pitala, “but again the power of the internet showed itself and I was able to find an online scan of the entire book.”
To Pitala’s amazement, the measurements matched, and the wreck has now been formally identified as the Königsberg.
Branded by historians as being “an extraordinary discovery,” the Königsberg was just one of a massive fleet used in Operation Hannibal, a last-ditch seaborne effort to evacuate civilians and military personnel from the approaching Red Army.
Over the course of 15 weeks, up to 1,000 merchant vessels helped evacuate between 800,000 to 900,000 civilians, and around 350,000 soldiers, across the Baltic Sea and onwards to Germany and Denmark.
