Adolf Hitler's 'lost fleet' found in Black Sea

By Jasper Copping
Last Updated: 2:36am GMT 03/02/2008

The final resting place of three German U-boats, nicknamed "Hitler's lost fleet", has been found at the bottom of the Black Sea.

The submarines had been carried 2,000 miles overland from Germany to attack Russian shipping during the Second World War, but were scuttled as the war neared its end. Now, more than 60 years on, explorers have located the flotilla of three submarines off the coast of Turkey.

The vessels, including one once commanded by Germany's most successful U-boat ace, formed part of the 30th Flotilla of six submarines, taken by road and river across Nazi-occupied Europe, from Germany's Baltic port at Kiel to Constanta, the Romanian Black Sea port.

In two years, the fleet sank dozens of ships and lost three of their number to enemy action. But in August 1944, Romania switched sides and declared war on Germany, leaving the three remaining vessels stranded.

With no base and unable to sail home - the Bosporus and Dardanelles were closed to them because of Turkish neutrality - their captains were ordered to scuttle the boats before rowing ashore and trying to make their way back to Germany. However, all three crews were caught and interned by the Turks.

Now the submarines' hulls have been discovered by a team led by Selçuk Kolay, a Turkish marine engineer, who will present his findings to a shipwreck conference in Plymouth this week.

Mr Kolay established the boats' positions through research in German archives, interviews with surviving sailors and by sonar studies of the seabed.

He has already completed successful dives to the wreckage of one vessel, U-20, two miles offshore in about 80ft of water. He believes he has discovered another, U-23, at twice that depth, three miles from the town of Agva, but bad weather forced him to suspend diving until the spring.

He thinks he is also close to pinpointing the third boat, U-19, thought to lie more than 1,000ft down, three miles from the Turkish city of Zonguldak.

"It's one of the least well known stories of the war but one of the most interesting," said Mr Kolay.

Full story, source: The Telegraph

That is intresting, an gonna put a few hollow earth theorists out of joint..lol

hahaha good point. At first I thought that the crew sank with the U-boats.

Nah, the Hollow Earth theorists won't be put out.
They'll claim that a vortex between the Hollow Earth and surface exists at the bottom of the Black Sea, and that these three subs were "burped" back onto the surface, as it were.
This report will be discredited by them as "disinformation."
Or that these three U-boats are not the ones that reached Middle Earth.
Or whatever ...
How long has a belief in fairies existed? Or Thunderbirds? The Hollow Earth belief will last as long, or longer, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary.
Proponents of the Hollow Earth theory are constant reminders of the old saying: "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with facts."

Lol too true >.<