The crew of the Norwegian drilling rig service ship Olympic Taurus forgets late on Tuesday 30 June this summer when it was in charge of Statnett, a state-owned company that handles the development and control of electricity transmission networks in and around Norway, including submarine cables to other countries.
This time the ship was checking the condition of the power cable to Denmark and was about eleven nautical miles southeast of Kristiansand. Among Statnett’s employees on board was the engineer Ole Petter Hobberstad, who is also an avid amateur historian, and that interest led to a historic meeting this Tuesday in June.
There is, however, some prelude. Hobberstad has often been on board Olympic Taurus together with Statnett’s colleagues in monitoring submarine cables. The ship is equipped with a powerful sound wave transmitter, or sonar, to analyze the landscape on the seabed, the cables, and other things that are under inspection at any given time.
Have free time
For the last three years, or since April 2017, a large and elongated shadow at a depth of 490 meters, only 15 meters from the Danish cable, had attracted the engineer’s attention and curiosity. However, there was usually a shortage of time to spend time on historical research alongside the electricity company’s projects, but that changed on the afternoon of 30 June.
Due to the weather that day, an extra task that the ship was supposed to take part in was canceled, leaving a few hours of space before leaving for the port. Hobberstad took the opportunity to send a remote-controlled reconnaissance submarine into the depths, to the shadows that had kept his curiosity awake for years.
At a depth of 490 meters, a clear ship’s side appears in the submarine’s light beam, so long as it is surprisingly sweet. Next appears an object that is undeniably reminiscent of a cannon tower and shortly afterward another such. Eventually, all doubt disappears like dew before the sun in the dark depths as the beam of light pulls out a hellish swastika, a symbol of Adolf Hitler’s third state, above a mighty anchor.
Hobberstad and others present realized in the next few days that at 16:40 on Tuesday, June 30, 2020, the sight that no one without gills and scales had seen for 80 years, the German grazing ship Karlsruhe, a 174-meter long flagship in the attack of a German invader on Kristiansand during the occupation of Norway on April 9, 1940.
The meeting is historic and perhaps just over where Karlsruhe was, until this summer, the last large German warship that was still undiscovered on the seabed around Norway.
The attack is the beginning of the end
It was the early morning of the fateful occupation 80 years ago, the day that marked the beginning of the five-year period of the Norwegian nation under the Nazi heel, that Karlsruhe, with 1,100 people on board, attacked Kristiansand in a coordinated German attack on many targets in Norway.
Karlsruhe was launched in 1927, weighed 7,800 tons equipped with 50-millimeter armor and three cannon towers with a total of nine 15 cm SK / C-25 guns as well as two anti-aircraft guns on Karlsruhe, four triple torpedo barrels, and space for 120 tundra forces. The crew generally 850 people.
Karlsruhe was accompanied by a number of other ships and it is still not known to this day whether it was Karlsruhe’s canon shooters or one of the accompanying ships that fired the spire from the cathedral in Kristiansand, as it was not a heavyweight during the war.
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