On 30 July, 1944, the German submarine U-250, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Werner-Karl Schmidt, sank the Soviet anti-submarine patrol boat MO-105 in the Koivisto Strait in the Gulf of Finland. Her sister-ship the MO-103 retaliated, sinking the U-boat.
Schmidt, along with five other crewmembers in the control room, managed to escape and was taken prisoner. Interrogations revealed that on board the sunken U-boat was a cache of important documents and minefield maps.
Commander of Russia’s Baltic Fleet Admiral V.F. Tributs ordered a team of Soviet divers commanded by Ivan Prokhvatilov to find the sub and retrieve the documents. The vessel was laying at a depth of 30 meters and the salvage site was under German artillery fire.
Five of the six surviving U-250 submariners. In the middle stands the boat's commander, Lieutenant Commander Werner-Karl Schmidt.
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Working mainly at night for hours on end, the divers braved stormy waters, the risk of decompression sickness and gun battles raging above their heads.
Despite German efforts to prevent the boat from falling into Soviet hands, on September 14, 1944, the Soviet Navy raised the U-250 and towed it to dry dock in Kronstadt.
Extraction of bodies of German submariners from U-250 in Kronstadt dock.
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The success of the operation allowed the Soviet command to retrieve valuable information about German submarine building at the time and the new secret T5 acoustically-fused torpedo carried by the sub, allowed the Soviet Navy to improve its own torpedoes.