The case of the German aircraft near Hel is like the Yeti – everyone has heard of it, but few have actually seen it.
We managed to come across this aircraft in May 2024, when during recreational dives with the Santi Scholars, we decided to check out “something” our sonar on ESPACE had drawn for us.
That “something” turned out to be the very aircraft we had been searching for over the years, although we were aware that we were not the first ones.
Today, after a year of research and archival work, we are closer to solving the mystery of this wreck.
At first, just as the legend among Hel fishermen said, we thought it was a Messerschmitt shot down in 1939.
But after many dives and photographs, and especially after clearing the wreck of nets and creating an excellent photogrammetry by Bartłomiej Pitala,
we now know it is a Ju 88. All the painstaking work was carried out by Tomasz Zwara, who even brought manuals from Germany in order to compare what we saw on the seabed with what was described in the aircraft documentation.
Why is this so important?
From the very beginning, we hoped we had found the wreck of one of the German planes shot down during the defense of Hel in 1939. That would have been a truly important discovery, because not a single aircraft downed by the Germans has been found so far, and the full list of German losses from those battles is still unknown. However, the Ju 88 model only began production in 1939 and certainly did not take part in the attack on Hel at the start of the war. This leaves us with just two possibilities: an accident during training, or German defense of Hel in 1945.
During training, the Germans lost six Ju 88 units over the southern Baltic. Two of them have already been found and identified (one near Łeba, the other on the Słupsk Bank). The remaining four are described as losses far from land. In the case of “our” Junkers, we are talking about an accident just 1 km from Hel – something that certainly must have been noticed. Despite months of searching, we couldn’t find any information about such an incident.
Let’s also remember that the wreck lies within the area of the German Torpedowaffenplatz Hexengrund, where test drops of aerial torpedoes were carried out at the end of the war. On our wreck, the mounts for such torpedoes are clearly visible, but unfortunately this lead also remains unconfirmed, as we have not found any reports of accidents or losses during such training.
A new lead appeared just yesterday, when we reached out to German Luftwaffe expert @Christian Koenig, who pointed to another possible trace. He wrote:
We do know that a Junkers Ju 88 G-1 (W. Nr. 730 538, C9+EH) of 1. Staffel Nachtjagdgeschwader 5 based at Jesau (JaFü Ostpreussen) was reported missing in the due course of chasing allied aircraft 21–22 December 1944 off Gdansk. The crew is still missing.
Could this be the right lead?
We keep searching.
We have reported this wreck (and 23 others) to the Maritime Office in Gdynia to be entered on the list of publicly accessible wrecks, and we know that work on such updates is ongoing
Greetings from the Team:
Tomasz Stachura
Tomasz Zwara
Piotr Cybula
Maciej Marcinkowski
Bartłomiej Pitala
Lukasz Pastwa
Marek Cacaj
Maciej Honc
Kamil Macidłowski
Lukasz Piorewicz
Krzysztof Wnorowski
Daniel Pastwa
Historical & Exploration Section:
Jacek Kapczuk
Karol Jacob
Andrzej Ditrich
Arkadiusz Siewierski
Zbyszek Okuniewski
Krzysztof Harbul
Wojciech Drzazgowski
