A decommissioned submarine, which is currently underway on the Rhine, passed the Deutsches Eck near Koblenz on Sunday evening. Shortly thereafter, it was to reach Lahnstein in the Rhein-Lahn-Kreis. Previously, the entire route in North Rhine-Westphalia had been lined with onlookers, reported Sabine Lingner from the Speyer Museum of Technology. "It was gigantic. It could have been millions." In Rhineland-Palatinate, too, numerous people followed the submarine's journey.
On Friday, "U17" first passed Emmerich and Wesel and then moored in Duisburg. There, thousands of onlookers watched the arrival. On Saturday morning, the submarine was then pulled via Düsseldorf to the next stopover in Cologne. On Sunday we continued via Bonn in the direction of Koblenz and the nearby Lahnstein.
The destination of the submarine, which was decommissioned by the German Navy in 2010, is Speyer. The colossus, which is a good 48 meters long and weighs 500 tons, had previously been demilitarized at a shipyard in Kiel and loaded onto a floating pontoon.
At the end of April, the submarine began its three-week journey across the Kiel Canal, the North Sea and the Rhine. The arrival in Speyer is scheduled for this Wednesday (17 May), where it will be prepared in the workshop of the Technik Museum.
The submarine is to receive its final home in 2024 in the Technik Museum Sinsheim in Baden-Württemberg. "U17" had been in service since 1973 and was retired in Eckernförde in 2010. After that, it lay in the naval arsenal in Wilhelmshaven. In 1997, it became the first German post-war submarine to cross the Atlantic for a military training program.