WARSAW, Poland — Poland's navy says a sunken shipwreck in the Baltic Sea is almost certainly Nazi Germany's only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin, which disappeared nearly 60 years ago.
The Polish oil company Petrobaltic discovered the wreckage July 12 on the sea floor about 40 miles north of the port city of Gdansk.
The Polish Navy sent a survey vessel to inspect it earlier this week, Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Bartosz Zajda said Thursday.
"We are 99 percent sure — even 99.9 percent — that these details point unambiguously to the Graf Zeppelin," said Dariusz Beczek, commander of the survey vessel.
The Graf Zeppelin was launched in 1938, but never saw action because of Hitler's disenchantment with his navy and political squabbles in the Nazi high command.
After Germany's defeat in 1945, the Soviet Union took control of the ship.
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On Aug. 16, 1947, Soviets used the ship for target practice, filling the hold with munitions before practicing dive-bombing it. The ship eventually sank, but its exact position has been unknown ever since.
Naval experts used a remote-controlled underwater robot and sonar photographic and video equipment to gather digital images of the 850-foot-long ship this week, Zajda said.
Zajda said a number of characteristics of the wrecked ship exactly matched those of the Graf Zeppelin, including the ship's measurements.
The experts were still waiting to find the name "Graf Zeppelin" on one side of the ship before declaring its identity with absolute certainty, Zajda said.
Nick Hewitt, a historian at the Imperial War Museum in London called the Graf Zeppelin "a fascinating what-if."
"Nobody really knows that much about her," Hewitt said by telephone.
"Graf" means "Count" in German, and the carrier, like the famous airship Graf Zeppelin, was named after Count Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich von Zeppelin.
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