SMS Hindenburg
The SMS Hindenburg is one of the most remarkable and historically significant shipwrecks in the world, lying on the seabed of Scapa Flow in Orkney, Scotland. She was the flagship of the Imperial German High Seas Fleet, a Bayern-class battleship of extraordinary size and firepower, scuttled by her own crew on 21 June 1919 in one of the most dramatic and deliberate acts of mass self-destruction in naval history. Today she rests in shallow waters and is considered one of the finest wreck diving sites in all of Europe, drawing divers, historians, and maritime enthusiasts from across the globe to these wind-swept northern waters.
The Hindenburg was the last and largest capital ship to be completed by Germany during the First World War, displacing around 26,000 tonnes and stretching nearly 212 metres in length. She carried eight 30.5cm guns in four twin turrets and was a formidable symbol of German naval ambition. However, she arrived too late to fight in the Battle of Jutland and spent much of her active service in a state of enforced idleness. After Germany's defeat in 1918, the entire High Seas Fleet — 74 vessels in all — was interned at Scapa Flow under the terms of the armistice, awaiting a final settlement at the Paris Peace Conference. Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, in command of the interned fleet and fearing the ships would be seized by the British before a peace treaty was signed, gave the order to open the sea-cocks. In the space of a few hours, 52 German warships slipped beneath the waves of Scapa Flow in an event that astonished the world.
The Hindenburg sank in relatively shallow water — approximately 21 to 30 metres at her deepest — lying on her starboard side at a slight angle. She remains largely intact, and this makes her especially thrilling to dive. Her enormous hull looms out of the cold, clear Orcadian water in a way that is genuinely awe-inspiring: the barnacled plating, the gun turrets, the anchor chains, and the massive propellers are all visible and explorable by recreational and technical divers. Visibility in Scapa Flow can be excellent, sometimes extending to 20 metres or more, and the wreck is heavily colonised by marine life including plumose anemones, nudibranchs, edible crabs, and schools of fish, giving the entire site a ghostly but vivid underwater character.
Above the waterline, the experience of visiting Scapa Flow is defined by the vast, sheltered expanse of water surrounded by the low hills and green moorland of the Orkney Mainland, Hoy, and the smaller islands. The landscape here is treeless and ancient-feeling, shaped by ice and Atlantic wind, and the quality of light in Orkney — particularly in summer — has a luminous, almost ethereal quality. The waters of Scapa Flow are rarely still and the skies are famously changeable, but the basin is naturally sheltered and in calm conditions it has a profound sense of spacious quiet, broken only by seabirds and the distant sound of boat engines.
Scapa Flow itself is steeped in naval history well beyond the German scuttling. It served as the principal anchorage of the British Grand Fleet during both world wars, and it was here that HMS Royal Oak was sunk by a German U-boat in October 1939 with the loss of 833 men — she remains a protected war grave and is not dived. The area around the wreck of the Hindenburg is accessible from the town of Stromness or the village of St Mary's on the eastern shore, both of which serve as bases for diving charter boats that operate throughout the season.
For practical purposes, visiting the Hindenburg means arranging passage with one of several reputable diving operators based in Orkney, principally out of Stromness. The diving season typically runs from April through to October, with the calmer summer months of June, July, and August generally offering the best conditions. The wreck is suitable for experienced divers comfortable in cold water — visibility is excellent but water temperatures rarely rise above around 12°C even in summer, so a drysuit is strongly recommended. Non-divers can still appreciate the history by visiting the Scapa Flow Visitor Centre and Museum at Lyness on Hoy, which tells the story of the fleet internment and scuttling with considerable depth and thoughtfulness.
A particularly poignant and little-known detail concerns what happened on the day of the scuttling: British soldiers stationed to guard the fleet opened fire on German sailors taking to lifeboats after the order to abandon ship, killing nine German sailors — the last combat deaths of the First World War. The Hindenburg herself was later partially salvaged between the wars by the firm of Cox and Danks, one of the most audacious engineering projects of the twentieth century, but she proved too large and complex to be fully raised and refloated, and so she remains where she settled in 1919, a monument to a war, an empire, and an era that vanished with her.