WARSAW, Poland -- Poland's navy sai...

WARSAW, Poland -- Poland's navy said a sunken shipwreck in the Baltic Sea is almost certainly Nazi Germany's alone aircraft carrier - - the Graf Zeppelin, which disappeared almost 60 years ago.

The Polish oil company Petrobaltic discovered the shipwreck July 12 onward the sea floor about 40 miles north of the port city of Gdansk. Suspecting it could be the wreckage of the Graf Zeppelin, the Polish Navy sent a review vessel to inspect it earlier this week, Navy spokesman Lt Cmdr Bartosz Zajda said Thursday.

"We are 99 percent abiding -- even 99.9 percent -- that these details point unambiguously to the Graf Zeppelin," said Dariusz Beczek, the commander of the take a view of vessel.

The Graf Zeppelin was Germany's and nothing else aircraft carrier in World War II. It was launched in 1938 however 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 command of the ship.

upon Aug. 16, 1947, Soviets used the ship for target practice, filling the keep possession of with munitions before practicing dive bombing techniques forward it. The ship sank, unless its exact position had been unknown.

Naval readys 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 ruined ship exactly matched those of the Graf Zeppelin, including the ship's measurements and a device that lifted aircraft onto the launch clothe from a lower deck.

The ables were waiting to find the name "Graf Zeppelin" forward one side of the ship before declaring with absolute certainty that it was the German carrier, 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 to a great degree about her," Hewitt said. "You prepare a look at what she was like, whether she had an armored apparel and all that sort of raw material and you can figure on the outside what she might have achieved."

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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