SMS Cöln (1919): Shipwreck Map, Location & Facts

Name	SMS Cöln	Wikidata label
Year lost	1919	English Wikipedia lead text (year following a loss verb, parsed)
Era	Interwar	derived from year
Ship type	cruiser, light cruiser	Wikidata P31 instance of
Cause of loss	Scuttled	Keyword match in English Wikipedia lead sentence
Nationality / flag	German Reich	Wikidata P8047 country of registry
Operator	Imperial German Navy	Wikidata P137 operator
Conflict	Scuttling of the German Fleet in Scapa Flow	Wikidata P607 conflict
Sea / ocean	North Atlantic Ocean	Natural Earth marine areas (public domain), point-in-polygon
Nearest coast	Scotland	Natural Earth (public domain); approx. 7 km from land
Position	58.8922, -3.0500	Wikidata P625 coordinate location (CC0)

About the wreck

SMS Cöln was a light cruiser in the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy), the second to bear this name, after her predecessor SMS Cöln had been lost in the Battle of Heligoland Bight. Cöln, first of her class, was launched on 5 October 1916 at Blohm & Voss in Hamburg and completed over a year later in January 1918. She and her sister Dresden were the last two light cruisers built by the Kaiserliche Marine; eight of her sisters were scrapped before they could be completed. The ships were an incremental improvement over the preceding Königsberg-class cruisers.

Cöln was commissioned into service with the High Seas Fleet ten months before the end of World War I; as a result, her service career was limited and she did not see action. She participated in a fleet operation to Norway to attack British convoys to Scandinavia, but they failed to locate any convoys and returned to port. Cöln was to have participated in a climactic sortie in the final days of the war, but a revolt in the fleet forced Admirals Reinhard Scheer and Franz von Hipper to cancel the operation.

Location

Recorded position: 58.8922, -3.0500 (Wikidata P625 coordinate location (CC0); may be approximate)
Sea / ocean: North Atlantic Ocean
Nearest coast: Scotland

Wreck positions on this site are for interest only and are not for navigation. Many wrecks are war graves or legally protected: never disturb human remains or remove artefacts, and check local law before diving.

OpenStreetMap

Text adapted from the Wikipedia article SMS Cöln (1916) (revision 1375908454), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; condensed by selecting paragraphs and trimming at sentence boundaries; citations and formatting removed. No text added. This excerpt is available under the same licence.