A summer of record heat and drought has pushed the Danube to some of its lowest water levels in decades, exposing dozens of shipwrecks left over from the Second World War. The discoveries, first reported by the Guardian, span several countries along the river and include warships, unexploded bombs and other wartime debris that had lain hidden underwater for more than 80 years.
The most striking finds have emerged near Prahovo, a small port town on the border between Serbia and Romania. According to reporting from Reuters and the Associated Press, an estimated 200 vessels belonging to Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine were deliberately sunk there in 1944 as German forces retreated from advancing Soviet troops, both to deny the ships to the enemy and to block the river to Allied shipping.
Wrecks still armed after eight decades
Some of the hulls now visible above the waterline are believed to still hold ammunition. Serbian authorities have had to bring in bomb disposal specialists to deal with the risk; Serbia's Mine Action Centre said earlier this year that a depth charge had been removed from one of the sunken vessels, known as the T-20, and destroyed in a controlled detonation, according to reporting compiled from Serbian sources.
The Serbian government, supported by European Union funding, has spent years trying to work out how to permanently clear the site, though no full removal of the wrecks has yet been carried out. Officials have said the process must proceed in stages given the danger that unexploded ordnance still poses.
Further north, in Budapest, low water on the Danube has revealed a Second World War-era military motorcycle on the riverbed, according to Hungarian news outlet Hungary Today. Bomb disposal teams also recovered ten German anti-tank mines from the site, a job that forced the temporary closure of a stretch of the Bem Embankment along the river.
A river under strain
The exposed wrecks are one visible symptom of a much broader crisis. The Danube, Europe's second-longest river and a vital shipping corridor for ten countries, is running at a 30-year low in Romania and Slovakia and at its lowest level on record in Hungary, according to RTE, citing recent monitoring data.
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution group have said the drought, though naturally severe, has been made worse by human-caused climate change, RTE reported. Romania has shut down a reactor unit at its Cernavoda nuclear plant as a precaution, while Serbia has had to cut power generation at its two largest hydroelectric plants, according to the same report.
The low water is also squeezing trade. Cargo vessels are carrying reduced loads to avoid running aground, and cruise ships have struggled to reach ports such as Budapest, according to CNBC. For farmers along the river in Romania, the drought has made it harder to move crops to market at a time when the wider region is also battling wildfires in France, Greece and Spain.
“"We began dredging works as early as April... The operations were divided into three sections, and a total of 270,000 cubic metres of sediments were dredged," said Adrian Maizel of the Lower Danube River Administration, describing efforts to keep the waterway navigable, as reported by Balkan Insight.”
For now, the sunken warships remain a stark, physical reminder of a wartime past that the river had kept hidden for generations. Whether they will resurface again depends largely on how quickly, and how often, Europe's rivers keep running dry.
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