The Type 202 submarine was a short lived class of

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

submarine A submarine (often shortened to sub) is a watercraft capable of independent operation underwater. (It differs from a submersible, which has more limited underwater capability.) The term "submarine" is also sometimes used historically or infor ...

s. Design of these very small submarines started in 1957 by Ingenieurkontor Lübeck (IKL). It was intended to build 40 Type 202 mini submarines with a six-man crew but technical difficulties and doubts about their usefulness reduced them to three, and of those three for trials, to be further reduced to two. The boats were in service only a few months and were scrapped shortly after. They were one of the few military

U-boat U-boats are Submarine#Military, naval submarines operated by Germany, including during the World War I, First and Second World Wars. The term is an Anglicization#Loanwords, anglicized form of the German word , a shortening of (), though the G ...

s not bearing "U-numbers", probably since they were never intended for combat use. Instead they were named after important German engineers in submarine constructions (like

Wilhelm Bauer Wilhelm Bauer (; 23 December 1822 – 20 June 1875) was a German marine engineer and inventor who built several hand-powered submarines. Biography Wilhelm Bauer was born in Dillingen in the Kingdom of Bavaria. His father was a sergeant in ...

). ''Hans Techel'' was built with traditional

propeller A propeller (often called a screw if on a ship or an airscrew if on an aircraft) is a device with a rotating hub and radiating blades that are set at a pitch to form a helical spiral which, when rotated, exerts linear thrust upon a working flu ...

and

rudder A rudder is a primary control surface used to steer a ship, boat, submarine, hovercraft, airship, or other vehicle that moves through a fluid medium (usually air or water). On an airplane, the rudder is used primarily to counter adverse yaw ...

s (similar to the

Type 205 submarine The Type 205 was a class of Germany, German diesel-electric submarines. They were single-hull (watercraft), hull vessels optimized for the use in the shallow Baltic Sea. The Type 205 is a direct evolution of the Type 201 submarine, Type 201 class ...

s), but ''Friedrich Schürer'' had a rotatable Kort nozzle instead.

List of ships

References

*
Die U-Boote der Marine seit 1955
- Spiegel online (in German)

- www.die-marine.de

oecd.de {{germany-submarine-stub