As the Iron Curtain of the Cold War hung over Europe in 1947, the ghostly silhouette of a formidable Nazi ship hovered on the horizon of the Baltic Sea, a mirage of the war that had ended two years prior. This was Nazi Germany’s first and only aircraft carrier, Graf Zeppelin. Echoing a battle that once might have been, Soviet ships fired at the carrier, striking it with terrific explosions. Blasted by torpedoes, the massive vessel sank beneath the cold waves of the Baltic Sea—and its final resting place remained a mystery to the rest of the world for nearly half a century.

This was an inglorious fate for a ship launched with fanfare in 1938 and hailed as the pride of the Nazi regime’s navy, the Kriegsmarine. It was christened with the name of one of Germany’s most famous inventors, Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Ironically it shared the name “Graf Zeppelin” with another scrapped invention: the Graf Zeppelin passenger airship, whose buoyant but brief career ended in the wake of the horrifying Hindenburg disaster of 1937, when an airship caught fire, killing 36 people. Why did the bold aircraft carrier end in such disaster—and could it have made any difference to Nazi Germany’s war aims?

The aircraft carrier was an odd bird for Nazi Germany from the outset, getting off to a bad start as it embodied a Nazi prestige project. In fact, it was one of many, which collectively contributed to Germany losing the war. Adolf Hitler managed to scare the British to the negotiating table in 1935 to sign the Anglo-German Naval Treaty. This move was part of Hitler’s aim not only to undo but flamboyantly exceed restrictions imposed on Germany’s military by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles after World War I. To appease Hitler, the British government politely agreed he could build two aircraft carriers, which ought to be smaller than British ones. They also allowed the Germans to come visit and inspect their carriers for inspiration.

The result was the Graf Zeppelin carrier project, typically mammoth in scope and Hitlerian in its ambition. At 19,250 tons, this new class of carrier would indeed be smaller than British versions—but armed to the teeth with guns and armor that made it more like a battleship than a portable flight deck. The carrier would also be capable of launching 40 of almost every type of Luftwaffe aircraft into battle, including fighters, dive bombers, torpedo bombers, and reconnaissance planes. Furthermore, it would have the best aspects of an ocean liner—with accommodations for a naval crew of 1,760 plus additional air crews. Those crews could live lavishly on the vessel too, as it housed bakeries, reading halls, shoe shops, and hair salons.

It was grandiose. It was unprecedented. And it was rather difficult, considering that German engineers previously grappling with poverty and the demolished military had zero experience in building aircraft carriers.

“Germany is a land power. In both world wars, the main focus for Germany was not at sea,” says Nicholas Reynolds, PhD, author, World War II historian, and former historian for the CIA Museum.

While aircraft carriers could conceivably have aided the Kriegsmarine in sea battles, Germany faced an uphill battle between the world wars to prepare adequate naval forces to match those fielded by Britain and the United States at the outset of World War II, he explains.

Using aircraft carriers effectively in battle requires not only production but support over long distances at sea, proficiencies which the U.S. and Japanese navies both demonstrated during battles in the Pacific. To accomplish this, the Germans would’ve had to undergo a complete shift in war aims and manufacturing goals, not to mention an overhaul in naval doctrine, Reynolds explains.

“Basically the leopard would have had to change its spots to create and successfully use carrier forces in the war,” he says.

In reality, the matters of doctrine, supply, and a generally coherent approach didn’t trouble Hitler or other leading Nazi dignitaries at the official christening of Graf Zeppelin on December 8, 1938, in Kiel, Germany. The ship wasn’t half finished yet, but that wasn’t going to get in the way of good publicity. It launched to a blast of trumpets, a naval parade, and a rip-roaring speech from Hermann Goering, chief of the German air force, the Luftwaffe.

“The ship, this gigantic hulk of iron and steel, stands here thanks to the joint work of technicians and workers of different educational backgrounds and a multitude of diverse skills,” declared Goering, inadvertently summing up the chunk of metal that the vessel would eventually become. The massive manufacturing project would start sliding soon after praise for Graf Zeppelin splashed across nearly four pages of coverage in the Nazi Party’s official Völkischer Beobachter newspaper.

Hitler was skeptical of whether bigger ships didn’t simply become bigger targets. For instance, on May 27, 1941, the British sank the Bismarck, another large jewel of the Kriegsmarine. Work on Graf Zeppelin straggled as German war aims focused elsewhere in Europe. Moreover, the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine operated as separate entities and failed miserably at joint efforts to design a floating airfield. The Luftwaffe constantly changed their designs and even aimed to produce planes with folding wings to fit aboard a vessel, prompting the Kriegsmarine to adapt its ship in a vicious cycle.

Hitler greenlighted work on Graf Zeppelin at full speed again as of March 1942. This whim came not long after the December 1941 Battle of Wake Island, in which the Japanese scored a victory against U.S. forces in the Pacific largely due to their skillful use of aircraft carriers. Work resumed in Kiel. Then Hitler changed his mind again and decided in January 1943 that large surface ships were a lost cause. All work on such vessels stopped. The ship never sailed using its own propulsion system; instead German navy personnel dragged Graf Zeppelin everywhere during its short lifetime—often evacuating it from Allied warplanes’ bombs. The Kriegsmarine decommissioned Graf Zeppelin on February 2, 1943, and towed it to a gloomy spot on the Oder River Delta bordering Poland.

Floating quietly on a tributary called the Möhne river, the Kriegsmarine harvested Graf Zeppelin for spare parts. It was already toothless, as the Kriegsmarine shipped its guns off for use elsewhere. As the war ground to its bloody conclusion and Soviet troops came barreling toward the borders of Third Reich, the Germans opted to destroy the metal monstrosity to stop the Soviets from using it. After sabotaging its propulsion system, they deliberately sank the vessel, and Germany’s first aircraft carrier settled into the mud.

It’s unclear how the Soviets learned of the ship’s location or managed to raise it from the depths, but they succeeded in refloating Graf Zeppelin after the guns of war fell silent. In a strange stroke of fate, a Russian crew lived aboard the vessel of their former enemies to gather intelligence about its design for Soviet use. The Soviets renamed it “PB10.” In 1947, they hauled it out into the Baltic Sea and sank it using torpedoes in a live-fire exercise.

In July 2006, a Polish oil company called Petrobaltic accidentally located the wreck some 35 miles off the coast of Wladyslawowo while using sonar for exploration and research. Polish divers of the research vessel Arctowski descended and positively identified the ghostly skeleton lying on the seabed as Hitler’s formerly prized aircraft carrier. It had come quite a long way from its initial launch, surrounded by smiles, cheering, and national acclaim all those long years ago in 1938. Was this its inevitable end—or did Germany make a strategic error in overlooking the untapped potential of aircraft carriers?

“It's difficult to say whether Germany's failure to develop aircraft carriers made a big difference in the European Theater of World War II,” says Tom Young, military historian, aviation expert, and author. “However, a lot of historians say the battleship was already outdated in the 1940s, and the aircraft carrier's time had come. U.S. aircraft carriers were certainly decisive in the Pacific Theater.”

Had Graf Zeppelin been completed, could it have played a role in using close air support to defend the Bismarck? Possibly, but both ships would certainly have had the British Royal Navy’s target on their backs nevertheless.

“No one thing is decisive. It’s the whole system that’s decisive,” says Reynolds, explaining that wartime intelligence played a huge factor in the successful U.S. defeat of German U-boats. Ultimately, the problem was not so much technology as Hitler’s deliriously changing war aims.

“With Hitler’s agenda, it’s hard to imagine how he could have won World War II,” Reynolds says. “His approach was nonstop dynamics. He was always doing something and there was always drama. Conquer this, fight that. He was not interested in stability.”

As with the war itself, it was an excess of ambition and lack of resources to follow through that ultimately led to the demise of Graf Zeppelin. Its untapped potential in terms of shifting the balance of German sea power can now only be measured in speculation and unfulfilled dreams.