The submarine U-1206 was sunk by its high tech toilet. Credits
Sometimes reality can be stranger than fiction. Can you imagine, being the commander of one of Germany's most modern submarines in 1945, to have your submarine (a U-boat no less) lost through a faulty toilet.
The U 1206 was built in 1943 at the Danzig shipyards and successfully launched in 1944. It was under the command of a young officer named Karl Adolf Schlitt. The operations that the submarine completed were more training exercises patrolling the North Sea, and it never saw action.
On April 14, 1945, while submerged at a depth of sixty one meters just off the coast of Scotland, the captain chose to use the bathroom. The toilet on board was a new modern system which allowed them to flush directly into the sea and not store it in septic tanks or compartments for later processing.
Unfortunately for him, Schlitt was not completely familiar with how to manipulate this sequence that would employ this complex system. As a result, the captain accidentally opened one of the valves possessing the wrong sequence, and sluiced seawater mixed with waste throughout the compartments of the submarine and this wrecked the batteries which were stored there. These batteries then began to release the toxic chlorine gas which made conditions in the submarine unsafe.
With no other option, the captain was forced to surface immediately. The British forces caught sight of the submarine almost immediately, and subsequently attacked with bombs. The crew abandoned ship, the U 1206 sank of the coast of Scotland.
One small error in the bathroom ended a highly advanced warship in the final months of the Second World War.