The Lürssen shipyard in Bremen began building the Neckar on December 22, 1960. Six months later, on June 26, 1961, the ship was ready to be launched . The Neckar , equipped with adjustable propellers from Escher Wyss AG , was put into service on December 7, 1963 and, after the tests were completed, assigned to the 7th Schnellbootgeschwader as a tender . In 1971/72 the Neckar was rebuilt to accommodate the material maintenance group (MEG, forerunner of the later system support group SUG) for the modernized speedboats of the Zobel class . The decommissioning took place on November 30, 1989. The Neckar was then sold to the Netherlands via VEBEG and broken up in 1993 in Turkey. The Neckar regularly took part in training trips and NATO maneuvers in the Baltic and North Sea with the speedboats of the 7th Schnellbootgeschwader. Alternating with other speedboat squadrons, the Danish-Norwegian-German NATO maneuver Bold Game took part regularly . During the operations, ports in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Spain were called.
Incident on the Baltic Sea
Gun turret of the Neckar after the bombardment
The warship became known through an incident on June 15, 1987, when it was shot at by a Polish corvette under the leadership of Corvette Captain Diethart Gatz in international waters off the Kaliningrad Oblast in the Baltic Sea . The Neckar , which had seen practice shooting by the Warsaw Pact navies , was hit by eight ship artillery projectiles when a Polish ship opened fire on a target drone flying from the Neckar . The Neckar was in the line of fire of the Polish missile corvettes ORP Górnik (434) and ORP Hutnik (435) of the Tarantul class, which were commissioned in 1983 . Three soldiers were injured; There was property damage in the amount of 560,000 DM . The German federal government protested on June 16, 1987 against this behavior.
Hans H. Hildebrand, Albert Röhr, Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships . Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present. tape9 : Collective chapter landing craft, mine ships, minesweepers, speedboats, training ships, special ships, tenders and escort ships, torpedo boats, supply ships. Mundus Verlag, Ratingen, S.144 .