German Maritime Museum, Maritime museum in Stralsund, Germany.

The Deutsches Meeresmuseum occupies the hall of the former St. Catherine's Church, a red-brick Gothic structure with a steep red tile roof and a gable dormer, plus lower brick wings and an arched-window building in front. Inside, a steel bracing framework installed in 1972–1974 creates exhibition floors within the church hall, and the choir holds a fin whale skeleton. Just under 50 aquaria keep more than 600 sea creatures, among them sea turtles and Polynesian fish.

Otto Dibbelt opened the Natural History Museum in the Katharinenkloster on 24 June 1951, showing terrariums of local amphibians and reptiles and aquariums with Baltic and Bodden animals. From 1957 Sonnfried Streicher led its conversion into the Museum für Meereskunde und Fischerei. The former monastery church was repaired in 1972–1974 and fitted with a steel bracing frame that created exhibition floors; the museum reopened there in 1974, and from late 2020 to 17 July 2024 it was fully modernised.

The museum occupies the hall of the former St. Catherine's Church, a convent church converted into an exhibition hall between 1972 and 1974 with a steel bracing frame that added floors inside. The choir holds a fin whale skeleton, and a 350,000-litre tank in the courtyard building houses sea turtles. The name changed repeatedly: Natural History Museum in 1951, Museum for Oceanography and Fisheries from 1957, Oceanographic Museum of Stralsund from 1966.

The main house occupies the hall of the former St. Catherine's Church, with aquaria in the vaulted cellar and further displays on the upper floors reached by stairs and lifts. The museum reopened on 17 July 2024 after a complete modernisation begun in late 2020, so some areas may still be newly arranged. Allow several hours for the exhibitions and aquaria.

The whale exhibition is not in the main house on the former St. Catherine's Church but in the Ozeaneum on Stralsund's harbour island, opened on 11 July 2008, where 39 large aquaria hold 7,000 animals from the Baltic, North Sea and Atlantic. In the Katharinenhalle itself, the fin whale skeleton hangs in the choir and the leatherback turtle Marlene is on show.