In Germany, 187,319 first implantations of total knee replacements (TKA) and 24,940 revision operations of TKA knee were performed in 2016 [
1]. Osteoarthritis is the most common cause of movement deficiency in old age [
2,
3] and its prevalence continues to increase [
4]. Osteoarthritis is expected to be the most common cause of disability in 2030 [
5,
6]. Changing mechanical stress on the articular cartilage is essential for the function and health of the cartilage. Unphysiologic stress, however, can cause degeneration of the cartilaginous tissue as well as the subchondral bone and lead to osteoarthritis. Degenerative changes in the articular cartilage can even affect every second German citizen at the age of over 60 years [
7,
8]. Degenerative changes are manifested in softening and continuous thinning of the articular cartilage to complete bone baldness, which is extremely painful for the patient in the late stage and requires therapeutic intervention [
8]. In addition, there is a thickening of the subchondral bone [
9,
10]. If a meniscectomy is performed, the risk of developing osteoarthritis increases later in life; the result is a 132-fold increase in TKA compared to the control [
11]. The menisci double the contact surface of the joint to twice [
12]. This distributes the joint pressure over a larger area. Also, the “leeway” on a possible position of the force resultants in the joint is considerably expanded. If the meniscus is removed, this free space for directional changes of the resultant will be significantly reduced. The result is an increasing burden on the cartilage. At present, there is a paradigm shift in the treatment of meniscal damage—from distance to meniscal maintenance or meniscal replacement [
13]. For the understanding of osteoarthrosis and the development of scaffolds for meniscal and cartilage replacement, knowledge of the mechanical properties of articular cartilage is essential, in particular, the influence of morphological changes of the meniscus on the mechanical properties of the cartilage and vice versa. Cyclic loads influence the viscoelastic properties. So far, there are very few studies dealing with the characterization of the mechanical properties of human joint cartilage [
14‐
16], most studies deal with animal samples [
17,
18]. In most cases, the determination of the mechanical properties had been carried out by means of unconfined compression tests [
15,
16,
19]. Often, cylinders were punched out of the tibiae [
15,
20] and examined by unconfined compression [
19]. In this type of experiment, it has not been possible to perform a mapping of the mechanical properties over the entire tissue. This approach was taken up and optimized by Deneweth et al. [
16] so that a rough mapping was possible by punching out 21 samples distributed over the entire tibial plateau and measuring them using unconfined compression. Other authors like Thambyah et al. [
21] tried to investigate the differences between meniscus-covered (m-covered) and meniscus-uncovered (m-uncovered) areas with one punched out cylinder each via unconfined compression. Furthermore, the tissue was no longer suitable for histological analysis due to compression damage. Sim et al. [
22,
23] showed in their work that automatic mapping of soft tissues, such as articular cartilage and meniscus, with the Biomomentum Inc. (Montreal, Canada) is possible. The focus in the previous work [
22] was, however, to compare the values measured with the Mach-1 to a newly developed measuring device Arthro-BST which non-destructively measured the mechanical and biochemical values of articular cartilage during knee surgery. But in contrast to the investigations of Sim et al. [
22], the focus of our investigations was to determine a biomechanical and histological difference between arthrotic joints, removed during TKA, and the healthy control with the same age distribution. So far, a mechanical characterization of the viscoelasticity of the cartilage of degenerated joints in comparison to healthy joints based on an indentation mapping test and regarding histological changes was not published.