Although the country has been at peace for three generations, German bomb-disposal squads are among the busiest in the world. In 2011, 45,000 people-the largest evacuation in Germany since World War II-were forced to leave their homes when a drought revealed a similar device lying on the bed of the Rhine in the middle of Koblenz. In November 2013, another 20,000 people in Dortmund were evacuated while experts defused a 4,000-pound “Blockbuster” bomb that could destroy most of a city block. Still, last May, some 20,000 people were cleared from an area of Cologne while authorities removed a one-ton bomb that had been discovered during construction work. Before any construction project begins in Germany, from the extension of a home to track-laying by the national railroad authority, the ground must be certified as cleared of unexploded ordnance. This story is a selection from the January-February issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĮven now, 70 years later, more than 2,000 tons of unexploded munitions are uncovered on German soil every year. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine for just $12 In both East and West, responsibility for defusing these bombs-along with removing the innumerable hand grenades, bullets and mortar and artillery shells left behind at the end of the war-fell to police bomb-disposal technicians and firefighters, the Kampfmittelbeseitigungsdienst, or KMBD. Yet as many as 10 percent of the bombs dropped by Allied aircraft had failed to explode, and as East and West Germany rose from the ruins of the Reich, thousands of tons of unexploded airborne ordnance lay beneath them.
Under Allied occupation, reconstruction began almost immediately. By the time the Nazi government surrendered, in May 1945, the industrial infrastructure of the Third Reich-railheads, arms factories and oil refineries-had been crippled, and dozens of cities across Germany had been reduced to moonscapes of cinder and ash. and British air forces dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe, half of that amount on Germany. Five bombs tumbled away into the icy sky.īetween 19, U.S. As his B-17 approached the Oder-Havel Canal, he watched as the needles of the automatic release mechanism converged. Sitting in the nose in the lead plane, the bombardier stared through his bombsight into the haze far below. But the Luftwaffe was on its knees no enemy aircraft engaged the bombers of the 493rd.Īround 2:40 p.m., some ten miles northwest of Berlin, the city of Oranienburg appeared beneath them, shrouded in a mist along the lazy curves of Havel River, and the sky blossomed with puffs of jet-black smoke from anti-aircraft fire. They flew on into Germany, passing Hanover and Magdeburg, the exhaust of each B-17’s four engines condensing into the white contrails every crewman hated for betraying their position to defenders below.
Inside the unpressurized aluminum fuselage of each aircraft, the temperature fell to 40 degrees below zero, the air too thin to breathe. They headed east, gradually gaining altitude until, assembled in tight box formations at the head of a stream of more than 1,300 heavy bombers, they crossed the Channel coast north of Amsterdam at an altitude of almost five miles. Eighth Air Force thundered down the concrete runway of Little Walden airfield in Essex, England, and rose slowly into the air.
on March 15, 1945, the first of 36 B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 493rd Bombardment Group of the U.S.
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