"Omkring 30 000 invånare på den japanska ön Okinawa evakuerades på söndagen från sina hem när byggarbetare hittade en amerikansk bomb från andra världskriget, meddelade den japanska polisen.
...
Bomben vägde 250 kilo och var över en meter lång.
Under andra världskriget var Okinawa den enda plats där markstrider förekom i Japan. Två tredjedelar av befolkningen dödades.
...
Okinawa har omkring 2 600 ton odetonerad artilleriammunition och annat sprängmedel kvar från kriget. Det tros ta hundra år att desarmera alltihop, rapporterar den japanska nyhetsbyrån Kyodo."
http://www.expressen.se/article.asp?id=102685
Amerikansk bomb hittades på Okinawa
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Johan Elisson
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 3530
- Blev medlem: 23 mars 2002, 17:58
- Ort: Rikets värn i väst.
Appropå (ett ord jag anävder ofta) Okinawa vill jag tipsa om en mod till Close Combat 5 som handlar om Okinawa!
http://www.close-combat-world.com
/Johan
http://www.close-combat-world.com
/Johan
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Andreas Wien
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 758
- Blev medlem: 23 mars 2002, 19:09
- Ort: Wien, Österrike
Repris: "48 tonnen Sprengkörper entschärft"
Favorit i repris! Även i Europa har man detta problem. För nagra ar sedan small det till rejält i Salzburg. Jag försöker leta fram den artikeln!
Hittade denna artikel i "Salzburger Nachrichten" den 2 februari 2002
48 ton stridsspetsar och bomber desarmerade i Österrike förra året
Avdelningen för desarmeringstjänster, som i sin tur är underindelad inrikesministeriet, fick rycka ut 1079 gånger förra året för att desarmera högexplosiva krigsreliker. 47 918 kilogram skarp amunition blev oskadligjord, sade ledaren för enheten, Wilibald Berenda, i en årsrapport på fredagen.
Under de oskadligjorda krigsrelikterna fanns bla blingångare från 37 bomber och 10 övningsbomber, som med störtsta försiktighet blev oskadliggjorda av ett 16-mannateam. Samma gällde även för mer än 1000 granater, 507 [Wurfgranaten], 329 handgranter, 89 [Pansarfäuste] och 19 minor.
Dykgruppen i specialenheten för desarmeringstjänster bärgade även 20 943 kilogram olika sorters krigsrelikter. Fyndorterna var bla Ossiachersee, Wörthersee, Mondsee, Ybbs och Längersee.
Mest skarp amunition hittade man i Kärnten (21 794 Kg) och i Niederösterreich (16 791 Kg).
51 370 kvadratmeter misstänkt terräng har den 16 personer starka specialenheten systematiskt undersökt med hjälp av metalldetektorer.
Sedan 1945 har man hittat mer än 25 000 Ton krigsrelikter och även mer än 57 år efter kriget hittar man fortfarande på byggställen och på åkrarna farliga reliker.
Mvh Andreas Wien
Hittade denna artikel i "Salzburger Nachrichten" den 2 februari 2002
48 ton stridsspetsar och bomber desarmerade i Österrike förra året
Avdelningen för desarmeringstjänster, som i sin tur är underindelad inrikesministeriet, fick rycka ut 1079 gånger förra året för att desarmera högexplosiva krigsreliker. 47 918 kilogram skarp amunition blev oskadligjord, sade ledaren för enheten, Wilibald Berenda, i en årsrapport på fredagen.
Under de oskadligjorda krigsrelikterna fanns bla blingångare från 37 bomber och 10 övningsbomber, som med störtsta försiktighet blev oskadliggjorda av ett 16-mannateam. Samma gällde även för mer än 1000 granater, 507 [Wurfgranaten], 329 handgranter, 89 [Pansarfäuste] och 19 minor.
Dykgruppen i specialenheten för desarmeringstjänster bärgade även 20 943 kilogram olika sorters krigsrelikter. Fyndorterna var bla Ossiachersee, Wörthersee, Mondsee, Ybbs och Längersee.
Mest skarp amunition hittade man i Kärnten (21 794 Kg) och i Niederösterreich (16 791 Kg).
51 370 kvadratmeter misstänkt terräng har den 16 personer starka specialenheten systematiskt undersökt med hjälp av metalldetektorer.
Sedan 1945 har man hittat mer än 25 000 Ton krigsrelikter och även mer än 57 år efter kriget hittar man fortfarande på byggställen och på åkrarna farliga reliker.
Mvh Andreas Wien
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subskipper
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 1226
- Blev medlem: 23 mars 2002, 16:30
- Ort: Örebro (Äntligen hemma igen)
Peter Englund
Peter Englund har skrivit en liten artikel om amröjare på de gamla slagfälten i Flandern:
http://www.peterenglund.com/textarkiv/vastfront97.htm
http://www.peterenglund.com/textarkiv/vastfront97.htm
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subskipper
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 1226
- Blev medlem: 23 mars 2002, 16:30
- Ort: Örebro (Äntligen hemma igen)
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Mikael Karlsson
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 276
- Blev medlem: 24 mars 2002, 12:09
- Ort: Vålberg
- Kontakt:
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Mad Hatter
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 42
- Blev medlem: 24 mars 2002, 15:54
-
subskipper
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 1226
- Blev medlem: 23 mars 2002, 16:30
- Ort: Örebro (Äntligen hemma igen)
Hittade den här artikeln i arkivet hos http://www.germanlife.com
Det står om en "incident" i München i början.
Germany's Deadly Legacy From World War II and the Cold War
By John Dornberg
These brief news items come from local papers around Germany:
Oranienburg--10,000 people in a radius of one kilometer were evacuated from their homes while police experts defused a dud 500-pound American bomb dropped in World War II. Munich--1,500 residents had to leave their homes, schools were closed, traffic on the A-96 autobahn was diverted, and service of the S-5 subway interrupted for nine hours while ordnance men worked to neutralize a 500-pound British bomb that had failed to explode when dropped 53 years ago. Magdeburg--Construction workers chanced on an undetonated 2,000-pound American "blockbuster," and 12,000 people in the neighborhood were evacuated from their apartments and offices during the disarming. Frankfurt-am-Main--Discovery and defusing of a World War II bomb in the city forest halted traffic on the A-3 autobahn and required closing the north runway of Frankfurt International Airport for hours.
Routine local stories? They might have been, had they not appeared just a few days apart one week last year, and were it not for the fact that you can read such briefs in some paper in Germany every day of the year. They are barely noticed accounts of the explosive legacy of World War II. That legacy makes big news only when it does explode- -like the 500-pound American bomb at a construction site in East Berlin on September 15, 1994. It killed three building workers, seriously injured 17 passersby, demolished dozens of cars parked nearby, ripped open an adjacent five-story house from the roof down to the second floor, and blew out windows for blocks around.
Although World War II ended more than 50 years ago, it is far from over in Germany because of still deadly bombs and other ammunition left in the ground. "And it will go on for at least another 50 years," says Martin Volk, a Berlin police captain who headed the city's ordnance disposal team from 1974 until his retirement in 1995.
In Berlin some 2,000 bombs, each with 150 to 2,000 pounds of explosives, have been found since 1945. At least 15,000 are believed to be still slumbering in the ground, especially in the city's eastern boroughs where during the years of Communist rule the search for them was not as systematic as in West Berlin. The longer they remain buried, the more dangerous they become. As the years pass, even when not jarred accidentally by a construction crew, they can explode.
The problem of finding and defusing this lethal and destructive heritage is nationwide--wherever there were wartime air raids or ground battles between German and Allied forces.
Add to that the legacy of the Cold War: 1.3 million acres, or nearly 2,000 square miles, of territory in East Germany used by the Soviet and East German armies as troop training areas until 1990. All of them are highly contaminated with undetonated and abandoned munitions: artillery shells, anti-tank rockets, grenades, mines, and bullets. They pose constant danger to people who enter these areas, especially juveniles, who are known to pick up and play with or collect them.
The facts and figures of the effort to rid Germany of this legacy are mindboggling.
Nationwide today nearly 3,000 people work permanently at searching for and detonating dud bombs and ammunition. On average they retrieve some 20,000 tons of the stuff each year. They are unsung heroes, for their profession is fraught with danger: a job done in the shadow of death every day. "My family never knew whether I'd come home from work in a coffin," says Josef Hermann, head of Frankfurt-am-Main's police ordnance team for two decades, who celebrated his 90th birthday last fall. "I was lucky." In the state of Northrhine-Westphalia alone 85 ordnance disposal men were killed and 140 injured between 1949, when records were first kept, and 1984. Thanks to new technologies of searching for and disarming the bombs that are found, the job has gotten a little safer. Since 1990 there have been "only" five fatalities.
One was Rainer Thüne, the veteran ordnance disposal chief of Hesse, and another his assistant. They were killed in Wetzlar in October 1990 when trying to disarm a 500-pound bomb found in a streambed. While attaching a hydraulic rig to yank out its fuse, one of them slipped in the mud, and the bomb exploded.
In addition to the police teams there are some 20 commercial ordnance disposal firms involved in the task, each with about 100 highly trained experts. The financial costs are astronomical. The 1996 and 1997 federal and state budgets for Kampfmittelbeseitigung, as ordnance disposal is called, total almost DM 1 billion, or about $625 million. Experts estimate that $5.6 billion ought to have been allocated. In Saxony-Anhalt, one of the most contaminated states, the cleanup bill in 1996 came to DM 10.3 million, or about $6.4 million. "That enabled us to do just the absolute minimum, such as prophylactic searches at planned building sites," says Diethard Posorski, chief of the service in Magdeburg. "It does not include the costs at the former troop training grounds on the Colbitz-Letzlingen Heath."
That 88-square-mile area, 50 miles north of Magdeburg, staked out in 1935 by the German Wehrmacht (Armed Forces), then used after World War II until 1994 by the Soviet Army, is one of six sites in East Germany that now belongs to the Bonn Defense Ministry. The area is destined to become a maneuver ground for laser-simulated war games by the Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces). For more than 60 years it was shot up like a moonscape. To clean it up and make it safe for use will cost an estimated $1 billion in federal government funds. Work began in March 1995 and by early 1997 a team of nearly 500 soldiers and civilian workers, using 115 computer-programmed metal detectors, had managed to clear only 2.5 square miles and spent $20 million to do it. "At this rate it will take another 35 years to make it safe for training exercises," says Lt. Col. Werner Böhm, the base commandant.
Whereas the cleanup in West Germany and West Berlin has been going on for decades, in the former East German Democratic Republic (GDR) it only started systematically after Germany's reunification in 1990.
The effort in both Germanys was fairly haphazard until 1985 when Allied aerial reconnaissance photos became available. These are the tens of thousands of pictures taken by American and British planes after each air raid on German towns during the war. Experts who study them, using microscopes and stereoscopic planimeters, can distinguish between large ground craters, made by bombs that actually exploded, and smaller holes that were caused by duds. These account for about 10 to 20 percent of the bombs dropped. Comparing the photos with detailed street maps enables them to pinpoint where an unexploded bomb might still be ticking away under the surface.
The photos have been a great help to West German disposal teams for over a decade, but because of Cold War restraints they were not available to the services in the former GDR until reunification. The Brandenburg service began working with them in 1992, but it was only in 1995 that the teams in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt had access to sets covering major cities such as Leipzig, Chemnitz, Dresden, Magdeburg, Halle, and Dessau. Even West Berlin's ordnance team did not have photos of East Berlin until after reunification. "Until then," says Martin Volk, "the British and American suppliers carefully blanked out everything on the other side of the Berlin Wall, so as not to get into a diplomatic squabble with the GDR."
"The pictures reveal a lot," says Gerd Lehmann, head of the Brandenburg service in Potsdam. "We recently examined one of a 22-acre plot, now the site of four schools, two kindergartens, and playgrounds, on the banks of the Havel River in Oranienburg. It was taken after one of the big American air raids in the spring of 1945. It showed 23 suspect craters. We probed those places with detectors and test-drilling. At 10 of them we found bombs lying about seven to eight meters deep, one of them only a yard from the wall of a building. We don't know yet how we are going to defuse them and get them out safely."
But the search with aerial reconnaissance photos is also expensive. In the 1970s the U.S. and British defense departments sold most of their pictures to commercial archives and libraries, which now market them to the German ordnance disposal services for DM 85, or about $53, per shot. "We had to pay $690,000 for 13,000 of them," says Lehmann indignantly. "But there may be another 100,000 photos for Oranienburg and other cities in Brandenburg."
No other state has as great and dangerous a World War II and Cold War legacy as this one. Some 700 square miles--about 6.5 percent of its surface area--are a ticking time bomb. From January 1992 until December 1996 only a fraction of this vast area, about 16,000 acres or around 60 square miles, was searched and cleared, despite an annual budget of around $40 million and a team of 600 government and commercial ordnance workers on the job. Last year they recovered 700,000 pieces of dud ammunition, 15,000 bombs of all sizes, 1,500 rockets, 2,400 land mines, and 4,300 hand grenades.
"But that is just scratching the surface," says Lehmann. "It may take a generation, and it is a race against time, for the longer these bombs and shells remain in the ground the greater the danger of explosions and tragedies. In fact, it is almost a miracle that we have had so few accidents."
A 16-year-old boy was killed in 1992 tinkering with a German anti-aircraft shell he had found in the woods; an ordnance man was fatally injured in 1993 while defusing a grenade; a 500-pound American bomb blew up by itself in 1994 in the town of Lehnitz, causing extensive damage but no injuries.
Brandenburg's legacy is three-fold.
One is the vast area east and south of Berlin and Potsdam to the Oder River where the fiercest fighting of the war took place in April 1945. Tens of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers were killed there, and millions of pieces of ammunition, all still highly volatile, contaminate fields and forests. Before any new construction can take place, properties have to be searched with metal detectors and cleared. Lehmann estimates that may take 50 to 80, possibly even 100 years.
Another problem is at the 250,000 acres of former military bases and maneuver areas, some dating back to the Prussian kings and German kaisers, that are now state property. Dud ammunition of all kinds, potentially as lethal as the day it was fired, slumbers just under the surface. For the first time in decades these areas are to be put to peaceful civilian use. But nothing can be built until they have been decontaminated. Meanwhile, despite fences, warning signs, and pamphlets distributed to schools, hikers and mushroom-hunters go into them and risk their lives.
To make those sites safe will cost about $1.7 billion, which, given present budget allocations, would take 90 years.
Brandenburg's worst and most urgent legacy is in cities north of Berlin, especially in and around Oranienburg, sites of key wartime German arms factories, including the Heinkel aircraft plant and the Auer Works, which was making parts for the V-1 rockets. In seven big raids from March 6 to April 20, 1945 the U.S. Army Air Force dropped 23,675 bombs there.
About half of those bombs had delayed-action fuses, and 10 to 20 percent failed to detonate. They are still in the ground--four to eight yards down. "It's a nightmare," says Lehmann, "especially the delayed-action bombs."
These were set to detonate after the "all clear" for an air raid had been sounded and people had come out of their shelters. Their fuses contain glass vials of acetone, supposed to break on impact. The acetone impregnates a celluloid restraining disk that holds back the spring-pressured firing pin, thus softening or dissolving the celluloid and releasing the pin. The amount of acetone and thickness of the celluloid determine the delay--up to 44 hours after being dropped. In each bomb that failed to explode during the war something went wrong with that sequence. Usually the vial did not break or the celluloid did not soften enough to release the firing pin. But the brass fuses were all sealed, making them as dangerous today as 50 years ago--even more so, because the celluloid has gotten brittle. The slightest motion could activate them. Worse, as the celluloid ages, the pressure on the firing pin may be great enough to set the bomb off by itself--as happened at Lehnitz near Oranienburg in May 1994.
Duds with impact fuses are also becoming more dangerous with time. Their firing mechanisms contain lead acid and copper that, with aging, turns into copper acid, a material so volatile that it will react and cause an explosion if you just stroke the bomb with a feather.
"There are at least 2,000 of these things in Oranienburg alone," says Lehmann. "Buildings have been put up over many of them. Even with recon photos it'll take decades to locate them."
In Berlin itself the cleanup effort is complicated by the fact that it was haphazard in the city's eastern boroughs before reunification and that many areas of West Berlin, especially in the Tiergarten district and around the Reichstag, have to be searched again before work can start on the federal government buildings that are planned there. The city-state's Building and Housing Department has jurisdiction, commercial ordnance disposal companies do the searching, and the police is responsible for defusing and detonating the bombs and munitions that are found.
Since that September 1994 construction site tragedy in East Berlin's Friedrichshain borough, the housing department has been flooded with requests from builders and property owners for analyses of sites based on aerial reconnaissance photos and for prophylactic searches-- on average 400 a month. The yearly budget of about $5.6 million is not enough and as a result there are backlogs and delays before construction can start. The search teams are also at work on open, city-owned public spaces in eastern and northeastern Berlin where new housing projects are planned, at Schönefeld Airport, which is scheduled for expansion, and on and around Pariser Platz and Brandenburg Gate.
And then there is the Tiergarten district. Nowhere else was fighting and shelling heavier in the last weeks of the war than in this area. Because it is in West Berlin, much of it had been combed and sifted by ordnance disposal teams over the years. But not all. Not, for example, around Bellevue Palace, now the official residence of Federal President Roman Herzog; not on Platz der Republik and the Spreebogen, huge grass-covered areas where the new Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellery) and Bundestag (Parliament) office buildings will be standing by the end of the decade.
To prepare for groundbreaking of the presidential office building, now under construction adjacent to Bellevue Palace, a team of 11 men from an ordnance disposal company spent 15 months from January 1995 to March 1996 searching and probing the 21-acre park, inch by inch, using highly sensitive computerized metal detectors and gingerly digging up every piece. On lucky days they managed to advance 200 yards, usually it was just a few feet. They came up with 4.5 tons of live ammunition.
"We found everything from infantry rounds and hand grenades to anti- tank rockets and artillery shells," says Andreas Mauersberger, the team chief.
Similar searches started early this year on the sites for the new chancellery and parliamentary office buildings.
The sheer magnitude and longevity of Germany's explosive legacy is expressed in the person of Diethard Posorski, 52, chief of Saxony- Anhalt's State Ordnance Disposal Service in Magdeburg. He is the second generation of his family in this dangerous work. His father Eberhard Posorski directed ordnance disposal at Münster in West Germany for 35 years.
Posorski, who "grew up in a house full of fuses and deactivated ammunition," learned the profession from his father and worked for nearly 30 years for ordnance search and demolition companies in West Germany before his appointment in Saxony-Anhalt in 1994. His own son, now 24, may follow in his footsteps to make up the third generation.
"What's new for me here," he says, "is all the unfamiliar Soviet and Russian ammunition that we didn't have in the West, and the sheer scope and diversity of the problem.
"You name it and we've got it," he adds. "Battlefields with American, British, German, and Soviet ammo; areas in the Eastern Harz Mountains where Wehrmacht soldiers dumped and hid vast amounts of munitions before surrendering; huge troop training areas such as the Glücksburger Heath and Arneburg, which were used by the Wehrmacht before the Russians took them over in 1945; cities that were carpet- bombed, like Magdeburg, Dessau, and Halle, as well as smaller towns, such as Leuna, Bitterfeld, Wolfen, and Merseburg, that were the heart of the wartime chemical industries. Saxony-Anhalt is so contaminated with duds of all kinds that it is practically impossible to zone and fence off the most dangerous areas in order to keep people from entering them. To protect everyone we'd have to build a fence around the whole state and evacuate the entire populace."
Last year Posorski and his team of 51 government and 140 commercial ordnance disposal workers recovered more than 4,000 tons of bombs and munitions at 551 different sites and decontaminated about 3,000 acres.
"But that is barely a dent," he muses. "The best we can do is keep warning people of the dangers around them. Maybe the generation or two after me will say they can see the end to this task. But not even they will reach it."
Warning the public of the dangers preoccupies Alfred Remler of Saxony's Ordnance Disposal Service in Dresden almost as much as the actual search for and demolition of the explosive legacy. That, as Remler puts it, is "because we made more systematic and prophylactic searches in Saxony than elsewhere in the GDR." He should know. He has been at it since 1957 and has all the old records and maps of where probes were made and duds found. Saxony's service today has 26 government employees and contracts with five private companies that employ, on average, 200 people. Last year they salvaged munitions at 1,602 spots around the state. The take consisted of 600 bombs, 189, 000 pieces of infantry ammo, 58,000 artillery and tank shells, and 190,000 other explosives, including land mines as deadly as when they were planted half a century ago.
The urban areas with the greatest density of dud bombs are Leipzig, Chemnitz, and Zwickau. Ironically, almost none have been found in Dresden, despite the terrible February 13-14, 1945 air raid that destroyed the city. The macabre explanation is that 80 percent of the bombs dropped that night were incendiaries. The fire storm they caused created so much heat that the duds among the 20 percent general-purpose bombs also exploded.
One of Remler's chief tasks is warning the public of the dangers of munitions and duds left at various Russian army training areas.
One of the biggest--187,500 acres or about 290 square miles--is at Königsbrück, 30 miles north of Dresden. The site was not only a Wehrmacht maneuver area before the Russians took it over in 1945 but even Saxony's King August the Strong used it for military exercises in the 18th century. It is now designated to become a nature and recreation reserve.
A team of 12 demolitionists began working there in 1992. Their first task, according to Maik Exner, the team chief, is to clear the roads so that fire fighters can get in without danger if there are brush and forest fires. Of the 40 miles of roads, only eight had been cleared after five years work.
"There are places where we get 10 readings per square yard of metal in the ground, and we have to dig up every piece," says Exner. "Some days we find so much that we move forward only two or three yards. Despite all the warning signs and publicity, more and more people are coming in here: kids, mushroom-hunters, militaria collectors, and even neo-Nazis who play war games. Worst of all, shrubs and plants are growing back, which makes searching even more difficult and dangerous."
How long will it take before those 290 square miles at Königsbrück are clear of Germany's awesome legacy?
"I know that I'll be finished in 2030 because that's when I retire," says Exner "But it'll be at least the year 2200 before this place is really safe.
"The job I'm doing really makes me think about human beings because we've found nearly everything they've invented to kill each other," he adds and then jokes grimly. "But at least guys like me don't have to worry about unemployment. I think we'll never be out of work."
Contributing editor John Dornberg writes from Munich.
~Henric Edwards
Det står om en "incident" i München i början.
Germany's Deadly Legacy From World War II and the Cold War
By John Dornberg
These brief news items come from local papers around Germany:
Oranienburg--10,000 people in a radius of one kilometer were evacuated from their homes while police experts defused a dud 500-pound American bomb dropped in World War II. Munich--1,500 residents had to leave their homes, schools were closed, traffic on the A-96 autobahn was diverted, and service of the S-5 subway interrupted for nine hours while ordnance men worked to neutralize a 500-pound British bomb that had failed to explode when dropped 53 years ago. Magdeburg--Construction workers chanced on an undetonated 2,000-pound American "blockbuster," and 12,000 people in the neighborhood were evacuated from their apartments and offices during the disarming. Frankfurt-am-Main--Discovery and defusing of a World War II bomb in the city forest halted traffic on the A-3 autobahn and required closing the north runway of Frankfurt International Airport for hours.
Routine local stories? They might have been, had they not appeared just a few days apart one week last year, and were it not for the fact that you can read such briefs in some paper in Germany every day of the year. They are barely noticed accounts of the explosive legacy of World War II. That legacy makes big news only when it does explode- -like the 500-pound American bomb at a construction site in East Berlin on September 15, 1994. It killed three building workers, seriously injured 17 passersby, demolished dozens of cars parked nearby, ripped open an adjacent five-story house from the roof down to the second floor, and blew out windows for blocks around.
Although World War II ended more than 50 years ago, it is far from over in Germany because of still deadly bombs and other ammunition left in the ground. "And it will go on for at least another 50 years," says Martin Volk, a Berlin police captain who headed the city's ordnance disposal team from 1974 until his retirement in 1995.
In Berlin some 2,000 bombs, each with 150 to 2,000 pounds of explosives, have been found since 1945. At least 15,000 are believed to be still slumbering in the ground, especially in the city's eastern boroughs where during the years of Communist rule the search for them was not as systematic as in West Berlin. The longer they remain buried, the more dangerous they become. As the years pass, even when not jarred accidentally by a construction crew, they can explode.
The problem of finding and defusing this lethal and destructive heritage is nationwide--wherever there were wartime air raids or ground battles between German and Allied forces.
Add to that the legacy of the Cold War: 1.3 million acres, or nearly 2,000 square miles, of territory in East Germany used by the Soviet and East German armies as troop training areas until 1990. All of them are highly contaminated with undetonated and abandoned munitions: artillery shells, anti-tank rockets, grenades, mines, and bullets. They pose constant danger to people who enter these areas, especially juveniles, who are known to pick up and play with or collect them.
The facts and figures of the effort to rid Germany of this legacy are mindboggling.
Nationwide today nearly 3,000 people work permanently at searching for and detonating dud bombs and ammunition. On average they retrieve some 20,000 tons of the stuff each year. They are unsung heroes, for their profession is fraught with danger: a job done in the shadow of death every day. "My family never knew whether I'd come home from work in a coffin," says Josef Hermann, head of Frankfurt-am-Main's police ordnance team for two decades, who celebrated his 90th birthday last fall. "I was lucky." In the state of Northrhine-Westphalia alone 85 ordnance disposal men were killed and 140 injured between 1949, when records were first kept, and 1984. Thanks to new technologies of searching for and disarming the bombs that are found, the job has gotten a little safer. Since 1990 there have been "only" five fatalities.
One was Rainer Thüne, the veteran ordnance disposal chief of Hesse, and another his assistant. They were killed in Wetzlar in October 1990 when trying to disarm a 500-pound bomb found in a streambed. While attaching a hydraulic rig to yank out its fuse, one of them slipped in the mud, and the bomb exploded.
In addition to the police teams there are some 20 commercial ordnance disposal firms involved in the task, each with about 100 highly trained experts. The financial costs are astronomical. The 1996 and 1997 federal and state budgets for Kampfmittelbeseitigung, as ordnance disposal is called, total almost DM 1 billion, or about $625 million. Experts estimate that $5.6 billion ought to have been allocated. In Saxony-Anhalt, one of the most contaminated states, the cleanup bill in 1996 came to DM 10.3 million, or about $6.4 million. "That enabled us to do just the absolute minimum, such as prophylactic searches at planned building sites," says Diethard Posorski, chief of the service in Magdeburg. "It does not include the costs at the former troop training grounds on the Colbitz-Letzlingen Heath."
That 88-square-mile area, 50 miles north of Magdeburg, staked out in 1935 by the German Wehrmacht (Armed Forces), then used after World War II until 1994 by the Soviet Army, is one of six sites in East Germany that now belongs to the Bonn Defense Ministry. The area is destined to become a maneuver ground for laser-simulated war games by the Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces). For more than 60 years it was shot up like a moonscape. To clean it up and make it safe for use will cost an estimated $1 billion in federal government funds. Work began in March 1995 and by early 1997 a team of nearly 500 soldiers and civilian workers, using 115 computer-programmed metal detectors, had managed to clear only 2.5 square miles and spent $20 million to do it. "At this rate it will take another 35 years to make it safe for training exercises," says Lt. Col. Werner Böhm, the base commandant.
Whereas the cleanup in West Germany and West Berlin has been going on for decades, in the former East German Democratic Republic (GDR) it only started systematically after Germany's reunification in 1990.
The effort in both Germanys was fairly haphazard until 1985 when Allied aerial reconnaissance photos became available. These are the tens of thousands of pictures taken by American and British planes after each air raid on German towns during the war. Experts who study them, using microscopes and stereoscopic planimeters, can distinguish between large ground craters, made by bombs that actually exploded, and smaller holes that were caused by duds. These account for about 10 to 20 percent of the bombs dropped. Comparing the photos with detailed street maps enables them to pinpoint where an unexploded bomb might still be ticking away under the surface.
The photos have been a great help to West German disposal teams for over a decade, but because of Cold War restraints they were not available to the services in the former GDR until reunification. The Brandenburg service began working with them in 1992, but it was only in 1995 that the teams in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt had access to sets covering major cities such as Leipzig, Chemnitz, Dresden, Magdeburg, Halle, and Dessau. Even West Berlin's ordnance team did not have photos of East Berlin until after reunification. "Until then," says Martin Volk, "the British and American suppliers carefully blanked out everything on the other side of the Berlin Wall, so as not to get into a diplomatic squabble with the GDR."
"The pictures reveal a lot," says Gerd Lehmann, head of the Brandenburg service in Potsdam. "We recently examined one of a 22-acre plot, now the site of four schools, two kindergartens, and playgrounds, on the banks of the Havel River in Oranienburg. It was taken after one of the big American air raids in the spring of 1945. It showed 23 suspect craters. We probed those places with detectors and test-drilling. At 10 of them we found bombs lying about seven to eight meters deep, one of them only a yard from the wall of a building. We don't know yet how we are going to defuse them and get them out safely."
But the search with aerial reconnaissance photos is also expensive. In the 1970s the U.S. and British defense departments sold most of their pictures to commercial archives and libraries, which now market them to the German ordnance disposal services for DM 85, or about $53, per shot. "We had to pay $690,000 for 13,000 of them," says Lehmann indignantly. "But there may be another 100,000 photos for Oranienburg and other cities in Brandenburg."
No other state has as great and dangerous a World War II and Cold War legacy as this one. Some 700 square miles--about 6.5 percent of its surface area--are a ticking time bomb. From January 1992 until December 1996 only a fraction of this vast area, about 16,000 acres or around 60 square miles, was searched and cleared, despite an annual budget of around $40 million and a team of 600 government and commercial ordnance workers on the job. Last year they recovered 700,000 pieces of dud ammunition, 15,000 bombs of all sizes, 1,500 rockets, 2,400 land mines, and 4,300 hand grenades.
"But that is just scratching the surface," says Lehmann. "It may take a generation, and it is a race against time, for the longer these bombs and shells remain in the ground the greater the danger of explosions and tragedies. In fact, it is almost a miracle that we have had so few accidents."
A 16-year-old boy was killed in 1992 tinkering with a German anti-aircraft shell he had found in the woods; an ordnance man was fatally injured in 1993 while defusing a grenade; a 500-pound American bomb blew up by itself in 1994 in the town of Lehnitz, causing extensive damage but no injuries.
Brandenburg's legacy is three-fold.
One is the vast area east and south of Berlin and Potsdam to the Oder River where the fiercest fighting of the war took place in April 1945. Tens of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers were killed there, and millions of pieces of ammunition, all still highly volatile, contaminate fields and forests. Before any new construction can take place, properties have to be searched with metal detectors and cleared. Lehmann estimates that may take 50 to 80, possibly even 100 years.
Another problem is at the 250,000 acres of former military bases and maneuver areas, some dating back to the Prussian kings and German kaisers, that are now state property. Dud ammunition of all kinds, potentially as lethal as the day it was fired, slumbers just under the surface. For the first time in decades these areas are to be put to peaceful civilian use. But nothing can be built until they have been decontaminated. Meanwhile, despite fences, warning signs, and pamphlets distributed to schools, hikers and mushroom-hunters go into them and risk their lives.
To make those sites safe will cost about $1.7 billion, which, given present budget allocations, would take 90 years.
Brandenburg's worst and most urgent legacy is in cities north of Berlin, especially in and around Oranienburg, sites of key wartime German arms factories, including the Heinkel aircraft plant and the Auer Works, which was making parts for the V-1 rockets. In seven big raids from March 6 to April 20, 1945 the U.S. Army Air Force dropped 23,675 bombs there.
About half of those bombs had delayed-action fuses, and 10 to 20 percent failed to detonate. They are still in the ground--four to eight yards down. "It's a nightmare," says Lehmann, "especially the delayed-action bombs."
These were set to detonate after the "all clear" for an air raid had been sounded and people had come out of their shelters. Their fuses contain glass vials of acetone, supposed to break on impact. The acetone impregnates a celluloid restraining disk that holds back the spring-pressured firing pin, thus softening or dissolving the celluloid and releasing the pin. The amount of acetone and thickness of the celluloid determine the delay--up to 44 hours after being dropped. In each bomb that failed to explode during the war something went wrong with that sequence. Usually the vial did not break or the celluloid did not soften enough to release the firing pin. But the brass fuses were all sealed, making them as dangerous today as 50 years ago--even more so, because the celluloid has gotten brittle. The slightest motion could activate them. Worse, as the celluloid ages, the pressure on the firing pin may be great enough to set the bomb off by itself--as happened at Lehnitz near Oranienburg in May 1994.
Duds with impact fuses are also becoming more dangerous with time. Their firing mechanisms contain lead acid and copper that, with aging, turns into copper acid, a material so volatile that it will react and cause an explosion if you just stroke the bomb with a feather.
"There are at least 2,000 of these things in Oranienburg alone," says Lehmann. "Buildings have been put up over many of them. Even with recon photos it'll take decades to locate them."
In Berlin itself the cleanup effort is complicated by the fact that it was haphazard in the city's eastern boroughs before reunification and that many areas of West Berlin, especially in the Tiergarten district and around the Reichstag, have to be searched again before work can start on the federal government buildings that are planned there. The city-state's Building and Housing Department has jurisdiction, commercial ordnance disposal companies do the searching, and the police is responsible for defusing and detonating the bombs and munitions that are found.
Since that September 1994 construction site tragedy in East Berlin's Friedrichshain borough, the housing department has been flooded with requests from builders and property owners for analyses of sites based on aerial reconnaissance photos and for prophylactic searches-- on average 400 a month. The yearly budget of about $5.6 million is not enough and as a result there are backlogs and delays before construction can start. The search teams are also at work on open, city-owned public spaces in eastern and northeastern Berlin where new housing projects are planned, at Schönefeld Airport, which is scheduled for expansion, and on and around Pariser Platz and Brandenburg Gate.
And then there is the Tiergarten district. Nowhere else was fighting and shelling heavier in the last weeks of the war than in this area. Because it is in West Berlin, much of it had been combed and sifted by ordnance disposal teams over the years. But not all. Not, for example, around Bellevue Palace, now the official residence of Federal President Roman Herzog; not on Platz der Republik and the Spreebogen, huge grass-covered areas where the new Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellery) and Bundestag (Parliament) office buildings will be standing by the end of the decade.
To prepare for groundbreaking of the presidential office building, now under construction adjacent to Bellevue Palace, a team of 11 men from an ordnance disposal company spent 15 months from January 1995 to March 1996 searching and probing the 21-acre park, inch by inch, using highly sensitive computerized metal detectors and gingerly digging up every piece. On lucky days they managed to advance 200 yards, usually it was just a few feet. They came up with 4.5 tons of live ammunition.
"We found everything from infantry rounds and hand grenades to anti- tank rockets and artillery shells," says Andreas Mauersberger, the team chief.
Similar searches started early this year on the sites for the new chancellery and parliamentary office buildings.
The sheer magnitude and longevity of Germany's explosive legacy is expressed in the person of Diethard Posorski, 52, chief of Saxony- Anhalt's State Ordnance Disposal Service in Magdeburg. He is the second generation of his family in this dangerous work. His father Eberhard Posorski directed ordnance disposal at Münster in West Germany for 35 years.
Posorski, who "grew up in a house full of fuses and deactivated ammunition," learned the profession from his father and worked for nearly 30 years for ordnance search and demolition companies in West Germany before his appointment in Saxony-Anhalt in 1994. His own son, now 24, may follow in his footsteps to make up the third generation.
"What's new for me here," he says, "is all the unfamiliar Soviet and Russian ammunition that we didn't have in the West, and the sheer scope and diversity of the problem.
"You name it and we've got it," he adds. "Battlefields with American, British, German, and Soviet ammo; areas in the Eastern Harz Mountains where Wehrmacht soldiers dumped and hid vast amounts of munitions before surrendering; huge troop training areas such as the Glücksburger Heath and Arneburg, which were used by the Wehrmacht before the Russians took them over in 1945; cities that were carpet- bombed, like Magdeburg, Dessau, and Halle, as well as smaller towns, such as Leuna, Bitterfeld, Wolfen, and Merseburg, that were the heart of the wartime chemical industries. Saxony-Anhalt is so contaminated with duds of all kinds that it is practically impossible to zone and fence off the most dangerous areas in order to keep people from entering them. To protect everyone we'd have to build a fence around the whole state and evacuate the entire populace."
Last year Posorski and his team of 51 government and 140 commercial ordnance disposal workers recovered more than 4,000 tons of bombs and munitions at 551 different sites and decontaminated about 3,000 acres.
"But that is barely a dent," he muses. "The best we can do is keep warning people of the dangers around them. Maybe the generation or two after me will say they can see the end to this task. But not even they will reach it."
Warning the public of the dangers preoccupies Alfred Remler of Saxony's Ordnance Disposal Service in Dresden almost as much as the actual search for and demolition of the explosive legacy. That, as Remler puts it, is "because we made more systematic and prophylactic searches in Saxony than elsewhere in the GDR." He should know. He has been at it since 1957 and has all the old records and maps of where probes were made and duds found. Saxony's service today has 26 government employees and contracts with five private companies that employ, on average, 200 people. Last year they salvaged munitions at 1,602 spots around the state. The take consisted of 600 bombs, 189, 000 pieces of infantry ammo, 58,000 artillery and tank shells, and 190,000 other explosives, including land mines as deadly as when they were planted half a century ago.
The urban areas with the greatest density of dud bombs are Leipzig, Chemnitz, and Zwickau. Ironically, almost none have been found in Dresden, despite the terrible February 13-14, 1945 air raid that destroyed the city. The macabre explanation is that 80 percent of the bombs dropped that night were incendiaries. The fire storm they caused created so much heat that the duds among the 20 percent general-purpose bombs also exploded.
One of Remler's chief tasks is warning the public of the dangers of munitions and duds left at various Russian army training areas.
One of the biggest--187,500 acres or about 290 square miles--is at Königsbrück, 30 miles north of Dresden. The site was not only a Wehrmacht maneuver area before the Russians took it over in 1945 but even Saxony's King August the Strong used it for military exercises in the 18th century. It is now designated to become a nature and recreation reserve.
A team of 12 demolitionists began working there in 1992. Their first task, according to Maik Exner, the team chief, is to clear the roads so that fire fighters can get in without danger if there are brush and forest fires. Of the 40 miles of roads, only eight had been cleared after five years work.
"There are places where we get 10 readings per square yard of metal in the ground, and we have to dig up every piece," says Exner. "Some days we find so much that we move forward only two or three yards. Despite all the warning signs and publicity, more and more people are coming in here: kids, mushroom-hunters, militaria collectors, and even neo-Nazis who play war games. Worst of all, shrubs and plants are growing back, which makes searching even more difficult and dangerous."
How long will it take before those 290 square miles at Königsbrück are clear of Germany's awesome legacy?
"I know that I'll be finished in 2030 because that's when I retire," says Exner "But it'll be at least the year 2200 before this place is really safe.
"The job I'm doing really makes me think about human beings because we've found nearly everything they've invented to kill each other," he adds and then jokes grimly. "But at least guys like me don't have to worry about unemployment. I think we'll never be out of work."
Contributing editor John Dornberg writes from Munich.
~Henric Edwards
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Mandolinmannen
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 34
- Blev medlem: 28 mars 2002, 20:01
Joachim von Bahr
När jag låg till sjöss i början av sextio talet hade vi en hökare som hette Joachim von Bahr, jag hoppas att det inte är du. För han var grym och slog en på armarna så fort han fick tillfälle,och det spelade ingen roll om man hade kniv i handen, han slog ändå. Han berättade en hel del om vad han hade gjort,, men vad jag har hört så är han borta nu...