Germany still has thousands of tons of unexploded bombs left over from World War II.

1945 March 15 morning1kloc-0/not long ago, the first bomber of 36 B- 17 flying fortresses of the 493rd bombing group of the Eighth Air Force of the United States bombed the cement runway of Little Walden Airport in Essex, England, and took off slowly. They marched eastward and gradually increased their altitude until they gathered in a dense box formation on the nose of more than 1300 heavy bombers and crossed the strait coast north of Amsterdam at an altitude of nearly 5 miles. In the pressureless aluminum fuselage of each plane, the temperature dropped to MINUS 40 degrees, and the air was too thin to breathe. They flew to Germany, passing through Hanover and magdeburg. The exhaust of the four engines of each B- 17 condenses into a white track, and each crew member is unwilling to sell his position to the defenders below. However, the German Air Force knelt down and surrendered, and no enemy plane engaged with the 493rd bomber. Related reading bombing

At about 2: 40 pm, a prison camp in Montenegro became a luxury resort. About 65,438+00 miles northwest of Berlin, the city of Olanburg appeared below them, shrouded in mist on the lazy bend of the Havel River, and the sky was full of black smoke from anti-aircraft fire. Bombardier sat on the pilot's nose and stared at the distant fog through his bomb sight. When his B- 17 approached the Odhaville Canal, he watched the hands of the automatic release device meet. Between 1940 and 1945, the American and British air forces dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs in Europe, half of which were dropped in Germany. By the time the Nazi government surrendered in May 1945, the industrial infrastructure of the railways, arsenals and refineries of the Third Reich had been paralyzed, and dozens of cities in Germany had become ashes and ashes, which were occupied by allied forces.

Reconstruction began almost immediately. However, as many as 10% of the bombs dropped by allied planes did not explode. When East Germany and West Germany rose from the ruins of the empire, thousands of tons of unexploded aerial bombs lay under them. In the east and west, the responsibility for dismantling these bombs and a large number of grenades, bullets, mortars and shells left over at the end of the war fell on the police bomb disposal technicians and firefighters Kampmittelbesitigungsdienst or KMBD.

This story is selected from the Smithsonian magazine 1- February issue.

Even today, 70 years later, Germany still finds more than 2,000 tons of unexploded ordnance every year. Before starting any construction project in Germany, it is necessary to prove that there are no unexploded munitions on the ground, from residential expansion to tracks laid by the National Railway Administration. Nevertheless, in May last year, about 20,000 people were cleared from an area in Cologne, and the authorities dismantled a ton of bombs found during construction. 20 1 13 10, another 20,000 people were evacuated from Dortmund. At the same time, experts dismantled a "blockbuster" weighing 4000 pounds, which may destroy most city blocks. 20 1 1 This is the largest evacuation operation since World War II, and 45,000 people were forced to leave their homes, because a drought showed that there were similar devices on the Rhine River bed in the center of koblenz. Although this country has been peaceful for three generations, hurt locker is one of the busiest teams in the world. Since 2000, 65,438 bomb technicians have been killed in Germany, three of whom died in an explosion when trying to dismantle a 65,438+000-pound bomb in a popular flea market in G? ttingen in 2065,438+00.

On a recent winter morning, Horst Reinhardt, director of KMBD in Brandenburg, told me that when he started to dismantle bombs at 1986, he never believed that he would do it again 30 years later. But his men found that at about 3 pm that day, a B- 17 plane of the Eighth Air Force dropped a bomb weighing 1000 pounds at an altitude of 20,000 feet from the railway station. It quickly reached the limit speed, fell to the southwest and lost its yard and chemical plant. It falls on the canal and two bridges connecting the city of Oranniburg and the suburb of Lenitz, and next to it is a low-lying land composed of banks and railway lines on Lenitz Street. Before the war, it was a quiet place by the water, leading to four villas in the Woods, parallel to a canal in Baum Shulenvi. But now it is occupied by anti-aircraft guns and a pair of narrow wooden single-storey barracks built by the national defense forces. Here, the bomb finally found that the earth was disappearing from the west wind of two barracks and falling into the sand at the speed of 150 miles per hour. It descends at an inclined angle, and suddenly inclines upward before the violent navigation tears the stabilizer fin from the tail, until its kinetic energy is finally exhausted, and the bomb and M 125 fuze stop working: the nose is up, but it is still deep underground.

By four o'clock, the sky in Oranburg was already very quiet. The city center is burning, and the first delayed explosion has begun: the Auergesellschaft factory will be destroyed soon, and the railway station will be entangled in the wreckage. But the bomb by the canal was not disturbed. In the deep winter sunshine, the shadow on Linitz Treacy Island gradually lengthened, and acetone slowly dripped from the broken glass container of the bomb fuse. Under the action of gravity, it drips harmlessly down from the celluloid disc that should have been weakened.

Less than two months later, the Nazi leader surrendered. Up to 10 square mile of Berlin was razed to the ground. A few months after Valentine's Day in May, a woman with her little son was blown out of the house and found the way to Oranniburg, where she had a boyfriend. The town is a huge crater and an abandoned factory, but next to Lehnitzstrasse, not far from the canal, she found an empty wooden house. She lives with her boyfriend and son,

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Abandoned ammunition and unexploded bombs almost killed the first victims after the war with the last shot. 1In June, 945, a batch of German anti-tank weapons exploded in Bremen, killing 35 people and injuring 50 others. Three months later, in Hamburg, a 500-pound American bomb with a delay fuse buried in the ground killed four technicians who were disarming. Clearing unexploded ordnance has become the task of the German National Democratic Party. This is a dangerous close work. Remove the fuse with a wrench and hammer. "You need a clear head. Horst Reinhard told me. He said that he never felt afraid during the demolition process. " If you are afraid, you can't do it. For us, this is a normal job. Just like a baker bakes bread, we defuse the bomb.

In the decades after the war, bombs, mines, grenades and shells killed dozens of Kuomintang technicians and hundreds of civilians. Thousands of unexploded allied bombs were dug up and defused. But many people were buried in the ruins during the war, or just buried in concrete and then forgotten. In the upsurge of post-war reconstruction, no one kept consistent information about where unexploded bombs were safely dismantled. Officials think it is impossible to find them systematically. When Reinhardt started to cooperate with KMBD in East Germany in 1986, he and his counterparts in the west usually found the same bombs: one at a time, usually during construction.

However, the Hamburg government recently brokered an agreement to allow the West German states to obtain 5.5 million aerial photos from the wartime archives translated and decrypted by the Allied Central Committee in Kiel, England. During the period from 1940 to 1945, ACIU pilots performed thousands of reconnaissance missions. In every attack by the Allied bombers, millions of stereo photo were photographed, which revealed the direction and success of the attack. These photos provide clues about where the bomb landed but never detonated-for example, a small round hole on the rugged crater line that has never changed.

At about the same time, geographer Hans George Kars was using aerial photography to draw a tree map of Wü rzburg in southern Germany, engaged in a municipal project, and stumbled upon another batch of ACIU images. They are stored in the cellar of a teacher in Mainz. They were ordered by an enterprising American intelligence officer in Germany from the archives of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He had hoped to sell them privately to the German government for his own benefit. When he failed, he sold 60,000 pounds to his teacher for a few pence each. Kars sensed the business opportunity and snapped up a German mark.

Photo analyst Timothy Fadek/Redux Pictures When he reduced his purchase of photos copied by the German government from Britain, he realized that he had photos that the British didn't have. He was sure there must be more. Kars set up a company somewhere in the United States, namely Luftbilddatenbank. With the help of British and American archivists, he brought hundreds of cans of aerial reconnaissance films that had not been inspected for decades to the public. Most importantly, Carl also found a map drawn by the pilot who shot the film-"Dispatch Map", which shows the exact location of each photo. These photos are usually archived elsewhere. Without these photos, these images would be meaningless.

Using local history and police records, contemporary eyewitness testimony and detailed records of bombing missions conducted at the Air Force History Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama to supplement photos and attack plots, Carl was able to establish a chronology of everything that happened on a certain land from 1939 to 1945. Kars uses a stereo to check the photos, so that the images can be displayed in three dimensions, and you can see where the bombs landed and exploded, or maybe not. From these data, he can build an Ergebniskarte- a "result map" for clients from international consortia to homeowners, and high-risk areas are marked with red lines. "He was a pioneer," said Allen Williams, director of the National Aerial Photography Collection, which now houses some photos once kept in Kiel.

Carl is now nearly 68 years old, semi-retired, and employs more than 20 employees. His office occupies the first three floors of his big house in the suburbs of Wü rzburg. Image analysis is now the core part of bomb processing in Germany 16 states. Kars provided many photos they used, including all the photos used by KMBD in Reinhard and Brandenburg.

One day, in the office of the German Federal Bank, Johannes Kroker, 37, is a senior photo translator of Kars. One of the two giant computer monitors on his desk shows the Google Earth satellite image of the area north of Berlin. He is near an L-shaped dead end in Oranniburg, between Lenin Street and the Canal. On another monitor, he used the geographic location data of the address to bring up a list of more than 200 aerial photos taken by allied reconnaissance pilots in this area, and scrolled through these photos until he found the one he needed. One week after the raid on March 15, photos 413 and 414 were taken at 27,000 feet above Orangenburg, only a few seconds apart. They showed the scene near the canal in bright monochrome details. The curve of the Lenitstraz bridge and the bare branches on Baumschulenweg drew subtle shadows on the water surface and the pale ground in the distance. Then Crocker painted one photo cyan and the other red with Photoshop, and combined them into a photo. I put on a pair of cardboard stereo glasses, and the scenery in front of me came into view: the house in the shape of an inverted matchbox without a roof was a piece of soil bitten out from the bank of the Leinitzsa River; A huge circular crater in the center of Baum Schulenweg.

However, we don't see any signs of 65,438+0,000 dormant bombs hidden in the nearby ruins. A woman will soon find a home for herself and her family after taking photos. Cloquel explained that even nude images like this can't reveal everything about the scenery below. "Maybe you have the shadow of trees or houses," he said, pointing to a courtyard house dropped by a villa a few hundred yards away from the canal in autumn and winter. "You can't see that every unexploded bomb has an antenna." But there is enough evidence to mark a McKibby Niska rock with ominous red ink.

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1993, Paul Dietrich bought a house at the end of a dead end in orenburg. He was born on the same day as the German Democratic Republic,1949101October 7th. For a time, this coincidence seemed auspicious. When he was 10 years old, he and a dozen children who celebrated his birthday with him were taken to have tea with President william peake. He handed every passbook to Mark's 15 savings account. At the age of 20, he and others became guests at the opening ceremony of Berlin TV Tower, the tallest building in Germany. In the next 20 years, the Republic of China treated Dietrich well. He drives buses and subways for the Berlin Transport Bureau. He rented an apartment in the city and then became a taxi driver. He increased the deposit given to him by the president. On an abandoned land in the west of Falcken, in the countryside outside the city, he built a summer bungalow.

But in 1989, Dietrich was 40 years old, the Berlin Wall fell, and Ostermark became worthless overnight. Three years later, the legal owner of the land in western Falcken came back from the west to recover the land. Near fort olanni.

Dietrich's mother has lived here since the 1960s. Dietrich met an old lady who was trying to sell a small house by the canal, which was the old Wehrmacht barracks where she had lived since the war. It needs a lot of work, but it's right by the water. Dietrich sold his car and mobile home to buy it and started whenever he could. His girlfriend and their only son Willie joined him, and slowly, the house was built. By 2005, it had been painted, waterproof and insulated, with a garage, a new bathroom and a brick fireplace. Dietrich lived there full-time from May to 65438+February, and plans to move here permanently after retirement.

Like everyone else in orenburg, he knew that the city was bombed during the war, but there were many places in Germany. Parts of Enburg, arani have been evacuated frequently, and it is easy to believe that there will not be many bombs left there. Buried bombs apparently blew themselves up many times. Near Dietrich's house, a bomb exploded under the sidewalk, when a man was walking his dog. But no one was hurt, not even the dog and its dog walker. Most people just don't think about it.

However, Brandenburg knew that Olanburg had raised a unique question. From 1996 to 2007, the local government in Germany spent 45 million euros on bomb disposal, which exceeded the sum of any other towns in Germany and more than one third of the unexploded ordnance expenditure in this state during this period. In 2006, the Ministry of Interior entrusted Wolfgang Spyra of Brandenburg University of Technology to determine how many unexploded bombs might remain in the city and where they might be. Two years later, Spyra published a 250-page report, which not only revealed a large number of time bombs 1945 dropped in the city on March 5, but also revealed an unusually high proportion of unexploded bombs. This is the function of local geology and the angle at which some bombs hit the ground: hundreds of bombs first got stuck in the sand and then had to stop against their noses, destroying their chemical fuses. Spyra calculates that there are still 326 bombs or 57 tons of high explosives hidden under the streets and yards of the city.

The celluloid disc in the bomb timing device becomes fragile over time and is very sensitive to vibration and impact. So the bomb started to explode automatically. In 20 10, the deaths of three KMBD technicians in G? ttingen were caused by the decay of this type of fuse. They have dug out the bomb, but they didn't touch it when it exploded.

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In 2003 10, Paul Dietrich read in the newspaper that the city of Olanburg would start looking for bombs near him. He had to fill out some forms. In July, the city contractor came. They drilled 38 holes in his yard, each more than 30 feet deep, and each hole had a magnetometer. It took two weeks. A month later, they drilled more holes in the back of the house. They stared at something, but said nothing.

20 131at 9: 00 am on October 7, when Dietrich was 64 years old, a delegation of municipal government officials came to his house. When I saw him recently, he said, "I thought they were coming to celebrate my birthday." But that's not it. "Here are some things," the official told him. "We must catch it." They said it was a suspicious place. Nobody uses the word "bomb".

They marked the place next to the house with an orange traffic cone and prepared to draw groundwater from the surrounding area. When Dietrich's friends came to celebrate his birthday that afternoon, they took photos of the cone. Throughout June 5438+ 10, the contractor's water pump operated 24 hours a day. They start digging at seven o'clock every morning and dig until eight o'clock in the evening. Every morning they drink coffee in Dietrich's carport. "Paul," they said, "that's not a problem."

It took them another month to find the bomb, which was under 12 feet: 1000 pounds, as big as a man, rusted and the tail stabilizer was gone. They blocked the hole with steel plates and chained the bomb so that it could not move. Every night, Dietrich stays at home with his German shepherd Loki. They slept only a few feet from the hole. "I thought everything would be fine," he said.

When their boss came, the contractors drank coffee as usual. He said, "Paul, you must take your dog and leave here at once." . "We must now set up a restricted area, from here to the street. “

Dietrich took his TV and his dog and drove to his girlfriend's home in Lenitz. On the radio, he heard the train to the canal stop in the city. The Kuomintang is defusing a bomb. The streets around the house are blocked. Two days later, on Saturday morning, he heard the news that the Kuomintang Ministry of National Defense said that the bomb could not be dismantled and had to be detonated. He and Loki were walking in the forest a mile away when they heard the explosion.

Two hours later, when the alarm sounded, Dietrich, a friend and his son drove to his residence. He can hardly speak. His house once had a crater more than 60 feet wide, which was filled with water and charred fragments. Straw used by the Kuomintang to contain bomb fragments was scattered on the roof of his hut and the neighbor's yard. The wreckage of Dietrich's front porch leans dangerously on the edge of the crater. The mayor, the TV crew and Horst Reinhard of the Kuomintang were all there. Dietrich wiped away his tears. He retired less than a year ago,

Paul Dietrich spent more than ten years decorating his house. One morning, at KMBD headquarters in Zosen, Brandenburg, Reinhard "KDSP" * * * * * "KDSP" slowly swept a showcase in his humble linoleum floor office. "These are all American fuses. These are Russian and these are British. " These are German goods, "he said, stopping on dozens of metal cylinders filled with boxes, some of which had small propellers, and some of which were cut off to show mec.