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 in the 36 B- 17 flight fortress 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 slowly took off. They marched eastward and gradually increased their altitude until they gathered in a dense box formation on the nose of more than 300 heavy bombers and crossed the strait coast north of Amsterdam at a height of nearly 5 miles. In the unpressurized aluminum fuselage of each plane, the temperature dropped to MINUS 40 degrees, and the air was so thin that it was impossible 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 hates to sell his position to the defenders below. But the German Air Force knelt down and surrendered, and no enemy plane engaged with the 493rd bomber. Related reading bombing

A prison camp in Montenegro is now a luxury resort around 2:40 pm. 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 filled with black smoke from anti-aircraft fire. The bomber 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 Third Reich, such as railways, arsenals and oil refineries, had been paralyzed, and dozens of cities in Germany were reduced to ashes and 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 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 after 70 years, 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. However, 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 years 10 months, 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, the largest evacuation operation since World War II, 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, German hurt locker is one of the busiest teams in the world. Since 2000, 65,438+065,438+0 bomb technicians have been killed in Germany, three of whom died in an explosion when a popular flea market in G? ttingen tried to dismantle a 65,438+0,000-pound bomb in 2065,438+00.

On a recent winter morning, Horst Reinhardt, the director of KMBD in Brandenburg, told me that when he started to dismantle the bomb 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 and fell to the southwest, losing 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 Shulunwei. But now it is occupied by anti-aircraft guns and a narrow wooden single-storey barracks built by a pair of national defense forces. Here, the bomb finally found that the earth was disappearing from the west wind of two barracks and falling into the yellow sand at the speed of 150 miles per hour. It tilted downward at an inclined angle, and suddenly tilted upward before the violent navigation tore the stabilizer fin from the tail, until its kinetic energy was finally exhausted, and the bomb and M 125 fuze stopped working: the nose was up, but it was still deep underground.

By four o'clock, the sky in Oranburg had quieted down. The city center is burning, and the first delayed explosion has begun: the Auergesellschaft factory is about to be destroyed, and the railway station is entangled in debris. But the bomb by the canal was not disturbed. In the midwinter sunshine, the shadow on Linetz Treacy Island gradually lengthened, and acetone slowly dripped from the broken glass container in 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. This town is a huge crater and abandoned factory, but next to Lehnitzstrasse, not far from the canal, she found an empty wooden house. She moved in 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 buried American 500-pound bomb and a delay fuse 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 during the demolition, he never felt afraid. " 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 rubble during the war, or simply buried in cement, 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 western counterparts 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 photographs 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, revealing the direction and success of the attack. These photos provide clues that the bomb landed but never detonated-for example, a small round hole on the rugged crater line that has never changed.

Almost at the same time, the geographer Hans George Kars is using aerial photography to map the trees in Wü rzburg, southern Germany. He was engaged in a municipal project and came across another batch of photos of ACIU. 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 the teacher at a price of several pence per pound. Kars felt 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 America called 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 indicated the exact location of each photo. These photos are often 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 by the Air Force History Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, supplemented by photos and attack plots, Carl was able to establish a chronology of everything that happened on a certain land from 1939 to 1945. Kars used a stereo to look at the photos, so that the images could be displayed stereoscopically, and he could see where the bomb fell and exploded, or maybe not. From these data, he can accumulate an Ergebniskarte-a "result map" for customers from international consortia to homeowners, and the 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 on the outskirts of Wü rzburg. Image analysis is now the core part of 16 German state bomb processing. 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 cul-de-sac in Oranniburg, between Lenitstras and the Canal. On another monitor, he used the geographical 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 them until he found the photos he needed. A week after the March 15 raid, photos 413 and 41Kloc-0/4 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 used Photoshop to paint one picture cyan and the other magenta, and combined them into a picture. I put on a pair of cardboard stereo glasses, and the scenery rose to me: the house in the shape of an inverted matchbox without a roof was a piece of soil bitten from the bank of Renizlasa; A huge circular crater in the center of Baum Schulenweg.

However, we can't see the 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 a tree or a house," he said, pointing to a quadrangle cast by the autumn and winter villa a few hundred yards away from the canal. "You can't see that every unexploded bomb has an antenna." But there is enough evidence to mark a rock in Niska, McBee with ominous red ink.

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1993, Paul Dietrich bought the house at the end of the dead end of Olanburg. He was born on the same day as the German Democratic Republic,1949101October 7th. For a time, this coincidence seemed auspicious. When/kloc-0 was 0/0 years old, he and a dozen children who spent his birthday with him were taken to have tea with President william peake. He gave 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 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 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. It's near Fort Olanni.

Dietrich's mother has lived here since the 1960s. Dietrich met an old woman who was trying to sell a small house by the canal, an 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 completely 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 other people in orenburg, he knew that the city was bombed in the war, but there were many places in Germany. Parts of Alaninburg have been evacuated so frequently that it is easy to believe that there will not be many bombs left there. The buried bomb apparently detonated itself several times. Just around the corner of Dietrich's house, a bomb exploded under the sidewalk while a man was walking his dog. But no one was hurt, not even the dog and its walker. Most people just don't think about it.

However, Brandenburg knew that Olanburg had raised a unique question. From 1996 to 2007, local governments in Germany spent 45 million euros on bomb disposal, more than the sum of any other towns in Germany, and more than one third of the state's unexploded ordnance expenditure 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, Spila released a 250-page report, which not only revealed a large number of time bombs dropped on the city on March 5, 1945, but also revealed an unusually high proportion of unexploded bombs. This is the function of local geology and the landing angle of some bombs: hundreds of bombs first got stuck in the sand, and then had to stop against their noses, destroying their chemical fuses. According to Spyra's calculation, 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 began 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 municipal 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 city officials came to his front door. "I thought they were coming to celebrate my birthday," he said when I saw him recently. 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, ready to draw groundwater from the surrounding area. In the afternoon, when Dietrich's friends came to celebrate his birthday, 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 human, 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.

1 19 June 65438+ 10/9 When their boss came, the contractors were drinking coffee as usual. He said, "Paul, you must take your dog and leave here at once." . "We must set up a restricted area now, 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 must be detonated. He and Loki were walking in the forest a mile away when they heard the explosion.

Two hours later, the alarm sounded and 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 in 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 Brandenburg, Reinhard "KDSP" * * * * "KDSP" slowly swept a showcase with his hands 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 in front of dozens of metal cylinders full of boxes, some with small propellers on them and some cut off to show mec.