Sixty years after the end of World War II, Germany is still nowhere near completing the job of destroying thousands of tonnes of unexploded bombs, shells, mines and grenades.
In the eastern state of Brandenburg, encircling Berlin, a 4 000km chunk of land is contaminated with leftover bombs, shells and other potentially dangerous and ageing munitions.
Weapons experts estimate that at the present slow rate of progress it could take up to 150 years before such clearance work ends. Currently, the task of eliminating contaminated areas is threatened by government spending cuts.
”The image of a ticking time bomb is appropriate when describing the dangers posed by these decaying war relics,” says Guenter Fricke, an arms-disposal expert employed by the Dresden Sprengschule (a bomb-disposal establishment).
He teaches students the intricacies of more than 200 assorted wartime bombs, equipped with up to 120 different fuses, all of which were deployed by the Allied forces.
He warns his pupils to take particular care with munitions found on old German-Soviet battle-ground sites and ”exercise” areas.
”With Russian mines and bombs, every part is individual,” he says.
Large parts of eastern Germany — occupied for decades after the war by Soviet forces — are ”contaminated” by rotting munitions. In the western half of the country, officials had 40 years to search suspect territory systematically.
”In the east, it was another story,” says Hans-Juergen Weise, a munitions-disposal service expert from Brandenburg. This is borne out by official statistics relating to munitions finds.
Whereas in the southern state of Bavaria about 13 tonnes of war-time bombs and other ammunition was found, in north-eastern Mecklenburg last year the figure was more than 230 tonnes. In western Germany, Hesse was the only state that could count on more than 100 tonnes of military scrap being salvaged on a yearly basis.
Across the whole of the country, more than 1 500 tonnes of military scrap has on average been salvaged yearly, of which a third — between 400 and 500 tonnes — has been discovered year for year in Brandenburg state, which today still counts as one of the worst areas for military leftovers.
Cutback in funding
Despite the need for a more concerted effort when combating the lethal arsenal of ageing bombs and grenades, there has been a cutback in official funding.
Bomb-disposal expert Weise feels it is odd that the German federal states have to shoulder the major costs of such work.
”After all, it was not Hesse or Brandenburg which began the war against the Allies,” he says.
Joerg Schoenbohm, the Brandenburg state interior minister, who happens to be a former army officer, is bitterly critical of Minister of Finance Hans Eichel, saying the government has a duty to bear the full costs of World War II salvage work.
”The war consequences were a joint historical legacy, and it was a duty of the government to bear the cost of salvaging ageing war munitions, not individual federal states,” he says.
Eliminating World War II munitions is not the only problem facing hard-up state governments. The new eastern states have in the past decade additionally been left with the job of handling sizeable quantities of military scrap abandoned by the Soviet forces.
Its troops also left behind sizeable tracts of oil-drenched military exercise grounds when departing the country in the spring of 1994.
Clearing up the mess has proved highly expensive, particularly in Saxony-Anhalt, which is one of the poorest federal states. Even today, live World War II bombs are frequently unearthed in German cities.
”When there is a lot of building going on, you are more likely to find live bombs amid rubble,” says a Thueringia state interior ministry official.
In Bremen, a government official speaks of the danger posed by decaying munitions.
”Increasingly, we have to detonate bombs at the site where they are found. It’s too dangerous to transport them to safe areas,” he says.
For more than 50 years, sizeable amounts of munitions have been regularly detonated every Friday at the Kummersdof-Gut site in Brandenburg, where explosives expert Weise has been busy defusing and blowing up hazardous bomb finds for 35 years.
”When I was first employed, the view was that in 10 years’ time I would have to be seeking another job as there would be no further work for me to do.
”Today, after extensive evaluation of aerial bombing material, and assessment of the vast quantity of bombs, shells and grenades deployed in the storming of the German capital in 1945, it’s clear that for generations to come there will still remain a huge amount of work to be done.” — Sapa-DPA