Oranienburg holds the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous town in Germany. That is because the heaviest concentration of unexploded World War II ordinance in all of Germany is regularly discovered in Oranienburg, a town on the banks of the River Havel, just 22 miles north of Berlin. Seventy years after World War II has ended, German bomb disposal teams continue to find and deactivate unexploded war-era bombs. It is estimated that another 350 to 400 bombs are still buried under the city.
Why so many unexploded bombs in Oranienburg?
Between 1940 and 1945, U.S. and British forces dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe, half of them on Germany. Oranienburg dates back to the 12th century. Hitler chose the town as a hub for his armaments industry. He located an arms depot, an aircraft plant, a railway junction for trains to the eastern front, and a research facility for his atomic bomb program in Oranienburg. To destroy these sites, the Allies dropped about 22,000 incendiary and explosive bombs over the city, 10,000 bombs between 1944 and1945 alone.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/05/germany-unexploded-bombs/484799/
It has been suggested that another reason for so many bombs being dropped on the city was to keep the Nazi research out of the hands of the rapidly advancing Russian troops. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/seventy-years-world-war-two-thousands-tons-unexploded-bombs-germany-180957680/?no-ist,
Seventy years after World War II, more than 2,000 tons of unexploded munitions are uncovered on German soil every year. As many as 10 percent of the bombs failed to explode, which means that tons of unexploded ordnance still remain beneath German cities. Since 1991, bomb disposal teams have found and defused 159 unexploded bombs in Oranienburg alone.
One of the reasons that unexploded World War II ordinance is so dangerous is that thousands of the bombs were equipped with chemical time-delay fuses rather than percussion fuses. While the latter are designed to explode on impact, time-delay fuses are intended to ignite up to 24 hours following impact. The impact is supposed to set in motion a chain reaction, which eventually leads to the decomposition of a critical part of the bomb and subsequent explosion. But in many bombs decomposition did not take place. The ordinance remained buried in the sandy soil, and over the years, these critical components have become so brittle that the risk of instantaneous explosion has become very real.
Who defuses the unexploded bombs?
Thousands of tons of unexploded bombs are uncovered every year in all parts of Germany. German bomb-disposal squads are among the busiest in the world. The Kampfmittelbeseitigungsdienst – KMBD – (bomb disposal team), made up of firefighters and police, is responsible for defusing these bombs. Before any construction project begins in Germany the ground must first be certified as cleared of unexploded ordnance. Oranienburg is the only city in Germany, which pursues a systematic search for unexploded ordinance based on postwar aerial photos and magnetic or radar underground measurements for metal.
It is impossible to predict how many years it will take to clear Germany of unexploded ordnance. So far, the bomb disposal teams have dealt primarily with open spaces. They still will have to systematically look beneath houses and factories. It is suspected, however, that a hundred years from now unexploded bombs will still be resting in the soil of Germany.
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Walled-In is my story of growing up in Berlin during the Cold War. Juxtaposing the events that engulfed Berlin during the Berlin Blockade, the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall and Kennedy’s Berlin visit with the struggle against my equally insurmountable parental walls, Walled-In is about freedom vs. conformity, conflict vs. harmony, domination vs. submission, loyalty vs. betrayal.
