[CPEO-MEF] MUNITIONS, GLOBAL: "Germany's Bomb Problem"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Germany's Bomb Problem
Outside Berlin, a building boom hits a snag: unexploded ordnance.


By JOSHUA HAMMER
The Atlantic
April 2011
Deep in a pine forest in the German state of Brandenburg, 30 miles  
south of Berlin, a team of explosives experts gathers around a large  
rusted cylinder half-buried in the earth. "You're looking at a French- 
made, 220-millimeter artillery shell," says Ralf Kirschnick, a German  
army veteran who served in Bosnia, Croatia, and Somalia in the 1990s.  
"The fuse is highly unstable," he says calmly. "The slightest  
movement could set it off."

Though Kirschnick retired from the military a decade ago, he hasn't  
lost his appetite for conflict zones. These days, the rangy, balding  
45-year-old works for the Kampfmittelbeseitigungsdienst (KMBD), or  
War Ordnance Disposal Service, a division of the Brandenburg state  
government focused on digging up and deactivating unexploded bombs,  
mines, and other World War II–era munitions. This morning, Kirschnick  
and his team are passing metal detectors over the soft ground outside  
Wünsdorf, an important site in one of the war's last major battles.  
In late April 1945, the Red Army attacked remnants of the Wehrmacht's  
Ninth Army and SS battalions, slaughtering tens of thousands of  
troops with tank, artillery, and small-arms fire before smashing  
through the German lines. Armaments abandoned in this part of the  
woods lay undisturbed until last autumn, when the local forestry  
department called in the KMBD to sweep the area for a new timber- 
harvesting project. Standing over a pit dug by his team, Kirschnick  
pointed out the morning's finds: grenades, a rusted carbine with a  
gleaming brass-jacketed bullet still in the chamber, a tiny sidearm.  
The artillery shell, he says, must have been captured from the French  
army during the First World War and deployed during this desperate  
last stand near Berlin.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/germanys-bomb- 
problem/8406/

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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