Joshua Hammer: Germany's Bomb Problem
[Joshua Hammer is a writer based in Berlin.]
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.
An average of about 2,000 tons of undetonated ordnance are recovered every year in Germany, reminders of a war that concluded before most Germans alive today were born....
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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.
An average of about 2,000 tons of undetonated ordnance are recovered every year in Germany, reminders of a war that concluded before most Germans alive today were born....