“Go on, see if you can break it,” says bomb disposal technician Peter Bodes, sharing out shards of a thin plastic disc manufactured at a munitions factory somewhere in wartime Britain. The brittle material snaps easily and a piece falls inaudibly to the carpeted floor of the conference room. It’s a greyish day in March 2018 at the Hamburg office for unexploded ordnance, the Kampfmittelräumdienst, located at the rear of a fire station on the city’s southern periphery.

Bodes has just plucked the pieces of decaying celluloid wafer from what, at first sight, looks like a cross section of an over-engineered pipe connector. On closer inspection, a small glass ampoule – reminiscent of a spirit level – is embedded in the milled brass; the acetone inside it has been sealed away for almost 80 years. This vial made its way from a munitions factory to an airfield and into a bomb bay, up into the air, over the North Sea, and all the way back down to earth – intact.



The bombs haven't lost any of their potency. The timescale for TNT to be broken down chemically is measured in millennia Peter Bodes

It should have broken, discharging its corrosive contents to eat away at the celluloid disc until it cracked, releasing a striker to detonate several hundred pounds of high explosive. It is the key element in a No 47 Mk1 side pocket pistol, a chemical time-delay device which, when it worked, allowed the RAF to make the bombs explode around half an hour after landing. Emerging from air raid shelters once the all-clear was sounded, German civilians would be taken by surprise and morale shattered. The fact this vial failed to shatter saved lives at the time – and endangers lives today.

During the second world war, the British and US air forces dropped around 1.5m tonnes of high explosives on the Third Reich. Hamburg, within easy reach of East Anglian airfields and with a hugely important harbour, bore the brunt of the bombardment. In summer 1943, Operation Gomorrah saw 9,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on the city, causing one of the first ever manmade firestorms and killing more than 42,000 people. The RAF reported at the time that 22,580 tonnes of ordnance had been released over Hamburg during the war by comparison, the Luftwaffe delivered around 74,000 tonnes over the whole of the United Kingdom.

‘Allied bombs were notoriously unreliable’ … a 1,000kg bomb found in Hamburg’s harbour, January 2017. Photograph: Carsten Koall/EPA

Around 10% of bombs dropped by the Germans are thought to have failed, and barely a month goes by without an unexploded bomb being found somewhere in Britain. A find in Docklands earlier this year closed London City airport; last summer, two bombs were found in the Bristol Channel near Hinkley Point nuclear power plant.

“As a rule of thumb, though, if German ordnance hit the ground, it exploded,” says period munitions expert Stephen Taylor, “while Allied bombs were notoriously unreliable, with a failure rate generally estimated at 15% or even 20%, especially if they hit soft soil and had pistols rather than fuses.”

That means that, after the war, there was anything up to 300,000 tonnes of unexploded aerial ordnance on the former territory of the Third Reich. And despite efforts to recover it during the conflict – often using prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates or forced labourers as expendable disposal squads – much of it remains unaccounted for. Prof Wolfgang Spyra, Germany’s leading research authority on the subject, estimates that there are around 3,000 live bombs still buried in Hamburg alone. In Berlin, the city’s biggest railway station, government ministries and a hospital were evacuated on Friday after the discovery of an unexploded second world war bomb.

An RAF Lancaster dropping bombs over Duisburg, Germany, October 1944. Photograph: Manchester Daily Express/SSPL via Getty Images

If it seems hard to imagine that so many devices packed with explosives falling from a great height failed to explode, a visit to Hamburg’s bomb disposal squad doesn’t make it any easier: after Bodes has put away the demonstration detonators, Ronald Weiler, head of underwater bomb disposal, leads the way down to the sheds in which examples of recovered munitions are kept. “Just look at that sharp, conical nose,” says Weiler, patting an eight-foot high RAF high-capacity Blockbuster as thick as a tree trunk: “Hard to believe it didn’t explode, isn’t it?” The Hamburg squad found it back in the early 1990s, four or five yards below the surface of the nearby wetlands.

Boosted by false assumptions about explosives and ignorance of historical facts, the dangers posed by unexploded ordinance are frequently underestimated. “Contrary to what many people seem to think,” explains Bodes, “the explosives in the bombs haven’t lost any of their potency. The timescale for TNT to be broken down chemically is measured in millennia. Since the end of the war, there have been around 100 spontaneous detonations of undiscovered time-delay devices, so ‘letting sleeping dogs lie’ is not a sound principle.”

In the immediate postwar years, huge amounts of rubble were simply buried in the race to rebuild Germany’s ruined cities; there was neither the time nor money to painstakingly search for live needles in the proverbial haystack. When accidents started happening in the 1950s, bomb disposal units were set up, yet by the early 2000s, they looked like expensive relics of an age long past – especially from the point of view of public accounts committees. “When a disposal went wrong in Salzburg in 2003, people in Hamburg were saying things like, ‘But that’s Austria, not Germany!’ Forgetting the fact that it was part of the Reich and that the same ordnance was used everywhere.”



A manmade firestorm … Hamburg in September 1943, a few months after Operation Gomorrah. Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

“Recent events have changed that perspective again, though.” Bodes reels off a series of finds closer to home that led to large-scale evacuations. “The real turning point was the 2010 explosion in Göttingen,” he adds. Three technicians were killed when a bomb detonated during the attempt to disarm it; Bodes was called as an expert witness to the public inquiry in Hamburg’s neighbouring state, Lower Saxony. “Since then, Hamburg has been investing in new equipment. Our politicians now fully understand the importance of what we are doing.” The city’s bomb disposal unit pioneered new techniques such as using reverse-mounted water-jet cutters to remove detonators. It has also just taken delivery of a new launch better able to withstand the strong currents in the river Elbe; many at the Hamburg Kampfmittelräumdienst are former navy divers – not immaterial in a city state whose surface area is 8.1% water and whose docks were prime targets.

Spyra considers Bodes’ Hamburg unit to be one of the best in Germany. “They’ve moved from responding to chance finds to a more systematic approach. What is more, they have the expertise and self-confidence to make safety considerations paramount; they don’t let themselves get pressured by businesses and officials with other concerns. Finally, they take professional development seriously and offer training for young bomb disposal officers.”

A 250kg device is destroyed by remote detonation in central Munich, 2012. Photograph: Marc Müller/EPA

That isn’t the case everywhere in Germany, and the stark regional differences are a direct result of the war itself. On every level, the Federal Republic was set up to be decentralised: never again should a dictator be able to lay his hands on one single seat of power. As such, postwar West Germany was composed of 10 federal states (plus Berlin), or Länder, with a remit for everything from education and broadcasting through to the policing, secret services and indeed bomb disposal (the German armed forces could only be deployed within the Republic in times of national emergency). On reunification, the former East Germany became part of this structure, too, adding five states.

What might not have been found 20 years ago might well be detected today. No area can ever be considered 100% free Prof Wolfang ​Spyra

So, while in most European countries unexploded ordnance is a matter for specialised military units, each of Germany’s Länder deals with it individually. The Berlin bomb disposal unit is part of the city state’s forensic science department, while in the city state of Bremen, it’s part of the police force. In Hamburg, it is organised as a part of the fire service. Germany’s most populous state, North-Rhine Westphalia – the target of 48% of all air attacks primarily because of the industrial importance of the Rhine and Ruhr basin – delegates down to its regional administrations. Thuringia and Bavaria have outsourced to the private sector.

Importantly, it is the federal state which remains legally responsible for dealing with unexploded ordnance, even when it delegates to contractors. So when a US bomb with a chemical time-delay device was found in Munich in 2012 and the contractor – unfamiliar with the type of detonator – refused to attempt to disarm it, Bavaria ended up having to send for a bomb disposal technician from the small town of Oranienburg. A botched controlled explosion then caused millions of euros of damage and led to a protracted lawsuit brought by the insurance company Axa against city authorities, which it accused of insufficient contractor scrutiny.

Police evacuate 60,000 people in Frankfurt in September 2017 due to an unexploded bomb. Photograph: Alexander Scheuber/Getty Images

Incidents such as this bring regional differences into sharp relief. Little Oranienburg – bombed disproportionately due to its armaments factories – is the only local authority in Germany to proactively search for unexploded ordnance, and its state, Brandenburg, takes the threat so seriously that it is agitating for laws to standardise and fund bomb disposal in Germany. Many see central government as shirking its responsibilities, and not just because it has made no effort to share the financial burden of detection and disposal with the states. Currently, the government pays for damages caused by German munitions, but landowners are responsible for insuring themselves against the consequences of the (far more frequent) discovery of Allied bombs.

And so the geographical lottery continues. While Hamburg has acquired copies of all available wartime reconnaissance photos and compiled a master heat-map of potential bombsites, the Bavarian interior ministry warns builders that it can only offer access to one third of comparable material for its state. And to the exasperation of experts, the city of Munich refers to surveys conducted in the late 1990s and declares areas such as the Theresienwiese (a vast open square on which Munich’s Oktoberfest is staged every year) to be clear of unexploded ordnance.

“Technology advances, though,” says Spyra, “and what might not have been found 20 years ago might well be detected today. No area can ever be considered ‘100% free’.” Bodes, too, says that “there can never be 100% security, even though that is what – in contrast to previous generations – many people today expect. Truly freeing Hamburg of unexploded ordnance would mean evacuating and excavating the entire city.”

The detonator from a 1,000kg bomb in Hamburg, January 2017. Photograph: Carsten Koall/EPA

Nevertheless, nothing is being left to chance. Whether on green or brownfield sites, whether owned by individuals, property developers or its own authorities, the state’s regulations require anyone applying for construction permits to have an ordnance survey carried out by vetted contractors. If suspect objects are encountered during works, Bodes’ department must be alerted. They remain on call round-the-clock: “As soon as unexploded ordnance is uncovered, the conditions in which it has spent the last eight decades change: soil pressure is removed, light and heat may start to have an effect, and often the device gets moved – whether by accident or in flagrant contradiction of regulations.”

As if to prove a point, beepers start to sound in the conference room. In the port, an unexploded device has surfaced in an industrial rinsing tank – and been pulled out of the water. There are sighs all round. Not infrequently, companies either delay reporting finds or move them out of the way so as to not lose working time. That makes life more difficult – and more dangerous – for the Kampfmittelräumdienst.

“We might be bomb disposal technicians, but we’re not suicidal,” says Bodes, passing round another object which once made its way from the UK to Hamburg: a signed copy of The Lonely War: A Story of Bomb Disposal in WWII by One Who Was There, signed by the author, Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wakeling, on 4 June 1998. Bodes met the veteran at Nato exercises in northern Germany that year, but apart from that has had little to do with his counterparts in the UK armed forces.

“There’s a lively exchange between European countries,” he says, pointing to memorabilia from the Swedish Göta Engineer Regiment behind him on the windowsill, “but the British Isles seem to be that bit further away than other countries.” Below one of the many plaques commemorating his unit’s success, however, a “Keep calm and carry on” fridge magnet has been fixed to the wall.

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