Children find war ammunition: work for bomb defusers

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Koblenz (dpa / lrs) - Three quarters of a century after the Second World War, many children in the Corona year 2020 brought more work to the bomb defusers in Rhineland-Palatinate.

"In the first lockdown in spring, the playgrounds were closed and many children dodged into the woods to play," says Marco Ofenstein from the ordnance clearance service (KMRD) Rhineland-Palatinate of the German press agency.

"They found infantry weapons from rifle ammunition to hand grenades."

Fortunately, “nothing went off.

I am not aware of any injuries to children. "

Nothing serious happened in their risky job to the ordnance clearance in the country in 2020.

The ongoing investigations by the Koblenz public prosecutor's office against eight bomb defusers due to alleged violations of the weapons law caused a stir.

Three of them were terminated, as the responsible supervisory and service directorate (ADD) in Trier announced.

According to the Koblenz public prosecutor's office, all eight accused have so far been silent on the allegations.

In raids in private rooms and official lockers, eleven firearms, cartridges, cartridges, old fuses and parts of explosive devices found were seized.

The forensic investigations of these objects to determine their origins are ongoing, according to the public prosecutor.

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For example, did ordnance clearance want to take home mementos from their dangerous job?

The ADD explains: "Mainly it was probably not criminal energy" - but rather supposed common law or thoughtlessness.

In order to prevent such a thing in the future, the "external help of an experienced former head of a KMRD was bought in and the operational processes were adapted and made more transparent".

This year, the KMRD received “significantly more” than 1,000 found reports from citizens - as many were there in the previous year, as Ofenstein reports.

"Everyone was at home in the first lockdown."

During gardening, excavation of earth for swimming pools and walks, suspicious objects were discovered by many citizens, of which, as always, several turned out to be harmless.

Again and again this year the ordnance clearance had to deal with larger duds from the Second World War, for example in Trier in May.

There they defused a British 250-kilogram aerial bomb.

2,700 residents within 500 meters of the site had to leave their homes for safety.

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The dud that the KMRD rendered harmless in Kirn in the Bad Kreuznach district in August also weighed 250 kilograms.

1900 residents had to leave their homes here.

Half of the explosive device was submerged, which made defusing it difficult.

The bomb was discovered by two paddlers in the summer low water in the Nahe.

For the first time in Rhineland-Palatinate, in October in Koblenz, the ordnance clearers provided very special protection against fragments.

Twelve overseas containers were stacked on top of each other in three rows, heavily loaded with water tanks and placed in a U-shape around an American 500-kilogram aerial bomb in order to have a barricade in the event of an accident.

The defusing was also successful here.

The advantage: instead of 15,000 residents within a safety radius of 1,000 meters, only 5,000 citizens had to leave their four walls within a radius of 500 meters.

The prison and the main train station in Koblenz did not need to be cleared either.

Ofenstein from the KMRD thinks it is quite possible to rebuild this type of container protection: "That is future-proof."

However, the respective municipality has to agree - after all, it may have more costs.

In Koblenz, however, this method was probably cheaper overall.

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Bombs are mainly discovered during construction work.

According to Ofenstein, seven and a half decades after the Second World War there are naturally very few references to ordnance from contemporary witnesses.

Sometimes someone also said that his father always said: "You mustn't plow this field, there could still be something from the war."

According to Ofenstein, the KMRD Rhineland-Palatinate only evaluates historical aerial photographs in exceptional cases.

The expert predicts: "Duds will be with us for many generations to come."

Experts estimate that a tenth of the bombs dropped on Germany did not explode during World War II.

According to the KMRD, the detonators sometimes iced up when dropped from a height of several thousand meters, so that the unlocking did not work.

Or the bombs with detonators only on the head and tail hit in such a way that they did not detonate.

The accuracy was bad anyway.

According to Ofenstein, the KMRD Rhineland-Palatinate currently has twelve male employees. Its main location is in Koblenz and the administrative headquarters in Trier. There is also a location in Worms. The KMRD has an interim storage facility for found ammunition near Koblenz. This is then usually brought to the state-owned company for the disposal of chemical warfare agents and old armaments (Geka) in Munster, Lower Saxony. The Geka announced that she was “unbeatable in this task. Chemical and conventional weapons lose their horror here in highly specialized methods of destruction. "