Amazingly, Europe is still cleaning up from the damage caused by the worst war in human history:
Deep in the Pomeranian forest, hidden among the groves of scraggly pine and birch, the World War II bomb squad is hard at work.
At 11:15 on an overcast winter morning, Alfred Buchholz carefully guides his spade into the sandy loam on the forest floor, aiming for the exact spot where a co-worker’s squawking magnetometer has signaled the presence of metal. He strikes something hard and bends down to grab an object the size of a softball, encrusted with corrosion and dirt.
It’s a piece of an artillery shell, circa 1945. Buchholz shakes off the loose dirt and plunks it into a black plastic bucket, already half-filled with remnants of war. He stands back up and waits a few minutes for the metal detector, passing back and forth over the soil, to beep again. He repeats the routine — with practiced caution — hundreds of times a day.
The flatlands of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a sparsely populated state that covers northeastern Germany, are still littered with thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance from the Nazi era. There are cluster bombs, mortar shells, hand grenades, rockets. Most were manufactured and abandoned by the Third Reich, but there are also plenty of aging but still potent explosives left here and in neighboring states by Soviet, U.S. and British forces.
For more than 60 years, German bomb squads have been cleaning up. They comb through the woods and dredge the ponds, sift through construction sites and back yards. There’s no end in sight.
“In my lifetime, I will never see all the munitions cleaned up in this area of Germany,” said Sebastian Dosdall, the boss of this bomb-disposal crew, clad in a pea-green jacket, work pants and metal-shanked boots. “It’s hard to clear everything, everywhere.”
And one wonders if they ever will.
