SHARE
COPY LINK

WWII

Hundreds evacuated as high-risk Baltic Sea WWII bomb defused

Hundreds of residents were evacuated on Monday as Polish military divers began a delicate operation to defuse a massive World War II bomb in a channel near the Baltic Sea.

Hundreds evacuated as high-risk Baltic Sea WWII bomb defused
The Baltic Sea by Swinemünde, photographed in August. Photo: DPA

The five-tonne device — nicknamed “Tallboy” and also known as an “earthquake bomb” — was dropped by the Royal Air Force in an attack on a Nazi warship in 1945.

It was discovered last year during dredging close to the port city of
Swinoujscie — formerly Swinemünde, a part of Germany — in the far northwest of Poland.

“It's a world first. Nobody has ever defused a Tallboy that is so well preserved and underwater,” Grzegorz Lewandowski, spokesman for the Polish Navy's 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla based in Swinoujscie, told AFP.

World War II bombs are still frequently discovered, particularly in east but also west Germany. 

The German capital was hit especially hard.

Of the nearly 400 air raids that took place in Berlin between 1940 and 1945, American and British bombers combined dropped around 70,000 tonnes of bombs on the city.

READ ALSO: What you need to know about WWII bomb disposals in Germany

'Dambusters' raid

During World War II the area was home to one of the German navy's most important Baltic bases and the area was subjected to massive bombardments, said historian Piotr Laskowski, the author of a book on the Royal Air Force raid on Germany's Lutzow cruiser in April 1945.

The ship's cannons were being used to hold back the advance of the Red Army
in the dying days of the war.

On April 16th, 1945, the RAF sent 18 Lancaster bombers from the 617th Squadron — known as the “Dambusters”.

The bombers released 12 Tallboys on the Lutzow but one failed to explode and one of the planes crashed on the island of Karsibor, killing all seven crew on board.

The ship survived the raid but was eventually seized by the Soviet army and used for target practice after the war. It sank in the Baltic in September 1947.

The Navy announced on its Facebook page that the operation had begun and
that it was planned to take until Friday, depending on the weather.

Michal Jodloski, the head of the diving team, told reporters later on Monday that the operation was “going according to plan” but work was slow as only one diver at a time was being allowed to work on the bomb because of the risks.

A total of around 750 local residents are being evacuated from an area of 2.5 kilometres around the bomb and the operation is expected to last up to five days.

But some residents told AFP they would be staying put.

Halina Paszkowska said the “main danger” for her was the risk of catching Covid-19 in a sports hall where residents are being given shelter during the operation.

Paszkowska said she also had to look after her 88-year-old mother, adding: “I've lived here 50 years and there have been other bombs, but this is the first time there's an evacuation! Before, we just had to stay indoors.”

'A very delicate job'

Maritime traffic on the navigation channel and surrounding waterways will be suspended in an area of 16 kilometres around the bomb disposal operation.

“The first two or three days will be preparations. Our bomb disposal divers will scrape around the bomb, which is embedded in the bottom of the channel at a depth of 12 metres. Only its nose is sticking out,” Lewandowski said.

“It's a very delicate job… The tiniest vibration could detonate the bomb,” he said, pointing out that the option of a controlled explosion has been ruled out for fear of destroying a bridge some 500 metres away.

The navy divers will instead use a technique known as deflagration to burn the explosive charge without causing a detonation, using a remotely controlled device to pierce through the shell to begin combustion.

The bomb is six metres long and has 2.4 tonnes of explosives – equivalent to around 3.6 tons of TNT.

Tallboys were designed to explode underground next to a target, triggering shock waves that would cause destruction.

 

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

WWII

How a new Berlin museum is carefully exploring Germany’s wartime suffering

A new museum dedicated to the long-silenced trauma of German civilians forced to flee eastern Europe at the end of World War II opens next week after decades of wrenching debate.

How a new Berlin museum is carefully exploring Germany's wartime suffering
An exhibit at the Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation. Photo: dpa | Bernd von Jutrczenka

Perhaps reflecting what its founders call their delicate “balancing act”, the new institution in Berlin carries the unwieldy name of Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation.

Some 14 million Germans fled or were ejected from what is today’s Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Baltic states, Romania, Slovakia and the former Yugoslavia between 1944 and 1950.

Escaping the Russian army and later forced out by occupying powers and local authorities, an estimated 600,000 Germans lost their lives on the trek.

Those who fled included people who had settled in Nazi-occupied territories as well as ethnic Germans who had lived for centuries as minorities.

Seventy-six years after the conflict’s end, director Gundula Bavendamm said Germany was finally ready to talk about their suffering, while still acknowledging the unparalleled guilt of the Nazis.

“We are not the only country that needed quite some time to face up to painful and difficult chapters of its own history,” she told reporters at a preview of the museum before it opens to the public on Wednesday.

“Sometimes it takes several generations, and the right political constellations.”

‘Universal’ experience

The 65-million-euro museum takes pains to place the Germans’ plight firmly in the context of Hitler’s expansionist, genocidal policies.

It is located between the museum at the former Gestapo headquarters and the ruins of Anhalter railway station from which Jews were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Just opposite is a planned Exile Museum devoted to those who fled Nazi Germany.

Access to the second-floor space spotlighting the Germans’ exodus can only be gained through a darkened room covering the Holocaust.

The first-floor exhibition looks at the “universal” refugee experience, covering mass displacements in countries such as Vietnam, Myanmar, Lebanon and India after the 1947 partition.

“Hyper-nationalism is one of the prime causes of war and forced migration – they almost always go together,” curator Jochen Krueger said.

A folding bicycle used by a Syrian asylum seeker crossing from Russia into Norway in the spring of 2016 resonates particularly in Germany, where more than 1.2 million people arrived at the height of that refugee influx.

Dropped stitch

An estimated one-third of Germans have family ties to the mass exodus at the war’s end and the museum presents their often poignant heirlooms.

A haunting cross stitch with a rhyme about kitchen tidiness hangs unfinished, a dark thread still dangling from the cloth because the woman working on it suddenly had to run from advancing Soviet troops.

A girl’s leather pouch is marked with her address in Fraustadt, now the Polish town of Wschowa: Adolf Hitler Strasse 36, displayed in a case near a well-thumbed Hebrew dictionary.

READ MORE:

Keys from a villa in Koenigsberg — today’s Kaliningrad — that was fled in 1945 and from a house in Aleppo, Syria abandoned in 2015 symbolise the enduring hope of returning home one day.

“Everything you see displayed here is a miracle because it survived the journey,” Bavendamm said.

The around 12.5 million people who made it to what would become East and West Germany as well as Austria often faced discrimination and hostility.

Now decades on, the museum’s library offers assistance to families hoping to retrace their ancestors’ odyssey.

An audio guide provides context in English, Polish, Czech, Russian and Arabic in addition to German.

And a “Room of Stillness” allows people to sit and reflect on difficult memories.

‘Last remaining gap’

A shroud of silence and shame long covered the suffering experienced by German civilians during and after the war.

Groups representing the expelled in the post-war period sometimes had links to the far right, and occasionally agitated against government efforts to atone for Nazi aggression.

Only after the Cold War and a long process of international reconciliation did incidents such as the devastating Allied firebombing of Dresden or the 1945 sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff ship carrying German refugees gain an airing.

The far right’s claiming of such events to underline German victimhood also complicates efforts to find the right tone to broach the subject.

News magazine Der Spiegel called the museum “a statement to the left and the right wing, to Germany and abroad. It is meant to close a last remaining gap in German remembrance”.

The seed for the project was planted in 1999 by Erika Steinbach, an archconservative lawmaker who had voted against the recognition of Germany’s postwar border with Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

An infamous Polish magazine cover depicted Steinbach as a Nazi dominatrix forcing Germany’s chancellor at the time, Gerhard Schroeder, to do her bidding.

However Schroeder’s successor Angela Merkel recognised the necessity of the museum and in 2008 agreed with broad mainstream support to establish a centre dedicated to a spirit of international reconciliation.

Historians from across Europe and Jewish community representatives were enlisted as advisors.

“Understanding loss is at the heart of the project – loss of property and ownership in general but also loss of social status, of community, of loved ones,” Bavendamm said.

“But it’s also about how people manage to process loss and perhaps, after a time, begin to look toward a better future.”

SEE ALSO: ‘We just didn’t realise’ – What it was like growing up in post-Nazi Dachau

SHOW COMMENTS