Rainer reports that yesterday, as he was leaving work, he noticed that Clayallee was closed off, the police were out in full riot gear, and there were 10-12 ambulances with flashing lights waiting. Now, since Rainer’s work is located about three blocks from the U.S. Consulate on Clayallee, he was certain that there had been a terrorist attack. He listened closely to the radio during his drive home. Once home, he checked the news. Finally, an hour and a half after getting home, RBB teletext had something on the mayhem. An unexploded 500kg WWII bomb was found in the area.
Now you would think that more than 50 years after WWII, there wouldn’t be a lot of these left, but you would be wrong. Last week, another was found in the Neuköln area of Berlin. Last month, downtown Potsdam had to evacuate twice while two separate bombs were deactivated and removed, and during the World Cup renovations of Berlin’s Olympia Stadium, a large bomb was found in the stadium.
See, when they made bombing runs, they dropped a lot of bombs in a row. Sometimes (actually, it seems that a lot of the time), one didn’t go off. The dud might roll into the crater of the previous bomb, then the next bomb would explode nearby, covering the dud with rubble, so that it often went unnoticed, and sometimes someone came along and rebuilt something on top of this rubble-covered bomb.
So why don’t we all just agree to stop dropping bombs, planting land mines, and in general trying to kill each other. Life would be much better and future allies won’t have to deal with having backyards full of unexploded ordinance. 
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happens about once or twice a year here in leipzig, too.
We usually have one a year here too. The last was a couple months ago and was right near my co-worker’s flat.
I think it would be frightening to have one found near you or someone you cared about. Has anyone ever heard of one going off?
Was just thinking… wouldn’t it have been ironic if the US Consulate was destroyed by a bomb the US dropped on Berlin 50+ years ago? Hmmm…
holy smokes! This is just another one of the things that I (probably) wouldn’t have had to worry about back in the states.
I’ve reported on U.S. Army cleaning old army bases, but its all off-limits to the public — its not in the middle of the freakin’ street!
This kind of thing always freaks me out. There haven’t been any directly in our town, but Hannover seems to be full of them since it was totally bombed to pieces. Last week they did remove one in a neighbouring town, about a 5 minute drive from here, but everything went smoothly – I haven’t heard of one exploding yet, but they do have to take precautions just to make sure everyone’s safe.
Some years ago, one completely obliterated a building on Frankfurter Allee. I think, by some miracle, only three people were killed, since nearly everyone in the house was at work. I went by there a few days later, by chance, and it was like some hand had just scooped a hole in the neighborhood.
Set off, of course, by some guy in a tractor digging another hole.
Finding one on Clayallee is indeed odd, because I tought the Americans were supposed to have done pretty good bomb-sweeping as part of the post-war cleanup.
Apparently the Clayallee bomb was a German one, which had been captured by the Soviet army and lobbed back at the Germans during the Battle of Berlin (according to the Berliner Zeitung).
Interesting article, thanks for the link MountPenguin!
To summarize it for my non-German-speaking readers, it seems Rainer did not have all the facts straight. The Neuköln bomb was also found and deactivated yesterday, and was a 250kg British bomb. The Clayallee/Zehlendorf bomb was also 250kg and necessitated the evacuation of 400 people out of the area. It was a German-made bomb with a Soviet detonator. When the Germans dropped it and the detonator failed, the Soviets replaced it and the bomb was “returned to sender”.