Just after I write that I’ve never heard of one going off, one does. As detailed in this Berliner Morgenport article (auf Deutsch, sorry), a WWII 5-hundredweight heavy aerial bomb went off Monday morning at a construction site on the A3 Frankfurt-Würzburg Autobahn near Aschaffenburg. It detonated when it was hit by a machine that removes the top foot of asphalt from the roadway. The machine operator was killed. Four other construction workers and a passing driver were injured. The bomb threw debris up to 500 meters away and left a 2.5 meter deep by 8 meter wide crater. Two nearby houses, seven passing cars, and two tractor trailers were damaged in the explosion. The Autobahn was closed all morning, causing a 20 km backup in both directions.
A little closer to home, the article mentions that a 70 kg aerial bomb was found and purposely detonated last Saturday near the A12 Berlin-Frankfurt/Oder Autobahn near Fürstenwald and yesterday morning a warning was put out of another bomb in the same area.
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Isn’t that scary? That one totally freaked me out. The evactuated about 22,000 people in Hannover the other day to remove a bomb that was found at a construction site and everything went fine, but to have one actually blow up right beside the Autobahn is soooo awful.
It is really scary! I can’t imagine – one minute you’re driving along, singing along to the radio or whatever, the next minute a bomb goes off right in front of you. And it’s not wartime or anything, just old dud bombs lying around.