World War II-Era Russian Bomb Defused in Berlin
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JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images(BERLIN) — Reminders of World War II still crop up in Germany nearly seven decades after the country surrendered to allied forces.
The latest memory to jolt Germans occurred when an unexploded aerial bomb dropped by the Russians during the war was discovered this week just a couple of yards from a train track in Berlin.
This was no cherry bomb. German bomb disposal experts said the explosive weighed about 220 pounds and could have blown a hole 10-feet wide by 10-feet deep.
Naturally, no one wanted to be around when the bomb was being defused on Wednesday, so about 850 people were told to evacuate the area while the experts got to work. It took about half an hour to safely complete the task.
The unwanted reminder of the war was actually stumbled upon by a bomb disposal team checking out a construction site by the train station. This is a regular practice since untold numbers of bombs were dropped on Berlin and the rest of Germany during the war.
Last August, a 550-pound bomb had to be detonated in Munich because of an unstable fuse. The force of the blast, despite precautions taken, managed to damage some nearby structures.
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