N�rnberg, Mittelfranken, 2006-10-16 - 5:41 a.m.

I just read in ASSOCIATED PRESS :

Germany: 22,000 evacuated as WWII bombs defused

Some 22,000 people were evacuated from their homes in the central German city of Hanover on Sunday as experts disposed of three World War II bombs, police said.

The three bombs were dropped in an Allied bombing raid in October 1943, and were located with the help of aerial photos.

Two of them were buried under open land, while the third was close to a house.
..
Unexploded bombs from Allied bombardments are still found regularly in Germany.

I also recently saw an report about those rest bombs hidden in the ground � in most cases found on construction sites while building. � Even 60 years after WWII there are still 1000s of tons of bombs in the ground & so Germany like Angola is one of the most hidden explosives pested country worldwide.

They find about 1500 tons of buried bombs every year, a 3rd of that amount in Brandenburg (area Berlin)

Since 1944 about 1500 chief blasters died by trying to deactive those bombs & it�s estimated that it needs about 150 years on still they found & deactivated them all.

Some months after I had moved into the flat I�m still living in � I was on my way home from work � but police patrol stopped me. They had roped off the are round my house, because in the neighbourhood they were building a new house & just had found a bomb there. I had to wait some hours with slight fear that the bomb may explode & destroy my new home � before I could return home.

& last week in the same quarter of Nuremberg town I live, they found another bomb near a school. � Maybe the pupils enjoyed it to get evacuated for some hours.

I was born in Schwabach, a small town of about 25.000 inhabitants � 16 km away from Nuremberg. � As children we often played in the surrounding woods. � & we liked to play to be Indians there � we had divided parts of the woods in �lands�, giving them names like �Hirschenland� (stag land) , �Biberland� (beaver lands), �Seenland� (land of lakes) �
& we gave the name Seenland, because it was full of little lakes � in fact little round craters with size about 10 to 20 meters, filled with water. � My father told us that these had origined by bombs thrown by the allies (mainly American bombers in this region) � who had either errantly missed the goal Nuremberg, or the goal Schwabach (which was of course in these raids totally without light at night) � or maybe they just dropped the rest of their bombs to lose weight, while flying back to their military bases. �
my old aunt, once an opera singer, who�s a bit extravagant & often mixes reality with fantasy once told me, that an uncle of my grandparents who had once emigrated to America (a lot of my relatives had emigrated there in the 20ies & 30ies) was the commander of that bomber escadrille, that should have bombed Schwabach & because his relatives lived in Schwabach, he gave the command to throw the bombs on the wrong place. � Later on I asked my father & other relatives of that root about it & he told me that what my aunt had told me, was absolute nonsense..

Anyway � we children often played & ventured in �Seenland� where all the bombs had exploded, totally unaware about the high danger of unexploded bombs & mines still there -