13,000 German residents were asked to evacuate when a World War II- era bomb was found in Germany’s Dusseldorf. According to the German news outlet, Deutsche Welle(DW) an operation was initiated by the police and the bomb squad over 7th and 8th August to detect a one-tonne shell. As per the officials quoted in DW’s report, the bomb was unearthed by the squad during working hours near the city zoo. Reports of bombs buried in Germany, from the two World Wars make rounds time to time.
Authorities of Dusseldorf ordered residents, anywhere within a 500-metre radius of the bomb’s location to evacuate their houses and leave the premises. People left with their pets before roads within the evacuation zone got temporarily sealed for the disposal operation.
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A similar drill ensued in 2017, when the discovery of a 1.4-tonne bomb in Frankfurt forced an evacuation of 65,000 people. A Second Word War bomb had even exploded at a construction site near Munich station, in December 2021. The explosion left four people injured.
According to the Smithsonian Magazine, between 1940 and 1945, The US and British Air Forces had dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe, half of which got planted in Germany. Hence, by the time Nazi Germany had surrendered, a dozen of cities had already been reduced to ash owing to a crippled industrial infrastructure of the country.
