Bulldozers stand on a building plot on the corner of Krautstraße and Lange Straße at the site where a war bomb was found.
© dpa
A 100-kilogram aerial bomb from the Second World War was found during construction work in Berlin-Friedrichshain on Tuesday. It is to be defused on Thursday.
For this purpose, a cordon will be set up around the site where the bomb was found in Krautstraße near the Ostbahnhof from 8 a.m. in the morning.
All people who live or work there must leave the area, as the police announced on Wednesday. No S-Bahn trains are expected to run between Ostbahnhof and Alexanderplatz from 11 am to 2 pm. Regional trains, ICEs and ICs will be diverted. If everything goes according to plan, the bomb could be defused around 2 p.m. and the closures ended.
The diameter of the exclusion zone around the site where the bomb was found on a construction site on the corner of Lange Straße and Krautstraße is 350 metres, according to the police. According to information from the "B.Z.", more than 3,000 people are said to be affected. Nearby are residential buildings, a school, a day-care centre, the railway line through the city centre and the large Holzmarktstraße. The Ostbahnhof is about 500 metres away. It is not in the exclusion zone and will not be cleared. Only when homes and workplaces are empty do the explosives experts from the police's State Criminal Investigation Office begin their work.
When the work on the bomb and the defusing, during which the detonator is removed or destroyed, begins, rail traffic in the area is to be stopped. There will be no replacement bus service for the S-Bahn. Passengers are to bypass the area and can switch to the Ringbahn, underground trains or buses. Regional trains will be diverted via Gesundbrunnen, and many stations in the city centre will not be served. Passengers should check the internet for information. Long-distance traffic will be diverted via the main station.
A bomb weighing 100 kilograms tends to be one of the smaller aerial bombs. More common are 250-kilo and 500-kilo bombs, for which the exclusion zone for defusing is even larger. Defused bombs are taken to the explosion site in Grunewald and detonated there in a controlled manner.
According to the police, Berlin's explosives experts are called out on average about two to three times a day to find ammunition or bombs. In 2021 alone, 52 tonnes of war munitions were found. Almost 80 years after the end of the war, the Berlin Senate estimates that there are still more than 4,500 unexploded bombs in the city's soil. According to historians, Americans, British and Russians dropped more than 45,000 tonnes of explosives on the city during the Second World War.