10,000 people evacuated in Berlin after WWII bomb find

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About 10,000 people in Berlin were forced to leave their homes on Monday as bomb disposal units prepared to defuse an unexploded bomb from the World War Two era on the site of a former railway siding.

Bomb disposal experts were due to move into place once the area, a radius of 500 meters around the 250 kg bomb in the southern borough of Schoeneberg, had been evacuated, Berlin police said in a tweet.

Police also imposed temporary road, rail and metro closures.

Large parts of Berlin were all but leveled in the final days of the war when British and US bombers pounded the city to ease the path of the encircling Russian armies that brought an end to Adolf Hitler's Nazi rule.

Some 60,000 people were evacuated from their homes in Frankfurt earlier this year after a massive bomb, dropped by Britain's Royal Air Force, was unearthed.

More than 2,000 tonnes of live bombs and munitions are discovered each year in Germany, more than 70 years after the end of the 1939-1945 war.

British and American warplanes pummeled the country with 1.5 million tonnes of bombs that killed 600,000 people. Officials estimate that 15 percent of the bombs failed to explode, some burrowing six meters deep.

Three police explosives experts in Goettingen were killed in 2010 while preparing to defuse a 450 kg bomb.

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Source(s): Reuters