Four injured by Second World War bomb in Munich

FOUR people were injured when a Second World War bomb blew up in Munich yesterday.

The 550lb ordnance dropped by Allied aircraft was detonated by accident during drilling at a construction site for a new railway line.

The explosion threw a mechanical digger onto its side and scattered debris for hundreds of yards. The blast could be heard several miles away, and witnesses described a column of smoke over the city. Four construction workers were injured, one seriously. All trains to Munich Central Station were suspended.

Second World War bombs are discovered and defused regularly in Germany, but it is rare for one to go off. Construction sites are usually checked before work begins. “We have to find out why this bomb was not detected beforehand,” Joachim Hermmann, the Bavarian regional interior minister, said on a visit to the site.

The blast took place at the Donnersberger bridge which carries road traffic over the train lines.

British and US aircraft dropped 1.5 million tons of munitions on Germany, and it is believed as much as 15 per cent failed to go off. Around 2,000 tons of unexploded ordnance are still discovered each year, and Germans are used to large areas of cities being evacuated and cordoned off so they can be removed.

In 2017, 70,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes in the financial capital Frankfurt after a 1.4-ton British “Blockbuster” bomb was found.

In 2011, 45,000 people had to leave their homes in Koblenz when a drought exposed another Blockbuster undetonated on the bed of the Rhine River.

In 2019 a 550lb bomb that had lain undetected since the war went off in a field outside Limburg in the night. The bomb was not disturbed and it is believed it went off because the chemicals in its detonator had decomposed.

No one was injured but the bomb registered 1.7 on the Richter scale and left a 13ft deep crater.