Second World War munitions debate explodes with Berlin forest fire

We met in a cafe that is a 1980s West Berlin reimagining of a Viennese coffee house, a frozen-in-time sea of wood veneer and brass fixtures.

We were not here for the decor, though, but for a chat over cake: a huge slab of rhubarb tart and a curved almond slice. Sitting outside on the pavement, the conversation was nearly drowned out by the adjacent bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Unusual for a Sunday, I told my friend by way of apology, and unheard of in August, when Berlin usually empties out.

“The traffic is like this because the Avus is closed,” my native Berlin friend remarked, as unperturbed by the exhaust fumes as the small swarm of wasps swirling around her rhubarb cake.

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The nearby Avus claims to have been the world’s first dual carriageway when it opened a century ago, running from Berlin’s western city centre to nearby Potsdam, cutting through the Grunewald forest. But the Avus had been shut down three days earlier when disaster struck.

“I woke up hearing bangs and thought, ‘I’ve not heard that before’,” said Paula, a friend living near the Grunewald. “You could smell the smoke in the air. The fire brigade was everywhere, it was like a war.”

The Grunewald, a forest and former royal hunting ground, is one of Berlin’s most important green lungs. The 3,000 hectares of trees and meadows are a popular destination for Berliners looking to escape the summer heat. But last Thursday the German capital woke up to news that a stretch of the forest alongside the Avus was ablaze.

Breakfast radio brought the bad news in breathless updates: this was no ordinary blaze in a bone-dry forest, by now the daily reality around Germany and Europe in this drought summer. The Berlin blaze was raging in a police depot for second World War munitions.

From 1950, radio listeners learned, every unexploded wartime bomb discovered in the ground in West Berlin — during building or roadworks — was taken here for storage or detonation. Just how many bombs?

“Around 25 tonnes,” said a nervous police spokesman on Berlin’s Inforadio.

British aircraft dropped an estimated 47,000 tonnes of bombs on Berlin in 16 wartime missions, according to a specialist Berlin bomb disposal squad. Some 15 per cent failed to explode, they say, and thousands are found each year during building works.

Several times a year, when the latest bombs are destroyed in the facility with controlled explosions, the adjacent Avus is shut down to traffic.

After closing the dual carriageway, the fire brigade parked on the empty lanes and watched in horror. All they could do was keep their distance from the exploding bombs and flying debris as ground thermometers reached 600 degrees.

Early this week they moved in on foot but the serious work was done by teams in tanks, assisted by fire robots and firefighting helicopters, each dropping 2,000 litres of water on the site from the air. After days of round-the-clock work the blaze was largely extinguished on Wednesday and the Avus opened to traffic on Thursday.

But as the shock over the fire subsides, a heated debate is raging over the bomb storage facility.

A legacy of the cold war, the Grunewald forest was the most isolated site the walled-in West Berlin could find to store and detonate bombs. More than three decades after unification, though, is this still the best solution?

After several failed rounds, Berlin has begun a fresh round of talks with the surrounding state of Brandenburg over a joint disposal site somewhere in the countryside.

As well as the security questions over transporting bombs over a long distance, though, “exporting” Berlin wartime bombs is a delicate political issue, particularly as Brandenburg’s policy is to detonate such bombs on-site.

For now the scorched area of the Grunewald forest remains off-limits for locals. As experts believe the extreme heat caused bombs to detonate and start the fire, they fear further spontaneous explosions are likely.

The first grim images from the forest show black and toppled trees over a 50 hectare area — the equivalent of 124 soccer pitches.

“We don’t think we lost too many animals, anything with legs or wings gets out of such an area,” said Katja Kammer, a Grunewald forester. “But many of the trees in this area, even ones that look green and healthy, will probably die because the soil is scorched.”

As traffic was diverted back to the Avus on Thursday morning, rather than roaring through the city, the crowd outside the Viennese cafe enjoyed their morning coffee in peace once more. The war is never far away in Berlin but the Grunewald forest fire was a new level of danger. As one friend muttered joked grimly, “it’s Churchill’s last revenge”.