German police said more than 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes today in the western town of Osnabrueck while explosives experts defused four unexploded World War Two-era American bombs.
A police spokesman said the four 1,000-pound (450 kilogram) bombs had been discovered in farmland near a rail station and that 10,000 people in the town of 160,000 were evacuated as a precaution.
There are still numerous Allied bombs that failed to explode in World War Two buried in German soil.
Scores of the British and American bombs are found and defused each year but construction workers are occasionally hurt or killed when they accidentally set off the devices.