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June/July 1997
SYLT--Germany's El Dorado
By Andrea Schulte-Peevers
We were driving along the streets of Germany in our modest little Opel when we noticed it for the first time: a black three-inch blob on the trunk of a brand-new S-class Mercedes. With
no small amount of Schadenfreude (read: snide delight in other people's misfortune), we chuckled at this obvious paint flaw or gob of tar. But then we saw it again--this time on a parked red Porsche--and took a
closer look: It wasn't a blemish but a decal. To me, its odd shape looked like a ballerina with a clubfoot. David saw an elongated profile of Daffy Duck. But now we had a mystery on our hands.
It wasn't until months later that we discovered what the cognoscenti and the well-heeled have always known: that little Rorschach splotch pasted on the back of cars all over Germany is
the profile of the North Sea island of Sylt.
In Germany, there are basically two types of people: those that have been to Sylt (usually the famous, the titled, or the merely moneyed) and those that haven't. But everyone usually
knows what's going on in Sylt: Over the past four decades, this tiny Frisian island has provided much of the smut and gossip for Germany's yellow press. There's been a steady stream of Hollywood-type
"who-does-what-with- whom" stories with countless lurid photographs of the wild parties and decadent behavior of "the rich and the naked." This smarmy legacy began in the 1960s when the new
German prosperity roared into the age of sexual liberation. On Sylt, this high-octane blend fueled an on- going bacchanalian frenzy. Today, the wild couplings--or triplings, or what have you--have quieted down
to the point where Playboy writer Benno Kroll remarked drolly that Sylt is experiencing a "sort of a collective post-coital hangover."
Maybe so. But Sylt remains the playground of choice for the German jet set. The glitter of its nightclubs, the fancy restaurants, the French designer boutiques, the million-dollar homes
with matching Rolls Royces all uphold the aura of luxury and indulgence. But this is not all there is to Sylt. Coexisting with all this human ostentatiousness is nature in abundance. We found the truths about
both sides of Sylt when we joined its club of "been-there's" last year.
Depending on where you go, Sylt presents you with more variations on island realities than a half dozen Mauis. On its western shore, we walked on sandy beaches where the fierce waves of
the North Sea mercilessly gnaw at the fragile shoreline. The wind can be so savage that the world's best windsurfers are drawn here for one of their World Cup events each year.
The contrast with the island's eastern side couldn't be greater: Here the serene Wattenmeer--eerily quiet tidal flats--appears and disappears like a benevolent ghost. In a strange
phenomenon, the shallow ocean retreats twice daily with the tides, exposing the muddy sea bottom. We drove to Sylt's north where wide expanses of shifting dunes arched like the tawny backs of a herd of kneeling
camels. We bicycled past candy-striped lighthouses jutting above a sea of gleaming yellow rape seed, keeping their watch over the water. Climbing atop a dune, we viewed collections of snug reed-roofed homes
embedded in fields of heath the color of burnt sienna.
Primal landscapes like these have fascinated artists for more than a century. Thomas Mann came and stayed for the fierce waves and the meditative solitude. Emil Nolde and Lovis Corinth
painted here. Theodor Storm dedicated an entire book called the Sylt Novella to the island. And Stefan Zweig wrote about his "week of love in this mild wilderness." They all had fallen under the spell
of Sylt. This mystique was something that we too were hoping to find.
We knew that we weren't going to an ordinary place when, in order to get there, we had to drop DM 130 ($87) to load our car onto a train: Sylt was already announcing its standard of
living. This privileged 20-minute ride took us across the sea atop a dam no wider than a basketball court. Called the Hindenburgdamm, this remarkable feat of engineering dates back to 1927. In summer, trains
take up to 4,000 cars daily along its spine.
We ensconced ourselves in style at the traditional Hotel Stadt Hamburg, housed in a beautiful mansion in the heart of Westerland. It's a stylish establishment with the personalized
charm of a boutique hotel. We saw lots of attention to detail--fresh flowers on an antique console, thick carpets, heavy silverware, and so on. But there was also friendly service, a commodity not to be taken
for granted in Germany.
From our comfortable digs, we started our first day by taking a stroll around Westerland, essentially the Miami Beach of Sylt. The view of the sea is sadly blocked by chunky high rises
in rows like concrete stalagmites. The main drag is the car-free Friedrichsstrasse where swank nightclubs rub shoulders with crammed tourist shops and pricey restaurants. This is the place where people
promenade, flaunt their glowing tans and name-brand shopping bags, and duck into trendy bars to guzzle a glass of champagne.
Westerland was Sylt's first resort back in 1855, its people having moved from a little village to the east called Eidum, which you won't find on the map. In 1436 Eidum had the
unfortunate fate of being swallowed up by the sea during a horrendous storm. To the resilient Frisians, this was a set-back but not the end: They simply moved and renamed their settlement. And amidst the
storm--try to imagine their presence of mind!--they even managed to save the glorious altar from the original village church. It can still be admired in Westerland's Alte Dorfkirche (Old Village Church).
Today, the only rising tide of real danger to Westerland is tourism. More than 2.5 million overnight stays were registered here in 1995. In addition, thanks to the Deutsche Bahn train
company which last year started to sell dirt-cheap weekend tickets, a veritable deluge of visitors now descends on Saturdays and Sundays. Naturally, this is a thorn in the side of the island's administrators.
Beer-swilling day tourists are not--how shall we say?--of the social caste you traditionally find on Sylt.
When you're on an island, your first explorations are naturally of the sea and its beaches. And on the strand we were confronted with a number of Sylt realities. First, it costs money
to get on the beach-- DM 6 ($4) to be exact. All communities on the island also have spa status, which entitles them to levy a tax called Kurtaxe. If you're staying in a hotel, this visitor's tax is usually
included in your room rate. You get a Kurkarte, which then entitles you to such things as admission to the beach, museums, and concerts. If you are not staying on the island, you must buy a Tageskarte, a day
pass, to do anything, even go to the beach. Luckily, all we had to do was to present our Kurkarte and--whoosh!--the self-important little man at the gate deigned to wave us through.
Moments later we were slapped with another realization: Sylt is "Verboten"-land. Before we even reached the boardwalk, a large sign informed us of all the things we must not
do: No beach castles. No dogs on the beach. No feeding the seagulls. No, no, no... Grousing loudly we gingerly proceeded to the paved promenade where flocks of elderly Germans perched on benches like birds on a
wire. Others sought shelter from the wind in large wicker beach chairs, the kind you can only rent on German beaches. The sun was out and this was a moment to be cherished. Statistically, Sylt may have 200 hours
more sun than Hamburg (1,750 hours a year, to be precise), but it sure ain't Jamaica. And at least in Jamaica the beaches stay in one place. Not so on Sylt...
It looked like a scene from a science fiction movie. Heavy bulldozers charged up and down the beach like giant monster roaches. They pushed gargantuan piles of sand that spewed from
snake-like tubes writhing up onto the beach from beneath the ocean. What the heck was this? We saw a salty old fellow with a weathered face and thought surely he would know. His name was Wilhelm and he did. He
explained that what we were seeing was a new beach being made. It's a process called terraforming, which is necessary because each year the sea gnaws some five feet off the island's western edge.
In a Sisyphean effort first begun in 1972, a custom-built ship anchors some two kilometers off-shore every few years. From there huge pumps blast up to one million cubic yards of sand
from the ocean floor onto the coast. We watched mesmerized as we pondered this awesome stand-off between nature and humankind.
The wind had blown the last wisps of clouds away, revealing an indigo sky. Perfect weather for a bike trip. We rented a couple and headed north to Kampen to see how "the other
half" lives. If Westerland is Sylt's Miami, Kampen is its St. Tropez. Pedaling down Strönwai, better known as Whiskey Alley, we looked for celebrities amongst the posh restaurants and ritzy boutiques. Sadly
there were none. But we saw plenty of folks who looked like they were on their own Star Search. They were sitting in plastic chairs on restaurant terraces and paying top Deutsche Mark for their cappuccinos. The
truly famous apparently prefer to sequester themselves in their reed- roofed villas to being put on public display.
And those villas! Under their mantles of thatch they splendidly sit amid the amber dunes or heath which, in fall, explodes into deep purple. We learned that a small one of these will
set you back DM 2 million ($1.34 million), not exactly pocket change in tax-heavy Germany. Kampen has its landmarks, too. One of them is the island's oldest lighthouse, rising 200 feet above sea level and dating
back to 1855. Locals have baptized it "Christian" in honor of all the Danish kings by that name that ruled the island until it became German in 1866. There's also the Uwe Düne, at 160 feet the island's
highest natural elevation and named for local 19th-century freedom fighter Uwe Jens Lornsen. You can climb to the top via 115 wooden steps for a 360-degree view over Sylt and, on a good day, to the neighboring
islands Amrum and Föhr.
We decided to return via the eastern shore where the Wattenmeer stretches lazily, as placid as a giant mirage. It's a very different landscape, muted and peaceful. The gray mudflats of
the Wattenmeer may look completely undramatic, even boring. But perhaps one can compare them to a desert, also a place of meditative and tranquil quality. And like a desert, too, it only appears completely
devoid of life. In fact it's a fertile ecosystem harboring countless species. One thimble of water can contain up to a million single-cell organisms, and about 40,000 minicrabs live in a square yard of silt. On
the other end of the food chain are seals, which are making a comeback after a mysterious mass dying in the late 1980s.
The fragility of this environment was finally recognized in 1985 when the Nationalpark Wattenmeer was born. It's Europe's largest such park and stretches from the Dutch coast all the
way to Denmark--a curious landscape best appreciated by walking barefoot through the sludge. This may sound strange, but with nothing but the screeching of gulls for entertainment, the wind quickly blows the
cobwebs right out of your mind. Or you can join a guided tour of the tidal flats where you'll learn that the heaps of sand sausages beneath your feet are the work of the pervasive pier worm. Adventurers can also
walk from one island to the next during low tide. But this can only be done on guided tours: the swift tides and treacherous channels have swept many unwary people out to sea.
We turned our bikes into the wind, heading south on a reed-lined path along the shore that we shared with walkers and people on horseback. Eventually we came to Keitum, easily the
island's prettiest village. We found quiet streets flanked by ancient chestnut trees and lush gardens erupting in symphonies of color. Here stand some of the older reed houses, once the homes of retired sea
captains. In former times, Keitum was Sylt's most important harbor, and evidence of this nautical tradition survives everywhere. St. Severin is a late Romanesque seaman's church known for its Gothic altar and
pulpit, as well as its romantic candlelight concerts. For excursions into the island's salty past, the Sylt Heimatmuseum and the historic Altfriesisches Haus await.
By the time we returned to Westerland our legs were rubber. We decided to soothe our sore muscles at the Sylter Welle, a state-of- the-art indoor water park built right into the dunes.
It's supposed to look like a ship; perhaps the architect was deluded. But it's great fun at the end of a long trail, and we plunged in gratefully. The water comes straight from the sea (okay, they filter and
heat it up to 80 degrees first). In a giant wave pool, we bobbed in the gentle surf that operates twice an hour for ten minutes. Beneath cascading torrents and in special underwater lounge-chairs our muscles
were gently pummeled into pleasant pudding. And then we headed for saunas of different temperatures and dips in an ice pool. Clothes, by the way, are not optional: you cannot wear any. This, and the fact that
German saunas are usually coed, may turn some delicate American sensibilities distinctly on their ear.
After a couple of hours of this hydro-therapy we felt restored and deliciously sleepy. The sights of the island, exercise in good air, the wind from the sea, and the broad spectrum of
nature had done their full day's work. We'd only just begun to understand some of the magic qualities of Sylt. But one thing is certain: the real allures of this island are not of the kind the tabloid press
would have us believe.
Contributing editor Andrea Schulte-Peevers writes from Bochum, Germany.
IF YOU GO
How to Get There
There is direct train service from Hamburg to Westerland several times daily. To take your car, you have to drive to the train station in the little town of Niebüll and load it onto the
Autoreisezug (Car Train). The round trip costs DM 130 ($87), including one car and all passengers. It's a bit cheaper if you drive to Rømø just across the border in Denmark and catch the ferry to List on Sylt's
northern tip. Round trip tickets are DM 85 ($57), which also includes one car and all passengers.
Where to Stay
Hotel Stadt Hamburg, Westerland: One of the premier addresses on the island. Member of prestigious Relais & Chateaux group of hotels. Traditional service and decor. Gourmet
restaurant. From DM 142 ($95) for a single and DM 240 ($160) for a double room. Tel: 011.49.4651. 8580; Fax: 011.49.4651.858220.
Walter's Hof, Kampen: Sophisticated 32-room hotel with all comforts, including sauna, massage, and indoor pool. Restaurant Piccolo serves Italian and local specialties. Doubles start at
DM 180 ($120), two- room suites at DM 290 ($194). Tel.: 011.49.4651.98990; Fax: 011.49. 4651.45590.
Private accommodation may be less comfortable but certainly more affordable. Rooms start at DM 50 ($34) for a double at Haus Malessa in Westerland, including breakfast, Tel.: 011.49.
4651.21667. Without breakfast you can get away with DM 40 ($27) for a room at Haus Fermate, also in Westerland, Tel.: 011.49.4651.5510.
Where to Eat
Gogärtchen, Kampen: The classic Sylt hang-out for the in-crowd. This is the place to see and be seen. Beer garden, terrace, and top restaurant with top prices. Main courses start at DM
25 ($17). Kupferkanne, Kampen: This sprawling cafe is located in the midst of former bunkers and has a great view of the Wattenmeer. Outside you sit in your private room formed by hedges, brambles, and trees; to
sit inside there's a snug and woodsy Frisian house with lots of nooks and crannies. Homemade cakes.
Gosch's, List: If you arrive by ferry from Rømø, the first thing you see on Sylt will be Gosch's famous fish stand in List. If you arrive any other way, be sure to make the trip to
Sylt's northern tip for some fabulously fresh fare. Everything, from the simple herring in a bun to a grilled salmon steak, is good.
Also recommended: Sansibar in Rantum, Pesel in Westerland, Fisch-Fiete in Keitum.
More Information
Bädergemeinschaft Sylt, Stephanstrasse 6, 25980 Westerland, Tel.: 011. 49.4651.82020; Fax: 011.49.4651.820222.
Reklamebilder--The Germans' Baseball Cards
By Robert A. Selig
Pondering ways to increase sales in his chain of Au Bon Marché stores some 130 years ago, Aristide Boucicaut of Paris came up with a new aspect of what we today call sales promotion.
His idea was as simple as it was effective. Sometime in 1865, he began handing each customer a 4-by-3-inch card with a picture on one side and the company logo on the other. Intended as a thank-you gesture for
having made purchases in one of his stores, Boucicaut's Kaufmannsbilder, or salesmen cards, shrewdly combined a human tendency to collect with his own need for advertising to increase sales. His customers loved
the idea: sales, profits, and circulation of his picture-cards increased steadily. Soon he expanded from individual cards to series, initially with six or 12 illustrations. When bookbinders started selling
albums in which to display the pictures, the hobby of collecting these picture-cards was born.
Across the Rhine, German businesses and corporations, most of all the Liebig company of Cologne, picked up the idea. Centered around Justus von Liebig's invention of Fleischextract
(precursor of the modern-day bouillon cube) in the early 1860s, the Liebig company rapidly developed into a multinational corporation with plants in two dozen European and Latin American countries. In 1872,
employing the same artists and printers as Boucicaut, the Liebig Corporation offered the first of 1,130 known German-language series of Reklamebilder, or advertising picture-cards, in a format similar to
Boucicaut's.
Following Liebig's successful advertising campaigns, Boucicaut's idea slowly spread across Europe. In 1880, the Swiss chocolate manufacturer Suchard, founded in 1826 in
Serrières-Neuchâtel, began including pictures in the Liebig format in its Milka chocolates (which already had the same purple cow on the wrapper as it does today). Between 1880 and 1914, the company issued about
5,000 different pictures, often with trilingual text (German, French, and English) in 400 series.
In Germany, Stollwerck Schokolade, a chocolate company first created by master baker Franz Stollwerck in 1839 in Cologne, followed suit. In 1885 Stollwerck offered the country's first
collector albums for the cards, which after 1897 contained explanatory text as well. To stay ahead of its competitors, Stollwerck insisted on original and high-quality illustrations. Many cards were printed in a
12-color process rather than the standard four-color method. Well-known artists such as Adolf von Menzel, Max Liebermann, Melchior Lechter, and Otto Madersohn entered Stollwerck's competitions for new series,
where the first prize could be as high as 1,000 Reichsmark, the currency at the time.
In 1887 Stollwerck further revolutionized the concept of selling when it set up the first vending machines in Germany. As an incentive, a 1.8-by-3.5-inch picture was included in each
chocolate bar. Four years later, some 10,000 of Stollwerck's machines were operating in Germany; by 1893 there were more than 15,000. In 1894 Stollwerck acquired the right to operate ticket vending machines at
German train stations--of course, they also sold Stollwerck chocolate with its featured advertisement cards.
By the turn of the century hardly a product was sold in Germany that did not include a picture-card or an offer for one. The card informed the customer-collector of far-away countries
and peoples, told him or her about the past and the present, introduced artists and heroes, movie stars, and animals, compared folk dresses and the latest fashions, and told of the "good old days" and
the miracles of modern technology.
Only large corporations such as Liebig or Suchard could afford to design their own series; smaller stores and companies ordered pictures from clearing houses like the Aktiengesellschaft
für Automaten-Verkauf (Corporation for Automatic Vending Machine Sales) or directly from printers, who simply had to change the company logo on the card's reverse side. Despite competition from corporations
promoting name recognition and sales through their picture series (the desire to complete any given series acted as a strong incentive for a customer to continue purchasing a product), the Kaufmannsbild remained
popular for neighborhood stores into the 1920s.
The names of many corporations well known to Germans even today could be found on the little cards: Kathreiner's Malzkaffee and Schicht soap; Paulaner Bier and Knorr's Erbswurst Suppe
(first sold in 1872); Palmin Kakao shortening; and Van Houten cocoa, Sarotti chocolates, and Erdahl Schuhkrem all offered the Reklamebilder. At a time when most groceries were sold in bulk and customers had yet
to get used to the concept of brand names, the Reklamebilder were valuable visual aids in fostering what marketing experts now call "corporate identity."
Cigarette companies did not enter the market for Reklamebilder until the late 1920s. Before World War I cigarettes were relatively expensive luxury items for men of means. The first
cigarette-making machines, invented in 1881 by James A. Bonsack, were not used commercially until 1883, when James Buchanan Duke installed two of Bonsack's machines in his business in Durham, North Carolina.
Within five years, Duke sold almost one billion cigarettes annually, far more than any other company. But until World War I, if they smoked at all, most men smoked either cigars or a pipe; no respectable woman
would have smoked, at least not in public. The war changed all that. At home, societal norms and constraints crumbled in the crucible of war; in the 1920s smoking became an expression of a woman's new-found
freedom. On the front lines cigarettes became part of a soldier's life as all sides handed out billions of free cigarettes: Between 1910 and 1919, production in the United States, by far the largest producer,
increased from fewer than 10 billion to almost 70 billion annually.
As movie stars and actors puffed their way across the silver screen, Zigarettenbilder, or cigarette cards, became the undisputed champions of collector interest during the 1920s and
1930s. Often included with the cigarettes but acquired with coupons, thousands of picture-cards enticed the German smoker to higher consumption. Between 1926 and 1945, some 700 albums of 200-300 pictures each
appeared on the market, besides about 420 series without albums. Editions of 700-800,000 copies were not uncommon; many of the Reemtsma cigarette company's albums even topped the one million copy mark.
The first company to include a free cigarette offer was the Waldorf-Astoria GmbH. The Waldorf-Astoria cigar store company had been founded by descendants of Johann Jacob Astor, a
peasant's son from Waldorf near Stuttgart. Astor had arrived in New York as a 19-year- old in 1766 in search of his fortune in the fur trade; during the 19th century, his company branched out into hotels and
tobacco products, among other directions.
During the winter of 1917/18, Emil Molt, general director of the now independent German branch of Waldorf-Astoria with headquarters in Stuttgart included, for the first time, 16-page
patriotic booklets with cigarettes that were distributed to German soldiers. Molt continued the Waldorf-Bücherei into the 1920s, even after Reemtsma (1926) and Eckstein (1928) had issued the first picture
series. But in 1929, Waldorf-Astoria, now owned by Haus Neuerburg, also owner of Eckstein and Zuban, joined the trend.
Before the 1920s, the primary goal of the Kaufmannsbilder had foremost been to entertain, advertise, and promote a product and its manufacturer. But in their attempt to inform the
collector about coats-of-arms and famous paintings, folktales and butterflies, collector cards had increasingly taken on an educational function.
After Germany's loss in World War I and the hated Treaty of Versailles, in the 1920s this educational aspect took on an increasingly political tinge. Female movie stars or fast cars
were still shown on the cards, where they replaced the royalty and exotic animals depicted before 1914. Increasingly, however, albums with titles such as Volk ans Gewehr (People to Weapons), Alles für
Deutschland (Everything for Germany), or Waldorf-Astoria's Der Erste Weltkrieg (The First World War) found their way into the German living room. In its Uniformen der alten Armee (Uniforms of the Old Army) of
1932, Waldorf-Astoria consciously conjured up the "good old days" when it wanted to revive a memory of the times of peace before 1914. Reversing tradition, the picture increasingly became illustration
for the text, and the quality of the reproductions suffered accordingly.
After 1933 the Nazis immediately appropriated the medium for their own purposes. Publishers and Bilderdienste, which exchanged the coupons found in the cigarette packs for the picture
itself, had to submit to censorship and police supervision. Some series were canceled altogether, others altered in their composition. Zigarettenbilder became a medium for propaganda despite the potential for
embarrassment: After the so-called Röhm-Putsch of 1934, complete pages had to be removed because Victor Lutze became the new leader of the SA and had to be thus represented in series like Waldorf- Astoria's
Deutschland Erwacht (Germany Awakens) and many others. Smoker-collectors were also asked to replace enemies of the new order depicted in their albums with politically correct figures: They might have made
themselves suspect if they had kept the (now outlawed) Bertolt Brecht in Josetti GmbH's series Unsere jungen Dichter in den dreissiger Jahren (Our Young Poets in the '30s).
The use and abuse of Reklamebilder for propaganda purposes reached its height in the years preceding World War II. In 1936 the Cigaretten-Bilderdienst Hamburg-Bahrenfeld (Cigarette
Picture Service) published its infamous Raubstaat England (Rapatious State England), which repeated every anti-British slur, rumor, and lie and repeated every anti-British picture or cartoon the Nazi
propagandists could find. Germany's attack on Poland in September 1939 spelled the end for Zigarettenbilder. Eight new series were launched in 1940, but only one each in 1941 and 1942. It was mostly albums such
as Raubstaat England, in its 300,000th copy in 1941, which were continued throughout the war.
Between 1872 and 1945, German corporations and businesses distributed over 40,000 different Reklamebilder and some 2,000 collectors' albums in millions of copies. Many of them are still
around: They can be found at flea markets, in used bookstores, or in stores such as Tradition Zorn in the city of Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber, where most sell for around DM 100 ($67). Despite the sometimes high
quality of the work, they have been largely ignored by historians, art historians, museums, students of popular culture, and also by the general public. Hardly anyone is interested anymore in a hobby enjoyed by
millions of Germans for decades, in which they invested their time and money, and for which they unknowingly risked their health: Just one album of 312 Zigarettenbilder meant buying (and assumably smoking) a
minimum of 312 packs of cigarettes. Otherwise you had to have doubles to trade with, which you acquired by smoking.
In all of Europe there is only one museum devoted to Reklamebilder, the Museo historico della figurina in Modena, Italy. Literature on the subject is just as rare: Erhard and Evamaria
Ciolina's Garantiert Aecht: Das Reklame-Sammelbild als Spiegel der Zeit (Guaranteed Real: The Advertising Collectors' Pictures as a Mirror of our Times--published by Edition Wissen und Literatur, Munich 1986)
and Erich Wassem's Sammeln von Serienbildern (Collecting Series Pictures--published by Landshut, 1981) are all that has been published on the subject.
Historian Robert A. Selig writes from Holland, Michigan.
Germany's Deadly Legacy From World War II and the Cold War
By John Dornberg
These brief news items come from local papers around Germany:
Oranienburg--10,000 people in a radius of one kilometer were evacuated from their homes while police experts defused a
dud 500-pound American bomb dropped in World War II. Munich--1,500 residents had to leave their homes, schools were closed, traffic on the A-96 autobahn was diverted, and service of the S-5 subway interrupted
for nine hours while ordnance men worked to neutralize a 500-pound British bomb that had failed to explode when dropped 53 years ago. Magdeburg--Construction workers chanced on an undetonated 2,000-pound
American "blockbuster," and 12,000 people in the neighborhood were evacuated from their apartments and offices during the disarming. Frankfurt-am-Main--Discovery and defusing of a World War II bomb in
the city forest halted traffic on the A-3 autobahn and required closing the north runway of Frankfurt International Airport for hours.
Routine local stories? They might have been, had they not appeared just a few days apart one week last year, and were it not for the fact that you can read such briefs in some paper in
Germany every day of the year. They are barely noticed accounts of the explosive legacy of World War II. That legacy makes big news only when it does explode- -like the 500-pound American bomb at a construction
site in East Berlin on September 15, 1994. It killed three building workers, seriously injured 17 passersby, demolished dozens of cars parked nearby, ripped open an adjacent five-story house from the roof down
to the second floor, and blew out windows for blocks around.
Although World War II ended more than 50 years ago, it is far from over in Germany because of still deadly bombs and other ammunition left in the ground. "And it will go on for at
least another 50 years," says Martin Volk, a Berlin police captain who headed the city's ordnance disposal team from 1974 until his retirement in 1995.
In Berlin some 2,000 bombs, each with 150 to 2,000 pounds of explosives, have been found since 1945. At least 15,000 are believed to be still slumbering in the ground, especially in the
city's eastern boroughs where during the years of Communist rule the search for them was not as systematic as in West Berlin. The longer they remain buried, the more dangerous they become. As the years pass,
even when not jarred accidentally by a construction crew, they can explode.
The problem of finding and defusing this lethal and destructive heritage is nationwide--wherever there were wartime air raids or ground battles between German and Allied forces.
Add to that the legacy of the Cold War: 1.3 million acres, or nearly 2,000 square miles, of territory in East Germany used by the Soviet and East German armies as troop training areas
until 1990. All of them are highly contaminated with undetonated and abandoned munitions: artillery shells, anti-tank rockets, grenades, mines, and bullets. They pose constant danger to people who enter these
areas, especially juveniles, who are known to pick up and play with or collect them.
The facts and figures of the effort to rid Germany of this legacy are mindboggling.
Nationwide today nearly 3,000 people work permanently at searching for and detonating dud bombs and ammunition. On average they retrieve some 20,000 tons of the stuff each year. They
are unsung heroes, for their profession is fraught with danger: a job done in the shadow of death every day. "My family never knew whether I'd come home from work in a coffin," says Josef Hermann, head
of Frankfurt-am-Main's police ordnance team for two decades, who celebrated his 90th birthday last fall. "I was lucky." In the state of Northrhine-Westphalia alone 85 ordnance disposal men were killed
and 140 injured between 1949, when records were first kept, and 1984. Thanks to new technologies of searching for and disarming the bombs that are found, the job has gotten a little safer. Since 1990 there have
been "only" five fatalities.
One was Rainer Thüne, the veteran ordnance disposal chief of Hesse, and another his assistant. They were killed in Wetzlar in October 1990 when trying to disarm a 500-pound bomb found
in a streambed. While attaching a hydraulic rig to yank out its fuse, one of them slipped in the mud, and the bomb exploded.
In addition to the police teams there are some 20 commercial ordnance disposal firms involved in the task, each with about 100 highly trained experts. The financial costs are
astronomical. The 1996 and 1997 federal and state budgets for Kampfmittelbeseitigung, as ordnance disposal is called, total almost DM 1 billion, or about $625 million. Experts estimate that $5.6 billion ought to
have been allocated. In Saxony-Anhalt, one of the most contaminated states, the cleanup bill in 1996 came to DM 10.3 million, or about $6.4 million. "That enabled us to do just the absolute minimum, such as
prophylactic searches at planned building sites," says Diethard Posorski, chief of the service in Magdeburg. "It does not include the costs at the former troop training grounds on the
Colbitz-Letzlingen Heath."
That 88-square-mile area, 50 miles north of Magdeburg, staked out in 1935 by the German Wehrmacht (Armed Forces), then used after World War II until 1994 by the Soviet Army, is one of
six sites in East Germany that now belongs to the Bonn Defense Ministry. The area is destined to become a maneuver ground for laser-simulated war games by the Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces). For more than 60
years it was shot up like a moonscape. To clean it up and make it safe for use will cost an estimated $1 billion in federal government funds. Work began in March 1995 and by early 1997 a team of nearly 500
soldiers and civilian workers, using 115 computer-programmed metal detectors, had managed to clear only 2.5 square miles and spent $20 million to do it. "At this rate it will take another 35 years to make
it safe for training exercises," says Lt. Col. Werner Böhm, the base commandant.
Whereas the cleanup in West Germany and West Berlin has been going on for decades, in the former East German Democratic Republic (GDR) it only started systematically after Germany's
reunification in 1990.
The effort in both Germanys was fairly haphazard until 1985 when Allied aerial reconnaissance photos became available. These are the tens of thousands of pictures taken by American and
British planes after each air raid on German towns during the war. Experts who study them, using microscopes and stereoscopic planimeters, can distinguish between large ground craters, made by bombs that
actually exploded, and smaller holes that were caused by duds. These account for about 10 to 20 percent of the bombs dropped. Comparing the photos with detailed street maps enables them to pinpoint where an
unexploded bomb might still be ticking away under the surface.
The photos have been a great help to West German disposal teams for over a decade, but because of Cold War restraints they were not available to the services in the former GDR until
reunification. The Brandenburg service began working with them in 1992, but it was only in 1995 that the teams in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt had access to sets covering major cities such as Leipzig, Chemnitz,
Dresden, Magdeburg, Halle, and Dessau. Even West Berlin's ordnance team did not have photos of East Berlin until after reunification. "Until then," says Martin Volk, "the British and American
suppliers carefully blanked out everything on the other side of the Berlin Wall, so as not to get into a diplomatic squabble with the GDR."
"The pictures reveal a lot," says Gerd Lehmann, head of the Brandenburg service in Potsdam. "We recently examined one of a 22-acre plot, now the site of four schools, two
kindergartens, and playgrounds, on the banks of the Havel River in Oranienburg. It was taken after one of the big American air raids in the spring of 1945. It showed 23 suspect craters. We probed those places
with detectors and test-drilling. At 10 of them we found bombs lying about seven to eight meters deep, one of them only a yard from the wall of a building. We don't know yet how we are going to defuse them and
get them out safely."
But the search with aerial reconnaissance photos is also expensive. In the 1970s the U.S. and British defense departments sold most of their pictures to commercial archives and
libraries, which now market them to the German ordnance disposal services for DM 85, or about $53, per shot. "We had to pay $690,000 for 13,000 of them," says Lehmann indignantly. "But there may
be another 100,000 photos for Oranienburg and other cities in Brandenburg."
No other state has as great and dangerous a World War II and Cold War legacy as this one. Some 700 square miles--about 6.5 percent of its surface area--are a ticking time bomb. From
January 1992 until December 1996 only a fraction of this vast area, about 16,000 acres or around 60 square miles, was searched and cleared, despite an annual budget of around $40 million and a team of 600
government and commercial ordnance workers on the job. Last year they recovered 700,000 pieces of dud ammunition, 15,000 bombs of all sizes, 1,500 rockets, 2,400 land mines, and 4,300 hand grenades.
"But that is just scratching the surface," says Lehmann. "It may take a generation, and it is a race against time, for the longer these bombs and shells remain in the
ground the greater the danger of explosions and tragedies. In fact, it is almost a miracle that we have had so few accidents."
A 16-year-old boy was killed in 1992 tinkering with a German anti-aircraft shell he had found in the woods; an ordnance man was fatally injured in 1993 while defusing a grenade; a
500-pound American bomb blew up by itself in 1994 in the town of Lehnitz, causing extensive damage but no injuries.
Brandenburg's legacy is three-fold.
One is the vast area east and south of Berlin and Potsdam to the Oder River where the fiercest fighting of the war took place in April 1945. Tens of thousands of Soviet and German
soldiers were killed there, and millions of pieces of ammunition, all still highly volatile, contaminate fields and forests. Before any new construction can take place, properties have to be searched with metal
detectors and cleared. Lehmann estimates that may take 50 to 80, possibly even 100 years.
Another problem is at the 250,000 acres of former military bases and maneuver areas, some dating back to the Prussian kings and German kaisers, that are now state property. Dud
ammunition of all kinds, potentially as lethal as the day it was fired, slumbers just under the surface. For the first time in decades these areas are to be put to peaceful civilian use. But nothing can be built
until they have been decontaminated. Meanwhile, despite fences, warning signs, and pamphlets distributed to schools, hikers and mushroom-hunters go into them and risk their lives.
To make those sites safe will cost about $1.7 billion, which, given present budget allocations, would take 90 years.
Brandenburg's worst and most urgent legacy is in cities north of Berlin, especially in and around Oranienburg, sites of key wartime German arms factories, including the Heinkel aircraft
plant and the Auer Works, which was making parts for the V-1 rockets. In seven big raids from March 6 to April 20, 1945 the U.S. Army Air Force dropped 23,675 bombs there.
About half of those bombs had delayed-action fuses, and 10 to 20 percent failed to detonate. They are still in the ground--four to eight yards down. "It's a nightmare," says
Lehmann, "especially the delayed-action bombs."
These were set to detonate after the "all clear" for an air raid had been sounded and people had come out of their shelters. Their fuses contain glass vials of acetone,
supposed to break on impact. The acetone impregnates a celluloid restraining disk that holds back the spring-pressured firing pin, thus softening or dissolving the celluloid and releasing the pin. The amount of
acetone and thickness of the celluloid determine the delay--up to 44 hours after being dropped. In each bomb that failed to explode during the war something went wrong with that sequence. Usually the vial did
not break or the celluloid did not soften enough to release the firing pin. But the brass fuses were all sealed, making them as dangerous today as 50 years ago--even more so, because the celluloid has gotten
brittle. The slightest motion could activate them. Worse, as the celluloid ages, the pressure on the firing pin may be great enough to set the bomb off by itself--as happened at Lehnitz near Oranienburg in May
1994.
Duds with impact fuses are also becoming more dangerous with time. Their firing mechanisms contain lead acid and copper that, with aging, turns into copper acid, a material so volatile
that it will react and cause an explosion if you just stroke the bomb with a feather.
"There are at least 2,000 of these things in Oranienburg alone," says Lehmann. "Buildings have been put up over many of them. Even with recon photos it'll take decades to
locate them."
In Berlin itself the cleanup effort is complicated by the fact that it was haphazard in the city's eastern boroughs before reunification and that many areas of West Berlin, especially
in the Tiergarten district and around the Reichstag, have to be searched again before work can start on the federal government buildings that are planned there. The city-state's Building and Housing Department
has jurisdiction, commercial ordnance disposal companies do the searching, and the police is responsible for defusing and detonating the bombs and munitions that are found.
Since that September 1994 construction site tragedy in East Berlin's Friedrichshain borough, the housing department has been flooded with requests from builders and property owners for
analyses of sites based on aerial reconnaissance photos and for prophylactic searches-- on average 400 a month. The yearly budget of about $5.6 million is not enough and as a result there are backlogs and delays
before construction can start. The search teams are also at work on open, city-owned public spaces in eastern and northeastern Berlin where new housing projects are planned, at Schönefeld Airport, which is
scheduled for expansion, and on and around Pariser Platz and Brandenburg Gate.
And then there is the Tiergarten district. Nowhere else was fighting and shelling heavier in the last weeks of the war than in this area. Because it is in West Berlin, much of it had
been combed and sifted by ordnance disposal teams over the years. But not all. Not, for example, around Bellevue Palace, now the official residence of Federal President Roman Herzog; not on Platz der Republik
and the Spreebogen, huge grass-covered areas where the new Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellery) and Bundestag (Parliament) office buildings will be standing by the end of the decade.
To prepare for groundbreaking of the presidential office building, now under construction adjacent to Bellevue Palace, a team of 11 men from an ordnance disposal company spent 15 months
from January 1995 to March 1996 searching and probing the 21-acre park, inch by inch, using highly sensitive computerized metal detectors and gingerly digging up every piece. On lucky days they managed to
advance 200 yards, usually it was just a few feet. They came up with 4.5 tons of live ammunition.
"We found everything from infantry rounds and hand grenades to anti- tank rockets and artillery shells," says Andreas Mauersberger, the team chief.
Similar searches started early this year on the sites for the new chancellery and parliamentary office buildings.
The sheer magnitude and longevity of Germany's explosive legacy is expressed in the person of Diethard Posorski, 52, chief of Saxony- Anhalt's State Ordnance Disposal Service in
Magdeburg. He is the second generation of his family in this dangerous work. His father Eberhard Posorski directed ordnance disposal at Münster in West Germany for 35 years.
Posorski, who "grew up in a house full of fuses and deactivated ammunition," learned the profession from his father and worked for nearly 30 years for ordnance search and
demolition companies in West Germany before his appointment in Saxony-Anhalt in 1994. His own son, now 24, may follow in his footsteps to make up the third generation.
"What's new for me here," he says, "is all the unfamiliar Soviet and Russian ammunition that we didn't have in the West, and the sheer scope and diversity of the problem.
"You name it and we've got it," he adds. "Battlefields with American, British, German, and Soviet ammo; areas in the Eastern Harz Mountains where Wehrmacht soldiers
dumped and hid vast amounts of munitions before surrendering; huge troop training areas such as the Glücksburger Heath and Arneburg, which were used by the Wehrmacht before the Russians took them over in 1945;
cities that were carpet- bombed, like Magdeburg, Dessau, and Halle, as well as smaller towns, such as Leuna, Bitterfeld, Wolfen, and Merseburg, that were the heart of the wartime chemical industries.
Saxony-Anhalt is so contaminated with duds of all kinds that it is practically impossible to zone and fence off the most dangerous areas in order to keep people from entering them. To protect everyone we'd have
to build a fence around the whole state and evacuate the entire populace."
Last year Posorski and his team of 51 government and 140 commercial ordnance disposal workers recovered more than 4,000 tons of bombs and munitions at 551 different sites and
decontaminated about 3,000 acres.
"But that is barely a dent," he muses. "The best we can do is keep warning people of the dangers around them. Maybe the generation or two after me will say they can see
the end to this task. But not even they will reach it."
Warning the public of the dangers preoccupies Alfred Remler of Saxony's Ordnance Disposal Service in Dresden almost as much as the actual search for and demolition of the explosive
legacy. That, as Remler puts it, is "because we made more systematic and prophylactic searches in Saxony than elsewhere in the GDR." He should know. He has been at it since 1957 and has all the old
records and maps of where probes were made and duds found. Saxony's service today has 26 government employees and contracts with five private companies that employ, on average, 200 people. Last year they
salvaged munitions at 1,602 spots around the state. The take consisted of 600 bombs, 189, 000 pieces of infantry ammo, 58,000 artillery and tank shells, and 190,000 other explosives, including land mines as
deadly as when they were planted half a century ago.
The urban areas with the greatest density of dud bombs are Leipzig, Chemnitz, and Zwickau. Ironically, almost none have been found in Dresden, despite the terrible February 13-14, 1945
air raid that destroyed the city. The macabre explanation is that 80 percent of the bombs dropped that night were incendiaries. The fire storm they caused created so much heat that the duds among the 20 percent
general-purpose bombs also exploded.
One of Remler's chief tasks is warning the public of the dangers of munitions and duds left at various Russian army training areas.
One of the biggest--187,500 acres or about 290 square miles--is at Königsbrück, 30 miles north of Dresden. The site was not only a Wehrmacht maneuver area before the Russians took it
over in 1945 but even Saxony's King August the Strong used it for military exercises in the 18th century. It is now designated to become a nature and recreation reserve.
A team of 12 demolitionists began working there in 1992. Their first task, according to Maik Exner, the team chief, is to clear the roads so that fire fighters can get in without danger
if there are brush and forest fires. Of the 40 miles of roads, only eight had been cleared after five years work.
"There are places where we get 10 readings per square yard of metal in the ground, and we have to dig up every piece," says Exner. "Some days we find so much that we move
forward only two or three yards. Despite all the warning signs and publicity, more and more people are coming in here: kids, mushroom-hunters, militaria collectors, and even neo-Nazis who play war games. Worst
of all, shrubs and plants are growing back, which makes searching even more difficult and dangerous."
How long will it take before those 290 square miles at Königsbrück are clear of Germany's awesome legacy?
"I know that I'll be finished in 2030 because that's when I retire," says Exner "But it'll be at least the year 2200 before this place is really safe.
"The job I'm doing really makes me think about human beings because we've found nearly everything they've invented to kill each other," he adds and then jokes grimly.
"But at least guys like me don't have to worry about unemployment. I think we'll never be out of work."
Contributing editor John Dornberg writes from Munich.
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