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| January •FebruaryJanuary 2016 MBS AWAY HIGGINB by O ADAM THAM lin, thecity ofOranienburg appeared beneath them, no enemy aircraft engaged the bombers ofthe493rd. to defenders below. ButtheLuftwaffe was onitsknees; trails every crewman hated for betraying theirposition each B-17’s four enginescondensing into thewhite con- many, passing Hanover andMagdeburg, theexhaust of zero, the air too thin to breathe. They flew on into Ger- each aircraft, the temperature fell to 40 degrees below miles. Insidetheunpressurized aluminumfuselage of coast northofAmsterdam at analtitudeofalmostfive than 1,300heavy bombers, they crossed theChannel in tight box formations at theheadofastream ofmore graduallyheaded east, gaining altitude until, assembled in Essex, England, and rose slowly into the air. They down theconcrete runway ofLittle Walden airfield bardment Group oftheU.S. Eighth AirForce thundered B-17 Flying the first of36 Fortresses ofthe493rd Bom- SHORTLY BEFORE 11A.M.ON MARCH15, 1945, Around 2:40p.m., some ten miles northwest of Ber - T T TIME ARERACING EXPERTS GERMAN W YEARSAFTER SEVENTY EXPLO THAT HASN’T O O O NS O RLD WAR II, RDNANCE DED—YET DEFUSE O F U. S .

CREDIT TK HERE leader Horst Reinhardt. difficult,” -squad says “It’s increasingly becoming Tail vane shrouded in a mist along the lazy grenades, bullets and mortar and ar- parked outside. Yet, according to Rein- not with percussion fuses, which ex- curves of Havel River, and the sky blos- tillery shells left behind at the end of hardt, Oranienburg is the most danger- plode on impact, but with time-delay HIDDEN MENACE somed with puffs of jet-black smoke the war—fell to police bomb-disposal ous city in . fuses, which both sides used through- Heavy fitted with chemical from anti-aircraft fire. Sitting in the technicians and firefighters, theKamp - out the war in order to extend the ter- time-delay fuses could be set to take up Arming stem nose in the lead plane, the bombardier fmittelbeseitigungsdienst, or KMBD. Between 2:51 and 3:36 p.m. on March ror and chaos caused by aerial attacks. to six days to detonate. In many cases, the stared through his bombsight into the Even now, 70 years later, more than 15, 1945, more than 600 aircraft of the The sophisticated, chemical-based fuse failed, creating a potentially deadly haze far below. As his B-17 approached 2,000 tons of unexploded munitions Eighth Air Force dropped 1,500 tons fuses—designated­ M124 and M125, underground hazard. the Oder-Havel Canal, he watched as are uncovered on German soil every of high explosives over Oranienburg, depending on the weight of the bomb— the needles of the automatic release year. Before any construction project a cluster of strategic targets including were intended to be used sparingly; mechanism converged. Five bombs begins in Germany, from the extension rail yards that were a hub for troops U.S. Army Air Force guidelines rec- AN-M65 M125 tumbled away into the icy sky. of a home to track-laying by the national headed to the Eastern Front, a Heinkel ommended fitting them in no more 1,000-LB. BOMB LONG-DELAY railroad authority, the ground must be aircraft plant and, straddling the rail than 10 percent of bombs in any given CHEMICAL FUSE Between 1940 and 1945, U.S. and certified as cleared of unexploded ord- yards, two factories run by the chem- attack. But for reasons that have never British air forces dropped 2.7 million nance. Still, last May, some 20,000 peo- ical conglomerate Auergesellschaft. become clear, almost every bomb tons of bombs on Europe, half of that ple were cleared from an area of Cologne Allied target lists had described one of dropped during the March 15 raid on amount on Germany. By the time the while authorities removed a one-ton those facilities as a gas-mask factory, Oranienburg was armed with one. Nazi government surrendered, in May bomb that had been discovered during but by early 1945 U.S. intelligence had Screwed into a bomb’s tail beneath HOW THE FUSE WORKS construction work. In November 2013, learned that Auergesellschaft had be- its stabilizing fins, the fuse contained another 20,000 people in gun processing enriched uranium, the a small glass capsule of corrosive ac- As the bomb falls, airflow rotates the THESE BOMB were evacuated while experts defused a raw material for the atomic bomb, in etone mounted above a stack of pa- tail vane, turning the LOADS WERE 4,000-pound “Blockbuster” bomb that Oranienburg. per-thin celluloid disks less than half arming stem. could destroy most of a city block. In Although the March 15 attack was an inch in diameter. The disks held UNLIKE 2011, 45,000 people—the largest evacu- ostensibly aimed at the rail yards, it back a spring-loaded firing pin, cocked ALMOST ANY ation in Germany since World War II— had been personally requested by the behind a detonator. As the bomb fell, were forced to leave their homes when a director of the Manhattan Project, Gen. it tilted nose-down, and a windmill in Rotation of the arming stem drives a OTHERS THE drought revealed a similar device lying Leslie Groves, who was determined to the tail stabilizer began spinning in the metal rod into a cap- on the bed of the Rhine in the middle of keep Nazi nuclear research out of the slipstream, turning a crank that broke sule, breaking the EIGHTH AIR glass and releasing . Although the country has been hands of rapidly advancing Russian the glass capsule. The bomb was de- 558 lbs. corrosive acetone. of TNT FORCE at peace for three generations, German troops. Of the 13 Allied air attacks even- signed to hit the ground nose-down, bomb-disposal squads are among the tually launched on the city, this one, so the acetone would drip toward the DROPPED busiest in the world. Eleven bomb tech- the fourth within a year, was by far the disks and begin eating through them. nicians have been killed in Germany heaviest and most destructive. This could take minutes or days, de- Glass OVER capsule Leaking acetone slowly since 2000, including three who died in As one squadron of B-17s followed pending on the concentration of ace- dissolves the celluloid delay disks. The GERMANY a single explosion while trying to defuse another into its run, almost five thou- tone and the number of disks the ar- Nose plug thickness of the disks a 1,000-pound bomb on the site of a pop- sand 500- and 1,000-pound bombs and morers had fitted into the fuse. When determines the delay. DURING Spring ular flea market in Göttingen in 2010. more than 700 incendiaries fell across the last disk weakened and snapped, Celluloid delay disks Early one recent winter morning, the rail yards, the chemical factory and the spring was released, the firing pin Booby trap THE WAR. disintegrate and An anti-withdrawal ball Horst Reinhardt, chief of the Branden- into the residential streets nearby. The struck the priming charge and—finally, release spring. prevents disarming. If it 1945, the industrial infrastructure burg state KMBD, told me that when first explosions started fires around the unexpectedly—the bomb exploded. is removed, the whole of the Third Reich—railheads, arms he started in in 1986, he railroad station; by the time the final Around three o’clock that after- firing-pin assembly Firing pin is re- snaps forward. factories and oil refineries—had been never believed he would still be at it al- B-17s began their attack, smoke from noon, a B-17 from the Eighth Air leased, striking the detonator. crippled, and dozens of cities across most 30 years later. Yet his men discover the burning city was so heavy the bom- Force released a 1,000-pound bomb Detonator Germany had been reduced to moon- more than 500 tons of unexploded mu- bardiers had difficulty seeing where some 20,000 feet above the rail yards. scapes of cinder and ash. nitions every year and defuse an aerial their bombs were falling. But where it Quickly reaching terminal velocity, Under Allied occupation, recon- bomb every two weeks or so. “People cleared, the men of the First Air Divi- it fell toward the southwest, missing struction began almost immediately. simply don’t know that there’s still that sion watched three concentrations of the yards and the chemical plants. It Person to scale Yet as many as 10 percent of the bombs many bombs under the ground,” he said. high explosives fall into houses near fell instead toward the canal and the dropped by Allied aircraft had failed And in one city in his district, the the road over the Lehnitzstrasse canal two bridges connecting Oranienburg The 1,000-lb. to explode, and as East and West Ger- events of 70 years ago have ensured bridge, around a mile southeast of the and the suburb of Lehnitz, closing on a bomb struck the ground at a speed Average depth of unexploded many rose from the ruins of the Re- that unexploded bombs remain a rail station and a few hundred yards wedge of low-lying land framed by the of at least 150 The bomb could end up miles per hour. 1,000-lb. bombs: ich, thousands of tons of unexploded daily menace. The place looks or- from one of the chemical factories. embankments of Lehnitzstrasse and in an upright position, 14.4 ft. causing the corrosive fluid airborne ordnance lay beneath them. dinary enough: a drab main street, These bomb loads were unlike al- the railroad line. Before the war this to fall away from the delay In both East and West, responsibil- pastel-painted apartment houses, an most any others the Eighth Air Force had been a quiet spot beside the water, disks so that the firing pin is not released. dropped over Germany during the war. leading to four villas among the trees, ity for defusing these bombs—along orderly railway station and a McDon- The depth of pene- with removing the innumerable hand ald’s with a tubular thicket of bicycles The majority of the bombs were armed / REDUX PICTURES FADEK 57: TIMOTHY P. 56: BETTMANN / CORBIS; P. parallel to a canal on Baumschulen- tration depended on the strike angle and type of soil or rock. 58 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY Hasaim Hussein weg. But now it was occupied by an- privately to the German government ti-aircraft guns and a pair of narrow, for his own profit. When he failed, he wooden, single-story barracks built sold 60,000 of them to the teacher for by the Wehrmacht. This was where a few pfennigs each. Carls, sensing a the bomb finally found the earth—just business opportunity, snapped them missing the more westerly of the two up for a deutsche mark apiece. barracks and plunging into the sandy When he compared what he’d bought soil at more than 150 miles per hour. with what the German government It bored down at an oblique angle be- had copied from the British, he real- fore the violence of its passage tore ized he had images the British didn’t. the stabilizing fins away from the tail, Convinced there must be more, held when it abruptly angled upward until, somewhere in the United States, Carls its kinetic energy finally spent, the established a company, Luftbilddaten- bomb and its M125 fuse came to rest: bank. With the help of archivists in nose-up but still deep underground. Britain and the States, he brought to By four o’clock, the skies over Ora- light hundreds of cans of aerial recon- nienburg had fallen silent. The city naissance film that had gone unexam- center was ablaze, the first of the de- ined for decades. Crucially, Carls also layed explosions had started: The Au- ergesellschaft plant would soon be de- stroyed and the rail yards tangled with IN THE wreckage. But the bomb beside the ca- POSTWAR nal lay undisturbed. As the shadows of the trees on Lehnitzstrasse lengthened RUSH TO in the low winter sun, acetone dripped REBUILD, A slowly from the shattered glass cap- sule within the bomb’s fuse. Taken by SYSTEMATIC gravity, it trickled harmlessly down- ward, away from the celluloid disks it APPROACH was supposed to weaken. TO FINDING Less than two months later, Nazi leaders capitulated. As much as ten UNEXPLODED square miles of had been re- BOMBS WAS duced to rubble. In the months following Oranienburg OFFICIALLY V-E Day that May, a in 1945. Far right: photo REGARDED AS woman who had been analyst Hans- bombed out of her Georg Carls. IMPOSSIBLE. home there found her way, with her young son, out to Oran- ied American 500-pound bomb with killed dozens of KMBD technicians same way: one at a time, often during had proved. Those images held clues found the maps made by the pilots who ienburg, where she had a boyfriend. The a time-delay fuse took the lives of the and hundreds of civilians. Thousands construction work. to where bombs had landed but never shot the film—“sortie plots” showing town was a constellation of yawning four technicians working to disarm it. of unexploded Allied bombs were exca- But the government of Hamburg detonated—a small, circular hole, for exactly where each run of pictures had craters and gutted factories, but beside Clearing unexploded munitions became vated and defused. But many had been had recently brokered an agreement example, in an otherwise consistent been taken—which had often been ar- Lehnitzstrasse and not far from the ca- the task of the German states’ KMBD. It buried in rubble or simply entombed in to allow the states of West Germany line of ragged craters. chived elsewhere, and without which nal, she found a small wooden barracks was dangerous work done at close quar- concrete during wartime remediation access to the 5.5 million aerial photo- Around the same time, Hans-Georg the images would be meaningless. empty and intact. She moved in with ters, removing fuses with wrenches and and forgotten. In the postwar rush for graphs in the declassified wartime ar- Carls, a geographer working on a mu- Supplementing the photographs and her boyfriend and her son. hammers. “You need a clear head. And reconstruction, nobody kept consis- chives of the Allied Central Interpre- nicipal project using aerial photography the sortie plots with local histories and calm hands,” Horst Reinhardt told me. tent information about where unex- tation Unit, held in Keele in England. to map trees in Würzburg, in southern police records, contemporary eyewit- Abandoned ammunition and unex- He said he never felt fear during the ploded bombs had been made safe and Between 1940 and 1945, ACIU pilots Germany, stumbled on another trove ness testimony and the detailed re- ploded bombs claimed their first post- defusing process. “If you’re afraid, you removed. A systematic approach to flew thousands of reconnaissance of ACIU images. Stored in a teacher’s cords of bombing missions held at the war victims almost as soon as the last can’t do it. For us, it’s a completely nor- finding them was officially regarded as missions before and after every raid cellar in Mainz, they had been ordered Air Force Historical Research Agency guns fell silent. In June 1945, a cache mal job. In the same way that a baker impossible. When Reinhardt started by Allied bombers, taking millions from the archives of the U.S. Defense at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, of German anti-tank weapons exploded bakes bread, we defuse bombs.” work with the East German KMBD of stereoscopic photographs that re- Intelligence Agency by an enterprising Carls was able to build a chronology in Bremen, killing 35 and injuring 50; In the decades after the war, bombs, in 1986, both he and his counterparts vealed both where the attacks could be American intelligence officer based in of everything that had happened to a

three months later in Hamburg, a bur- mines, grenades and artillery shells in the West usually found bombs the LUFTBILDDATENBANK / REDUX PICTURES FADEK TIMOTHY directed and then how successful they Germany, who had hoped to sell them given patch of land between 1939 and

60 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2016 January • February 2016 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 61 1945. Examining the photographs us- ever he could. His girlfriend and Willi, ing a stereoscope, which makes the their only son, joined him, and slowly images appear in 3-D, Carls could see the house came together. By 2005, it was where bombs had fallen, where they finished—plastered, weatherproofed had exploded and where they may not and insulated, with a garage, a new have. From that data he could compile bathroom and a brick fireplace. Die- an Ergebniskarte—a “result map”—for trich began living there full-time from clients ranging from international May to December and planned to move consortiums to homeowners, with in permanently when he retired. high-risk areas crosshatched in red. Like everyone else in Oranienburg, “He was the pioneer,” said Allan Wil- he knew the city had been bombed liams, curator of Britain’s National during the war, but so had a lot of Collection of Aerial Photography, places in Germany. And parts of Oran- which now includes the pictures once ienburg were evacuated so frequently held in Keele. that it was easy to believe there Carls, now nearing 68 and semi-re- couldn’t be many bombs left. Buried tired, employs a staff of more than 20, bombs had apparently gone off on their with offices occupying the top three own a few times—once, just around floors of his large house in a suburb of Würzburg. Image analysis is now a central component of bomb disposal in ONE each of Germany’s 16 states, and Carls SATURDAY has provided many of the photographs they use, including all of those used by MORNING, Reinhardt and the Brandenburg KMBD. HE HEARD One day in the Luftbilddatenbank office, Johannes Kroeckel, 37, one of ON THE Carls’ senior photo-interpreters, called up a Google Earth satellite image of NEWS THAT the area north of Berlin on one of two THE BOMB giant computer monitors on his desk. He closed in on an L-shaped cul-de-sac COULDN’T BE in Oranienburg, in the area between DEFUSED; Lehnitzstrasse and the canal. On the Paule Dietrich IT WOULD other monitor, he had spent more than ten HAVE TO BE used the geolocation years renovat- data of the address ing his house. DETONATED. to summon a list of more than 200 aerial photographs of combined them into a single image. I landscape below. “Maybe you have 10, he and a dozen or so other children the city, he built a summer bungalow. the corner from Dietrich’s house, one the area shot by Allied reconnaissance put on a pair of cardboard 3-D glasses, shadows of trees or houses,” he said, who shared the birthday were taken to But in 1989, Dietrich turned 40, the exploded under the sidewalk where a pilots and scrolled through them until and the landscape rose toward me: pointing to a crisp quadrilateral of tea with President Wilhelm Pieck, who Berlin Wall fell and his Ostmarks be- man was walking his dog. But nobody, he found the ones he needed. A week upended matchbox shapes of roofless late-winter shade cast by one of the gave them each passbooks to savings came worthless overnight. Three years not even the dog and its walker, had after the March 15 raid, photographs houses; a chunk of earth bitten out of villas a few hundred yards from the accounts containing 15 Ostmarks.­ At later, the rightful owners of the land in been seriously injured. Most people 4113 and 4114 were taken from 27,000 the Lehnitzstrasse embankment; a canal. “You can’t see every unexploded 20, he and the others were guests at the Falkensee returned from the West to simply preferred not to think about it. feet over Oranienburg, a fraction of a giant, perfectly circular crater in the bomb with the aerials.” But there was opening of the Berlin TV tower, the tall- reclaim it. The state of Brandenburg, however, second apart. They showed the scene middle of Baumschulenweg. more than enough evidence to mark est building in all of Germany. Over the In nearby Oranienburg, where his knew Oranienburg presented a unique near the canal in sharp monochro- Yet we could see no sign of a dor- an Ergebniskarte in ominous red ink. next 20 years, the Republic was good to mother had lived since the 1960s, Diet- problem. Between 1996 and 2007, the matic detail, the curve of the Lehnitz- mant 1,000-bomb concealed in the Dietrich. He drove buses and subway rich met an elderly lady who was trying local government spent €45 million on strasse bridge and the bare branches ruins of the neighborhood, where, Paule Dietrich bought the house on the trains for the Berlin transit authority. to sell a small wooden house down by bomb disposal—more than any other of the trees on Baumschulenweg trac- soon after the photograph was taken, cul-de-sac in Oranienburg in 1993. He He was given an apartment in the city, the canal—an old Wehrmacht barracks town in Germany, and more than a ing fine shadows on the water and the a woman would find a home for her- and the German Democratic Republic and he became a taxi driver. He added she’d lived in since the war. It needed a third of total statewide expenses for pale ground beyond. Then Kroeckel self and her family. Kroeckel explained had been born on the same day, October to the savings the president had given lot of work, but it was right by the water. during that used Photoshop to tint one picture in that even an image as stark as this one 7, 1949, and for a while the coincidence him, and on an abandoned piece of land Dietrich sold his car and mobile home time. In 2006, the state Ministry of

cyan and the other in magenta, and could not reveal everything about the seemed auspicious. When he turned DIETRICH PAULE 62-63: COURTESY PP. in Falkensee, in the countryside outside to buy it and began working on it when- the Interior commissioned Wolfgang

62 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2016 January • February 2016 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 63 Spyra of the Brandenburg Univer- siren sounded, Dietrich drove over to sity of Technology to determine how his place with a friend and his son. He many unexploded bombs might re- could barely speak. Where his house main in the city and where they might had once stood was a crater more than be. Two years later, Spyra delivered a 60 feet across, filled with water and 250-page report revealing not only the scorched debris. The straw the KMBD huge number of time bombs dropped had used to contain bomb splinters on the city on March 15, 1945, but also was scattered everywhere—on the the unusually high proportion of them roof of his shed, across his neighbor’s that had failed to go off. That was a yard. The wreckage of Dietrich’s front function of local geology and the angle porch leaned precariously at the edge at which some bombs hit the ground: of the crater. The mayor, a TV crew and Hundreds of them had plunged nose- Horst Reinhardt of the KMBD were first into the sandy soil but then had there. Dietrich wiped away tears. He come to rest nose-up, disabling their was less than a year from retirement. chemical fuses. Spyra calculated that 326 bombs—or 57 tons of high-explo- Early one morning at the headquarters sive ordnance—remained hidden be- of the Brandenburg KMBD in Zos- sen, Reinhardt swept his hand slowly across a display case in his spartan, “YOU CAN’T linoleum-floored office. “These are all SEE EVERY American fuses. These are Russian ones, these are English ones. These are UNEXPLODED German ones,” he said, pausing among BOMB WITH the dozens of metal cylinders that filled the case, some topped with small pro- AERIALS,” pellers, others cut away to reveal the mechanisms inside. “These are bomb THE IMAGE fuses. These are mine fuses. That’s just EXPERT SAID. a tiny fingernail of what’s out there.” At 63, Reinhardt was in the last few STILL, HE days of his career in bomb disposal MARKED and looking forward to gardening, collecting stamps THE MAP Dietrich now and playing with his uses his for- grandchildren. He IN OMINOUS mer carport to entertain recalled the bomb in RED INK. visitors. Paule Dietrich’s yard, and said his men had neath the city’s streets and yards. fill out some forms, and in July, city to get at it.” They said that it was ein It took them another month to un- ate an exclusion zone right now, all the had no alternative but to blow it up. And the celluloid disks in the bombs’ contractors arrived. They drilled 38 Verdachtspunkt—a point of suspicion. cover the bomb, more than 12 feet way from here to the street.” Sallow and world-weary, he said it was timing mechanisms had become brit- holes in his yard, each more than 30 feet Nobody used the word “bomb.” down: 1,000 pounds, big as a man, Dietrich took his TV set and his dog impossible to tell how long it would tle with age and acutely sensitive to deep, and dropped a magnetometer into They marked the spot beside the rusted, its tail stabilizer gone. They and drove over to his girlfriend’s house, take to clear Germany of unexploded vibration and shock. So bombs had be- every one. It took two weeks. A month house with an orange traffic cone and shored up the hole with steel plates in Lehnitz. On the radio, he heard that ordnance. “There will still be bombs gun to go off spontaneously. A decayed later, they drilled more holes in back prepared to pump out groundwater and chained the bomb so it couldn’t the city had stopped the trains running 200 years from now,” he told me. “It’s fuse of this type was responsible for of the house. They were zeroing in on from around it. When Dietrich’s friends move. Every night, Dietrich stayed in over the canal. The KMBD was defus- becoming increasingly difficult. At the deaths of the three KMBD techni- something, but didn’t say what. turned up that afternoon to celebrate the house with his German shepherd, ing a bomb. The streets around the this point, we’ve dealt with all the cians in Göttingen in 2010. They had It was nine in the morning on Octo- his birthday, they took pictures of the Rocky. They slept with their heads just house were sealed off. Two days later, open spaces. But now it’s the houses, dug out the bomb, but weren’t touch- ber 7, 2013—the day Dietrich turned cone. Throughout October, the con- a few feet from the hole. “I thought ev- on Saturday morning, he heard on the the factories. We have to look directly ing it when it went off. 64—when a delegation of city officials tractors had pumps running round the erything was going to be fine,” he said. news that the KMBD said the bomb underneath the houses.” arrived at his front gate. “I thought clock. They started digging at seven On November 19, the contractors couldn’t be defused; it would have to Late the following day, as the wet In January 2013, Paule Dietrich read they were here for my birthday,” he every morning and stayed until eight were drinking coffee as usual when be detonated. He was walking with wind slapped viciously at the plastic in the newspaper that the city of Ora- said when I met him recently. But that every night. Each morning they drank their boss arrived. “Paule, you need to Rocky in the forest a mile away when roof overhead, I sat with Paule Dietrich nienburg was going to start looking for wasn’t it at all. “There’s something coffee in Dietrich’s carport. “Paule,” take your dog and get off the property he heard the explosion. in what had been his carport. A few feet

bombs in his neighborhood. He had to here,” the officials told him. “We need they said, “this will be no problem.” / REDUX PICTURES FADEK 64-65: TIMOTHY PP. immediately,” he said. “We have to cre- Two hours later, when the all-clear of grass sepa- CONTINUED ON PAGE 138

64 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2016 January • February 2016 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 65 By the time we met, Dietrich had Bombs been offered scant financial compen- Frida Kahlo CONTINUED FROM PAGE 65 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 113 sation by the authorities—technically, rated it from the spot where his house the federal government was required valuables during a hospital stay, writ- once stood. The bomb crater had been to pay only for damage caused by Ger- ten in 1940 as Frida departed San Fran- filled in, and Dietrich was living there man-made munitions. But among a pile cisco, and now in the collections of the in a mobile home. He kept the carport of documents and newspaper clippings Smithsonian’s Archives of American for entertaining, and had equipped it he had in the binder was a rendering Art—is a testament to why they lasted. with a fridge, a shower and furniture of the new home he wanted to build on They didn’t have a passionate relation- donated by friends and supporters the site. It had once been the best pre- ship that dissipated and was gone. They from Oranienburg, where he has be- fabricated bungalow available in East had an earthly human love as well as come a minor celebrity. Germany, he said, and a contractor in the loftiness of a revolutionary agenda Sitting at a small table, Dietrich Falkensee had given him all the compo- and their work. The fact that this isn’t a chain-smoked Chesterfields and drank nents of one, except for the roof. Even profound letter makes it in some ways instant coffee. He produced an orange so, more than a year after the explosion, more special. She addressed it to “Di- binder filled with photographs of his he hadn’t started work on it. ego, my love”—even though this is the former home: as it was when he bought Outside, in the afternoon gloaming, most mundane, simplest correspon- it; when he and his colleagues were he showed me why. In the grass at the dence, she still noted their love, their in- decorating it; and, finally, as it was af- bottom of the embankment of Lehnitz- timacy. She held the letter in her hands, ter the bomb had reached the end of its strasse was a patch of sandy ground. she kissed it with her lips, he received it 70-year fuse. Dietrich said he realized Men from the city had recently marked and held it in his hands. This little piece that he and his family had been lucky: it with two painted stakes. They had of paper holds their simplicity and their Every summer, his grandchildren had told him only that it was a “double intimacy, the earthiness of their life. It played in a plastic pool near where the anomaly,” but he knew precisely what contains the sender and the receiver. bomb had been lying; at night, they they meant. Paule Dietrich had two As artists, every scrap of paper is slept in a mobile home beside the pool. more unexploded American bombs at meaningful. This is brown, folded. He “Directly on the bomb,” he said. the end of his yard. saved it. Somebody kept it. It still exists. SAMPLE

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