Hanover evacuates 50,000 after five RAF bombs are found

Postwar Germany began its second biggest evacuation of a major city on Sunday as ordnance disposal experts moved in to Hanover to tackle five RAF bombs from World War II found on building sites.

Fifty thousand people from flats, houses, care homes and clinics were on the move in Hanover at 9.00am and told they won’t be allowed back for up to 24 hours. The number amounts to ten per cent of the city’s population.

Hanover was hit 125 times by Allied air forces during the war. The unstable duds that must be tackled date from a raid in October 1943 when 260,000 high explosive and incendiary devices were dropped.

The raid killed 1,245 locals and left a further 250,000 homeless.

Hanover was often a target for Allied forces in World War II. It was a vital railway junction through which two major east-west and north-south routes passed.

Additionally, it was an industrial city where tyres for military vehicles and aircraft were produced.

The Hanover evacuation was only topped by a mass movement of people in Augsburg on Christmas Eve last year when 54,000 people were forced from their homes by unexplored wartime bombs.

Thousands of helpers from across the state of Lower Saxony have been drafted in to aid in the Hanover evacuation.

Schools have been opened to accommodate those with nowhere to go. Long distance trains have been rerouted to avoid the city’s main train station.

The ‘iron harvest’ of bombs and munitions continues to be a huge headache for Germany 72 years after the end of the war.

It is estimated that 150,000 bombs lie unexploded beneath German towns and cities and they grow more unstable with every passing day.

Dozens have been killed and injured in explosions in the past decades and thousands placed in danger.

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