Germany Dumped Piles of WWII Ammo in the Sea. It's Trying to Recover Them

Slowly, Dirk Schoenen dives down to a huge pile of ammunition from World War II at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. He removes some of the top pieces and carefully puts them into a basket, as a team of engineers, divers, and seamen watch his every move from a camera attached to his head. After an hour, the men pull Schoenen back up onto the Baltic Lift, a mobile platform located 3.7 miles off the small town of Boltenhagen on the German coast. He has recovered several 12.8cm-shells, fragments of smaller grenades, and several 2-centimeter projectiles. His bounty was fruitful but humble compared to what's left on the sea floor, reports the AP.

Approximately 1.6 million tons of old ammunition are lying on the bottom of the North Sea and Baltic Sea, posing a considerable danger: their casings are slowly rusting and emitting toxic substances such as TNT compounds. As tensions between Russia and NATO build up on the Baltic Sea, Europeans are still busy cleaning up the mess that World War II—and to a smaller extent World War I—left behind in the ocean. Most of the ammunition was deliberately sunk after the war because the Allies were concerned that Germans would resume hostilities against them again at some point, and ordered that Germany destroy all ordnance. At the time, the easiest way to do so was to simply dump everything into the sea.

Trains from all over Germany were sent to the coasts in 1946, and fishermen were commissioned to take the material to designated disposal areas in the Baltic and North Seas. Often, however, they threw the ammunition elsewhere into the ocean, and strong currents, especially in the North Sea, have spread the ordnance all over the seafloor. In an effort to clean up the seabed from the remains of war, Germany has given $117.4 million to diving teams to study how to best recover the ammunition, and to engineers to come up with long-term plans on how to rid the oceans of it.

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"This isn't a routine job," said Schoenen, 60, who has been diving since 1986 and volunteered for the Baltic Taucher diving team. "Most of these things can be handled, but you mustn't ... just randomly hit something or throw something away." The rotting ammunition isn't just contaminating the water—it can also explode as the detonators of sea mines and unexploded aerial bombs become increasingly sensitive over time. That is, however, rare. More here.