← The History Podcast
The History Podcast
Half-Life: 2. The Quiet Town by the River
00:28:11
Dangers lurk beneath the soil, in the town where Joe's great-grandfather worked.
Loading summary
Transcript61 lines
- [00:00]
Ryan Seacrest
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
Ameca Insurance Representative
At Ameca Insurance we know it's more than just a car. It's the two door coupe that was there for your first drive, the hatchback that took you cross country and back, and the minivan that tackles the weekly carpool for the cars you couldn't live without. Trust Ameca Auto Insurance. Amiga Empathy is our best policy.
- [00:36]
Ryan Seacrest
Ryan Seacrest here When you have a busy schedule, it's important to maximize your downtime. One of the best ways to do that is by going to chumbacasino.com Chumba Casino has all your favorite social casino games like spin slots, bingo and solitaire that you can play for free for a chance to redeem some serious prizes. So hop on to chumbacasino.com now and live the Chumba Life. Sponsored by Chumba Casino.
- [01:00]
Chumba Casino Representative
No purchase necessary. VGW Group Void where prohibited by law 21/ terms and conditions apply.
- [01:08]
Joe Dunthorne
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts the first time I came to Oranienburg in 2019, I knew almost nothing about the town. After finishing reading my great grandfather's memoir, I was feeling confused that he dedicated far more pages to his great aunt's love life and his childhood trips to the seaside than his first hand experience of living here, raising a Jewish family under the Third Reich. After more than 500 pages of him avoiding the point, his final 13 pages, in which he unburdened himself of the guilt he'd been carrying, still left me with unanswered questions. I convinced my partner to join me on what I pitched as a fun weekend in Berlin with just a tiny bit of family historical research thrown in. I was planning to see my grandmother's old apartment, maybe even sweet talk my way inside and see where she used to brush her teeth morning and night with the radioactive toothpaste her father manufactured. So on a cold December morning we caught the S Bahn north, watching the city skyline disappear as the train entered deep forest. Oranienburg was only half an hour outside of Berlin, but it felt like another world. When we arrived at the train station, we found out that a half ton WW2 bomb, a bomb that had fallen from the sky 75 years ago, had just been discovered nearby, still live and buried in the soft banks of the river. 5,000 people had been evacuated from their homes while 100 police and firefighters established a perimeter. We learned that this wasn't unusual foranienburg, a town with a full time bomb disposal team. When I looked on the local council's website, there was a special page for Ordering the collection of Christmas trees, garden waste and unexploded ordnance. Oranienburg is also Germany's most radioactive town. We learned while walking the streets with our phones out, trying not to think about the fact that my partner was three months pregnant. In Oranienburg they test the emergency bomb siren every Saturday. Except of course, on this occasion when it wasn't a test. You're listening to Half Life. I'm Joe Dunthorne and this is episode two, the Quiet Town by the River. After the all clear siren, my partner and I walked through the town looking at photos on social media that showed the rusty bomb dug up and disarmed. During the Second World War, more bombs fell on Oranienburg per square kilometer than any other German town. From the photos, this particular bomb resembled a whole roast pig with an oilcloth stuffed in its mouth. The mayor of the town was now quoted as saying that there was one less monster in Oranienburg. And the man standing proudly beside the monster, giving a big thumbs up, was Mr. Andre Muller, head of the Oranienburg bomb squad. When I returned to Oranienburg five years later, I arranged for a meeting at Andre's office, bringing with me Eleanor, my radio producer, and Lorenz, our interpreter.
- [05:50]
Eleanor McDowell
So their work started with the fact that there were bombs detonating by themselves in Oranienburg since 1977. There were five self detonations like they call them. Since 1991 they found 231 bombs here and they think there will be 300 more in the ground.
- [06:27]
Joe Dunthorne
I ask, does he live in Orenburg?
- [06:30]
Eleanor McDowell
Leben Siede? Oranienburg wouldn't go to sleep one hour. No, because he says it's not healthy to live where you work.
- [06:45]
Joe Dunthorne
Is that the only reason? In a bowl on Andre's desk, among highlighter pens and paper clips, there was a full size grenade being used as a key ring. And beside it there was what looked like a quite unusual paperweight, which was in fact one of the fuses he had removed from a Second World War bomb. It's these fuses that are at the heart of the problem in Oranienburg.
- [07:12]
Eleanor McDowell
These fuses have. How you say that? Laufzeit. The intended delay is between 1 and 144 hours. It was meant to make sure that no ambulances and other people who wanted to help could go because nobody could know at what moment a bomb could explode.
- [07:45]
Joe Dunthorne
Wow. So anyone who's hurt is just left lying for days?
- [07:50]
Eleanor McDowell
Yeah. Okay. 15th of March 1945, the Welchbrigadewer, the U.S. air Force attacked Germany and in Oranienburg, through like 5,000 bombs. Of those 5,000, 4,000 were with these chemical fuses. And this is singular in Germany that such a small area was so intensely bombarded. The aim of this attack was to destroy all of the equipment, to kill the people, and to destroy also the raw materials that were there.
- [08:52]
Joe Dunthorne
The Allies were targeting Oranienburg because of its importance as a center of military industry, as well as the chemical weapons laboratory and the gas mask factory in both of which my great grandfather had worked. There was also a military aircraft manufacturer and an SS barracks, not to mention the uranium refinery for the Nazis atomic bomb project. Oranienburg was the quiet town in which Berlin hid its secrets. So the Allies aimed to flatten it, and it worked. 5,000 bombs dropped in less than an hour.
- [09:31]
Eleanor McDowell
But now it's getting complicated.
- [09:42]
Joe Dunthorne
The bombs were designed to drop and bury themselves in the ground, nose down. Then the countdown to detonation would start. But due to the shape of the bombs and the particular structure of the soil in Oranienburg, many of these bombs ended the wrong way round, nose up. This meant their fuses malfunctioned. And rather than delaying the detonation by a matter of hours or days, they instead delayed the explosion by years or decades. And that means that basically the bomb will still go off, but because it's not functioning as normal, that timer can be, you know, where are we now? 80 years later and the bombs could still go off.
- [10:29]
Eleanor McDowell
Could you ask that? All these bumps will detonate sooner or later?
- [10:47]
Joe Dunthorne
Right. When my great grandfather Siegfried worked for the Auer Company in Oranienburg, he lived so close to his laboratory that he could hear the machinery from his bed. That was in 1925, when he was making radioactive toothpaste, a product he always thought of as rather Gimmicky. But in 1926, he was offered a promotion to what was called the protection department. And for the first time in his career, he felt he was doing something worthwhile. Feeding apricot and peach stones into a large rotating furnace, he made activated charcoal, a substance that was nicknamed the universal antidote for how well it could neutralize poisons and save lives. A few teaspoons of this black powder inside a gas mask filter enabled the wearer to walk calmly into a room full of chlorine gas. And that was also the downside. In order to check the charcoal worked, it was necessary to test it with the latest chemical weapons. He and his colleagues sometimes had to wear the masks themselves. Stepping into an airtight room with a pellet of Hydrogen cyanide. And so gradually, inevitably, he became an expert in chemical weapons. In 1928 he was offered another promotion. Though, as he wrote in his memoir, this one he was much less sure about. He knew that making poison gas was in clear violation of Article 171 of the Treaty of Versailles. The use of asphyxiating poisonous or other gases, their manufacture and importation are strictly forbidden in Germany. For my great grandfather, whether or not to take the job was, in his words, a ticklish question.
- [13:19]
Eleanor McDowell
What is what you see now exactly?
- [13:24]
Joe Dunthorne
Next door to Andre's office, we met his colleague Frau Keisel, who was sitting in front of a huge triple width computer screen across which was an image that looked like the surface of the moon. In truth, this was a composite of historic aerial photographs of Oranienburg from after the bombings in 1945. Frau Keisel's job is to work out where bombs exploded and where ones may still be lying in wait in the soil. Would you be able to show us the Linden ring? I hoped she could find an image of where my family lived.
- [14:10]
Eleanor McDowell
Mark the spot and then we take the aerial shots. You can look into the buildings.
- [14:28]
Joe Dunthorne
You can see through the.
- [14:29]
Eleanor McDowell
Because the roofs are not as you.
- [14:31]
Joe Dunthorne
Can see through the windows. This is Alles im grunderkompletsa sturt.
- [14:35]
Eleanor McDowell
It's completely destroyed.
- [14:38]
Joe Dunthorne
Would it be possible to look also down here? This is where I think my great grandfather worked in his laboratory.
- [14:51]
Eleanor McDowell
Exactly where this building was there is a crater. So there it was destroyed by a bomb in the center of the building. Okay.
- [15:04]
Joe Dunthorne
Complete ousgebombed. Completely gone.
- [15:07]
Eleanor McDowell
Yeah. So just around this building where your grand grandfather used to work, they found a bomb in 1991 and a 500 kilo bomb. And you can see all these where they had exploded just at or around the building. So you can imagine that there was nothing left. This is one of the areas that was most destroyed in the city of Oranienburg.
- [15:48]
Ryan Seacrest
It is Ryan Seacrest here. There was a recent social media trend which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to chumbacasino.com it's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumba Casino has over a hundred online casino style games, all absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now@chumbacasino.com sponsored by Chumba Casino.
- [16:13]
Chumba Casino Representative
No PURCHASE NECESSARY VGW Group VOID where prohibited by law 21 + terms and conditions apply.
- [16:21]
Joe Dunthorne
My Great grandfather spent a week trying to decide whether to take the new job at the chemical weapons laboratory. In his memoir, there are pages of him weighing up the options, fighting with himself about it. He knew it would be better paid. They had two young children and needed the money, having lost their family savings during the hyperinflation in the early 1920s. But he also knew the work would be dangerous, which was why his employers were offering him an extra life insurance policy. His brother in law, Wilhelm, a lawyer who he called one of the most principled and honest people I have ever known, said he should say yes, because otherwise they would just find someone else to do the job, someone with less integrity. In his memoir, my great grandfather was keen to point out that he was offered the job in peacetime, at the height of the Weimar Republic, 1928, when the economy was back on track, and it was easy to feel that these weapons were largely theoretical and would never be needed. And anyway, in his more hopeful moments, he imagined developing a new kind of chemical, a gas that would waft across the fields of battle and painlessly put the enemy to sleep as gentle as a lullaby, leaving them unconscious in the mud for long enough to be carried to the prisoner of war camps where they would wake defeated but unharmed.
- [18:32]
Eleanor McDowell
On the right side, you see a company looking for bombs in the ground. We can't pass afterwards if we want to.
- [18:46]
Joe Dunthorne
Later that morning we drove into town with another colleague from the bomb squad. My number is Gerd Wil. This was the detonation master, a quiet and reserved 39 year old.
- [18:57]
Eleanor McDowell
So we have to walk some meters.
- [19:02]
Joe Dunthorne
It was a normal Monday morning in Oranienburg, and multiple teams of specialist workers were busy hunting for World War II explosives.
- [19:13]
Eleanor McDowell
So the city of Oranienburg wants to renovate the street. And before they start their work, they need to know if there are any bombs left or if it's free from danger.
- [19:37]
Joe Dunthorne
What looked at first like ordinary roadworks was, on closer inspection, the drilling of precise and evenly spaced bomb boreholes in the pavement. Into each hole they sent a magnetic probe to search the surrounding soil for anything suspicious.
- [19:55]
Eleanor McDowell
Can you imagine what kind of work that is for Oranienburg to do that all over the city? This company, for example, dropped drills every day somewhere.
- [20:13]
Joe Dunthorne
It was strange how routine it felt. Men in high vis cleaning up a distant past, still breathing beneath the surface. Except these bombs were much more than a metaphor. In 2010, three disposal workers in Gottingen were killed while digging up a World War II explosive. It had the same slow release fuse as the ones in Oranienburg but it's insane to think Kino. It's about to be the 80th anniversary of that bombing in 1945, and it's still full time work for so many people. Obviously for the people who've been survived these things, it lives in them for that time as well. Or in their children, or in their children's children. In the summer of 1928, after careful consideration, my great grandfather said yes to the new job. In his memoir, he from today's perspective, there is no question that I should have declined the proposal. I also honestly admit that I hardly understand how I was able to say yes back then. Today I openly confess to my descendants who will read these lines, that I made a grave error. They built it next to the river, the laboratory for the experimental production of chemical weapons. My great grandfather described how at the end of each day, he and his colleagues would take the liquid diphosgene, a powerful respiratory poison, and pour it into the soft earth by the harbor, the same water in which my grandmother sometimes swam, albeit up upstream. He was confident that the chemical would be quickly neutralized. It's possible that the fish felt something, he wrote, but I doubt it. Finally, the detonation master drove us to a football pitch at the edge of town where there was a large blue skip that was covered and sealed.
- [23:05]
Eleanor McDowell
The soil that was radioactive is in this container already.
- [23:11]
Joe Dunthorne
We were not allowed to get close because it was full of radioactive material. This was yet another family legacy. When my great grandfather and his colleagues made radioactive toothpaste, they extracted thorium from monazite sand, huge piles of which lay strewn around the factory buildings. After the bombings of 1945, the people of Oranienburg tried to rebuild the town by filling in the many bomb craters with whatever materials they could find. In this way, the same radioactive thorium with which my grandmother brushed her teeth was then distributed across Aranienburg, emitting alpha particles in perfect crater shaped holes. Walking around Oranienburg, it felt like my family history was everywhere beneath my feet, either silently irradiating me or waiting to blow me up. It felt so present that I assumed it would be easy to find more written records about my great grandfather's work with poison gases. Given that, it sometimes feels like every corner of Nazi history has been written about, seeing as there's a 200 page book about the collectible spoons of the Third Reich, surely it shouldn't be difficult to find a chapter or two about an actual chemical weapons facility developing poisons for the German military. But I slowly came to realise why that wasn't likely. Many official records that might have explained what went on at the laboratory didn't survive the British and American bombs that ripped through the town in 1945. And of the confidential records that weren't blown up, some were likely destroyed by the very people they implicated. And of those that were not shredded or burned, many were subsequently seized by either the Soviets or the Americans, both of whom had an interest in taking away information and technology they might find useful. If any other documents survived in the corporate archive of Mine safety appliances, the US based defense manufacturer who took over the hour company in 1958, they did not seem motivated to maintain a public archive of material that could connect them to the Holocaust. Finally, I thought of my own mother, who admitted that when clearing out my grandmother's flat after her death, she had dumped a large box of Siegfried's letters and documents straight into the recycling. One of the few documents I did manage to track down was an old architectural plan of my family home. The apartment building looked quite fancy, with a steep red tiled roof and columns around the front door. But the most noteworthy feature was the bomb shelter, built in its basement in 1932, one of the first in Germany, installed a year before the Nazis came to power. And did you say you had the first air raid shelter?
- [26:48]
Family Member
First air raid shelter in Germany was a Nauhausen. There's a picture of it.
- [26:55]
Joe Dunthorne
The shelter was put in by my great grandfather's employers, the Hour Company. It was for educational purposes, as part of their gas protection school. The idea was that students could learn how it might feel if one day, years later, bombs really did rain down on Oranienburg. My granny used to hear the clomping of feet in their hallway as students examined their apartment building, discussing what materials would burn fastest in the event of a firebomb.
- [27:31]
Family Member
And gas masks we had.
- [27:33]
Joe Dunthorne
And you remember playing with those?
- [27:35]
Family Member
We didn't play with them exactly, but we did possess them.
- [27:40]
Joe Dunthorne
But that was before there was any need to have any of that.
- [27:45]
Family Member
No, it was German preparation for war.
- [27:48]
Joe Dunthorne
Was it? Even in 30.
- [27:52]
Family Member
Well, but you know, if you go about it and try and gasp, people, you've got to be aware of the consequences.
- [28:06]
Joe Dunthorne
Reading my great grandfather's memoir, I reassured myself that ultimately none of the chemical weapons he worked with in Oranienburg were, were ever manufactured in large volumes or used in war. His work never moved beyond the realm of research. At least that's how he put it in his memoir. All that remained then was a little fact checking. Half Life was written and presented by me, Joe Dunthorne. It was Produced by Eleanor McDowell and mixed by Mike Woolley. Lorenz Rolhauser was our translator in Oranienburg. The music was composed by Jeremy Walmsley, the story consultant was Sarah Geiss, and the executive producer was Alan Hall. It was a Falling tree production for BBC Radio 4 and the History podcast.
- [29:56]
Ameca Insurance Representative
Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human.
- [30:09]
Joe Dunthorne
Thank you for calling Ameca Insurance.
- [30:11]
Eleanor McDowell
Hey, I was just in an accident.
- [30:13]
Joe Dunthorne
Don't worry. We'll get you taken care of.
- [30:15]
Ameca Insurance Representative
At Ameca, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking. It's human. Emeca empathy is our best policy.
- [30:26]
Chumba Casino Representative
Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck.
- [30:30]
Joe Dunthorne
I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.
- [30:32]
Chumba Casino Representative
With family. Cannolis and spins mean everything. Now you want to get mixed up in the family business? Introducing the Godfather@Champacasino.com. test your luck in the shadowy world of the Godfather slots. Someday, I will call upon you to.
- [30:47]
Joe Dunthorne
Do a service for me.
- [30:48]
Chumba Casino Representative
Play the Godfather now@Champacasino.com. welcome to the family. No purchase necessary. VGW Group void. We're prohibited by law 21 + terms and conditions apply.