Wartime chemical weapons threaten Germany

GERMAN environmentalists fear a looming catastrophe as the country struggles to destroy its mammoth backlog of chemical weapons from two world wars. The phosgene and mustard gas shells used to lethal effect against allied troops in the first world war, coupled with the nerve gas agents developed by Nazi scientists, are piling up at an incinerator plant in Mnster where they await destruction.

The shells are leaking their lethal toxins into the ground from bunkers at a prohibited military zone filled to capacity. Each week more shells, grenades and containers - most of them rusting - arrive along with tons of contaminated soil to be burned in a giant incinerator in the north-western town.

"The bunkers are filled to overflowing," said Manfred Dornblut, an army officer in charge of the disposal team. "Officially we have no more space but the c-weapons keep on coming."

The incinerator in Mnster works around the clock. Shells are first cut open by an automatic drill in a room no personnel may enter without a chemical suit. When detonators and fuses are separated from the projectile's load the chemicals themselves are burned to ash in the 2500C heat of the furnace.

A second high-tech furnace was built at a cost of #65 million and should have been in service three years ago. It comes complete with a special unit to "wash" contaminated soil free from toxins but it remains idle, the victim of continual technical and bureaucratic problems.

Meanwhile, along with the shells, 40,000 tons of contaminated earth is added to each week by military trucks which bring it to Mnster from firing ranges and battlefields all across Germany. Many of the chemical weapons were buried by British troops after the second world war around Mnster.

The city which saw the signing of the Peace of Westphalia marking the end of the brutal 30 Years War has historical reasons for becoming the dustbin for the doomsday weapons of the Kaiser and the Nazis; it was an arsenal town in the 19th and 20th centuries where many of the chemical agents were manufactured in the first place. In 1919 an explosion at an ordnance plant spewed thousands of shells into the countryside that offers up its toxic harvest to farmers, foresters and road-repairers on a regular basis.

Werner Jacobi, leader of the Chemical Weapons Disposal Group in Mnster said: "We are forever finding chemical munitions. Someone lays a cable or digs up a road and we get the call out." One of his men, Dieter Martin, said: "From the beginning I told my wife how dangerous this job is. Part of the problem is that we don't often know what shells contain until they are taken back to the incinerator and its adjacent laboratory."

Each week the prohibited military zone in the north of the town takes delivery of thousands more tons of earth and dozens, sometimes hundreds, more chemical shells that arrive in special military convoys. Some of these include tabun and sarin, the nerve-gas agents Hitler's scientists developed but which even he, a victim of a British mustard gas attack in the first world war, refused to unleash upon his enemies.

The backlog has become chronic in recent months due to piles of contaminated earth brought from the military exercise grounds at Ehra- Lessian near Wolfsburg. Also discovered there were shells containing agents that cause huge blisters on skin and a breakdown of the body's immune system.

Hans-Jrgen Rapsch from the Niedersachsen Ministry for the Environment in Hanover, said: "We insisted on the removal of these substances after finding decomposition products of chemical weapons in the earth and ground water." The agency spent over #330,000 on drilling and investigating the contaminated soil which it says is in a "frightful" state.

The special army transporters worked around the clock for several months moving the earth which now adds to the problems in Mnster. Bernd Appler, director of the national association for the disposal of chemical weaponry and substances, says he hopes the new incinerator will be working by the end of this month.

Permits for its operation have not yet been obtained from the local authority which is concerned about toxic gases being released into the air. But he said: "Every process is completely cut off from the outside world and no toxic gases will be released into the outside environment. The earth will be washed so thoroughly that only a few harmless salts are left that can be thrown onto a rubbish tip."

Christoph Hoffmann, a Berlin environmentalist, is among those pressing the German government for a swifter solution. He said: "Not only is the water table and soil around Mnster under threat but woodland, heath, streams and rivers across Germany. More troops should be assigned from the Bundeswehr to search for and remove these weapons."

Local environmental groups are divided as to whether the new incinerator is either good for the town or bad for it; some see it as the solution to the German chemical-weapon problem as a whole, but don't like the idea of it on their doorstep, while others are concerned that unless it goes online the potential for disaster only increases while the munitions pile up.

Copyright 2001
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