An unexploded British bomb from World War II forced 54,000 people out of their homes in Germany on Christmas Day, the country’s biggest such evacuation since the end of hostilities.

The huge operation on Sunday in the southern city of Augsburg took 11 hours, involved 900 police officers and it ended successfully around 1800 GMT, local authorities announced.

The 1.8-ton explosive was found on Tuesday during work at a construction site in the Bavarian city, but authorities waited until Sunday to coordinate the logistics necessary to make it safe.

More than 70 years after the end of the war, unexploded bombs are regularly found buried on German land, legacies of the intense bombing campaigns by the Allied forces against Nazi Germany.

Augsburg, the third-largest city in Bavaria, was targeted several times during the war.

 

Read the whole story from PRI.

Featured image courtesy of AFP.