Another Volkswagen bomb
War history still has ghosts that haunt VolkswagenThere are fears a bomb is about to explode at Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg headquarters – and this time it’s not yet another twist in the #Dieselgate scandal.
According to Reuters, Volkswagen has been quietly but extensively searching its main assembly plant in Wolfsburg for an unexploded World War II bomb. The search was began after a building team at the factory noticed strange pieces of metal around the site of a redevelopment and called in investigators.
Bomb damage would be nothing new to the giant Wolfsburg plant. Many of its steel structural struts and braces still bear holes where shrapnel from exploding ordinance tore through them in the 1940s, while pieces of the factory have frequently been shut down due to stray bombs being uncovered.
Northern Europeans have become particularly skilled at finding and defusing WWII (and even WWI) bombs without getting killed because a massive proportion of the millions of tonnes of bombs dropped on Germany during the 1940s failed to explode on impact.
Wolfsburg (which didn’t actually have a name during the war, but was called KdF Car City in German, after the Beetle’s forerunner) was heavily targeted during the war, mostly because it built both the Kübelwagen and the Schwimmwagen light utility military vehicles.
It’s a much nicer place now, with the factory turning out the Touareg (for now, the next generation will move to Slovakia), the Golf and the Tiguan.
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