Europe’s Wildfires Uncover Buried Bombs from WWI and WWII Across France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands

ELSENBORN, Belgium — A new peril has emerged amidst the wildfires scorching Europe this summer: the perilous remnants of past wars. Hidden beneath the charred earth lie rusty bombs and mines from World War I and II, posing a significant risk to the brave crews battling the relentless flames.

The intense heat has already triggered some explosives, sending blasts echoing through France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. In one incident, a bomb-disposal team rushed to a forest in Limburg province, close to a historic 1944 battle site, as flames threatened the area.

Raging fires, exacerbated by climate change, are signalling the end of Europe’s long-standing “climatic luck,” according to Sarah Njeri, a peace and conflict expert at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Historically, stable temperatures and regular rainfall kept these buried wartime relics dormant.

“Climate change is now unearthing and reactivating what was once stable,” Njeri explained. Wildfires not only ignite old munitions but also strip away the natural cover that hides them, making detection even more challenging.

This year’s fire season has been exacerbated by January’s heavy rains, which promoted lush vegetation that quickly turned into tinder as summer’s heat arrived. Paired with drought, low humidity, and strong winds, these conditions have created a perfect storm for wildfires, as highlighted in a recent study by the World Weather Attribution group.

Flames chewed up old battlefields and set off buried explosives

As they advanced, the flames moved over territory that has long been known to hold unexploded weapons, a lethal legacy that lingered long after the guns fell silent.

In a forest in tinder-dry France, a massive wildfire outside the southwestern city of Bordeaux uncovered a cache of what is believed to be World War II-era ammunition.

In the eastern Belgian province of Liege, Gov. Hervé Jamar said “a few sporadic detonations” were recently heard and that emergency services were adapting to account for munitions buried in a fire area. He said no fire crews were in danger, but local media published photos of a firefighter handling a rusted bomb.

During World War II, booby traps, bombs and mines were sprinkled throughout the province’s dense peat-bog forest known as the High Fens. In the first four years after Germany’s surrender in 1945, the munitions killed six civilians, said Bernard Collard, a local historian who runs the Truschbaum Museum near Belgium’s border with Germany that houses a collection of found objects from the war.

“When you go into a forest like this, you are not sure where the explosives are,” he said. He remembers his father detonating a found bomb in a quarry.

The fire in the High Fens, which stretches across the border with Germany, is smoldering atop a much-bloodied battlefield where Nazis fought Allied troops. The Battle of the Bulge was fought in and around the High Fens.

The fire is even closer to the sites of two lesser-known skirmishes along Elsenborn Ridge and in the Hurtgen Forest, which lasted 88 days and killed about 33,000 American and 28,000 German troops.

Every year, Belgium responds to thousands of calls about explosives

Collard is authorized to scan with a metal detector the former battlefields, now forests, pastures and farmland. He has found mortar shells, machine guns, helmets, cigarette cases, and once, a human skeleton.

“You never know what you might come across, and you shouldn’t take it lightly,” Collard said while standing in a field that was once a blood-soaked site. Nearby, blueberry bushes cover old foxholes, trenches and deep craters from artillery fire.

He frequently works with the Belgian demining squad. “It’s part of our history. We live with it,” Collard said.

Unexploded ordnance is even more dangerous around wildfires because heat can trigger the explosives, said Jonas Tepe, a spokesperson for North Rhine-Westphalia, just across the border in Germany.

The Belgian Ministry of Defense said it receives requests from the region about every week to assist in disarming explosives, yet it does not consider the area a “hot spot” compared to elsewhere in Belgium. Such requests are even more common in the west, where farmers in towns such as Ypres – infamous for harrowing trench warfare in World War I – call the annual tilling of the soil ” the iron harvest ” because it turns up so many war remnants.

Every year across the nation, Belgium’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Destruction Service responds to more than 3,000 calls and disposes of 200 to 250 tons of munitions left over from both world wars.

Flames are not the only threat

Drought has also helped to lay the past bare by shrinking rivers and lakes to reveal old weapons.

In Slovakia, the Danube River fell and exposed two naval mines that police pulled out of the water and buried in a trench for a controlled demolition. Authorities in Hungary closed Budapest’s Margaret Bridge after a bomb dating from World War II emerged at its base in receding water.

As the Rhine dried up, German authorities also found a WWII-era bomb.

Christina Greene, a researcher at the University of Arizona who, with Njeri, wrote an article on Europe’s wildfires and unexploded ordnance risk, said “the legacy of war keeps creeping up” because of climate change.

“It’s reliving the legacies of war and conflict in a way that we haven’t had to deal with in a while in certain places.”

___ Associated Press writers Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands; Sylvain Plazy in Brussels; Angela Charlton in Paris; Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin; and Stanislav Hodina in Prague contributed to this report.