Overview

• Three American-made bombs—two weighing 20 tons and one 10 tons, all with impact fuses—were discovered Monday during construction work in Deutz.
• Authorities evacuated 20,500 people from a 1,000-meter radius that included the historic district, 58 hotels, nine schools, a hospital, care homes and key transport links.
• Bomb disposal teams carried out door-to-door checks and overcame a defiant resident before safely defusing all three devices by around 7 p.m. Wednesday.
• The operation spanned roughly 12 hours from the 8 a.m. evacuation launch to the lifting of the exclusion zone, marking Cologne’s biggest post-war evacuation.
• Unexploded ordnance remains common in North Rhine-Westphalia, where experts find an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 WWII bombs each year.