BERLIN — Berlin police evacuated thousands of people from a central area of the German capital Friday and shut down the main train station as a precaution while they defused and removed an unexploded World War II bomb found during recent construction work.
Some 10,000 residents and workers were forced to leave a square-mile area, including the train station, while bomb experts defused the 1,100-pound British bomb dropped during the war.
Trains were prevented from stopping at the busy station from 10 a.m., and through traffic was shut down at 11:30 a.m. before experts began their work, German rail operator Deutsche Bahn said. Some 300,000 travelers use the station daily.
Bomb disposal experts were able to successfully remove the detonator just after 1 p.m. and destroy it in a small controlled explosion.
The evacuation area, a circle around the construction site north of the train station where the bomb was discovered during digging, also included a hospital, the new offices of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, and parts of both the economy and transportation ministries.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office and Germany’s parliament building are close by, but outside the zone.
Even 73 years after the end of the war, such discoveries remain common in major German cities.
Downtown Berlin was largely reduced to rubble in hundreds of Allied bombing raids during the war and street-to-street fighting between the Nazi and Soviet armies in the final days of the conflict.
Experts estimate that more than 5 percent of the bombs dropped on Berlin failed to explode due to a variety of reasons, including faulty fuse.