The explosives lie on the seafloor just beyond the Kiel harbor in the German North Sea, several kilometers from the beach, shallow enough to poke with a long fishing pole. Dumped by the Allies after World War II at a site known as Kolberger Heide, over an area the size of downtown Kiel, they formed an aqueous afterimage of the bombs that had recently leveled the city. The drowning of these weapons was in part a signal that Germany could move on from the war. Kiel began to rebuild. The munitions, soon forgotten, stayed where they were. “Today, any amateur diver could go there, take some TNT, bring it back, dry it out and make a bomb,” said Edmund Maser, one of the scientists spearheading North Sea Wrecks (NSW), a project investigating the ecological impacts of underwater ordnance. Then he paused for a moment and smiled. “Maybe don’t write that.”
Maser is the director of the Schleswig-Holstein University Clinic’s Institute of Toxicology, where he treats the occasional poisoning and studies how living organisms, including human beings, cope with toxic chemicals, like the ones leaching from world war-era dumpsites and shipwrecks around Europe. He’s punctilious and chatty, with a soft spot for mussels, water fleas and other uncuddly creatures, and a laissez-faire attitude toward personal risk — he rides a Harley-Davidson, likes his nightly beer and, contra clinic regulations, allowed us to go maskless in his office. There, he told me how he himself might have remained ignorant of the 1.8 million tons of submerged ordnance lying in German waters if he hadn’t been approached twelve years ago by Schleswig-Holstein’s Ministry of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Areas, which wanted his help in understanding if these munitions were poisoning the marine environment. Maser and his team began bringing mussels to Kolberger Heide and leaving them to stew around the corroding mines before collecting them again and assessing their health. The results, he said, were clear: “The mussels were suffering.”