From Mine Field To Bike Path

Once a heavily mined death strip, the former border between East and West Germany was declared safe Tuesday after five years of clearing the deadly remnants of the Cold War.

Long stretches of the 861-mile border are now paths for hiking or mountain-biking.

Though communist East Germany declared the border free of mines in the mid-1980s, records showed discrepancies between the numbers of mines laid and removed. After German unification in 1990, work began to search out the missing mines, and 1,100 were found.

Bernd Wilz of the Defense Ministry turned over the last cleared mine field to civilian use at a ceremony Tuesday in Hof, a town on the border between Bavaria and the east German state of Saxony.

Machines like harvesters were used to plow repeatedly through the border area, while steep terrain, streams and wetlands where mines could have drifted were checked with mine detectors.

Steffen Krueger was one of the 500 mine clearers.

“Erosion and wind effects changed the original location of some mines, so you couldn’t know where you would find one,” he told ARD television.