The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts

by Scott Anderson

Over the span of forty minutes on the afternoon of March 15, over six hundred American B-17 bombers dropped 1,500 tons of high explosives on the center of Oranienburg, obliterating the city and marking it as the site of one of the greatest concentrations of conventional explosives in world history. That wasn’t the worst of it, however. Most of the bombs dropped on the city were equipped with a recently developed time-delay fuse. In contrast to the traditional explode-on-impact bomb, the detonation of these depended on the speed of an internal chemical reaction that triggered their firing pins, a process that might take several minutes or hours or even days. Or decades, as it turned out. Due to a peculiarity of Oranienburg soil composition, hundreds of the bombs dropped in March 1945 failed to explode at the time, but have done so intermittently ever since, killing residents and earning Oranienburg the title of “the most dangerous city in Germany.”