A roughly 1,000-pound American World War II aerial bomb is secured after being defused by specialists in a section of Amberg, Germany, Thursday, April 4, 2024. (Oberpfalz police station)

GRAFENWOEHR, Germany — Specialists defused two American World War II-era bombs Thursday near a decommissioned train station outside the Bavarian city of Amberg.

The roughly 1,100- and 1,000-pound aerial bombs were discovered by a German construction company around 5:45 p.m. Wednesday next to the closed Amberg-Nuremberg railway line in Luitpoldhöhe, according to a statement Thursday from Bernhard Scheimer, first chief superintendent of the Upper Palatinate police.

The bombs pose no immediate danger to the neighboring U.S. Army installations at Grafenwoehr and Vilseck, said Dominik Lehmeier, a senior police commissioner in Amberg. The city is a popular destination for U.S. troops and their families who work on installations nearby.

After the bombs were uncovered, police set up a half-mile cordon and 500 people in the area were temporarily evacuated, the statement said. Operations were discontinued at an adjacent foundry.

The 1,100-pound bomb, measuring 3 feet in length and 20 inches in diameter, was defused Thursday at around 1 a.m., Lehmeier said. The three-man disposal crew was hampered in defusing the second bomb by flooding and shifting soil in the 13-foot-deep excavation pit. The all-clear came at 3:40 p.m. Thursday.

The second bomb “kept us busy for quite some time, but it has been safely defused,” Lehmeier said. 

Luitpoldhöhe is approximately 2 miles northwest of Amberg’s city center. The foundry and its connecting rail line made the site a target for Allied bombers during World War II, Lehmeier said.

Technicians in Germany disarm close to 5,000 bombs annually, the national explosive ordnance disposal agency KSU said on their website. Approximately 100,000 tons of unexploded ordnance are still believed to lie hidden beneath urban areas and farmland.