Hitler's Chemical Weapons a Seeping Menace

[papau]

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=VPRUB5OJIB23ECRBAE0CFEY?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=4229273

Hitler's Chemical Weapons a Seeping Menace
Wed January 28, 2004 10:14 AM ET

(Page 1 of 2)
By Alister Doyle
HORTEN, Norway (Reuters) - Six decades after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler's chemical weapons are coming back to haunt Europe as they ooze from rusting and poorly mapped graves on the seabed.

Far from the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, corrosion, deeper fishing by trawlers and seabed cables or oil pipelines are disturbing stockpiles in what once seemed inaccessible dumps from the Baltic to the Atlantic.

"It was terrifying. The pain was unbearable and my hands blistered all over," said Danish fisherman Walther Holm Thorsen, who was 15 when he threw a cracked gray canister back into the Baltic Sea after it was snared in the net of his trawler.

One of the first postwar victims of the Nazis in the 1969 accident, he said the pain came in the middle of the night, hours after he and another crew member had rinsed the oily substance off the fish. They had no idea it was mustard gas. <snip>


Norway knows the exact locations of just 15 of a probable 36 ships in waters about 1,970 feet deep off the southern town of Arendal, one of the main postwar chemical dumps with 168,000 tons of Nazi ammunition. <snip>