Werk Tanne in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

Atlas Obscura profiles Werk Tanne, the ruins of an explosives factory near Clausthal-Zellerfeld in Germany's Harz region, built shortly after the Nazis seized power and once among the Reich's five largest producers of TNT. Hidden in forested terrain as natural camouflage against aerial reconnaissance, the plant relied on forced laborers who suffered severe chemical poisoning, and a nitration unit exploded in June of nineteen forty, killing sixty-one people. As Atlas Obscura tells it, the concrete skeletons still stand as silent memorials, while cleanup of the toxic legacy pollution grinds on decades later, the contaminated ground still sealed off.

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