orecastWhen the first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated in 1949, it contained uranium from the Erzgebirge. Over fifteen hundred documented find points in Saxony alone — and for decades no one was allowed to know where they lay. This is the map the GDR hid. This episode treats a sensitive chapter of German history in a sober, respectful tone.
A second silver rush — for uranium
We already know these mountains: eight hundred years ago silver drew people into the Erzgebirge, the great Berggeschrey. After the Second World War a second one began in the same mountains — this time no one was looking for silver. The Soviet Union searched feverishly for uranium for the bomb, and its geologists knew what the miners of Schneeberg and Johanngeorgenstadt had for centuries carelessly tipped onto the spoil heaps: pitchblende. Already in 1889 the uranium in the ores of the Erzgebirge had been described chemically, and from pitchblende of Sankt Joachimsthal just across the border Marie and Pierre Curie had isolated radium — the same ore veins, the same mountain fault.
Cover name Wismut
From 1946 the Soviet military administration took over the mines. On the map a network of find points arose: Johanngeorgenstadt, Schneeberg, Schlema, later Ronneburg in Thuringia and Königstein on the Elbe. The company was given a cover name meant to reveal nothing: Wismut, the German word for bismuth. Whole regions became restricted zones, factories, shafts and entire valleys were missing from GDR maps, and those who worked there signed a vow of silence. And more people worked there than anyone suspected: around half a million between 1946 and 1990, in 1953 alone over a hundred and thirty thousand at once.
Two kilometres deep — and the price
The mountain near Schlema became the largest deposit of its kind in the world: from Niederschlema-Alberoda the Wismut took over seventy-three thousand tonnes of uranium, the shafts reaching almost two kilometres down — among the deepest mines in Europe. But these mountains carried a dark history: the silver miners of Schneeberg already died of a mysterious ailment, the Schneeberg disease; only late was the cause understood — radon, a radioactive gas from the rock. In the early years there was hardly any radiation protection. More than fourteen and a half thousand cases of dust lung and over five and a half thousand radiation-related cancers were recognised as occupational diseases in GDR times alone. To this day one of the largest studies in the world follows almost sixty thousand former miners; in the spa park of Bad Schlema stand memorial stones.
The balance and the end
Despite everything, mining ran at full tilt for four decades. Ronneburg in Thuringia became the largest site, with the largest uranium resource in Europe — around a hundred and thirteen thousand tonnes. In the end there stood two hundred and thirty-one thousand tonnes of uranium from German soil; only the Soviet Union, the USA and Canada produced more. In 1991 the end of the Wismut was agreed, and the mining company became a remediation company on behalf of the federal government. It is the most expensive clean-up in German industrial history: six point eight billion euros. And until the first of June 2021, Germany still delivered uranium, recovered from the mine water of Königstein.
Uranium had a life before the bomb
Uranium had long had a life before the bomb — as colour. Uranium glass dyed vases and bowls a glowing yellow-green, and the dye works of Sankt Joachimsthal supplied the pigment around the world. No one then suspected what power really lay in the substance. Only the discoveries of Marie and Pierre Curie turned the pretty dye into a material over which world powers would later wrestle. So an arc runs from the glowing glass of the nineteenth century to the atomic bomb of 1949 — always leading through the same ore veins of the Erzgebirge.
The most famous gateway to this world still stands: Shaft 371, the steel headframe near Hartenstein. Once the early shift descended two kilometres here; today the site belongs to the UNESCO World Heritage mining region of the Erzgebirge. How great the task of remediation was is shown by images from Thuringia: mountains of spoil as far as the eye can see. For decades they were carried off, reshaped and greened, given back to the land piece by piece — work that continues to this day. What began as a militarily sealed restricted zone is today partly monument, partly spa town, partly garden. The mountains carry both: the memory of dangerous work and the visible signs that a landscape can heal, if it is given the time and the means.
Where uranium lay, gardens grow
Today new life blooms on the old wounds: Bad Schlema, once a restricted zone, is again a spa town with a radon bath, and where the open pit gaped near Ronneburg, the Federal Garden Show bloomed in 2007 — the New Landscape of Ronneburg. On the orecast map all of this is visible: the mineral veins, the old mining fields, the deposits, from open sources of the state surveys and the federal institute. But one thing this map expressly is not: an invitation. The heaps have been remediated, entering and collecting are forbidden — this documentary documents, it is not a guide to searching. The Erzgebirge has told two great stories, that of silver and that of uranium. But the mountains are not finished with us: beneath them also lies the metal the future speaks of — lithium. We will tell that story another time. Glück auf.