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Dr. Hans-Georg Carls, founder of the Luftbilddatenbank (aerial photography digital archive) company in Wurzburg, Germany. Tens of thousands of unexploded Allied aerial bombs from World War II are still lurking underground in German cities. The treacherous delay-action bombs in particular pose a growing threat because their detonators have corroded to the point where they have become too dangerous to defuse. During World War II, over 10,000 bombs fell on Oranienburg in 13 attacks - subjecting the town to more explosive firepower per square kilometer than any other German city. As many as 1,500 bombs failed to detonate. Some 200 were defused or detonated when the town was part of communist East Germany, and 168 have been eliminated since German unification in 1990. The most recent one was rendered harmless by the bomb specialists last Friday at the railway station. Hundreds of bombs still lie undiscovered under the city. In Oranienburg the search is more systematic than anywhere else in Germany. Still, experts estimate that here alone it will cost some ?400 million to find and remove them -- and it will take decades before the job is finished. More than half of the big bombs discovered in Oranienburg since 1990 were equipped with a chemical delayed-action detonator. Depending on how they were set, these bombs were designed to detonate up to 48 hours after they hit the ground -- impeding rescue work and adding an element of insidious terror to the bombings.