Sixty-two disused military bases on what used to be the edge of the Iron Curtain in West Germany will now be turned into bio reserves for rare eagles and woodpeckers, as well as threatened bats and beetles.
“We are seizing a historic opportunity with this conversion –
many areas that were once no-go zones are no longer needed for
military purposes,” said environment minister Barbara
Hendricks.
“We are fortunate that we can now give these places back to
nature.”
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The bases take up 31,000 hectares, the equivalent to over 40,000
football pitches. The government considered selling off some of
the assets as real estate, before settling on the environmental
solution. Implementation of the plan will raise Germany’s total
area of protected wildlife reserves by a quarter.
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This is not the first time military areas have been given a
second life as a nature park. When Communist Europe collapsed in
the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was
discovered that the no man’s land between the Western and Eastern
powers, rarely visited by humans, was one of the most flourishing
habitats on the continent. This led to the formation of a
European Green Belt, which snakes down almost continuously from
Scandinavia all the way into Greece.
But news of the peace-loving initiative ironically comes when
tensions between Moscow and the West are at their highest since
the end of the Cold War, prompted by the outbreak of violence in
Ukraine last year. At present, the European divide still appears
to exist, simply having moved a few hundred miles to the east.
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Many of the future German bird sanctuaries formerly served as
NATO strongholds manned by an international force. This year will
be the first since 1945 when no British troops are stationed in
Germany. Poland and the Baltic states, all NATO members admitted
in the past two decades, are demanding that the alliance place
new permanent bases on their territory. Moscow says this is a
violation of a 1997 treaty that promised no such outposts would
be set up in the region, even if its members joined NATO.
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While the military group has not yet said yes to Lithuania,
Latvia or Poland, NATO’s headquarters in Eastern Europe, located
in Poland’s Szczecin, is set to double in size in the coming
years. Though not comparable in scale to the thousands of tanks
on either side of the divide after World War II, the creation of
a permanent rapid reaction force of over 5,000 is also in the
works. After accusing Moscow of violating the 1987 treaty banning
intermediate range missiles in Europe, the Pentagon is also
reportedly considering deploying said ballistic missiles on the
continent.
Germany itself, playing its most dominant role in the continent’s
military affairs since reunification, is also taking its part.
Last week, Bundeswehr tanks rolled across Poland, as the
country’s former invaders participated in a large-scale
integrated drill, known as Operation Noble Jump, with its allies.
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