This novelty chess set caused a bit of a stir when offered for sale at an Istanbul market recently.  All the comment seemed to centre on the "Nazi" theme; nobody seems to have been much concerned with the fact that the "other side" represent Comrade Stalin and the Soviets.  I doubt whether Dr. Post would have approved.  Best regards, JR.

Chess Nazis (3)

Event: The Dump That Sunk a U-Boat – April 1945

Relieving oneself aboard a submerged submarine doesn’t differ from the usual dry land procedure, but getting rid of the resulting waste is much, much more complicated, requiring advanced technology and the training of personnel to operate the equipment. Unfortunately for the crew of German U-1206, a systems failure was the beginning of unlucky events that would lead to four deaths.

The original toilet or “head” developed for U-boats was a two-valve system that only worked during shallow dives. The newest VIIC U-boats like U-1206 were outfitted with new toilets with a high pressure valve rigged for deep water dives. 

On April 14, 1945, while patrolling at 200 feet, 10 miles off Scotland’s coast under the command of Karl-Adolph Schlitt, an improperly flushed toilet aboard U-1206 malfunctioned and began flooding the compartment with sewage and salt water. The water leaked into the batteries, creating deadly chlorine gas. The captain was forced to surface the submarine.

While repairs were being made, U-1206 was spotted by British patrols and fired upon. The captain burned his orders and scuttled the boat. One crewman died in the attack, and three others drowned. Forty-six other crewmen were captured. While it’s not known exactly whose “movement” caused the initial problem, some have speculated the captain himself was responsible. The lost submarine was rediscovered in 2012.



Toilet Troubles

Berlin (CNN) -- It happens more often than you might think: Streets cordoned off and bomb disposal experts called in to deal with unexploded bombs that were dropped on Germany nearly 70 years ago.

Commuters in Berlin Wednesday were the latest to suffer the inconvenience of dealing with ordnance dating back to World War II.

This time the culprit was a Russian-made aerial bomb weighing in at 100 kilograms (220 pounds), unearthed just two meters away from a train track leading into the city's main train station.

Nearly 840 people were evacuated from the central Berlin area, police said, before bomb disposal experts moved in to defuse the device.

About 25 minutes after they started their delicate task, the mechanical fuse was unscrewed and the bomb was disabled.

Alert over, Berliners could return home and go back to their everyday business.

A member of the bomb disposal team told CNN the bomb could have blown a crater 3 to 4 meters wide and 3 meters (10 feet) deep, had it gone off.

The device was discovered by Heidestrasse, a lightly populated street with an industrial feel in the former "no man's land" between East Berlin and West Berlin.

"They do risk a lot, but they have a lot of experience," Berlin police spokesman Jens Berger told CNN as the bomb disposal team set to work.

"Here in Berlin it is a fact of daily life to defuse bombs, but without question they are risking a lot."

Wednesday's operation was made more complicated because there was a depot for freight trains on one side of the site and houses on the other, Berger said.

The device was found Tuesday afternoon by a bomb disposal team that was checking out a construction site near the Hauptbahnhof, the central station.

Roads were closed in the area overnight as the experts assessed the best way to deal with the device. Some train services were delayed Wednesday, said Holger Auferkamp, spokesman for national railway operator Deutsche Bahn, but Berlin's metro system, or S-Bahn, was not affected.

It may seem surprising that unexploded bombs remain undiscovered in Berlin and other German cities decades after World War II ended. But so many were dropped by Allied forces during the war that finding them all will still take years.

From the archives: WWII bombs defused, allowing 45,000 evacuated residents to return

Their presence is sufficiently common that private bomb disposal teams are contracted by German railway operator Deutsche Bahn and other companies to check that sites are safe when building works are planned.

Some bigger devices have been found elsewhere.

A 250-kilogram (550-pound) bomb discovered in central Munich last August had to be detonated where it lay because the fuse was unstable. The explosion damaged nearby buildings.

In 2011, 45,000 residents were evacuated from the city of Koblenz, situated on the Rhine and Moselle rivers, as bomb squads dealt with two bombs and a military fog-producing device that were dropped by American and British warplanes in the last years of the war.

One was a 1.8-metric ton British air bomb that could have wiped out the city center, according to the local fire brigade.

They were exposed 65 years after being dropped when water levels in the Rhine River fell to record lows, prompting what officials said was the biggest evacuation since the war's end.

Sometimes the bombs can have a more deadly impact.

Three members of a bomb-disposal squad were killed in 2010 when the device they were trying to defuse in the German town Gottingen went off.

