Research Site: ERZGEBIRGE (THE ORE MOUNTAINS)

The traditional mining region of the Erzgebirge (often translated as the Ore Mountains) in Saxony looks back on more than eight hundred years of mining history and was the center of German uranium mining. Uranium was discovered in the sixteenth century as a by-product of the mining of silver and tin. At that time, the heavy, black, and previously unusable mineral was called “pitchblende.” It was not until the twentieth century that the mineral gained an economic and strategic importance with the discovery of nuclear fission and its role as a lucrative primary energy source.

During the Cold War arms race, the Wismut company was founded in 1946 as a Soviet joint-stock company in Saxony and Thuringia. Its purpose was to supply uranium for the Soviet atomic bomb project of the late 1940s. The rapid expansion of uranium mining and the hasty settlement of workers led to the disappearance of villages and forests as huge tailings heaps were created from mining excavations, and the landscape was irretrievably contaminated. Uranium mining took place under strict secrecy and security under Soviet management and then, after 1953, as a joint venture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Soviet Union.

The GDR was the fourth-largest uranium producer in the world. More than two hundred thousand tons of radioactive raw material were supplied to the Soviet nuclear industry over the course of forty-four years under the code name “Wismut.” This made Wismut the largest Soviet company abroad. The uranium mined there covered 60 percent of the USSR’s nuclear program, providing a crucial element for the Cold War. The mining, processing, and reprocessing of uranium by SDAG Wismut took place at various locations in a forty-square-kilometer area shared between eastern Thuringia and western Saxony. One of the most important areas was the Johanngeorgenstadt district, where old ore mining shafts were reopened for uranium mining. The first mining site was Schlema (1946–1990), followed by Aue and Schneeberg, and then Königstein and Freital (near Dresden) as well as three mining operations in the Ronneburg area and an opencast mine in Lichtenberg. Important uranium processing plants were located in Seelingstädt (near Gera), another in Königstein, and also in Crossen (near Zwickau).

After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986, a GDR-wide environmental movement was formed in which activists collected and published information about SDAG Wismut. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wismut’s uranium mining was discontinued. Wismut AG was transformed into a federally owned limited liability company with the task of decommissioning the remaining facilities and remediating the region above and below ground, including the estimated five hundred million tons of radioactive waste generated during mining. Today, fifteen hundred square kilometers of soil are suspected of being contaminated with radioactivity and heavy metals. Environmental activists consider this an environmental catastrophe of unknown proportions, with the number of victims of lung cancer due to radiation exposure assumed to be in the five-digit range.