The incident occurred in the western city of Darmstadt on Wednesday. According to police spokeswoman Andrea Loeb, the child "found a stick-type incendiary bomb during a walk in the woods and carried it into the kindergarten." When the "'strange object' was spotted on a shelf, the teachers immediately notified police and took the children to a playground off site."
A bomb squad descended on the kindergarten and defused the bomb without incident. They then swept the forest where the shell was uncovered for additional explosives, but found nothing.
Darmstadt police issued a warning to citizens to report anything they believe to be an unexploded WW2 shell to the relevant authorities.
Millions of tons of explosives were dropped on Germany over the course of the war by Allied forces, and some of them remain unexploded still, more than 70 years later. Over 2,200 tons of live explosives are found every year in Germany.
Darmstadt was the subject of a particularly intense bombing campaign. In September 1944, the Royal Air Force destroyed more than half the city in a prolonged bombing raid, killing one out of every nine residents and leaving two-thirds of the survivors homeless.
In May, 50,000 people were evacuated from the city of Hanover when 13 unexploded ordnances were discovered on a construction site. In December 2016, an unexploded British bomb forced 54,000 Germans from their homes in the city of Augsburg.
