The Patient Weapon

German landmines in World War II

Landmines have a long history of use in war, and an equally long history of indiscriminate killing after wars end. In 2024 alone, landmines took at least 5,757 casualties, 84% of them civilians – and that number was 22% up from 2022’s figures. Mines left behind after a war will keep killing innocents for decades, and finding and removing them is an equally long task. This article about landmines in World War II was first published on April 4, the International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action, and is dedicated to those who have fallen victim to these indiscriminate weapons and to those who risk their lives to clear them.
 
The basic concept behind the mine is very simple: put something dangerous on the ground, and it will harm the enemy when he steps on it while coming at you. Non-explosive weapons utilizing this principle have been around since Antiquity: the Romans have used caltrops, small iron devices that could be scattered on the ground and would always have a sharp end pointing upward, waiting for a footsoldier or a horse to step in it. They also deployed several other similar weapons, including pits with sharpened stakes at the bottom, and stakes dug into the ground with a metal hook at the end. Like with modern mines, these weapons were primarily designed to disable men and slow down an advancing force; actually killing someone was a “nice bonus,” but not the primary aim.

This is equally true in the modern era. A minefield can only slow down an enemy, who has to bring up sappers to make a path across. The defenders can use this time to dig in, and to attack the stopped force with artillery, anti-tank guns and machine guns.
 
Explosive mines were used in China during the Middle Ages, and in Europe since at least the 16th century. Some of these had a timed fuse, which burned down over a known period of time; others had various mechanisms that would create a spark or cause a slow-burning substance to light a fuse when someone stepped on it or disturbed it in some other way.
 
Mines saw use in numerous wars, including the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War, and became far deadlier after the invention of TNT by the German chemical industry in the mid-19th century. It was not only powerful but also cheap, light and resilient to damp, it could be melted to any shape, and it would not be accidentally detonated by a shell exploding nearby.
 
The invention of the anti-tank mine, a mine designed specifically to incapacitate or destroy armored vehicles, logically followed the introduction of the first British tanks in World War I. Between the two World Wars, Germany became a major innovator in landmine design, while the future Allies lagged behind and were forced to play catch-up once World War II began.

The first major use of mines in the war occurred in Finland. The 6,000 tanks of the invading Soviet army outnumbered Finnish armored force 20 to 1, but the defenders had the advantage of good defensive terrain, where lakes, forests and thick snow restricted Soviet troop movements to roads and railroad tracks, which were easy to mine.

Later in the war, the deserts of North Africa and the steppes of Eastern Europe became common hosts to minefields. The wide-open ground in these two regions were conductive to mobile mechanized warfare, and therefore also to mine fields to hinder those mechanized units. The Soviets, who learned a harsh lesson about the effectiveness of mines in Finland, laid three million of them just for the Battle of Kursk (The Largest Tank Battle in History), and another 64 million on the rest of the Eastern Front. In Africa, Rommel’s (The Accomplishments and Legacy of the Desert Fox) mine fields slowed down General Montgomery’s (Montgomery – Part I) forces after the Second Battle of El Alamein (The Second Battle of El Alamein) , allowing Rommel to escape to the west and participate in the Battle of Kasserine Pass (The Battle of Kasserine Pass) against the recently arrived American forces. Later in the war, the German construction of the Atlantic Wall, the continental defense system against Allied landings, incorporated many minefields. Just along the beaches of Normandy, Rommel wanted to lay more than 50 million mines, but “only” got to deploy around 6 million before the D-Day landings due to supply shortages. We don’t really know the total number of mines laid during the war; some sources claim tens of millions across all belligerent nations, while others claim that the Soviet Union alone deployed over 200,000,000.

Since the Third Reich was the foremost pioneer of landmine technology during the war, here is a brief overview of some of their notable mine designs.
 
Teller mines (“teller” being German for “plate,” after the mine’s disk shape) were Germany’s primary anti-tank mine design. Teller mines came in four different versions, holding 12 lb (5.5 kg) of TNT and activated by a pressure of approximately 200 lb (91 kg). One version, the Tellermine 35, was often deployed on beaches or underwater inside a purpose-built earthenware or concrete pot to keep it dry. The main weakness of the Teller mine was that it only detonated if a tank or other vehicle hit it directly with its track or wheel, but not if the vehicle passed over it with the mine between the wheels. A direct hit on a tank track disabled the tank, but the crew would typically still be in a fighting condition and able to use the gun.

One way to circumvent the problem was to use a tilt-rod fuze, a metal stick attached to the mine pointing upward and disguised as vegetation or a piece of rubble. The stick was long enough that a vehicle’s front would bump into it, causing a delayed detonation soon after, once the vehicle was directly over the mine. Such an explosion attacked not the track or wheel, but the vehicle’s thin underside, with a much higher chance of killing the crew and destroying the vehicle.
 
Another solution was the Riegel mine 43, which had the shape of a long thin metal rectangle 31 in (80 cm) long, 3.7 in (95 mm) wide and 4.7 I (12 cm) tall. It was placed across the path of an expected incoming vehicle, and its length made it likely that at least one track or wheel would hit it. The Riegel mine’s fuze was quick to corrode and became very likely to activate from any handling, making already deployed mines dangerous to clear.

The Panzer-Stabmine (“Armor Rod Mine”) 43 and the Hohl-Sprung Mine (“Hollow Jump”) 4672 were early experiments with shaped charges. Rather than throwing a shockwave in every direction, a shaped charge uses a cone-shaped structure, to focus the energy of the blast in a single direction, giving it much greater penetrative power. The Stabmine had a conical metal body on top of a wooden post that would be dug into the ground, and was activated by a tilt-rod fuze. The Hohl-Sprung Mine used a Panzerfaust warhead, which would be first launched upward at the tank’s bottom, then would explode on contact. Both weapons were able to penetrate over 100 mm of armor, which was more than any World War II tank had on its belly, and had a good chance of completely destroying a tank rather than just disabling it. Neither was produced in very large numbers: 59,000 Hohl-Sprung Mines were built, because the Germans believed that the traditional Panzerfaust launcher was a better way of getting the warhead to its target, and the Stabmine project was canceled after around 25,000 built due to inter-departmental acrimony in the German army.

Another direction of development was to use less metal in mines. Electromagnetic mine detectors work by transmitting an electromagnetic field form the device into the ground. Any metal objects in the ground will become energized and retransmit an electromagnetic field of their own, which is then picked up by the detector. The less metal there is in a mine, the harder it is to find it with a detector, so the Germans set about designing mines in which the detonator was the only metal object.
 
The Holzmine 42 and the B-Stabmine held the explosives in wooden boxes, with the latter being equipable with a tilt-rod fuze if needed. The Pappmine, based on a Soviet design, was made of cardboard waterproofed against moisture and rotting. These mines where not only hard to detect, but could also be built by the woodworking industry, relieving some of the pressure on the already overstressed German metal industry.

The most advanced minimum metal mine was the Topfmine (“pot mine”), made of glass, cardboard, compressed wood-pulp and tar. These were so hard to detect with mine detectors that the Germans themselves couldn’t do it, either. They solved this problem by painting the mines with a black sandy substance called Tarnsand (“camouflage sand”). This sand was slightly radioactive, which made the mines easy to find with a Geiger counter. The Topfmine came in three versions; one was produced with very thin glass walls so to enable sympathetic detonations: one mine being run over would also cause all the others nearby to explode.

Germany also used a variety of anti-personnel mines. The Glasmine was a minimum metal mine made of glass. Specimens of this type are still buried today on the grounds of the Vogelsang Training Area, an old training facility for Nazi leadership. The Schü-mine (“rifleman’s mine”) 42 was a minimum metal wooden box, similar to the Holzmine but smaller.

The most common German anti-personnel mine of the war, however, was the S-mine, alternatively called “Schrapnellmine,” “Springmine” and “Splittermine” in German, and nicknamed Bouncing Betty by the Western Allies and “frog-mine” by the Soviets. The S-mine was the first so-called “bounding mine” in history. The mine was buried in the ground, with only a small three-pronged pressure fuze (or a tripwire) exposed. Once someone stepped on it, it waited 3.9 to 4.5 seconds (depending on the condition of the mine), then “jumped” up into the air, propelled by a small black powder charge, in the middle of the infantry squad. It exploded at a height of 3 to 5 ft (0.9 to 1.5 m), scattering roughly 360 steel balls, metal rods or shrapnel pieces, maiming everyone nearby, very often on the leg, torso or genitals. Contrarily to incorrect U.S. propaganda and a still-persisting belief, you could not delay the detonation indefinitely by refusing to step off. Once the time was up, the mine would try to bounce and would explode no matter what – the best defense was to throw yourself on the ground and hope the shrapnel passed over you.

S-mines were often deployed in a circle around an anti-tank mine. If a vehicle was incapacitated by the central mine, the crew had a hard choice to make: they could sit still and potentially expose themselves to hostile fire, or they could climb out and make a run to safety, but had a good chance of stepping on an S-mine. These mines were sometimes also loaded into angled tubes mounted on tanks and other vehicles, and could be fired to create an “instant minefield” if Allied soldiers approached. Over 1,930,000 of these iconic German mines were produced during the war, and they have inspired French, American, Soviet, Yugoslav, Italian, Swedish and Chinese designs during or after World War II.

Save 20% on all tours