Nearly 54,000 Germans evacuate their homes in Germany on Christmas Day, because of an unexploded British bomb from World War. It was the nation's biggest such evacuation since the end of hostilities.

The local authorities announced that, the huge operation in the southern city of Augsburg happened at 11 hours which involved 900 police officers and it ended successfully around 1800 GMT.

According to the police, the 1.8-tonne explosive was found during work at a construction site in the Bavarian city, but authorities waited to coordinate the logistics necessary to make it safe.

A 1,500-metre exclusion zone was created for the operation in case the bomb exploded while engineers were trying to deactivate it and sandbags were set up all around.

The unexploded bombs are regularly found buried on German land more than 70 years after the end of the war, legacies of the intense bombing campaigns by the Allied forces against Nazi Germany.

The third-largest city in Bavaria, Augsburg, was targeted several times during the war.

Augsburg mayor Kurt Gribl said that, he had earlier urged “everyone concerned to leave the area, if possible by themselves,” in a video message posted on the city’s Twitter account.

Gribi also called for “each person to verify that their relatives, parents and friends have found places to stay outside the (security) zone. Look out for one another.”

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