Explosion by Krylbo

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The Krylbo explosion occurred on July 19, 1941 at around 5:20 a.m. near the train station in the small Swedish town of Krylbo , which is now part of the city of Avesta .

history

Here exploded a German freight train , equipped with ammunition for Finnish Tornio was traveling. Before the detonation, some wagons had burned. Thanks to a shunter who made sure that the train was removed from the station area before the actual explosion, only about 30 were injured, but no deaths were to be complained about. The explosive force was so strong that many window panes shattered in the village and several explosion craters were formed , the largest of which was 2.5 meters deep and 10 meters in diameter. The bang of the detonation was heard in Horndal , 25 km away . The event received a lot of attention in the Swedish newspapers and was generally treated under the catchphrase Krylboknall (Schw. Krylbosmällen ).

Remnants of ammunition and wagon parts were dumped during the clean-up work in the nearby Dalälven and in a lake ( Bysjön ) about 20 km away . Tiny pieces of ammunition have been found several kilometers from Krylbo over the years.

root cause

The actual cause of the explosion has not yet been satisfactorily clarified; the full result of the investigation that followed was only published in July 2011, 70 years after the detonation. According to one possible theory, it was a sabotage by the British secret service Special Operations Executive . An indication of this is the expulsion of the military attaché from the British diplomatic mission in Sweden, Malcolm Munthe, the following day. In contrast , the reports published in 1941 describe the detonation as a disaster. Possible causes named here were an overheated axle bearing or spark formation during braking, which should have ignited sacks of gunpowder that were carried along .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ekenberg, Malin: Krylbosmällen (PDF; 357 kB), term paper , Luleå University of Technology, 2007
  2. ↑ Lennart Oldenburg: Stöveln Under. Norge 1940-45 , Atlantis, Lund 2008, ISBN 978-91-7353-226-6 , pp. 210-11
  3. ↑ Björn Fontander: De onda åren , Stockholm 2006 (Fontander states in the book that Munthe secretly admitted the sabotage to him.)