Dhaka, June 25 -- Residents of Ahlbach, Germany, were mostly asleep at about 4 a.m. Sunday when they were jolted by a sudden blast, reports CNN.

Something seemed to have exploded, large enough to feel like an earthquake, and a massive crater in a cornfield was all that remained.

Police were sent to inspect the hole, which measured 33 feet wide and 13 feet deep, they said.

Was it a World War II bomb? At first, officials weren't sure. But after a day studying the crater, they said it "almost certainly" was a 550-pound dud.

"With the former railway depot, we were quite a bomb target at the end of the Second World War," city spokesman Johannes Laubach told the German news website Hessenschau. "We can be glad that the farmer was not in the...