I've been thinking on and off for a long time about weapons caches, especially those in Europe. During the late stages of WWII and well into the cold war, security agencies hid many caches of weapons (Finland/Winter War, late war Germany, and Operation Gladio come to mind) in Europe; these staches were never really used, so I was thinking that at some point some malcontents might stumble upon a stash of military hardware and use it for crime or something.
Is there an instance of this happening? I'm especially thinking about situations like the Italian Years of Lead, Brabant Killers, and just generally postwar organized crime
Tracking the movement of surplus weapons from military caches into criminal networks is obviously tricky but I can think of one example of a WWII/Cold War arms cache that’s caused some recent headaches over its misuse (or potential misuse).The Volodarsky salt mine in the Donbas region of the Ukraine supposedly houses more than a million firearms and some crew-served weapons leftover from WWI, WWII and the Soviet era. The salt mine began to be used as an arms cache by Soviet authorities in 1957 and was apparently still being maintained into the late 80s. When Russian-backed separatists took over that region of the Crimea in 2014 members of a local militia apparently rushed out to secure the entrance to the mine but I haven’t been able to find any further information about whether any of the weapons were actually collected.
Unfortunately the most reputable source for this drama is a single Guardian article from 2014 (and most English-language news coverage refers back to that one report) so it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. For what it’s worth C.J Chivers refers to the Volodarsky cache in his history of the AK47 and he did quite a bit of research into Soviet small arms proliferation.The Volodarsky cache is interesting because, even if it hasn’t played much of a role in actually arming separatist groups, it does provide some cover for Russian sponsorship of the forces belonging to the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic militias. Naturally the insistence by Russian media that Russia isn’t supplying weapons to the separatists has prompted a lot of sarcastic jokes from Ukrainians about militants stumbling across surface-to-air missile batteries in Donbas mines.
Setting aside the question of precisely where they've been stashed away there’s clearly a lot of Soviet-era small arms sloshing about in the Ukraine and these weapons occasionally spill out into the rest of Europe or are intercepted at the border. Probably the most high-profile seizure was a whole lot of explosives and RPG launchers that someone attempted to smuggle into France back in 2016 (apparently for a terrorist attack on the UEFA Football Championship).
Within the Ukraine the ubiquity of surplus weapons causes occasional strife (last year some guy threatened to detonate a hand grenade at a supermarket in Kiev because someone told him to put on a mask) and criminal gangs in the Ukraine occasionally end up in possession of rockets, landmines and grenades (see: SAS-Report-Illicit-Ammunition-Ukraine.pdf). About 70% of the weapons and ammunition seized by Ukrainian authorities were manufactured in the Soviet-era.
FYI the folks who do illegal archeological excavations to find WWII weapons and mementos are sometimes referred to as 'black diggers' but I'm finding it tricky to research that term from Australia because google wants to steer me towards Indigenous soldiers/diggers. It's hard to imagine anyone restoring those weapons to working order however.