Hamburg - Germany built a 112-mile long electrified "death strip" between Belgium and the Netherlands in the first World War and it killed about 3,000 people, according to new historical research. The weekly newspaper Die Zeit published the research of Dr Alex Vanneste, a University of Antwerp academic, documenting how the 2,000-volt fence was used to keep spies from entering German-occupied Belgium and to stop cross-border smuggling.
The fence was built in 1915 and used extraordinary amounts of energy for the era, the paper said.