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From Der Spiegel:

Unstrittig ist, dass in den Hinterhöfen des MfS und der Volkspolizei gepanzerte Wagen mit Schusswaffen bereitstehen; dass am Hauptbahnhof sechs LkW mit Räumgittern postiert werden, ...

The word Räumgitter cannot be found in any of the dictionaries Reverso, dict.cc, or Duden. The similar word suggested, Raumgitter, refers to some chemical structure and is thus unrelated. From my Google search, "Räumgitter" is some vehicle related to military, but I can't find a good reference. What does the word mean?

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  • Many German compound words are not to be found in dictionaries, you have to look them up by their constituents – in this case räumen and Gitter. Oct 18, 2014 at 23:39

2 Answers 2

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This is a picture of one:

enter image description here

It is a Gitter (grate, grille...) in front of a car. It can be used to clear/evacuate (räumen) an area.

The picture can be found here: http://www.panzerbaer.de/helper/bgs_sonderwagen-a.htm

There is another Spiegel article from 1989:

Die so harmlos als "Zaunsegmente" deklarierten Werkstücke entpuppten sich als Räumgitter für die Lastwagen der Volkspolizei vom Typ "W 50", ...

In 1975 the Räumgitter is also mentioned in another Spiegel article (this time West Germany):

setzte die Polizei ein Arsenal neuer Waffen gegen die Demonstranten ein: so ein "Sonderfahrzeug mit ausklappbarem Räumgitter", das geeignet ist, "auch größere Menschenansammlungen wegzuschieben"

It seems, the Swiss police has also a car with a Räumgitter

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A Räumgitter is a kind of attachment placed on the front of a vehicle (in the text you've included, onto a large truck), which is usually employed as a moving barricade. The attachment is made of a metal lattice.

As far as an English equivalent, that's likely technical jargon. The train equivalent seen on steam engines is called a pilot, however this attachment is probably referred to as a "grate barricade" or something similar.

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