Текст книги "Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943"

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

Numbed by shock, they did not move for a while, but eventually they were drawn to the rubble that had once been their sleeping quarters by cries: ‘It was light, you could see everything, because it was burning, because the firebombs were falling down as well, and the phosphor bombs. We saved lots of girls, but some of them died. We just kept pulling them out of the rubble. There were bits of flesh everywhere. Bits of flesh. And there was one arm, just an arm, sticking out of the debris. One hundred and twenty-three girls died that night.’

Throughout Hamburg, similar destruction was being wreaked on countless other streets and houses. While those who had sought shelter in the larger public bunkers were generally safe, many more people had hidden in the cellars of the larger houses. When one of these received a direct hit, or caught fire, those in the cellar often found their exit blocked by rubble or flames. In such cases they could only escape by breaking through to a neighbouring cellar in the hope that there might still be a way out.

Sometimes the only option was to run through the fires, the most terrifying choice of all. Although he was only a small child at the time, Klaus Müller remembers doing exactly that. He lived with his parents and grandparents, who owned a milk shop on Marthastrasse, right in the centre of one of the worst-hit areas, and was sheltering with his family in a cellar beneath his grandfather’s apartment. As the bombing subsided, it became apparent that the whole house was on fire, and that the only way out was through a burning passageway into the inner courtyard. Fortunately, Klaus’s grandfather had kept several milk churns filled with water in their cellar for just such an emergency. ‘As a small child one remembers everything as being far larger – it was probably only a few metres – but it was an inferno. The entire entrance was filled with flames … My grandfather and the other men poured ten milk churns of water into the passageway, and this created a small path through which we could pass.’ ³²

As he and the rest of the group escaped through the inner courtyard to the street outside, they found the whole of Marthastrasse on fire – not only the houses but the asphalt on the road. Beyond, they could see Bellealliancestrasse and the Eimsbüttler Chaussee where there was a small park, which would be safe, but to get to it they had to run along the pavement beside the burning road. It was only twenty metres, but by the time they got there Klaus’s clothes were alight – his parents had to beat out the flames, then carry him to safety in the park.

A few streets away, nine-year-old Liselotte Gerke was sheltering in a cellar on the Eimsbüttler Marktplatz. The street was home to a large tram depot, and tonight a line of stationary trams was nose to tail along the centre of the road. As Liselotte came out of her shelter she saw that while her side of the street was relatively untouched by the bombs, the opposite side was burning, and scores of people were trying to cross the road to escape the flames. But the trams were in the way, and there wasn’t time for them all to clamber into the cars and out the other side. The next day, when she and her friends went out to investigate the damage to the trams, she stumbled on a pair of small, charred corpses. ‘This was the moment the war started for me. It was the first time I had ever seen anything like it.’ ³³

* * *

Descriptions like these are merely snapshots of what people experienced that night. The bombs spread over the entire west of the city, and in many places to the east and south. Tens of thousands of people were affected, and since the bombs were indiscriminate, women and children found themselves caught up in the fire and explosions just as frequently as the city’s workforce, who were the ostensible target of the attack. Even political prisoners and forced labourers such as Wanda Chantler were affected. Terrifying though their ordeal was, however, the bombing raid was no worse than many others that had taken place in other parts of Germany. Despite the widespread destruction, most people escaped with their lives, and even their belongings, intact. Hamburg had not yet been made special by its ordeal – it was just another name on the long list of towns that had suffered heavy bombing raids.

That said, the death toll was extraordinarily high. Early estimates claimed that about fifteen hundred people died during this raid – far more than in any other previous attack on the city – and tens of thousands more were now homeless. ³⁴For a city that had made such a huge effort to ready itself for an attack like this, the figures represented a crushing defeat.

According to the official police report on the disaster, the performance of the emergency services had been exemplary, but in the heat of battle it was inevitable that many of the drills that had been practised so often did not go according to plan. Hans Brunswig worked in the technical division of the Hamburg fire service, and noted that some of the Nazi Party volunteers did not follow the drills properly, and were content to muddle through. ³⁵Many eyewitnesses on the night say the same thing: Erwin Garvens, for example, noted in his diary that it was almost impossible to put out the fires in his neighbourhood because of a lack of leadership and direction. While the women co-operated admirably, many men, particularly the soldiers on leave, were quick to abandon burning buildings to their fate. ³⁶

To be fair, however, the huge destruction in the city, including the severing of many water mains, made it almost impossible for even the best-trained fire-fighters to do what they were supposed to do. Paul Elingshausen, the deputy air-raid warden of his block, spent almost two hours fighting the fires in his and the neighbouring houses before he finally gave up:

There was no running water, the Tommies had smashed the waterworks first. The small amount of water we had on the ground was quickly used up, and we had to abandon house after house. Finally Dr Wilms’s house caught fire, and I, as deputy air-raid warden, stopped fighting the fire, since there was neither sand nor water, and the flames were already licking the side of our roof. We started to save what could be saved … I had all of fourteen minutes to rescue the most important things, some clothes and other stuff … One cannot imagine how fast fire is, and how easily it can cut off your escape route; this is why I also gave up, no matter how much I would have liked to have this or that. And so I stood below with what little stuff I had, and was forced to watch, full of impotent anger, as our beloved building burned. ³⁷

The British tactic of dropping a combination of high-explosive and incendiary bombs had worked: while the incendiaries started the fires, enormous explosions kept the local wardens away from them until it was too late. Further bombs on timer fuses continued to hamper the fire service into the next morning. The gas and water mains had been cut, and so had electricity supplies, making many pumps useless. Just as problematic was the damage to telephone lines. In order to direct the emergency effort, the control room of the Air Protection leader had to be in communication with all the affected areas – but while they were swamped with calls from the south and east of the city, the worst-hit areas in the west were unable to inform them of how bad things had become. As a consequence, early on at least, the fire service was directed to the wrong parts of town. Once the mistake was discovered, the fire chief had no choice but to send out motorcycle dispatch riders, some of whom perished in the chaos. Officers on reconnaissance were often forced to take long detours and were unable to report back for several hours. Things became even more difficult when the control room was engulfed in flames, and its staff were compelled to evacuate to another building. ³⁸

Early that Sunday morning the city’s gauleiter, Karl Kaufmann, was compelled to declare a state of emergency. Immediately the running of the city came under stronger Nazi Party control, and the SS were sent out to make sure that fire-fighters continued the effort to extinguish fires throughout the day. Kaufmann’s worst fear was that the RAF would return the next night to stoke the fires, in which case it was essential that Saturday night’s conflagrations were put out by dusk on Sunday. In the event it proved impossible. Even after fire services from all of the nearby towns had been drafted in to help, many fires raged for days. In some areas the fires were so huge that they were not extinguished for several weeks – many households had already bought their winter supplies of coal and coke, and when they caught fire it was next to impossible to put them out. ³⁹

* * *

Once the all-clear had sounded, the flak batteries stopped firing. Unable to pinpoint the attacking aeroplanes, the best they had been able to do was put up an unaimed barrage in the hope that they might score a few hits. When they stopped, the barrels of the guns were glowing with the heat of the firing. Rudolf Schurig, the officer in command of the heavy flak battery at Steilshoop, claimed afterwards that his battery alone had shot 547 rounds into the sky on that night. ⁴⁰In total, about fifty thousand rounds of heavy flak were discharged into the heavens. ⁴¹For all that, only a single Wellington had been shot down over Hamburg, and a Halifax of the Pathfinder Force seriously damaged. ⁴²

Now that the firing had stopped, the flak helpers were free to join the emergency effort in the streets. In Altona, the wounded Johann Johannsen was finally given permission to stand down by his battery commander. He went immediately to look for his family. As he hurried through the burning streets he narrowly missed being blown to smithereens by a high-explosive bomb: even though the RAF planes had returned home, explosions were still going off throughout the city, partly because numerous bombs had timer fuses, and partly because chemicals caught fire in factories. By the time Johannsen reached his house, he was a bag of nerves:

Everything was in flames: houses, vehicles, trees. Burning phosphorus dripped from the roofs. Around my house it was empty of people – apparently they were sitting in the cellar even though the house was ablaze. I hurried into the stairwell, where glowing sparks were already coming down, and then in two, three leaps was down in the air-raid cellar. On my question, ‘All Ok?’, I discovered that my son and another person who’d been sheltering in the cellar had broken through a wall cavity into a neighbouring cellar. ⁴³

As he gathered up his family and took them through the streets to safety, the suitcase he had rescued from the cellar caught fire, set alight by a ‘huge rain of sparks… pouring down over everything’. ⁴⁴

Across Hamburg people were emerging from their shelters to be greeted by chaos. After several terrifying hours below ground, Rolf Arnold clearly remembers his first sight of the devastation that was unfolding outside his Harvestehude home:

As we left the cellar after the regular tone of the all-clear siren, the first window in the stairwell presented us with a view over the courtyard towards Harvestehude: a terrible picture – everything we could see was on fire. Grindelberg was burning on both sides, and the facing parts of Oberstrasse, Werderstrasse, Brahmsallee, Hansastrasse and Hallerstrasse – they were all burning. It was a complete sea of flame. ⁴⁵

Just across the Alster in Winterhude, the picture of destruction was similar, as Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg recorded in her diary shortly afterwards:

Back in our flat we stand on the balcony and see nothing but a circle of flames around the Alster, fire everywhere in our neighbourhood. Thick clouds of smoke are hanging over the city, and smoke comes in through all the windows carrying large flakes of fluttering ash. And it is raining in torrents! We go into the road just for a moment at three thirty a.m. In the Sierichstrasse several houses have collapsed and fire is still raging. The sight of the Bellevue is dreadful, and the Mühlenkamp is nothing but glass and rubble. We go to bed completely shattered. ⁴⁶

The huge fires across the city were so numerous that they sparked off a number of unusual meteorological events. To begin with, the massive heat had created strong winds. Johann Johannsen claims he had to struggle against ‘a frightful storm, caused by the heat’. ⁴⁷Liselotte Gerke remembers her aunt telling her the next day that she was unable to fight her way through the wind to the shelter at Osterstrasse station, and had to go to the one at Emilienstrasse instead. ⁴⁸And then, amid all the wind and fire, another phenomenon occurred: it started to rain.

The full effect of these events could only be seen clearly from a distance. Professor Dr Franz Termer, director of the museum of ethnology, was watching the city burn from his home in Hochkamp in the far western suburbs:

I will never forget the view over burning Hamburg. On a wide horizon, from north to south, a single fiery glow; above this, while we had a clear starry sky over us, an enormous cloud whirled and billowed upon itself over the city, reaching to the sky with sharp, threatening edges. I was reminded of a volcano eruption, and, to strengthen this, the phenomena it caused were similar to an eruption. Because of the hot air, which rose and then cooled and condensed in the upper atmosphere, a downpour fell over Hamburg from the 2,000–3,000-metre high cloud of smoke… In Hamburg the rain mixed with the ash and created a thick black mud, as we know of volcanic eruptions – a mixture that covered everything, distorted people’s faces and matted their hair. I personally saw such creatures on the following day. ⁴⁹

* * *

As Sunday dawned Hamburg was wreathed in thick black smoke. Perversely, the morning seemed darker than the night before: at least then the people had had the fires to see by, but under the smoke there was nothing to light the streets. Night had become day, and day night, as Pastor Schoene of the Christuskirche in Eimsbüttel noted: ‘By the morning everything was wrapped in black smoke, which was so thick that at nine o’clock in the morning it was still too dark to see anything indoors. Not until eleven o’clock did it become lighter, so that one was able to see what time it was. At three in the afternoon the sun appeared like a small ball shining through the smoke cloud.’ ⁵⁰

The houses and their coal stores were burning and so were numerous warehouses, storing everything from timber and grain to margarine. ⁵¹The municipal gasworks was ablaze, and in Barmbek three thousand litres of ethanol exploded in a liqueur factory. ⁵²

The billowing smoke was blown by the prevailing winds eastwards across the city. When Ilse Grassmann woke up in her Uhlen-horst apartment, she recorded in her diary the eerie effects of this huge cloud: ‘The sun has no power today. It is already midday and it still hasn’t managed to pierce through the layer of smoke and ash. An indescribable radiance: a wan, yellow light gives everything a feeling of unreality that is beginning to seem oppressive.’ ⁵³

Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, who lived a little further north, noted: ‘There is no proper daylight the following morning, the town is so shrouded in smoke. The sun cannot fight its way through, but looks like a bloodshot eye on to the devastation. It remains like that all through the day; the smell of burning is all pervading, so are the dust and the ash. And the siren never stops.’ ⁵⁴

Her husband, Emil, walked into the city to see what had happened, and when he returned, ‘He was full of sad tales. His beloved cigar shop no longer existed, his favourite luncheon place, Michelsen, destroyed, huge devastation at the Gänsemarkt, a direct hit on the Opera, Eimsbüttel and Grindel wiped off the face of the earth.’ ⁵⁵

In fact, the scale of the damage was beyond anything that anyone on the ground could yet imagine. In Eimsbüttel whole streets had been destroyed, with post offices, schools, churches, the tram depot, the police station and Schlump railway station. In Altona the damage included numerous factories and council offices, the military hospital, an electricity sub-station, the county courts, the police headquarters and barracks, and the old town hall. ⁵⁶Although no area was quite ‘wiped off the face of the earth’, the damage in the west of the city was extensive, and the dispersed nature of the bombing meant that not a single area of central Hamburg was unaffected. The effect on morale was devastating.

Wanda Chantler had spent most of the night doing what she could to help the wounded and dying in her forced-labour camp, even stepping through the barbed wire to help rescue a German family whose house on the other side of the street had been hit. After a long night she returned to the rubble. Exhausted and confused, she wanted to see if any of her few belongings had survived the destruction, and was particularly concerned about her Latin grammar book, which she had been studying in the evenings:

I should have taken it with me in my pocket when the warning sounded, but it was so hot that night that I didn’t put my coat on. So I’d lost my grammar, and I was looking for it in this terrific light from the fires. And there, in the debris, were five eyes on a plank, looking at me. Just five people’s eyes. And I said ‘Go to sleep,’ and started crying. Five eyes on a plank. I said, ‘Go to sleep, I’ll come back.’ But when I came back they were not there. ⁵⁷

Over the coming week, the forced labourers of the Lokstedt fish-canning factory were abandoned by the authorities, forgotten among the mounting devastation. Wanda and many of the other surviving prisoners considered escaping – the barbed-wire perimeter fence of their camp had been blown down, and the guards were caught up in the wave of chaos that had swept the city. But since they had nowhere to go most stayed where they were, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

A few days later Wanda was in the factory dining room that had become their makeshift dormitory, arms flailing, striking out at anyone who came near her. When she had been restrained, she was diagnosed as having suffered a complete nervous breakdown, brought on by the shock of the horror she had witnessed. To this day she is haunted by the memory of five eyeballs on a plank amid the debris of her barracks. There could be few more stark images of the reality of modern warfare.

* * *

On the afternoon of Sunday, 25 July, Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann announced that nobody would be allowed to leave the city without special permission – and thereby ensured the deaths of thousands in the coming days. ⁵⁸Certain that what had happened was merely the beginning of something much larger, those who had strings to pull did so now. However, even those who won permission to leave often found it difficult to do so because the train network had been severely disrupted. Those who had cars drove to safety, perhaps using petrol they had set aside for such an emergency. ⁵⁹Parents who could afford to do so sent their children to friends or relatives outside Hamburg. Some of the homeless, the Ausgebombten, were evacuated to other parts of northern Germany in specially commissioned army lorries while others were forced to find shelter where they could in the city.

The majority of Hamburgers had nowhere to go, and no means of transport in any case. Thousands of people were involved in emergency operations and could not leave the city because they were desperately needed – there would be no let-up for several days. The rest had to stay and go to work as normal: without permission to leave it would have been impossible to find work, shelter or rations elsewhere.

The people of Hamburg did what the people of Essen, Bochum, Cologne, Warsaw, London and many other European cities had done before them: they gritted their teeth and got on with life as best they could. Although they expected another attack, nobody could have predicted what was about to befall them. The raids that were yet to come would be unparalleled in history.