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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

16. Firestorm

What if the breath that kindled those grim fires

Awaked should blow them into sevenfold rage

And plunge us in the flames?… what if all

Her stores were opened and this firmament

Of hell should spout her cataracts of fire

John Milton, Paradise Lost ¹

To understand what happened on the night of Tuesday, 27 July 1943, one needs to know a little about how major fires work. Few people have any direct experience of conditions inside a major conflagration, and even those unlucky enough to have lived through a house fire cannot possibly understand what it is like to be caught in a firestorm.

Large conflagrations are different from house fires in two important respects. First, because of their sheer size they produce such vast quantities of smoke that even those far away from the flames may suffocate. This is particularly dangerous in city fires – anyone sheltering in the confined space of a basement or cellar risks death from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide poisoning, as all the oxygen is sucked out of the air and replaced with poisonous fumes.

Second, and more importantly, the incredible temperatures such fires reach – sometimes as high as 800°C – superheat the air above and around the fire, causing it to rise rapidly. In some cases this sets off a chain reaction. As air rushes skywards it leaves a vacuum, which sucks new air from the surrounding areas to fill it. The new air brings oxygen, which feeds the fire. The process accelerates: the fire gets hotter, and the winds get faster, often reaching speeds of 60 or 70 m.p.h. This is what gives the ‘firestorm’ phenomenon its name: the combination of huge fires and storm-force winds. As long as there is enough fuel to keep the fire burning the winds will continue to blow, first rushing into the fire horizontally along the ground, then shooting skywards with the heat.

As I mentioned in Chapter 10, Hamburg had already had a firestorm on Saturday night, where witnesses claimed to have seen ‘a frightful storm, caused by the heat’, and winds so strong that it was impossible to fight one’s way through them. ²On that night British air crew reported seeing clouds of smoke billowing up to 20,000 feet and beyond, forced rapidly into the sky by the heat. This was comparable to the devastating firestorm that had enveloped Wuppertal two months before the Hamburg bombings, and that would consume Dresden eighteen months later. ³

What happened on the night of 27 July, however, was in a different league. The winds reached speeds of at least 120 m.p.h., and in places perhaps as high as 170 m.p.h. ⁴To make things worse, they were not steady in their force: they swirled and changed direction from one moment to the next. In a forest firestorm the wind is generally free to take the most direct route to the centre of the conflagration, spiralling inwards in an anti-clockwise direction, like a cyclone. By contrast, in a city like Hamburg, the winds are forced away from their natural course by all the buildings that stand in the way. That night they were channelled along streets, sometimes meeting head-on at junctions, causing eddies and swirls that knocked people off their feet. There are many reports of ‘fire-whirls’ at such junctions – miniature tornadoes – which added to the misery of the fugitives trying to reach safety. ⁵

Some of the hottest temperatures ever experienced in a city fire accompanied the hurricane-force winds. The sheer amount of flammable material, stacked up in six-storey buildings, like huge charcoal ricks, produced enough heat to melt the glass in the windows of cars and trams on the streets – which means the temperature must have approached glass-furnace level, about 1,400°C. ⁶Inside the buildings it was even hotter – cutlery and glass bottles melted, and bricks burned to ash.

In the years that followed the catastrophe, the Hamburg fire-storm came under intense scientific scrutiny, and it was concluded that no other large fire in recorded history has ever equalled its intensity. It was far worse than any of the great forest fires that have engulfed large parts of America and Canada; greater even than the fires that have consumed London, Chicago or any other city bombed by the Allies across Germany.

The reason Hamburg’s firestorm was so bad is as simple as the result was tragic: weather conditions – a set of circumstances so unusual for the area that they have only rarely been repeated since. Because of all the hot, sultry weather Hamburg had been experiencing, an unstable pocket of warm air was sitting directly over the city. It had been warmed by all the fires that had been burning since Sunday, and was saturated with smoke particles, which retained the heat even more effectively. All around Hamburg, however, and high above it, the air was much cooler. Surrounded on all sides by this colder air, the pocket of warm air was like a huge, pressurized balloon, sticking up some 10,000 feet. All it would take to burst the top off this balloon was a sharp rise in temperature. Once it hadburst, the warm air over the city would rise unrestricted for thousands of feet, rapidly drawing newer air behind it, and setting off the greatest firestorm the world has ever seen. ⁷

The final factor was the humidity – or, rather, the lack of it. Because the city is close to the sea, the air in Hamburg normally has a very high humidity – a seasonal average of about 78 per cent. On 27 July 1943 the humidity was a mere 30 per cent. After the long, dry summer most of the buildings in Hamburg were like tinder, but with such low humidity there was nothing to stop the rapid spread of fire. Other historians have used the analogy of a furnace with a very tall chimney, just waiting for someone to light a match. ⁸That match was lit shortly before 1.00 a.m. when the RAF dropped the first of 1,174 tons of incendiaries into the eastern quarter of the city.

* * *

Part of the tragedy for Hamburg was the sheer bad luck of it all. The Allies had not planned specifically to take advantage of the prevailing weather conditions; indeed, they did not even realize that such conditions couldlead to a firestorm. ⁹Their understanding was far more basic: the weather was good because it was clear, which made navigation to the city much easier, and because it was dry, which would make it easier to start effective fires. They had no idea quite how perfect the conditions were for their purpose.

They did, however, have a good idea of how to start fires, and how to keep them going. After years of practice, they had created a highly effective system. To start with, they knew that the most important factor was concentration. If an attacking force dropped its incendiaries in a single area it would be impossible for the defenders to put out all of the fires. If enough were allowed to take hold, they would soon join up into huge conflagrations. The fire services would be unable to cope: they would be forced further and further away from each fire’s centre, and would struggle to prevent them spreading to other districts.

The second most important thing was the use of high-explosive bombs. Most people assume, instinctively, that the purpose of explosives is to destroy buildings. Our perception is coloured by our modern experience: the bombs used by terrorists, or even by conventional military forces, are almost always designed to cause maximum damage to buildings by razing them to the ground. But bombing during the Second World War was carried out on such a huge scale that different tactics were required. Fire is far more efficient than high-explosive bombs at destroying large areas, so Allied tactics were aimed at getting the fires to spread as far and as quickly as possible. Military planners had learned early in the war that if they wanted their fires to spread it was counter-productive to blast buildings down because this created fire breaks. The purpose of high explosives, therefore, was not to destroybuildings but merely to blow in as many doors and windows as possible, to allow the air to get inside and feed the flames. Buildings that were not yet burning would catch fire as the sparks and embers from neighbouring buildings floated in, setting curtains and furniture alight. By blowing off roofs, high-explosive bombs would also allow the incendiaries to pierce the lower floors of a building, where they could do most damage. The explosions would have the added effect of keeping most fire-fighters inside their shelters long enough for the fires to take hold, and putting craters in the roads that prevented fire engines getting to affected areas. So while the incendiaries would do most damage, high explosives had an essential role, and it was important that the exact mix of the two different types of bombs was right. ¹⁰

One might be tempted to ask what kind of mind comes up with such theories, but to be fair to the Allies a great deal of the research had been done for them – or, rather, tothem. During the Blitz in 1940–41, the Luftwaffe had rained incendiaries on London and other cities, causing huge damage. The British, who had only really used high-explosive bombs until then, soon learned that the fires did far more damage than the explosions, and began to experiment accordingly. ¹¹Repugnant as it might seem now, the cruel logic of war requires such efficiency. By the summer of 1943, RAF planners had brought large-scale bombing to a fine art.

* * *

The concentration of bombs on Hamburg that Tuesday night was so great that the civil-defence organizations in the eastern quarter of the city had little chance of saving anything. ‘After only a quarter of an hour, conditions in these districts were terrible,’ claimed the official German report shortly afterwards. ‘A carpet of bombs of unimaginable density caused almost complete destruction of these districts in a very short time. Extensive portions were transformed in barely half an hour into one sea of flame.’ ¹²The bombs came down so thick and fast it was impossible to stop the spread of fire: tens of thousands of individual fires quickly became one vast conflagration.

The people of Hamburg had been expecting another attack, but nothing could have prepared them for the hammering they were now experiencing, especially in the eastern quarter of the city. Even those who had lived through the first night of attacks must have been shocked at the intensity of tonight’s bombardment. For Fredy Borck, the eleven-year-old who lived in the riverside district of Rothenburgsort, it was the most terrifying night of his life:

Suddenly it started to happen outside. It was a bombardment that is still indescribable, even today… All around us were the crashes of bombs striking with appalling explosions – ear-shattering explosions that seemed to be right next to us, over us. You could even hear the howl of the nearer bombs before they hit, then the crash as they burst. It must have been hell outside! It got worse and worse. The walls of the cellar rose and sank… An inhuman screeching and groaning came from the walls. We screamed along with it, screaming out our terror! We lost all self-control, crouched on the benches, cowering together with our heads between our knees to cover our ears. ¹³

Fifteen-year-old Herbert Wulff was sheltering in a basement in Süderstrasse, right at the centre of the main attack. He was huddling with his mother and sister when the sound of the bombs became unbearable: unlike Fredy Borck, his instinct was to leave the shelter and take his chances outside. His sister was still recovering from a gall-bladder operation – she had been discharged from Barmbek hospital early because the room where she had been recuperating was destroyed in the first night of attacks. Even so, Wulff recalled, she too was determined to get out of the basement shelter:

Shortly after everyone in the building had filled the cellar, the whole building shook, right down to the foundations, from the explosion of a huge bomb. I can still see it, how the foundation walls moved between the buttresses and swayed dangerously. Then the lighting went out abruptly, and a cry rang out through the cellar room, and I thought for a moment that my final hour had come. After that first terrifying second we had only one thought: to get out of there. Instinctively my mother, my sister and I grabbed each other’s hands and pushed our way through to the cellar stairs. ¹⁴

Some people – the foolish and the brave – were already outside their cellars watching events unfold. Most houses and factories had a fire warden who would make regular patrols for incendiaries, and call for help from the shelters when a new fire needed to be put out. ¹⁵Many of those brave men and women died before they had a chance to do anything useful. The survivors found themselves quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of incendiary bombs falling around them. The German authorities estimated that 96,429 stick incendiaries fell on every square kilometre of ground, plus a further 2,733 larger incendiary bombs. This was over five times as concentrated as the previous large-scale attack. ¹⁶To give some idea of what this meant on a human scale, imagine a large attic room, about ten metres long and ten metres wide. On average, in this attic room alone, ten incendiary bombs would fall, each crashing through the ceiling to set the roof timbers alight.

The incendiary bombs were of two main types. The most common were the four-pound thermite stick incendiaries. They fell nose down, to strike roofs so hard that they would either lodge in the roof cavity or pierce through to the rooms below where they would burst into flame. Some were also fitted with an explosive charge, so that if a fire warden came across it in time to shovel it out of a window it would explode, killing or maiming him or her. The second type of incendiary was bigger, weighing thirty pounds, and was heavy enough to crash through the roof space into the lower storeys. They were filled with a liquid mixture of Benzol and rubber, designed to splash across whatever the bomb hit, setting fire to everything within ten metres. German civilians tended to call them, and all incendiaries, ‘phosphor bombs’, which gave rise to a number of gruesome myths. Phosphorus is a particularly evil substance: it sticks to the skin and is impossible to put out as long as it is in contact with the air. In fact, while a small number of bombs contained phosphorus, the vast majority were made from other substances, less immediately terrifying, but much more effective at starting fires. ¹⁷

With dozens of apartments catching fire simultaneously, whole blocks were soon ablaze. Henni Klank, a young mother, was one of those who ventured out of her shelter.

I don’t know why, but suddenly the Devil possessed me; I wanted to go into our house one more time. Perhaps I thought I could still get some things out, like papers, photographs, and such things. But as I stood in the corridor the ceiling was already crackling, and I wanted to go to my father’s desk in the living-room, but there I saw only fire. The blazing and burning curtains flew in the room, the window panes burst and there was a hissing and crashing all around me. I couldn’t manage the few steps to the desk, which stood at the window, my legs felt paralysed. While dashing out of the apartment I hadn’t grabbed even a single article out of the wardrobe. I was in such a panic that I rushed back to the shelter as quickly as possible. The streets were already burning, the firestorm was now raging through all the streets! ¹⁸

Downstairs she found her friends and neighbours close to despair. They all knew that they must leave the building, but when one had tried to go out by the front entrance he had been blown by the wind into the fire. The front of the building was ablaze, and a timber business opposite was burning so fiercely that they would not be able to get through to the relative safety of the canal beyond it. Eventually somebody came up with the idea of breaking through the back wall of the building – Frau Klank’s husband had remembered a pickaxe that stood in the corner of the basement. They smashed a hole through the wall big enough to push through the pram that contained their newborn baby.

The vision that greeted them on the other side of that wall was worthy of Hieronymus Bosch: ‘We came out at the Stadtdeich but into a thundering, blazing hell. The streets were burning, the trees were burning and the tops of them were bent right down to the street, burning horses out of the Hertz hauling business ran past us, the air was burning, simply everything was burning!’ ¹⁹

The bombardment had been so fierce that many people found themselves in similar situations: their houses were on fire, yet their escape routes were blocked by rubble or flames. That was what happened to Erich Titschak, a professor of entomology, who lived on Dimpfelsweg in the centre of Hamm. At 1.15 a.m., in the middle of the attack, an incendiary set the cellar stairs alight making escape from the shelter virtually impossible. He and some others broke through to their neighbouring cellar, only to find that the way out there was also blocked by flames. In desperation they got through to the basement on the opposite side. That house and the one beyond it had been burned down in a previous raid, so they thought it would be easy to find a way through to the street. In a letter to his children shortly afterwards, he described what he found:

A labyrinth of cellars, hallways, corners and sheds opens before us… All kinds of useless junk block our way. We break through eleven doors, one by one, hoping to finally find the exit on to the Hammer Landstraße… there must be a safe way out of here, the corner house, for our wives and children. Some cellar doors fly open at the first hit, but now we are faced with two heavy doors, which resist all our efforts. We take it in turns, sweat running in streams from our foreheads, but without success. The doors are probably lined with iron on the other side. The bolts are strong, our axe glances off the concrete without leaving a trace. ²⁰

Disappointed, Titschak and his companion, Herr Bläß, returned to their own cellar, knowing that the only way out was up the burning stairs. On the way back they caught a view of what they were up against.

In one of the adjoining rooms, I knock out the cellar window and catch my first glimpse of Dimpfelsweg and the gardens. What I see takes my breath away. Not just our building and the neighbouring building: no, the entire Dimpfelsweg, the buildings opposite, the Wagnerische Villa, the big building by the cinema, the cinema itself, the Claudiastraße – it all is one enormous sea of fire. A tornado-strength storm sweeps through the streets, pushing a rain of embers before it as thick as a snowstorm in winter. We were supposed to go through there? We’d never make it! Our clothes would instantly catch fire. The Hammer Landstraße, which was supposed to save us – the same picture. As far as I could see through the iron bars of a small cellar window, all the big beautiful buildings were burning from top to bottom. ²¹

Back in their cellar they instructed everyone to wrap wet towels round themselves and do their best to escape up the burning stairs. At that point, while they could see the immediate danger, they had no real idea of the hell that lay outside. Each person in the cellar made the short run through the flames, Titschak leading. As they stumbled out on to the street, they were confronted by the sight of their entire neighbourhood on fire.

Another survivor in similar circumstances, Hans Jedlicka, claims that the shock of this sight numbed him:

I was still convinced that the fire bombs had only hit our doorway, that once we’d run through we’d be safe. As we came through, the sight that met us was like a blow. All I could see was flames. The whole of Hammerbrook was burning! A powerful storm took hold of us and drove us in the direction of Hammerbrookstraße. That was wrong. We had to go towards Heidenkampsweg – there was water there, and the Stoltenpark. We stumbled over the first charred corpses. From there on it was like a switch turned in my head. It was like being in a dream. I saw and heard everything, crystal-clear, but in spite of the great heat felt no pain. We had to fight our way through the firestorm metre by metre. My mother’s clothes caught fire. I put the flames out with my hands. ²²

It is little wonder that many people chose to stay in their cellars in the unrealistic hope that the reinforced ceilings would afford them some protection from the flames in the buildings above them. Some people must have believed they would be safer in their makeshift bunkers than they would be outside – as the public-information documents and broadcasts had told them. Others gave up in despair. When everything outside was burning, what difference did it make whether one stayed or left? Some air-raid wardens reported having to bully people into seeking safety elsewhere with blows and kicks, even though it had become obvious that to stay put meant certain death. ²³

In any normal raid, when the upper floors of a house were on fire it was still fairly safe in the cellar, and certainly better than risking the explosions outside – occupants of a burning building were encouraged to stay where they were at least until the all-clear had sounded. But, this was no normal raid. Once the firestorm had taken hold, the wind and all the flaming debris it carried made it almost impossible to escape through the streets. Many of those who survived did so because they left their cellars early – perversely, those who initially appeared to be in the most danger were the most likely to survive. Those whose buildings caught fire later in the raid found themselves trapped between their own fire and the ‘hell’ of the firestorm outside.

In an interview with Der Spiegelmagazine in 2003, the poet and song-writer Wolf Biermann described how agonizing the decision was to stay or go. He was six at the time, but remembers the events of that night as clearly as if they were burned into his memory:

I sat there alone with my mother… She was sitting there as if she was paralysed or maybe because she was smart – because in such a panic everything you do is a mistake. It’s a mistake to leave: you run to your own death. It’s a mistake to stay: death will come to you. Nobody is rational in such a situation. In a sense I was rational: I pressed my little head into my mother’s coat, into her lap, and thus I could breathe; the air was impossible to breathe elsewhere.

Then my mother realised we’d burn there. She took a little leather suitcase with our papers and a few photos of my dad who, just a few months ago, had gone through the fiery oven in Auschwitz, as a Jew, as a Communist. And she handed me a little bucket – a little aluminium bucket with a cover. There was mirabelle jam inside, my mother had made it. And I took my little bucket and then we got out. We crawled through the basement. ²⁴

As he stepped outside it was not so much the sight of all the flames that terrified him as the noise. The crash of the bombs exploding around him, the roar of the fires, the drone of the planes and, above it all, the terrifying whine of the wind: ‘What a sound it was! It was hell, it was hell’s fires. In hell it is not only hot but loud. The firestorm was screaming!’ ²⁵

The odyssey that lay before people like the young Wolf Biermann and his mother defies imagination. In a conflagration so huge it was impossible to escape the fire – the distance to the edge was too great. The best anyone could hope for was to get to some open space that would act as an island in the terrible flaming sea – a park or playing fields where the fire could not properly take hold. In Hammerbrook people made for the Stoltenpark, or the banks of the many canals that criss-crossed the area. In Hamm, those who could made their way to the Hammer Park, and in Eilbek it was the Jakobipark, just north of Hasselbrook station. Even there the heat was so great that people were overcome. Without shelter from the storm of sparks their clothes and hair were still in danger of catching fire, and many sustained such bad burns as they escaped that they perished shortly after reaching relative safety. In the smaller parks and open spaces hundreds died because they could not get far enough away from the incredible heat. In one green about 120 metres square, more than a hundred people who had sought safety in the centre were burned to death. ²⁶

The following account is by a man who was in his mid-forties. When the exit from his cellar was blocked by rubble he was forced to break through into his brother-in-law’s pastry shop on the ground floor of the building. From that point on it became almost impossible to keep the family together as they ran through the burning streets in a desperate search for shelter:

There were only two places that might be safe; either the sports field on Grevenweg or the Ankelmannplatz in the opposite direction. The escape route to the sports field was shorter, but was more likely to be in the middle of a sea of fire. I personally, with my family, chose the somewhat longer route, racing along the middle of the street which was alight with flying sparks, in order to avoid some of the heat from the burning house façades.

Even on the short distance to the next corner, we saw the first people burning, desperately running figures, who suddenly fell, and as we approached, were already dead. We had reached the first crossroads. Here we saw a building whose roof had, exceptionally, only just caught fire. In the entrance to this building we took shelter for a few moments from the storm, the heat, the whipping whirl of sparks and the glowing mounds of phosphor. We were in desperate need of this break. Although we had only travelled a short distance, our lips were already badly swollen. Our throats were incredibly dry. Our legs felt weak…

All around people fled from burning buildings. Some came out with their clothes already alight, others caught fire outside, from the sparks, the blazing heat or the phosphor. Again and again we saw burning people suddenly start to run, and soon after, to fall.

After this terrible cries were to be heard, but they too grew rarer. I saw many burning people who ran and collapsed in silence. There were also people travelling in the opposite direction to us. Because of this we had only gone a few steps when I heard my sister call. We could not see her, because despite the bright fires close by, thick smoke and dust darkened everything. We followed my sister’s voice, calling [to her] ourselves, but received no answer. For a short while it became lighter. Around twenty metres in front of me, I saw my brother-in-law appear from the darkness of a building’s wall, and run into the middle of the street. I called to him. He turned to me. I saw from his badly swollen face that he had already suffered heavy burns. Whether or not he recognized me, I do not know. My brother-in-law suddenly turned away again and began to run. I then saw that all his clothes were burning brightly. He fell into a mass of three or four corpses which were already completely burned. When my wife and I reached there, our brother-in-law was already dead, burned. There was no way to save the people who were falling. He who fell over during his escape was lost…

My wife’s head began to burn. Her hair had caught fire. With a small amount of water that I had in a bucket with me I was able to put out her burning hair. At the same time I cooled my hands and face… My wife complained, ‘I can’t go on! My feet are burned! My hands!’… I also felt great pain in my right hand, caused by a severe burn. My left hand was beginning to hurt similarly as well. My head burned as if on fire, especially my face. I also noticed that my sight began to fade.

The stretch of road upon which we now travelled brought ever worsening scenes of horror. I saw many women with their children held in their arms running, burning and then falling and not getting back up. We passed masses of people made up of four or five corpses, each probably a family, visible only as a pile of burned substance no larger than a small child. Many men and women fell over suddenly without having caught fire. Around us were hundreds of people. Some of them ran, some moved slowly, with a peculiar shuffling walk. All this happened in silence. The terrible heat had dried throats so much that no one could scream. Silently and with the last of their force, women tried to save their children. They carried them pressed close. Many of these children were already dead, without their mothers knowing. ²⁷

A tornado, a whirl of sparks, the tops of trees bent to the street by the force of the burning wind – what these people were witnessing was the beginning of a unique phenomenon. The word Flammenmeer, ‘sea of flames’, comes up again and again in accounts of the firestorm. It is a literal description of what those people saw: a vast sea of fire in the grip of a hurricane. When a local priest saw what had overcome his neighbourhood in Eilbek he was reminded of the apocalyptic vision of St Matthew. ²⁸For most people, however, they were witnessing, quite simply, a picture of hell. The fires spread for miles in each direction and there was literally no end to the flames – their entire world had been transformed into a blazing inferno.

The city authorities struggled vainly to keep the fires under control, but from the outset they were fighting a losing battle. With most of the fire service still in the west of the city there were few teams to combat the flames. Those who did appear soon gave up trying to put out the fires and concentrated instead on rescuing people from burning buildings. In Rothenburgsort, for example, the fire-service leader ordered his men to create an umbrella of water for the fugitives to escape beneath, and in this way brought up to five thousand people to safety. ²⁹Such rescue attempts were still possible on the outer edges of the main firestorm area – but once the fire brigade ventured into Hammerbrook, Borgfelde and Hamm they were forced to abandon all hope of saving anyone. The head of one fire-fighting unit discovered that, not only was he unable to help the fugitives, he was lucky to escape with his own life: