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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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In Hammer Weg there were people lying on the street. We climbed out of the car to rescue them. Then suddenly, along the Landstraße, there came a colossal sheet of flame, which I tried to escape by running ahead of it. The driver got away by turning the car down Horst-Wessel-Straße. The firestorm was a hurricane. No smoke on the streets, only flames and flying sparks as thick as a snowstorm… I ran until I was exhausted. ³⁰

Ludwig Faupel was another fireman who had rushed to Hamm only to find himself embroiled in the full force of the firestorm. After driving through a ‘roaring, boiling hell’, he and his crew were forced to abandon their vehicle in the middle of the road and take whatever shelter they could find. ³¹

Closely pressed against the ground behind a heap of stones, the heat was unbearable. Again and again I had to put out my smouldering clothes. I put my gas mask on for lack of air. Bits of fire, dust and ash flew all around. In the howling and crashing of the wind people were blown over, stumbled and lay there exhausted, doomed to die. Above it all the growling drone of hundreds of aircraft. Bombs exploding.

Our fire engine was burning. My comrades had disappeared in the storm and heat. In order to stop myself being pulled into the fire I struggled against the storm and landed up in a huge bomb crater, full of water from a broken pipe. Trapped, I ripped the gas mask from my face and clung to the edge of the crater for fear of drowning. The rim broke off, my helmet was gone, dread began to take hold of me. I ducked under the water in order to escape the glowing heat. There was an insane noise in the air. ³²

In this atmosphere, surrounded by incessant noise and unbearable heat, the terrifying scenes took on a surreal quality.

With a glance over the edge of the crater I saw a man kneeling right in front of me. With big, frightened eyes he fell forwards. I pulled the dead man into the crater. Only those who had left the cellars by this time would now survive. They rushed over glowing mountains of rubble. Many were killed by the ruins collapsing, or torn to pieces by bombs, suffocated or burned. I could not believe what I was seeing. In the thunderous din none of them could hear the screams of the others. Each struggled for survival. Parts of a collapsing house façade poured down on the other side of the crater and into the water. The brown sludge splashed around the edge and meant the end for some of those seeking shelter. ³³

As he clung to the edge of the crater, Faupel lost all sense of time. He had no idea how long he stayed there, whether it was hours or merely minutes. Eventually, however, instinct told him to move on:

At some point in the night I ran on once more with the dripping wet jacket of the dead man over my head. In this whirling fire I had lost all sense of direction. On my way out of the chaos I came across a burnt-out tram. The windows had melted in the heat. Dead bodies lay naked on top of one another in the carriage. Their clothes had disintegrated into embers. The people had tried to shelter there from the firestorm. In Eiffestrasse they struggled for survival. Sinking into the hot Tarmac, they had tried to support themselves with their hands, and lay now on their knees. They ended their lives screaming with fear and pain. I could not help them. ³⁴

Although he was only a child, Wolf Biermann remembers equally chilling scenes:

The firestorm was so strong that it converted streets into jets. Schwabenstrasse, where we lived, was in a good position, aslant to the suction of the fire. But once you got into a street which was part of the suction, people started to burn like tinder and they had no chance. So we ran close to the walls to escape the storm. I saw how roofs were flying through the air; it was like in the movies, like science fiction, but real. The asphalt was burning and boiling. I saw two women running, a young one and an older one, whose shoes got stuck in the boiling asphalt. They pulled their feet out of the shoes but that wasn’t a good idea because they had to step into the boiling asphalt. They fell and didn’t get up again. Like flies in the hot wax of a candle. ³⁵

Ernst-Günther Haberland was another schoolchild who witnessed this uniquely awful vision, after leaving the safety of the main bunker at about five o’clock the next morning:

We looked around us at the area where we had once lived. All the buildings burned brightly, it was a single wall of fire. One could hear the terrible cries of people seeking help for their wounds. One saw people on Heidenkampsweg trying to cross from one side of the street to the other, where there was a canal. The asphalt of the road had become almost liquid with the immense heat. They reached the middle, where their feet got stuck in the asphalt. Their legs began to burn because of the heat, the flames ate their way up and met again above their heads. At first they screamed, then became quieter, and finally, they gave a last rattling breath and were dead. ³⁶

* * *

Survival in the open streets of Hamburg was now virtually impossible. The hurricane was full of burning debris – roofs, branches, pieces of masonry and timber – and there are many accounts of people being bowled over by items that hit them. ³⁷The air was so hot and so choked with smoke and poisonous gases as to be all but unbreathable. Sparks and embers caught on people’s hair, setting it on fire. To make things worse, the fugitives could not allow themselves to be carried along by the wind: since the hurricane was caused by the fire sucking air inwards to feed itself, that would have been suicide. Instead they had to battle againstit, and all the flaming debris it carried, to reach anything resembling safety. Neither were they able to seek shelter in doorways – often the heat from burning houses was so intense that they were obliged to stick to the middle of the road, where the force of the wind was strongest.

When the safety of an open space was too far for the fugitives immediately to reach, they had to try to get there in stages, taking what shelter they could along the way. One woman tells how she, her husband and daughter travelled from one burning cellar to the next, sheltering for as long as the flames were not immediately threatening, before moving on again. They did this no fewer than seven times, before finally succumbing to despair:

So we had finished with our lives. There was too little hope of escaping this hellish cauldron. No way to break through this ring. We no longer said a word to one another, we did not cry either, nor did we whine or complain, we only stared silently in front of ourselves. Suddenly we were told there was an escape route by the railroad embankment, that we should get onto the rails, since no trains could come because the station had been destroyed. We then slid down a long rope on to the platform. Today I can’t imagine how we managed to get down there – but anyway, we got down. Exhausted, we threw ourselves on to the embankment. However, the grassy knolls were so hot that one could not stay on them. The opposite embankment had already caught fire. Hannelore climbed to the top of the embankment with the last of her energy in order to see how thick the smoke above was… She called to us, and we climbed with what little strength we still had to the top, our cramped hands in the hot grass. When we arrived at the top, we fled into a small corrugated metal toilet. Here people sat on top of each other in the disgusting air, safe only from the sparks, and in no way from the smoke. ³⁸

On such a hellish night, a public toilet was a welcome haven, particularly if the cisterns still had water in them. Erika Wilken and her husband Willi found shelter in a toilet under the street on Grevenweg, at the centre of the firestorm area in Hammerbrook. For a while they huddled with at least eighty others, wetting a blanket in the water from the cisterns to drape over their heads. When it ran out they used the water from the toilet bowls. There was little they could do beyond staying put, and hoping not to suffocate as all the oxygen was sucked out of the air by the fires. But worse was to come:

To our misfortune, a large phosphorus bomb fell directly outside the entrance (whose door had been blown off on Saturday evening). The people nearest the door now gave way to an indescribable panic. The inner lavatory doors were torn off and used as shields in front of the bomb. After a few minutes, they too were burning brightly.

Terrible scenes took place, since all of us saw certain death in front of us, with the only way out a sea of flames. We were caught like rats in a trap. The doors were thrown on to the canister by screaming people and more smoke and heat poured in. In the meantime, the water in the tank had been used up… My husband was completely worn out and we crouched next to the bowl. The other people here sat down too; some collapsed and never woke up again. Three soldiers committed suicide. I begged my husband to beat back the flames with our blanket – the one object we had brought with us apart from our papers – but he was no longer able to do so. So with my last strength I did it. My hair began to singe and my husband extinguished it…

What now? Our hearts were racing, our faces began to puff up and we were close to fainting. Perhaps another five or eight minutes and we would be finished too. On my question ‘Willi, is this the end?’, my husband decided to risk everything and try to reach the outside… I took the blanket and he the little suitcase. Quickly but carefully, so that we would not slip on the corpses, we reached the outside, me first and my husband behind me. One! Two! Three! We were through the wall of fire. We made it. Both without burns; only our shoes were singed. But our last strength and courage had gone. We lay down on the ground at the side of the canal… People swimming in it kept wetting our blanket for us. ³⁹

Erika and Willy Wilken had stumbled by accident upon probably the last safe haven in Hammerbrook. Away from the relative security of the parks and open spaces, the canals that criss-crossed the area proved the only salvation for thousands of people. Beside the water they were a fraction cooler, and the air near the water’s surface was breathable. Most of the fugitives did not stop on the canals’ banks but hurried to submerge themselves, cooling their burns in the life-saving water.

Yet even here it was not completely safe. There are many tales of people becoming drenched in liquid phosphorus and being unable to extinguish the flames, even by throwing themselves into the canals because phosphorus burns as soon as it comes back into contact with oxygen. Most of these stories can be dismissed as repetition of a particularly gruesome urban myth, ⁴⁰but the British used liquid phosphorus in some of their incendiaries, and there are enough first-hand eyewitnesses to make one or two instances of this terrible story possible.

Just as dangerous, however, was the thin layer of oil on the water’s surface. Ben Witter, who witnessed the firestorm as a local journalist, describes the circumstances in which some people found themselves as they sought shelter in the canals:

It is difficult to explain how water can burn. It was burning because very many ships, small ships, had exploded and oil had been released into the water and the people who were themselves on fire jumped into it and… I don’t know, some kind of chemical must have been in it… and they burned, swam, burned, and went under. ⁴¹

The official report of the Hamburg police chief confirms that while the canals were often the only safe place to go they were still by no means comfortable. Even those who stayed in the water throughout the firestorm suffered burns on their heads; they were obliged to keep wetting their faces to avoid perishing in the heat. ‘The firestorm swept over the water with its heat and its showers of sparks so that even thick wooden posts and bollards burned down to the level of the water.’ ⁴²Many people were obliged to stand in the water or swim for hours; some became exhausted and drowned. Others died from injuries caused by falling masonry and other debris that fell on to the water’s surface.

Twenty-one-year-old Heinz Masuch was driven to the Süd Kanal after being forced to abandon every other place of refuge he’d come across. Having left his shelter in Robinsonstrasse (a street so badly burned that it has since been erased from the map), he tried the docks, the Sorbenpark and a space behind the pillars of a bridge – but in each case the temperature became so unbearable that he and his companions feared that their clothes would ignite.

So we sat in the canal up to our necks in water and our wet jackets and coats over our heads. If we thought we had escaped the flames there, we were gravely mistaken, as there were glowing coal barges floating along, from which we had to protect ourselves. We must have spent two hours, maybe more, in the water, until the fires had died down. ⁴³

Wolf Biermann’s mother was likewise trying desperately to find a safe place for them to weather the storm. Having taken shelter in a factory for a short time, she was now steering her son towards one of Hammerbrook’s canals, rightly assuming that it was the only place left that might offer them safety. As he recalls, he was still clutching a little bucket of jam she had entrusted to him in the cellar:

Back into the streets? To try that was to put yourself straight back into the blaze. That was suicide. Impossible. But we had to go. We turned left round the corner, there was a canal, a bridge. My mother tried to reach the water with me near the bridge. We crawled through the handrail, down the canal’s bank… We reached the water, found a spot in the group of people and stood in the water. I was standing next to an old lady who on every finger was holding a little suitcase or handbag, everything she could grab. And now that was all floating on the water. I saw, from my low point of view, that my head was at the same level as her hand. And suddenly I could see right in front of me how the woman’s fingers were losing their grip, how the suitcases were floating away, how the woman was sinking. Then she was gone.

More and more pieces of debris were falling around us from above, and it became obvious we couldn’t stay there. Some stayed because they could think of nothing better to do, but my mother had a feeling we should leave. So she grabbed me by my shoulders and swam with me across the canal. And on the other side it was idyllic! There was grass, there were shallow banks and there were a dozen other people who had escaped there. They were sitting there like in a theatre box: nothing could fall down from above, and around them there was the panorama of a burning city which they could watch from a safe position. How wonderful! Believe it or not, it’s true, I still had my little bucket in my hand. And as there was a good lid on it nothing bad had happened to it even when I fell into the water… We opened the lid and it was the most wonderful mirabelle jam of my life – little wonder when your throat is sore, from the smoke, from the fire, from all the dirt, from all the anxiety! We passed the bucket around, so that everybody could take a taste of its syrupy sweetness. It was paradise on earth, in the middle of hell! ⁴⁴

From their position on the bank they had a grandstand view of the blazing buildings that stretched on all sides as far as the eye could see. Directly before them lay Hammerbrook, the centre of the firestorm, and the glow of Hamm beyond. To their right the docks were in flames, all the way down to the riverside suburb of Rothenburgsort. To their left, Borgfelde, Hohenfelde, Eilbek and Wandsbek were all burning.

* * *

It is impossible to tell precisely when the firestorm started, but certainly it was before the bombing finished. The word ‘firestorm’ was not written in the chronological record at Fire Service Headquarters until 2.40 a.m., but Hans Brunswig, the chief engineer on duty that night, remembers that by two o’clock the winds were so strong that it was impossible to walk through the fire-station courtyard: the men had to crawl on their hands and knees. ⁴⁵From the study he made both at the time and after the war, Brunswig estimates that the firestorm probably began as early as twenty or thirty minutes after the first bombs fell. ⁴⁶His suggestion is backed up by the accounts of eyewitnesses.

By 1.30 a.m., the fires already extended from the Berliner Tor on the edge of the city centre to the Hammer Park in the east, and from the banks of the river as far north as the Wandsbeker Chaussee. In half an hour the RAF had created a single fire that had engulfed several square miles of the city. Had it been left to itself it would

probably not have spread further. A feature of firestorms is that, because all the winds blow inwardsto feed the flames, there is little spread from the main centre. But the fire was not left to itself. The RAF continued bombing for almost half an hour after the firestorm had taken hold, dropping incendiaries across the entire eastern quarter of the city. Large parts of Eilbek, Barmbek and Wandsbek were badly hit, and soon the fire service was receiving reports that the flames had spread as far as the main railway station to the west, and the suburb of Horn to the east. ⁴⁷

The centre of this burning hell was in Borgfelde, around the point where Ausschläger Weg crosses the Mittel Kanal. ⁴⁸This was where the Lotze Engineering Works was situated, which the British War Office suspected of producing underwater mines for the Wehrmacht. However, the Nienstadt timber yard lay on the other side of the canal, and it is possible that the intense heat given off by huge stacks of burning wood acted as the first catalyst to the firestorm. ⁴⁹

For four and a half hours this unassuming corner of the city was the eye of the hurricane – the centre of a city-wide furnace that was burning at temperatures of over 1000°C. By dawn there was little left to burn. In many areas the house façades were all that was left standing, like blackened empty shells above the glowing rubble. Everything else – floors, ceilings, furniture, the stuff of people’s everyday lives – had been consumed. In some buildings the fires would continue to burn for a long time, particularly those in which the occupants had stocked up early on coke and coal for the winter, but in most cases it was gradually burning itself out. As it ran out of fuel, the raging heat diminished, and the wind died down.

Morning broke darkly over the city, just as Sunday had, the sun blotted out by smoke, and no light beyond that which came from the fires. In the gloom it was impossible for the survivors to see the extent of the city’s devastation. The damage immediately around them, though, was plain: buildings reduced to shells, cratered roads, burned-out cars and trams. And, most distressingly, there were corpses everywhere. Almost all eyewitness accounts of this terrible morning have in common a deep sense of shock at the gruesome and ubiquitous presence of death.

Max Kipke remembers the sight that greeted him when he came to one of the underground shelters in Hammerbrook:

I went to the shelter and wanted to see if people had already come back out. But I saw only corpses, corpses, corpses. They must have wanted to reach the shelter, but did not make it. Even today, I do not understand why they were already dead. I was still in pretty good shape. The staircase that led down to the entrance of the shelter had a bend in it, and shortly after, another: the shelter was built practically two storeys underground. The staircase was covered with bodies. The door to the shelter opened outwards, and because it was blocked by the corpses, the people could not open it. After a while the next living being arrived, a marine. I asked him if he could help me. The shelter was full of people and they probably could not open the door. A third man joined us, and together we managed to clear the entrance enough, so that we were able to open the door a short way. The first people came out; they felt their way up, because there was no light – all the power lines were destroyed. Maybe it was better that they did not see anything. ⁵⁰

The sensitivities of those leaving the bunkers would not be spared for long. Once they found themselves at street level they were greeted with the most gruesome sights, as Ruth Schramm remembers:

When we had clambered up the stairs, our first glance fell on the stacked corpses to the left of the shelter entrance. It was a double row, around ten metres long. I can still clearly see these completely blackened bodies before me. There was no time to waste thoughts on them; we were forced to protect our hair… ⁵¹

Parents did what they could to shield their children from the horror. Else Lohse was a young mother who had literally thrown her children out of a ground-floor window on to the Hammer Landstrasse to save them from the flames. Now she was doing all she could to keep them safe, both physically and emotionally:

The little ones kept asking, as we stepped over the dead: ‘What is that, mama?’ I said to them, ‘Don’t step on that or you will fall. It is a branch, fallen from a tree.’ ‘Mama, here is another one,’ and so it went on from Meuthien to Biederbeck, one after another. Some hugged themselves, others folded together or their limbs spread… You cannot imagine the scene, how the Hammer Landstrasse looked. Burned-out cars stood at angles in the road, dead upon dead. ⁵²

Traute Koch also remembers the corpses on Hammer Landstrasse. She had spent the night in a house that was relatively safe because it had been burned out in a previous raid. Now her mother was trying to lead her away from the fires to safety:

We came to the junction of the Hammer Landstrasse and Louisenweg. I carried my little sister and also helped my mother climb over the ruins. Suddenly, I saw tailors’ dummies lying around. I said, ‘Mummy, no tailors lived here and, yet, so many dummies lying around.’ My mother grabbed me by my arm and said, ‘Go on. Don’t look too closely. On. On.’ ⁵³

It is impossible to imagine the trauma that such sights inflicted on the exhausted people, who were already in shock from their experiences of the night. Many were driven to the brink of madness. Erich Titschak, who had spent the night out in the streets remembers seeing a woman screaming, ‘They’re coming to kill us!’ repeatedly, although the bombers and the firestorm had long gone. ⁵⁴

With so many people struggling to reach the open spaces, the parks were soon filled with the screams of the injured and the weeping of those who had been forced to leave behind loved ones. One woman describes sitting in what was left of the rose garden in the Stoltenpark, listening to all the terrifying sounds around her:

In front of me was the front of Heidenkampsweg, and I saw building after building collapse. Behind me was the animal sanctuary where the animals slowly burned. On top of the cries from the surrounding burned and wounded, the last calls of the dying, and the cries for help from the collapsing buildings, came the barking and screeching of the cats and dogs. It was enough to drive you to despair. ⁵⁵

Hans Jedlicka, who was also sheltering in this park, witnessed similar things:

How long we stayed in the Stoltenpark I no longer know. We watched the flaming hell of Hammerbrook. It still surprises me that anyone at all was able to make it through there alive. Again and again people came running over the bridge into the park. Screaming people with dreadful burns. One young woman especially stays in my memory. I still have the picture before my eyes. She came screaming out of the smoke over the bridge. She was completely naked and barefoot. As she came closer I saw that her feet were nothing but charred stumps. As soon as she found safety she fell down and died. ⁵⁶

Herbert Wulff, who had spent the night huddling between an advertising pillar and the wall of a bridge, remembers the scene the next morning, after the fires had died down. Buildings were still burning, his city was utterly ruined and horribly disfigured corpses were scattered across the Heidenkampsweg:

The most gruesome sight we must have seen was the people, lying on the ground completely naked, no longer recognizable as man or woman, with a centimetre-thick burned crust covering them, seemingly dead, but still giving their last signs of life through guttural sounds and small movements of their arms. This appalling sight will stay with me all my life. ⁵⁷

* * *

It is impossible to say with any accuracy how many people died that night. At the time rumours put the death-toll at a hundred thousand, and for once the figure was not entirely far-fetched. Because of the chaos that reigned in the aftermath of the catastrophe, German officials were never able to say for certain which deaths had occurred during which air raid, but the official number for the series of attacks that week was eventually calculated at 42,600, ⁵⁸of whom the vast majority died during the firestorm of 27/28 July.

Terrifying as that total is, it is a miracle that the final figure was not higher. A quarter of the population of Hamburg lived within the bombed area – 427,637 people, according to official figures – and their numbers had been swelled by the influx of people made homeless by the first heavy attack. ⁵⁹Yet more than 90 per cent of the population escaped with their lives. Many of these people lived beyond the edges of the firestorm, but even in Hammerbrook and Hamm the number who survived still outweighed the number who died. ⁶⁰

To survive the terrible conditions caused by the firestorm required not only incredible physical stamina, but huge courage and an unwavering determination to survive. Fugitives had to face the combined dangers of fire, high-explosive bombs (many of which were on time-delay fuses), falling masonry and hurricane-force winds. In addition, they had to maintain the presence of mind to battle against the wind rather than let themselves be carried along by it, and seek out shelter in the most unpromising places. Many people refused to give up despite terrible injuries: more than thirty-seven thousand people were hurt during this series of attacks – again, the vast majority on the night of the firestorm. ⁶¹

There was a strong element of chance involved in who survived and who did not: sometimes a family would make a sensible decision over which way to run only to find their hopes crushed by the collapse of a building or a sudden change in wind direction. Even so, certain groups were more vulnerable than others. The very old or the very young were often the first to succumb. According to the Hamburg police chief’s report the winds were so strong that ‘Children were torn away from their parents’ hands by the force of the hurricane and whirled into the fire.’ ⁶²Another eyewitness, who described the ‘tornado-like storm’, claimed it was so strong that it was almost impossible to fight it: ‘Elderly people, who were unable to walk well, were obliged to give up this impossible fight, and the flames greedily made their way over this prey.’ ⁶³A man in front of her was set alight like that, and ‘in less than ten seconds he too became a living pillar of fire’.

Their bodies, with hundreds of others, were found where they had fallen. They were nearly always face downwards, arms thrown round their heads as if they were trying to shelter their faces from the heat as they died. ⁶⁴Most of the bodies were charred and shrivelled to half their normal size. Some were so badly burned that the fat had seeped out to form pools round them. By contrast, others were not burned. Many were naked except for their shoes – the city coroner concluded later that they had probably tried to flee in their nightwear, only to have it torn or burned off in an instant by the heat of the firestorm.

Far more died in the shelters. In the east of Hamburg, there were relatively few purpose-built public bunkers and most people were forced to make do with the basements of their apartment buildings. When some were opened the next day, nobody was alive inside: they had all succumbed to the fierce temperatures generated by the fires. In some basements the heat had been so great that everything inside was charred beyond recognition, including the bodies of the occupants. But the worst killers were smoke and carbon monoxide. One woman remembered afterwards how the lack of oxygen had affected those in her shelter:

The very small children fell asleep first, then the four to six-year-olds, then the slightly older, then the adolescents and finally the old. I knew what this sleep meant. Many never woke up, because our rescue came very late – we could not be saved sooner because of the terrible heat that raged on the street… We owe our lives to an armaments-factory worker who was looking for his flat and his wife, and looked in the Gothenkeller and found us all unconscious. This man then informed the police station on Nagelsweg. Consequently fifty soldiers were sent to carry us out and lay us in the open, first in front of Gothenhaus so we could breathe some oxygen… I regained consciousness as three soldiers lifted me, and a fourth, who stood nearby, said: ‘That is number 238’. ⁶⁵

It is probable that as many as 70 per cent of those who died were killed by smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide poisoning. ⁶⁶Their bodies were sometimes found piled up around the exits to the shelters, as if they knew they were in danger but were unable to escape. More often, though, they were found seated at tables, or leaning peacefully against walls, as if they had simply fallen asleep. ⁶⁷Those men, women and children paid the price for having followed official advice to remain in their cellars until the all-clear sounded. Had they taken their chances in the inferno of the firestorm, many more might have been saved.