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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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* * *

As the storm died down, those who had survived the night began to move. Often their first instinct was to leave the city, but many had become separated from their families during the frantic escape from their basement shelters, and to leave without them was too painful to consider. People milled about, some venturing back towards the fires in the hope of finding friends and loved ones still alive.

Sixteen-year-old Herbert Wulff was one of the lucky ones. He had seen his sister run off several hours before, and had lost his mother in the smoke and chaos of the night. Now, in the gloom of morning, he was trying desperately to find them:

It was a terrible twilight, as I first began to make out the many corpses and the devastation all around. But of course my first worries were now for my family. Had they managed to survive? Luckily I found my mother again nearby, where I’d left her. She herself was unhurt, but beside her lay two dead bodies. Our joy at seeing one another again was huge. I took my mother with me to the other side of the street and started the search for my sister and father. And I was lucky. I found my sister nearby where we had last seen her during the night. She too had survived, albeit with bad burns on her legs caused by the devilish phosphorus. I myself had picked up some small burns, but nothing too bad. And then, like a wonder, my father turned up, relatively unscathed. He had had an unbelievable odyssey. Our joy at seeing one another again was overwhelming, and we were simply indescribably lucky to have survived this purgatory. ⁶⁸

Others were not so lucky. Desperate stories emerged, of mothers losing their children in all the smoke and darkness, of children losing their parents when their buildings collapsed – stories that would be repeated again and again in the days to come. Countless others did not know what had become of their loved ones. They picked their way through the crowds searching and calling names. Occasionally family members were reunited in this way, but for the most part the calls echoed round the parks unanswered.

Meanwhile, those who had no one to look for remained silent, dazed by what they had experienced. Many, including some of the eyewitnesses quoted here, were too badly injured or burned to do anything but stay where they were. Herbert Wulff and his sister had fairly bad burns. The man in his forties who had watched his brother-in-law die in the fire, was himself badly burned and suffering from exhaustion. Fredy Borck’s eight-year-old brother fell into the flames as they were being evacuated from their Rothenburgsort cellar, and burned his legs severely.

One of the most common injuries was burns to the eyes. After spending the night in the open Erich Titschak complained that his eyes hurt so much he could no longer keep them open. Hans Jedlicka’s were scorched, as were those of Else Lohse and her son Peter, who soon began to lose their sight. ⁶⁹Erika Wilken’s eyes were so badly damaged during her ordeal in the Grevenweg public lavatory that by the time she and her husband were evacuated she could no longer see. ‘From Horn onwards our eyesight became worse and worse, and once we reached the compound we were already blind.’ ⁷⁰Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. In most cases people’s eyesight would return, but for now at least they were spared some of the gruesome sights others had to endure.

Most of the injuries that occurred were caused by the great heat – inflamed lungs, scorched eyes, severe burns – but many people had broken bones from the blasts of high-explosive bombs and falling masonry. When the authorities arrived en masseto oversee the evacuation, these people were taken away first, carried off in whatever vehicles could be commandeered: boats, lorries and even horse-drawn carriages. Most people, however, had to walk to the edge of the city to find transport. All the normal methods of escape – trams, subways and the railway – had been destroyed. Most roads were impassable. The only transport conduit relatively unaffected was the river, and even that was strewn with debris.

As tens of thousands of people streamed out of Hamburg, they left behind a broken city, shrouded in smoke, in many places still burning. Despite the terror they had all experienced, it was impossible to leave without a last glance at the place that had been their home. For many it seemed like their final farewell and, in a sense, it was: although most would return to Hamburg in future months and years, it would never be the same city again. In the course of a single night almost a quarter of it had been erased from the map.

Henni Klank, who had escaped to the river with her newborn baby, left the city by boat. She remembers her departure as a final moment of supreme sadness:

The boat was supposed to go to Lauenburg, and what took place aboard it on the journey is almost beyond description. There was no wound-dressing material, only paper bandages. I helped a young mother dress her half-burned baby with my makeshift gauze-nappy. We couldn’t do more… The woman and the others were all in a state of shock. We glanced back once more at our broken and beloved Hamburg, across which a giant mushroom-cloud was spreading. It was as if it wanted to say: I’ll cover up all of this horror that descended on Hamburg tonight, for ever! ⁷¹

17. The ‘Terror of Hamburg’

A stream of haggard, terrified refugees flowed into the neighbouring provinces.

In every large town people said: ‘What happened to Hamburg yesterday

can happen to us tomorrow.’

Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland ¹

The events of 27/28 July 1943 shook the Nazi hierarchy to its core. Writing in his diary a few days later, Josef Goebbels called the disaster ‘the greatest crisis of the war’. ²For once, the normally resourceful propaganda minister seemed at a loss for what to do.

A city of a million inhabitants has been destroyed in a manner unparalleled in history. We are faced with problems that are almost impossible of solution. Food must be found for this population of a million. Shelter must be secured. The people must be evacuated as fast as possible. They must be given clothing. In short, we are facing problems there of which we had no conception even a few weeks ago. ³

Many other key figures in the Nazi establishment were just as shaken. Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and War Production, told Hitler that if the British managed to attack another six German towns on the same scale then armaments production would be brought to a halt. ⁴Erhard Milch, the State Secretary for Air, went further: ‘It’s much blacker than Speer paints it,’ he told the members of his ministry. ‘If we get just five or six more attacks like these on Hamburg, the German people will just lay down their tools, however great their willpower.’ ⁵

The crisis of confidence became so bad that Hitler was forced to take action to avert a collapse of morale in the Party. A few days after the catastrophe, he instructed Goebbels to speak to an assembly of ministers and gauleiters to ‘inject some concrete into them’. Ever faithful to his master, Goebbels did as he was told. It was a tense meeting. During the discussion, Milch repeatedly interrupted Goebbels with the almost treasonable outcry, ‘We have lost the war! Finally lost the war!’ The propaganda minister had to appeal to his honour as an officer to quieten him. ⁶

While those around him were in deep shock at the scale of the disaster, Hitler appeared to react in much the same way as he did to all such catastrophes: by remaining in denial. To Speer’s announcement that further British attacks might halt German arms production, he simply said, ‘You’ll straighten all that out again.’ Neither was he sympathetic to the victims of the firestorm. When Hamburg’s gauleiter, Karl Kaufmann, repeatedly telegraphed him, begging him to visit the stricken city, Hitler steadfastly refused. When Kaufmann asked him at least to receive a delegation of the heroic rescue crews, Hitler refused that too. He was simply not interested in Hamburg, or the fate of its people. ⁷

* * *

On the other side of the North Sea, the mood was precisely the opposite of that in Germany. While the Nazis imposed a virtual news freeze on all but the most general reports of the firestorm, the British and American authorities were quick to announce their success to the international press. In London, The Timesprinted a large photograph of American bombs falling on the Howaldtswerke shipyards under the headline ‘Hamburg Battered’: ‘Air bombing reached a new intensity on Tuesday night,’ it said, causing damage that would ‘far exceed that caused in any previous attack’. ⁸The Daily Expresswas more graphic. ‘RAF blitz to wipe Hamburg off the war map’ was the front-page headline on 31 July:

It now seems plain that Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, our bomber chief, has set himself the task of wiping out completely the town of Hamburg from the enemy’s war effort… Bombs went down at the rate of about 50 tons a minute for 45 minutes, and nothing the guns and night fighters could do could stop them. ⁹

In America, the headlines were equally triumphant: ‘Hamburg Pictured in Ruin and Death,’ wrote the New York Times; ‘Swedes Report Hamburg Has “Ceased to Exist” ’ claimed the New York Herald Tribune; while the Washington Postwent with ‘Heaviest Raid Dumps Death on Hamburg’. ¹⁰To add weight to their reports, they quoted statistics and eyewitness statements from the neutral press in Sweden and Switzerland. Lest the German people missed out on the news, propaganda leaflets were printed, showing photographs of the devastation, to be dropped across Germany over the next few weeks. The photographs’ caption read, ‘Das war Hamburg’ (‘This was Hamburg’), the verb deliberately in the past tense. ¹¹

The Soviets also appreciated the propaganda value of the catastrophe. In the days after the firestorm Russian soldiers erected loudspeakers along the front to broadcast the news across no man’s land to the German troops. The announcements came with the suggestion that, since the Germans were suffering as badly at home as they were at the front, they should surrender. Most German troops did not believe what they heard, of course; they were used to enemy propaganda. It was not until they were able to return to Hamburg on leave that they discovered the truth for themselves. As one veteran from the Russian Front remembers, their first view of the city left them in a state of shock, despite the warnings. ‘When we saw it [Hamburg] we just stood there in the train and thought, This cannot be. It was not only me, but all of us were completely shattered by it. We thought, that’s it, the war’s over.’ ¹²

Soldiers caught up in the bombing said that it was far worse than being at the front. ¹³Some claimed that it was worse even than the military disaster at Stalingrad. Martha Bührich remembers meeting a soldier in the street who said that ‘he had witnessed the hell of Stalingrad, but that it was nothing compared to this terrible night’. After the war, many others said exactly the same thing. ¹⁴

Looking back, the implication of such statements is clear. If Stalingrad was the great turning point of the war for the German Army, then Hamburg was the equivalent for German civilians. Before the firestorm most people believed that their towns were largely safe from Allied bombers; afterwards they realized that they would be lucky to escape erasure from the map. Hamburg made it clear that the Allies, and the British in particular, were intent on annihilating one city after another until Germany capitulated. It was beginning to look as though the terrible predictions that Douhet had made in the 1920s were at last coming true: the home cities had become more dangerous than the battlefields. ¹⁵

* * *

While government ministers were panicking over how to handle the disaster, the city authorities in Hamburg could not allow themselves such a luxury. With vast swathes of the city still on fire, and tens of thousands abandoning it in panic, something had to be done immediately. Early on the morning of Wednesday, 28 July, Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann officially announced the evacuation of Hamburg. Women and children were told, not asked, to leave the city within the next few hours.

As Goebbels had suspected, the evacuation of Hamburg was a logistical nightmare. According to the city’s disaster plan, displaced people were supposed to be evacuated by rail – but since all the train lines in the centre of Hamburg and most of the city’s stations had been destroyed, this was impossible. The roads were not much better. Throughout the main disaster area the streets were full of craters, and rubble from collapsing buildings had made many impassable. To make things worse, whole districts were still on fire. In such circumstances the only course of action was for refugees to make their way to the edge of the firestorm area on foot. They would be guided by the emergency services, and evacuation would take place from there. ¹⁶

In an attempt to bring order to the chaos, the city authorities were forced to improvise wildly. Almost all of the collection centres for the homeless had been destroyed or damaged, so the authorities designated four huge refugee camps: at the Moorweide Park, at the horse-racing courses in Horn and Farmsen, and at a large open space in Billstedt. Since nobody knew about them, loudspeaker vans were sent to roam the outer edges of the firestorm area telling people where to go. At the same time dressing stations were set up on all the major exit roads to cope with the huge numbers of injured staggering out of the destroyed city. Enormous amounts of food and drink were brought in to feed everyone. On the first day alone half a million loaves were given out, along with sixteen thousand litres of milk, beer, tea and coffee. ¹⁷

Meanwhile, the authorities commandeered lorries, buses and horse-drawn carriages from every possible source to get people out of the city. Ten thousand men from the armed forces were brought in to help with the operation, along with all the police and SS forces that neighbouring areas could spare. They shuttled people from the refugee camps to the nearest major stations – more than three-quarters of a million people in total – then sent them to cities throughout the Reich. A further fifty thousand were evacuated on the river, and thousands more were flown out from Fuhlsbüttel airfield. Within a few days more than a million people had been evacuated from the city, the largest such transfer ever carried out in Germany at such short notice.

* * *

The figures are undeniably impressive. On a grand scale it seems that the evacuation worked smoothly and efficiently – incredibly so, given the extent to which the authorities had to improvise. But this was not how most people experienced it. As they stumbled out of the burning suburbs, the streets strewn with corpses and rubble, many refugees were too exhausted to walk as far as the collection centres. Occasionally lorries arrived at seemingly random locations to help them on their way, but there were too few to make much difference. Many mothers were forced to stand with their children on street corners hoping to catch a ride on an army truck or in a private car. ¹⁸

Huge numbers of people did not wait to be processed through the official collection centres, but made their way to nearby towns and villages in the hope of finding shelter there. It is important to remember that not everyone was supposed to go: officially, it was only the city’s women and children who were evacuated, while the men were meant to stay behind to continue working. In reality, many men left to take their families to safety. Nobody considered stopping them.

Within hours, all the satellite towns of Hamburg were swamped with refugees. Even those further away were unable to cope with the numbers: it was one thing to take people away from Hamburg, but another to find them places to stay. For example, when Heino Merck fled to his sister’s house in Kellinghusen he found it already full of refugees. ¹⁹Ilse Grassmann and her children were unable to stay with her sister-in-law in Wittenburg because the house was jam-packed with other relatives in the same plight. ²⁰Erwin Krohn described the scene when he arrived in Neumünster as ‘unparalleled chaos. Forty thousand inhabitants and 160,000 Hamburgers. Nobody knew where to go.’ ²¹

With so many people on the move, the city authorities were terrified of a breakdown in law and order. To prevent possible riots they stationed extra police and even SS units in the refugee-collection points. Helmuth Saß describes the scene he witnessed when he arrived in the Stadtpark on Friday morning:

On one side of the grass, I saw a detachment of the SS marching. They set up heavy machine-guns every two metres. As I approached this row, I was curtly sent away. I asked Mr Lukas what the SS were doing here. He answered: ‘They are supposed to guard us.’ And so it was that we, the Ausgebombten, were not to make a stand against the Nazi Party, otherwise we would be shot. ²²

However, the police could not be everywhere at once, and there are countless examples of ordinary people expressing hostility openly towards the Nazi authorities away from the main collection points. Hans J. Massaquoi describes an incident at a station where ‘a man in a brown Nazi uniform came into sight, and a woman screamed at him from the train, “You pigs, it’s all your fault!” ’ She continued shouting similar accusations until someone from her company ‘literally gagged her by holding a towel over her mouth’. ²³He also tells of a soldier friend who was determined to desert the army, on the grounds that in the wake of this catastrophe ‘the war can’t last longer than a couple of weeks, perhaps only a couple of days’. ²⁴Another refugee, Lore Bünger, remembers hearing a man proclaiming loudly, ‘That Hitler! The pig should be hung!’ before his wife warned him to be quiet. ²⁵

There was little the authorities could do about such outbursts. They certainly could not have arrested everyone who voiced their anger – in the desperate atmosphere that prevailed in the wake of the firestorm, to do so would have risked causing riots. People no longer felt they had anything more to lose; consequently, for the first time in ten years, they were defying the Nazis without fear of reprisal. Hans Erich Nossack recounts a scene that speaks volumes: ‘In the Harburg railway station I heard a woman who had broken some rule or other screaming, “Go ahead, put me in prison, then at least I’ll have a roof over my head!” and three railway policemen didn’t know what else to do but turn away, embarrassed, leaving the crowd to calm the woman.’ ²⁶

Had they known how common such outbursts were, the Allies would have been delighted. This was exactly what was supposed to happen in the wake of a huge bombing raid: anger at the authorities leading to open defiance and, finally, revolution. But the final link in the chain never materialized. The speed and relative efficiency of the evacuation was certainly a factor in avoiding serious civil unrest: by carrying people away from the city the authorities dispersed potential trouble. Besides, the disaster had left most people too exhausted and apathetic to cause much more than a token fuss. It was simply too big an event to blame wholly on the Nazis. It seems that most people regarded the firestorm almost as an act of God: in such circumstances the state was ‘something completely irrelevant that could neither be blamed for a fate such as Hamburg had suffered nor be expected to do anything about it’. ²⁷

* * *

The evacuation of Hamburg was a huge event for Germany, arguably more important to the course of the war than even the firestorm. Terrifying as it had been, the firestorm had affected only a single city. The evacuation, on the other hand, affected the entire Reich – indeed, until the Allied invasion in 1945, the mass migration of refugees from Hamburg was probably the biggest single event on the home front of the war. Until now, many ordinary Germans in the smaller towns and cities knew of the scale of Allied bombing only through what they read in the newspapers or heard on radio broadcasts. But as a deluge of refugees poured over the country, even those in rural areas came face to face with people who had suffered the most unimaginable horror. The stories they brought with them could not be dismissed as rumour, and the message was clear: nobody was safe. What had happened in Hamburg would soon happen, in some degree, to every city in Germany.

The psychological effect this had on the country is incalculable. Years later, many would remember it as a defining moment of the war. For example, Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe’s most senior fighter general, claimed in his memoirs that the constant stream of shattered, frightened refugees spread what he called the ‘Terror of Hamburg’ to even the remotest villages of the Reich: ‘A wave of terror radiated from the suffering city and spread throughout Germany… Psychologically the war at that moment had perhaps reached its most critical point.’ ²⁸

Accounts from ordinary civilians back up his claim. ‘I’ll never forget the scene,’ says Margret Klauß, who was sixteen at the time. She had turned out at Lübeck station with the League of German Girls to hand out food and drinks to the refugees. ‘Most of them just sat there full of apathy, the horror still in their faces. Others hurried from wagon to wagon, calling the names of missing relatives in the desperate hope of finding their spouses, parents or siblings again. It was heart-breaking.’ ²⁹

Hiltgunt Zassenhaus saw the beginning of the exodus after the first night of attacks, as lines of bizarrely dressed people traipsed past her window:

There were women who dragged along in their winter clothes, who had draped themselves in fur coats. They panted in the heat. There were women in flimsy summer dresses with stockings of differing colours. The bombs had torn them out of their sleep. In their mad haste they had pulled on whatever they found as they fell out of their burning houses. They pulled their children along with them; little feet that couldn’t keep in step with their big ones. The men dragged suitcases and boxes tied up with string. They lay down on the paving stones. They pulled their shoes off. Or they lay down on the surface of the road and stared up into the darkened sky. Hardly anyone cried or complained. In their faces all life had been extinguished. ³⁰

Hannah Voss saw a later stage of the evacuation, on Wednesday afternoon, as trains full of refugees arrived in her home town, ninety kilometres south of Hamburg. She and a friend went to the station to meet the hordes who were piling out of the trains; it was their job to lead the refugees to the school, where straw pallets had been laid out for them to sleep on. The sight that greeted her when she arrived at the station was pathetic:

They were just standing there with nothing except their bags and the clothes they were in… One female came out of the train on to the platform, and all she had… was a budgerigar in a cage. I don’t know how the budgerigar survived the blast or whatever. But that was all this woman had in the world: a flimsy nightgown, no cardigan, no wrap, nothing except the cage and the budgie. ³¹

Such images are poignant, but they are nothing compared to the distressing scenes that occurred when some refugees had their luggage searched. One twelve-year-old boy fleeing Hamburg was stopped at the Danish border. He was travelling alone, carrying two sacks. When customs officers made him open them they found that one contained the corpse of his two-year-old brother, killed in the raid, the other the bodies of his pet rabbits. ³²

Since this is a third-hand report its veracity is perhaps questionable, but many refugees did bring the bodies of their loved ones when they fled Hamburg. Friedrich Reck described seeing one woman drop her suitcase as she tried to board a train in Bavaria. As its contents spilled across the platform, among the toys, manicure case and singed underwear was ‘the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago’. ³³

Ernst-Günter Haberland described a similar event, when he met a man from his neighbourhood shortly after the catastrophe:

He had a small and a large case in his hand, and did not know where he should go. He opened the cases; in the larger one was something which looked like a burned tree stump, in the other, two objects, smaller but otherwise similar. They were his wife and children, their bodies melted by the phosphor; he could not leave them behind. ³⁴

Many others brought the bodies of children who had suffocated as their families were in the very act of escaping. ³⁵In the hurry to flee Hamburg there was no time to bury them, and to abandon them was unthinkable. As a consequence, many ordinary people across Germany did not merely hear about the deaths in Hamburg, they saw the corpses for themselves.

* * *

Despite the official suppression of detailed news about the disaster, those who witnessed scenes like this could only conclude that what had happened in Hamburg must have been truly extraordinary in its horror. To their infinite credit, most people extended whatever help they could offer to the refugees. Families all over Germany opened their doors, and shared what they had with those who had lost everything. The state provided free food in all the major towns, but it could not have been distributed properly without the help of thousands of volunteers from the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls and many other community groups.

The outpouring of goodwill towards the Hamburg refugees was as spontaneous as it was phenomenal. Hans Erich Nossack wrote shortly afterwards about the ‘heartening experience of seeing those who had been most distant, sometimes the most fleeting acquaintances or business associates, voluntarily step into the breach with such kindness that one is shamed into asking oneself whether one would have done the same if the situation were reversed’. ³⁶Inevitably there were some exceptions, but in general refugees were accepted with open arms, and the welcome did not wear thin for several weeks. ³⁷

Those who came into contact with the refugees could not help but be affected by them. Their stories were horrific. One woman told how a succession of badly injured people had clutched at her feet and clothes as she scrambled through the fiery ruins, begging her to take them with her. She had been forced to kick them off, because only by doing so could she escape death herself. ³⁸Another told of how she had wrapped her children in pillows and thrown them out of the window to save them from the fire. Her baby slipped out of the padding and died when it hit the pavement. The mother who told this story ‘did not cry or complain; with the general fear, the thousands in agony, her pain was nothing special’. ³⁹Tales like these were repeated ad infinitumall over Germany in the weeks to come.

Inevitably, gloom descended wherever the refugees gathered. Writing in the months shortly after the firestorm, Hans Erich Nossack claimed that the sense of total defeat was universal among the people of his city.

I have spoken with several thousand people… We were without exception firmly convinced that the war would be over very shortly; there was no debating this point at all; for us, after all, the decision had already been reached. There remained only the question of how and in what place of refuge we would be able to survive this brief interval. ⁴⁰

This sense of foreboding quickly spread throughout the nation. The general depression was directly comparable to the mood of the country after the defeat at Stalingrad – the difference was that, while the Stalingrad disaster had taken place more than two thousand kilometres away, Hamburg was at the heart of northern Germany. The conclusion that everyone came to was that if Hamburg could not defend itself, even though it had been one of the most heavily protected cities in the Reich, the same fate would come soon to other cities.

* * *

As far as the Allies were concerned, this gloomy atmosphere was the greatest success of all. The intention had been to undermine the morale of the German people to such a degree that they would either abandon their workplaces or rise up against their government and demand an end to the war. Until now the Allies had been unable to deliver a blow hard enough to cause such a drop in morale.

However, to produce the ‘knock-out blow’ that would win the war, the RAF would have to do as Albert Speer had warned Hitler, and follow up with the devastation of another major city. The most obvious target was Berlin, and everybody, including the Germans, expected the Allies to strike there next. The only thing that stopped them was that the nights were not yet long enough for RAF bombers to get there and back under cover of darkness – but they were lengthening, and by the end of August the Reich capital would be within range. Soon observers in Washington were giving Berlin just ‘three weeks to live’, and RAF officials in London were hinting that the city was about to get ‘the Hamburg bombing treatment’. ⁴¹

Germany was rife with similar speculation. In Berlin the people were so worried about what was coming to them that even the neutral press remarked on the change of atmosphere in the city. ‘Fear approaching panic prevails in Berlin, and the people expect the city to be laid in ruins at any moment,’ claimed one correspondent from the Swedish Aftonbladet. ⁴²He described how trenches were being dug in the parks to protect people from the effects of a possible firestorm, and how frightened civilians were fleeing the city. While the German authorities must have been dismayed at such gifts to Allied propaganda, there was nothing they could do to deny the reports. Indeed, a partial evacuation of the city had already been ordered by Goebbels himself, in his capacity as Berlin’s gauleiter: to prevent an unauthorized exodus, he had instructed women, children and non-essential civilians to leave the city at the beginning of August. When this was confirmed in an official release to the Nazi Völkischer Beobachtera few days later, the British and American press could barely contain their glee. ⁴³