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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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PART ONE

Hamburg

1. City on the River

Wherever there’s trade, there tread Hamburgers.

Hamburg saying, mid-nineteenth century ¹

The city of Hamburg lies on the banks of the river Elbe in northern Germany, about sixty miles from the coast of the North Sea. In truth, it is not a hospitable place to found a city. Situated on a fluvial plain, most of the ground is little better than marsh, and it is prone to flooding. Ever since the area was first settled the city fathers have fought a constant battle against the storms and tides that regularly cause the waters of the river to rise and break their banks. The threat extends far beyond the city boundaries. For mile after mile the earth lies flat, perhaps rises a little, then is flat again, providing scant protection from the whims of the river. In times of flood the entire area becomes submerged: farmland, docklands, parks, city streets and houses are ruined. When eventually the water subsides it leaves behind it a blanket of silt covering city and countryside alike, reducing everything to a dull, muddy uniformity.

There is nothing to protect the city from the weather either. No mountains infringe on the curve of the horizon, or provide a break to the prevailing winds rolling in from the North Sea. The moist sea air produces huge banks of cloud, which smother the region for most of the year, bringing frequent rain and occasionally sleet and snow. In winter, if the wind changes direction and blows in from the Baltic, temperatures plummet and drift ice appears on the river. Even in summer the nights can be cold and wet, and the temperature rarely reaches the highs that other parts of Europe experience.

The element that dominates the city is water. The river Elbe is its lifeblood, linking it to the North Sea and trade routes across the globe. A second river, the Alster, was dammed in 1235 and has formed two large lakes right in the city centre. To the east, elaborate networks of canals creep like tentacles into the city’s warehouse and workers’ districts. To the south, in the midst of the Elbe, lies a series of islands that have been linked together over the centuries into a vast complex of docks and waterways: this is Hamburg’s harbour, one of the largest ports in the world, and the foundation of the city’s considerable prosperity.

Apart from its harbour, Hamburg is an unremarkable place. Unlike Dresden, which lies a couple of hundred miles upstream, it has never been considered a jewel, and its architecture is generally functional rather than ornate. Its city churches have none of the scale and grandeur of other German cathedrals, like that at Cologne. There are no palaces or castles here, like those in Berlin, Potsdam or Munich; in fact, the grandest houses the city has to offer are the upper-middle-class villas along the Elbe Chaussee. The city boasts more bridges than Venice, but that is where the comparison ends, and not even its most enthusiastic citizens would pretend otherwise. Few pleasure boats travel the city’s canals, hardly any of the buildings are more than sixty years old, and the sound of voices and footfalls is drowned by the noise of traffic flowing down the six-lane dual-carriageways that scar the city in all directions.

Even before the Second World War, Hamburg was never really considered a destination for sightseers: the historic centre of the city was not particularly historic, since most of it had been destroyed by fire less than a century before. The few tourists who came to this part of Germany generally preferred the picturesque centre of nearby Lübeck. Neither is it considered a city of culture. Hamburg did not have a university until after the First World War, and while the Musikhalle and the Hamburg Opera are much admired by the middle classes, the city has always been better known for the more low-brow pleasures to be found on the Reeperbahn in the St Pauli district.

To their credit, the people of Hamburg have never much cared about the lack of superlatives connected to their city: they are proud of what they have, and unconcerned about what they do not. They are a tough, practical people, accustomed to dealing with challenges and to making the best of any situation that Fate might throw at them. Over the past two centuries they have seen their city ravaged in turn by epidemics of cholera, famine, economic recession, unemployment and, of course, by flooding. The town centre has been destroyed by fire not once but four times – despite the huge quantities of water that dominate the city’s open spaces. ²In the face of such a history it is little wonder that there are so few ancient architectural gems.

However, the lack of grand monuments in the city cannot be blamed entirely on natural disasters: it is also the result of an inherent reserve that has deep roots in the city’s mentality. For more than eight hundred years Hamburg has been a place of merchants, and the centuries have carved it into a middle-class rather than an aristocratic city. The town centre is dominated by the towers of that most bourgeois of German buildings, the Rathaus(or town hall). It sits before a large piazza, where Adolf Hitler once addressed a crowd of more than twenty thousand, overlooking the great Alster lakes. The streets around the Rathausare filled with exactly the kind of buildings one would expect in a city of merchants: shops, office buildings and, a little further south, the warehouse district of the Speicherstadt. The only towers to break the skyline, apart from those of the Rathaus, are the spires of the city’s five main churches.

As for the rest of Hamburg, it is generally a green, pleasant place to live. To the west of the city are the tree-lined boulevards of Eimsbüttel, Eppendorf and Harvestehude, with their tall, elegant apartment buildings and rows of flower-filled balconies. To the north, the leafy suburbs of Winterhude, Barmbek and Alsterdorf cluster round the huge Stadtpark. Further north still, in Ohlsdorf, the greenery conceals the largest cemetery in Europe: four square miles of gravestones among well-tended gardens.

The working-class districts have traditionally been confined to the east of the city, in suburbs like Hammerbrook, Hamm, Rothenburgsort and Billbrook. Here, low-rise apartment blocks have always crammed in high concentrations of people within easy commuting distance of the docks and warehouses. There is nothing – not a building, not a tree, not a lamp-post, not even a street sign – that is more than sixty years old. In some areas even the people have moved away. In Hammerbrook, for example, there are few apartments, only offices and warehouses, garages and depots. After office hours, the only human beings that walk along Süderstrasse are prostitutes trying to attract the attention of a passing car. In the smaller streets even those signs of life are missing, and the whole area lies silent.

* * *

While the historic centre of the city might lie on the north shore of the Elbe, it is the harbour that is its true heart. The industrial landscape here is vast and impressive, and has a savage beauty unparalleled by any other place in Germany. Formations of cranes stretch as far as the eye can see, towering above the warehouses and the dry docks of Hamburg’s ship-building companies, like the silent regiments of some huge mechanical army. The manycoloured blocks of transport containers rise in mountains from the quayside, dwarfing the trucks and railway trains that come from all over Europe to collect them. Their reflection stains the grey waters of the Elbe with every colour of the rainbow.

When the population of Hamburg gathers each May at the Landungsbrücken to celebrate the official birthday of the harbour, they are not merely giving thanks for the wealth that floods through its gates. The harbour is more than just a source of jobs and economic prosperity: it has provided Hamburg with its identity as a city of trade. Because of it, Hamburg has been known for centuries as Germany’s gateway to the world.

According to tradition, the harbour was founded more than eight hundred years ago, in 1189, when the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa granted Hamburgers the right to duty-free trade all along the Elbe from the city to the sea. With such an advantage over their neighbours, the city’s merchants soon built Hamburg into a major trading centre. By 1242 the city was powerful enough to draw up an agreement with nearby Lübeck, thus forming the template for the Hanseatic League. This alliance brought them major trading partners right across the region – not only in Germany, but also in Bruges, Amsterdam, London and even as far away as Novgorod – making this marshy, watery city one of the wealthiest in Europe. ³

By the sixteenth century Hamburg was nothing short of a huge, city-wide storehouse, holding vast quantities of goods for resale throughout Europe. Tall warehouses stacked with grain, oil, salt and beer rose beside the narrow canals and waterways that carried the tide of commodities into the heart of the city. The more expensive goods, such as honey, fine wines and amber, were stored on the higher floors to keep them safe from the floodwaters of the Elbe, while the lower floors were reserved for cheaper items, such as fish or lumber. With the discovery of the New World, local merchants who had made themselves rich by trading in cloth or foodstuffs were soon trading in precious gems and metals, saltpetre, coffee, tea, tobacco and exotic spices. One of the most lucrative cargoes was that of peppercorns, which Hamburg’s spice traders brought back in sackloads from the Orient. Even today, the wealthier citizens of Hamburg are still occasionally called Pfeffersäcke(‘peppersacks’) – a derogatory nickname for fat-cat businessmen.

The city’s residents lived in similarly tall houses, rising above the squalid streets like warehouses of humanity, storing workers for use in the busy port. In such cramped conditions hygiene was impossible, disease was rife, and life expectancy short. Despite the ubiquitous waterways, fire was a very real danger. In 1284 the entire city was completely destroyed by a huge fire that, according to tradition, left only a single building standing. In 1684, after a series of smaller fires, a second conflagration destroyed 214 houses. Nearby Altona also suffered a major fire in 1711, followed by the deliberate burning of two-thirds of the city by Swedish troops two years later. ⁴After each catastrophe, the city was rebuilt with houses even taller and more densely occupied than before.

Among this jumble of homes and warehouses there were also small islands of industry – tanneries, weaving houses, potteries, breweries and shipbuilders. Some of the city’s most important industries were brought here by outsiders. Hamburgers learned the art of sugar refining from the Dutch, and by the early 1600s Hamburg was one of the world’s biggest exporters of refined sugar. Dutch immigrants also brought the velvet and silk trades to the city. The French brought new baking techniques, and Franzbrötchenare still something of a city speciality. Greenlanders brought their skill in extracting oil from whale blubber, and set up a district of workshops in Hamburger Berg (now St Pauli): the glut of train oil they produced meant that the citizens of Hamburg could afford to put lanterns along the major streets, making this one of the first cities ever to have street lighting. ⁵

As a maritime power, Hamburg has always teemed with foreigners, and the face of the city seems to have changed with every new influx of immigrants. It was not only the sailors and adventurers who settled here, drawn to Hamburg along the world’s trade routes in search of a better life: refugees came too. While the rest of Europe was persecuting its religious minorities, Protestant Hamburg tended to extend a cautious welcome to anyone who brought in new money or new trades. In the sixteenth century Jews from Spain and Portugal settled there after being expelled from their own countries, and built one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. Dutch Calvinists found safety from the Catholic armies of Philip II, and came to dominate the city’s foreign trade. Later, Huguenots would flee there after the purges in France, as would aristocrats after the French Revolution. Hamburg fast became one of the most cosmopolitan places in Europe, a Renaissance Babel where English gentlemen and French princes knocked shoulders with Finnish sailors, Brazilian rubber merchants, and the countless migrants from Mecklenburg and Schleswig-Holstein who flocked there to take a tiny share of the city’s considerable fortune.

* * *

Hamburg has always been like this: hardworking, multifarious and quick to embrace new ideas. Throughout its history, the only constant has been change. Buildings rise, are demolished by fire or flood and rebuilt; whole suburbs are regularly created and destroyed. The population comes and goes from all over the world, creating distinct communities that flourish for a few generations then disperse once more as they are integrated into the whole. This is natural to Hamburgers, and continues to this day.

Even the river is not constant. Before the Second World War, parts of it silted up and caused problems for the ever-larger ships that travelled in and out of the harbour with the tides; specialist pilots had to guide them to the safety of their berths. Sometimes whole islands of silt would form in the centre of the river; for months, or even years, they would give the illusion of solidity, before the waters rose once more and they were swept away towards the sea.

2. The Anglophile City

I am the enemy you killed, my friend

Wilfred Owen ¹

Through its trade links, Hamburg has developed associations with many countries over the centuries; but two relationships are particularly interesting, especially when considering the events of the Second World War. Hamburg’s connections with Britain and America go beyond that of mere trading partners: somehow those two English-speaking nations have found their way beneath Hamburg’s skin. This is particularly the case with the British – or, more specifically, the English. Even during the height of the war Hamburg still thought of itself as an anglophile city, and it was not until the dreadful events of July 1943 that Hitler’s propaganda minister was able to note with wry satisfaction that the city was at last learning to hate its English cousins. ²

Hamburg’s ties to England were deep-rooted and remain close to this day. As part of the Hanseatic League, the city has been trading with London since the thirteenth century. The first English company to set up a permanent office in the city was the Merchant Adventurers Company in the sixteenth century. It was followed by other English merchants, trading wool and fine English cloth for continental wine, linen and timber, and by 1600 Britain had established itself as a significant trading partner.

As Britain’s power grew, it became increasingly important for Hamburg to maintain a good relationship with its neighbours across the North Sea. This was not always easy. For example, in 1666 when Dutch men-of-war attacked British merchant ships in the Elbe, the British blamed Hamburg for allowing the warships passage, and insisted on compensation. The lawsuit between them continued for four years, but when Britain eventually threatened reprisals against the city there was nothing the burghers could do but resort to the centuries-old tradition of buying their way out of trouble. There was no question of Hamburg standing its ground: the city had only two warships at the time, which it used for escorting convoys, while the British navy consisted of 173 ships, equipped with 6,930 guns. ³

Hamburg’s precarious relationship with Britain blundered on, with various minor mishaps along the way, until the end of the eighteenth century. Then, in the 1790s, the city unwittingly found itself embroiled in a dispute between France and Britain, and its relationship with both countries rapidly degenerated. The dispute centred round Napper Tandy, the leader of the ill-fated Irish revolt against the British, who had fled to Hamburg in 1798 with three of his comrades. The British legation demanded that Hamburg hand over the rebels, but the French envoy objected, arguing that to do so would be a violation both of Hamburg’s neutrality and of international law. France was at war with virtually the whole of Europe at the time, including Britain, and would not tolerate any action that could be considered pro-British.

After a month of negotiations over the prisoners, Britain finally threatened military action. To emphasize the point, she seized several ships sailing under the Hamburg flag, and stationed a blockade at the mouth of the Elbe. Left with no choice, in 1799 the Hamburg authorities handed over the prisoners. The French, under Napoleon, were furious at what they saw as a betrayal of Hamburg’s neutral status, and immediately set up a complete embargo of goods traded from the city. In the end Hamburg was allowed once again to buy its way out of trouble, by paying the French Republic a huge four million livres in compensation. But Napoleon remained angry, and vowed to bring the city of Hamburg to heel. ⁴

Finding itself on the wrong side of Napoleon turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes in the city’s history. Ever since the fourteenth century its policy of strict neutrality had been respected, by and large, by the nations of Europe. As a consequence, it had managed to avoid the many wars that had repeatedly devastated other cities in the region over the past four hundred years. But Napoleon was determined to build an empire, and had no intention of allowing this city state to continue trading with his enemies, regardless of whether they did so under a neutral banner or not.

The first stage of Hamburg’s downfall occurred in 1801, when the Danes, who had allied themselves to the French, finally occupied the city. Their intention was only to disrupt British trade, and they stayed for only two months, but it emphasized Hamburg’s powerlessness in the face of a sizeable army. It also showed what the French and Danes thought of the ‘neutrality’ of Hamburg’s relationship with the British. Five years later, after defeating the Prussians at Jena–Auerstadt, Napoleon himself marched on the city, and on 19 November 1806, three thousand French troops entered Hamburg.

In truth, Napoleon was not much interested in Hamburg: it was merely a pawn in a much larger game with the British, his other major enemy. Almost the first thing the French did after invading the city was to confiscate all British property, and to burn British wares in a huge bonfire on the island of Grasbrook. City merchants were told to declare all profits made by trading with Britain, and all correspondence with France’s enemy was banned. The British responded by blockading the entire European continent, cutting off Hamburg from all foreign trade.

The city was to remain in French hands until May 1814, when Marshal Davout finally surrendered to the British/Prussian allies. By this time Hamburg was ruined: its once hugely profitable trading houses were bankrupt, its banks out of business, its industries destroyed and its population on the brink of starvation. Hamburg’s ancient talent for rebuilding and reinventing itself out of every disaster had been stifled, and for a while it seemed as though the city would not recover. But help was on its way, and from an unlikely source. After contributing to the city’s downfall, Britain came to Hamburg’s rescue. In the following years dozens of British firms opened branches in Hamburg, providing much-needed jobs for the people. Penniless Hamburg merchants became commissioning and transport agents for the British, and within a short time the port was trading once more. The city was grateful. It was this era, more than any other in Hamburg’s history, that laid the foundations of the city’s love affair with Britain that continues to this day.

The following decades reflected the new balance of control in the city, as trades opened with British markets in mind. The first steamship to drop anchor in Hamburg’s harbour was British, and by 1825 there was a regular passenger service to Britain. This was followed by trade services to several British colonies and protectorates, such as Sierra Leone and Zanzibar, and in 1851 Godeffroy and Woermann began the city’s first ever trade service to Australia. The world was once again unfurling before Hamburg, but it was a world in which Britain was the undisputed superpower.

While trade increased exponentially in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, the vast majority of the ships that anchored in the harbour were British. In 1835 only 14 per cent flew the flag of Hamburg. ⁵This did not change until after 1850 when Hamburg became a major centre of shipbuilding in its own right, and giant German shipyards, such as Blohm & Voss and Howaldtswerke, began to transform the south shores of the Elbe into a centre of industry. New freight companies were also founded, such as Ferdinand Laeisz’s Flying P Line and the Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG), which was soon to become the biggest shipping company in the world.

Despite this renaissance of German trade and industry there remained a distinctly British atmosphere in Hamburg until the Second World War. Hamburg’s relationship with Britain was not merely economic, it was personal. After centuries of trading with one another, wealthy patricians from Hamburg often sent their sons to England to spend half a year or so among the English, and many personal friendships stretched across the North Sea. They were not confined to the rich city merchants – tradesmen, students and even dock workers had close relationships with their counterparts in Britain. ⁶There were links with the English at all levels of Hamburg society, and by the middle of the twentieth century Hamburg was universally known in Germany as ‘the anglophile city’, which would appear painfully ironic after the events of 1943.

* * *

Hamburg’s relationship with America was of a very different nature from that with Britain. If Britain had treated the city rather paternally in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, America treated it more like an equal partner: right from the start, each side saw the other as an unmissable opportunity to get rich quick. While Hamburg’s relationship with Britain had taken centuries to mature, that with America was virtually love at first sight. Within just ten years of opening formal relations in 1783, America had overtaken the Mediterranean as a trade destination; within fifty years it had overtaken most of Hamburg’s traditional partners. From now on, the city would increasingly turn away from its European brothers and sisters, and devote much more effort to its new relationship across the Atlantic.

Like most other countries, Hamburg did not have any kind of association with the American states before 1783, for the simple reason that they were a British monopoly so trade with them was effectively closed. After America won its independence, however, the city of Hamburg was among the first to send the fledgling nation its best wishes, and to propose a trading relationship. Within a short time, Hamburg merchants, like Voght & Sieveking, were sending ships across the Atlantic with their holds full of Westphalian and Silesian textiles, and returning with all those commodities that had proved so lucrative for British traders over the preceding decades: rice, sugar, cocoa, coffee, cotton and, of course, tobacco.

The links between Hamburg and America were based on the huge volumes of trade that passed between them, but over time a more personal side to the relationship evolved. In the second half of the nineteenth century one of the city’s biggest exports to the USA was not ceramics, textiles or glassware but people. America was opening up as a land of opportunity, and thousands of Germans were emigrating there each year in search of a better life – many of them Hamburgers.

Despite the great wealth of certain sections of the community on the Elbe, poverty was rife among the lower classes, ⁷and for many in Hamburg’s slum districts the temptation to start afresh on the other side of the Atlantic proved irresistible. It was not a decision that was made lightly. Travelling to America was a desperate business, and conditions during the long sea voyage were comparable to those in eighteenth-century slave ships. Travellers would be crammed into a dark hold with barely anything to eat and only half a pint of water to drink each day. There was little sanitation, no doctors, and after seventy days at sea it was not uncommon for diseases like typhoid or cholera to have claimed up to a fifth of the passengers. For those who survived, conditions on the other side of the Atlantic were often only marginally better than those they had left at home, but a large proportion did find a better life, and the letters they sent back were enough to inspire yet more people to make the journey.

By 1866 more than fourteen thousand people were travelling each year from Hamburg to America. They came from all over northern Europe – even from as far away as Russia – and many from Hamburg itself. A faster, more reliable steam service now navigated the route, and companies like HAPAG were growing rich on the hopes and dreams of this constant stream of emigrants to the USA. ⁸Later on, even members of the middle and upper classes made the voyage across the Atlantic, but on luxury cruise liners. By the turn of the twentieth century, the biggest passenger ships could make the crossing in under six days. There was even talk of flying Zeppelins across the ocean, and Hamburg was a major centre of Germany’s growing aircraft industry. ⁹

By the early 1900s not a single community in northern Germany was untouched by emigration to the United States. At the outbreak of war in 1914, the German population of the United States was so large that the Canadians were induced to take precautions against the possibility of cross-border attacks. ¹⁰In Hamburg almost everyone had friends or relations in America – after all, the majority of northern European emigrants to the United States had embarked on their journeys from that very port.

It was this personal relationship, more than any volume of trade, that bound the two peoples together: Hamburg and America had, quite literally, become family. When the USAAF flew over the city in July 1943, more than a few American airmen could trace their ancestry back to Hamburg. Their grandparents or great-grandparents had passed through the port on their way to America, and now, as descendants of those emigrants, the young men were returning to destroy the city that had been their gateway to a new life.

* * *

But we are running ahead of ourselves. Before we become embroiled in the catastrophic events of 1943, it is necessary to explain a little about how those events came about in the first place – not least because Hamburg remains firmly in the centre of the story. For that we must turn our focus not merely to the beginning of the Second World War, but to the end of the First, for it was in 1918, in the dockyards of Hamburg and Kiel, that some of the most potent seeds of the Second World War were sown.