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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

* * *

The only consolation for the British was that the terrible conditions were as bad for the German fighters as they were for the RAF. Wilhelm Johnen, a fighter pilot with III/NJG1, ²⁴later recorded his thoughts on the sort of conditions he and his fellows had to endure on that terrible night:

When gusts of wind at gale force flung the machine about the sky; when in a fraction of a second the propellers, wings and engines were swathed in thick, heavy ice… When devilish St Elmo’s fire began to dance on the aerials, cockpit panes and propellers, blinding the pilot… In these moments is born the airman… Pilots trust in God far more than people would believe. ²⁵

Without their radar, German night fighters were relying on their eyes to find their victims, but this was almost impossible in the midst of the stormclouds that filled the sky. Every now and then one would find a British bomber, and an extraordinary game of cat-and-mouse would develop as each aircraft wove in and out of the clouds to escape the shots of the other. ²⁶Visibility was so bad that one Dorner 217 of II/NJG3 actually collided with the bomber it was trying to attack: the pilot, Feldwebel Krauter, could

not see to pull out of his attacking run and crashed into Flight Sergeant J. A. Couper’s 75 Squadron Stirling. Both planes crashed to the ground. Krauter escaped alive, but the crew of the British plane died in the crash. ²⁷

As the British bomber force approached their target they became steadily more ragged: what had begun as a tight stream was now degenerating into a dispersed scattering of individual aeroplanes. This was the final, and perhaps most deadly, effect of the storm. As the British planes were blown about the sky, their navigational instruments rendered useless by the effects of static electricity, many were separated from the bunch. Since Window only worked when the bomber stream was fairly concentrated, the isolated planes showed up on German radar screens. Consequently they were now in more danger than ever.

The German defences wasted no time in picking them up. The fighters were also beginning to pick up lone bombers on their Lichtenstein airborne radar sets. Flak batteries won back some of their old accuracy: it seems that at least four British planes were brought down by flak alone, and many more seriously damaged. ²⁸

Barely half of the bombers that set off that night reached Hamburg, and by the time they arrived they were in serious trouble. Hamburg’s flak batteries had been heavily reinforced since the night of the firestorm, and now let loose a barrage that rivalled the storm itself. According to Rudolf Schurig, the commander of a flak battery in the north-east of the city, ‘the storm paled in the diabolic noise’ given off by the German artillery. Their battery alone fired 776 rounds into the sky (compared with only 547 rounds on the night of the first attack – more than 40 per cent more). ²⁹

Not only was there more flak for the British to contend with, it was now far more concentrated than before. Two days earlier Generaloberst Weise had decreed that all flak above a target city should be limited to 4,500 metres (14,700 feet), to give the German fighters space to attack the bombers from above. The skies over Hamburg had therefore become doubly dangerous. Above the flak level the bombers faced the combined perils of ice, lightning and the gun-power of every fighter aircraft for miles, yet if they tried to venture out of the bottom of the stormcloud they faced an alternative storm of shells from Hamburg’s greatly reinforced flak batteries.

As the raid progressed, the British situation became yet more miserable. When a greatly depleted force at last turned for home it was so broken up that any protection it might have gained from Window was long gone. Many of the crews were lost, scattered across the sky from Holland to Denmark. One 405 Squadron Halifax was so badly damaged by flak that its pilot decided to fly to Sweden: he and his crew eventually bailed out over Malmö and were interned by the Swedish authorities for the rest of the war. At the opposite extreme, six bombers were shot down just off the coast of Holland, some more than fifty miles off course. Alone, damaged by flak and forced to lose height by the power of the storm, they were no match for the fighter aces of the Luftwaffe’s coastal squadrons.

Of these six crews there was just one survivor. Peter Swan, a bomb-aimer with 44 Squadron, was the only member of his crew who bailed out before his Lancaster crashed into the sea: he hit his head on the escape hatch and passed out in mid-air, but regained consciousness just in time to pull the ripcord of his parachute. After four hours in the cold waters of the North Sea, he was eventually picked up by a German E-boat. He spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp. ³⁰

* * *

It was not until almost six o’clock the next morning that the last of the battered British force returned to the ground in England. As the tired, shaken crews climbed down from their aircraft, they were immediately taken to the debriefing rooms, where a fairly depressing picture of the night’s operations emerged. Some described being attacked by night fighters, many more described the increased intensity of the flak, but all spoke in awe about the violence of the storm.

It soon became apparent that many crews had not even attempted to bomb Hamburg, prevented by the conditions. To make things worse, even those who had reached the target had been unable to bomb it properly: they had been instructed to drop their loads on the green TIs, but often there were none to be seen.

Trevor Timperley, who flew one of the Pathfinder aircraft that night, explains what went wrong. It was his job to mark the target using the Wanganui method: rather than illuminating the target on the ground he had to drop indicators into the air above the aiming point, which would float down for all the other bombers to see. This was the method the Pathfinder Force used when clouds obscured the target. The problem was that even in relatively still conditions the TIs tended to drift away from where they were supposed to go. In a storm they were blown all over the sky. Even so, that was the least of Trevor Timperley’s worries:

They had forecast some cumulo-nimbus cloud, but nothing like the scale that was encountered. I was supposed to be towards the end of the raid, illuminating with this Wanganui air marker. There was no point unless it was outsidethe cloud: if you drop it in a cloud, nobody will be able to see it. As we got closer, and we were climbing up to get over the top of it, I realized that I was still going to go in the cloud… I decided that if I kept my markers only, which was the important thing, and jettisoned the bombs, I would get the height [to break out of the clouds]. This turned out in the end to be 29,000 feet, which is pretty good in a Lancaster. Anyway, I just managed it… There were big gaps between the cloud, and I dropped my markers into one of them. But whether my markers slowly drifted into cloud as they went lower, I don’t know. It was the best I could do. ³¹

With the impossible conditions, their instruments failing, and TIs that drifted into the clouds, it is no wonder that many of those who battled their way through the storm failed to find Hamburg. Pilot Colin Harrison was completely disillusioned with the attack:

I never saw the target. I was weighted down – the aircraft was badly iced up – and battered from all the thunder and turbulence and the like. I got knocked down from the 20,000 feet where we used to fly most of the time, to about 10,000 feet, and I came into a sort of a clear area. We were below cloud – it was practically a hole in the cloud – and there was no sign of the target. And I thought, well, this is a waste of time. ³²

Other pilots are even more outspoken about the seemingly pointless nature of their ordeal. Bill McCrea, still upset at having been sent to Hamburg twenty minutes late on the previous raid, is unforgiving about being dispatched into such danger a second time:

The fourth raid was a shambles. An absolute shambles – entirely the fault of the Met men. We should never have gone, because this electric storm came through England the previous day… They said it would have cleared Hamburg in twenty-four hours – well, it hadn’t, it was right across the city. I think I flew in it for five minutes and I could feel the ice building up, so I turned round the other way. I got what I thought was a source of light coming from down below, so of course I dropped my bombs on that. I think it was Bremerhaven but I couldn’t be sure. ³³

He and his crew didn’t care what they had bombed. Shaken and silent, they were merely glad to be on their way home.

* * *

If the previous raids had been uniquely devastating in the history of bombing, tonight’s operation had been an expensive RAF flop: a miserable performance conducted in miserable conditions. The RAF had lost thirty aircraft, at least a handful of which had been defeated by the sheer force of the storm; ³⁴106 planes had dropped their bombs in the sea, 14 had jettisoned them over land, and 197 had given up on Hamburg and attacked targets of opportunity elsewhere. ³⁵Some crews had bombed Bremen, more than fifty miles to the south-west of the place they were supposed to be bombing; others had bombed Kiel, about fifty miles to the north. In fact, only 393 aircraft had made it as far as the target, barely half of the total British force, and even the planes that reached Hamburg did not attack the areas they were supposed to. In the words of the Hamburg police chief, ‘No focal point of the raid was observable… Casualties among the population remained small.’ ³⁶In other words, the city had been spared the final, lethal blow that everyone had been dreading.

It seems that many of the crews who made it to Hamburg had dropped their loads early. In the poor visibility, with their instruments affected by the storm, many navigators had been forced to calculate where they were by dead reckoning: most crews dropped their loads well south of the city, but a few hit Harburg. This southern part of the port area had been one of the two original targets and, ironically, had been taken off the list that afternoon; several bombers hit it by mistake.

A large number of planes overshot the city. The small town of Elmshorn lay about twelve miles to the north-west of Hamburg; that night a large fire was burning in the town centre, caused either by lightning or by some of the initial stray bombs. Drawn towards it, as many as seventy British planes dropped their bombs on the hapless town, destroying more than 250 houses and severely damaging 200 more. Elmshorn was one of the evacuation points from the previous raids, and was still packed with refugees, some of whom could be forgiven for thinking that the British were deliberately targeting them as they fled. ³⁷Fifty-seven people were killed there.

As for Hamburg, a few fires were started in the centre of the city and in the eastern part of the port, but they were scattered and the city’s fire-fighters were able to deal with them relatively easily. ³⁸Some bombs fell into areas that had already been destroyed, and many more fell uselessly into the surrounding countryside. For the few people who still remained in the city, like Wanda Chantler and her friends in the remains of their forced-labour camp, it was a blessed relief. Far from being a threat, the awesome force of the storm had come to their rescue.

* * *

The raid of 2/3 August brought an end to Operation Gomorrah, and also, for the moment, the devastation of Hamburg. After nearly ten thousand tons of bombs had been dropped on the city there seemed little point in repeating the attack. As far as the Allies were concerned, the job had been done.

PART THREE

The Aftermath

20. City of the Dead

Who could ever, even with unbound words, tell in full of the blood and wounds that I now saw, though he should narrate them many times?

Dante ¹

In the days following Operation Gomorrah, the Hamburg authorities found themselves facing one of the biggest clean-up operations in history. Hundreds of miles of streets were now buried beneath mounds of rubble. The city centre had been transformed into a collection of smashed monuments, broken church spires, gutted architecture. Its famous waterways were choked with floating detritus, charred wood, sunken boats. And the harbour – the heart and soul of the city – was in a terrible state. The parts that were visible across the river, such as the Blohm & Voss shipyards and the surrounding docklands, had been reduced to a mess of burned-out warehouses, sunken ships and the mangled remains of some 122 cranes. ²

At the centre of the wasteland, like a huge black hole in the landscape, lay the charred remains of what would soon become known as the ‘dead city’. It was there, in the districts of Hammerbrook, Rothenburgsort and Hamm, that the worst damage had occurred. Streets that had once teemed with activity were now a virtual moonscape, devoid of life. The whole area was fundamentally unstable: unexploded bombs lurked beneath the rubble, fires still raged in coke stores and lumber yards, and some of the house façades that had not already collapsed swayed visibly whenever the wind changed. Bodies were scattered across the streets, many so badly scorched that they were indistinguishable from the blackened tree trunks torn up by the force of the firestorm.

In the face of such devastation, not only here but in many other parts of the city, it was difficult for the authorities to know what to prioritize. The rubble had to be cleared off the roads before any major work could begin. Many damaged façades were so unstable that they had to be torn down to prevent them collapsing on rescue workers. Supplies of drinking water had to be restored to prevent outbreaks of disease, and there was pressure from Berlin to get the city’s damaged war industries back up and running. There were still fears that some of the larger fires might burn out of control again. Indeed, some would not be put out until the beginning of October, a full two months after they had first been set alight. ³

However, the authorities realized that the first priority, for everyone’s sake, had to be the recovery and burial of the dead. This was easier said than done: the sheer numbers involved meant it was impossible to recover more than a fraction of the bodies within the first week. So they decided to concentrate on those that the population would find most distressing – the ones that were strewn, visibly, throughout the streets of the firestorm area. In this they were motivated by a genuine desire to spare the people of Hamburg any further anguish: they had experienced enough without having to contend with the gruesome sight of bodies lining the roads.

Of course, it was inevitable that many people were not spared this sight – especially in the early days. Annegret Hennings was one of those who ventured through the district of Hamm a few days after the firestorm. What she saw there shook her to the core:

In the Hammer Landstrasse I saw something lying there that looked like a charred tree trunk, and next to it another, smaller thing. They were a mother and child. Totally charred, so that they were unrecognizable. The dead lay everywhere. With some of them you couldn’t tell if they had been burnt to death or killed by the blast. None of them had any bodyhair left. After some time these streets were closed off, walls were built across them. Prisoners had to go into the cellars and fetch the people out. I felt very sorry for them. ⁴

Gretl Büttner also describes making a journey into the ‘dead city’. She and her companion, Dr Maack, were investigating what had happened in these areas, and looking for the remains of some colleagues in the Air-raid Protection Service. After clambering over the rubble for a short way, they found themselves overlooking a sea of corpses:

On a little open square near Boonsweg – I shall never forget the sight – there lay hundreds of men and women, soldiers in uniform, children, old people. Many had torn the clothes from their bodies shortly before their death. They were naked, their bodies seemed unmarked, the faces showed peaceful expressions, like in deep sleep. Other bodies could hardly be recognized; they were charred, torn to pieces, and had shattered skulls… There an old woman lay. Her face was peaceful, soft, and tired… And there, a mother with a child on each hand. They were all three lying on their faces in an almost gracefully relaxed position… And there a soldier, with charred stumps for legs. There a woman with a torn body, on whose bulging-out intestines the flies were feeding. And there a child, clutching a birdcage in his hand. And there, detached from the body, a boy’s foot with a black boot; a small, brown girl’s hand with a blue ring… The heart almost stops beating at such sights. ⁵

Scenes like that were only the tip of the iceberg. There were literally hundreds of streets and squares in the affected areas, and many were strewn with corpses. Most of the bodies, however, were out of sight, hidden in the cellars where they had succumbed to the combined effects of heat, smoke and carbon-monoxide poisoning.

Hamburg had an efficient system for collecting, identifying and burying those who died in air raids, but in the summer of 1943 it was overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies it had to collect, and by the inaccessibility of the areas in which people had died. With rubble strewing the streets, often the only way to get to them was on foot. Corpses in the worst-affected areas had to be left for days or even weeks until the roads were clear enough for lorries to get in to take them away. Many were buried beneath piles of stone, requiring heavy lifting equipment before they could be recovered. Those bodies that were still underground were especially difficult to recover. Sometimes the inrush of air as cellars were opened caused fires to break out afresh, and many cellar shelters had to be left for up to ten days before they were cool enough for the disposal squads to enter. ⁶

In the first few days after the firestorm ten thousand corpses were collected from the streets for burial. This was the sort of work normally carried out by the Air-raid Protection Service, but the sheer scale of the clean-up operation meant that hundreds of auxiliary workers had to be drafted in to help. Most came from the armed forces, but the SS were also called in, as were prisoners from the concentration camp at Neuengamme. The bodies were gathered without ceremony: there was barely time to identify them before they were taken away. After their details had been logged, with a description of where they had been found and any possessions they had had, they were piled on to the back of a lorry and transported to Ohlsdorf cemetery. ⁷

Ludwig Faupel was one of those who dealt with the bodies. The company at which he was apprenticed had been destroyed, so he and his surviving colleagues were immediately drafted by the Rescue and Repair Service to help clear up the city.

The clean-up work went on. The streets had to be rubble-free, burned out façades had to be levelled… With the rest of our group we were obliged to join in with the clean-up work, in which the mountains of corpses were regarded as the worst part. It was not the sight of it, but the smell that made this activity so hard. As you walked through the ruins every now and then the smell of burned flesh, or the sickly sweet stink of decomposing tissue, would bring on a strong and immediate nausea. ⁸

Corpses everywhere were sprinkled with chlorinated lime, partly as a hygiene measure, but mostly in an attempt to counteract the terrible stench of advanced decomposition. Soon whole areas of the city smelt of the powder – it was the only way to keep nausea at bay. Clean-up crews entering the cellars had a particularly hard job. Here the stench was so bad that some military detachments insisted on blasting the cellars with flame-throwers before entering. ⁹Recovery squads were issued with gas masks, in which the filter had been replaced by a pad soaked in rum or Cognac. The mental and physical strain on those men was so great that many took to drinking the rum instead, and extra rations of alcohol and cigarettes were freely distributed throughout the Decontamination Service to keep the men working. ¹⁰

The most unpleasant jobs were often reserved for the concentration-camp inmates. Jan Melsen had been in Neuengamme since 1942, when he had been arrested as a member of the Dutch resistance. By the summer of 1943 he was a virtual wraith. Perversely, his work clearing up corpses probably saved his life since it allowed him access to extra food – often stolen from kitchens and factories among the ruins. However, as he explained after the war, the extra food came at a high price:

Later a lorry came. Then we formed a chain and passed the corpses along until they were laid on the back of the truck… After we had carried the corpses out of the cellars we had to start afresh with searching through the rubble for body parts, because they wanted to know approximately how many dead there were. We fetched ourselves bowls and buckets – there were enough lying around – then dug through the rubble and put whatever body parts we found in the buckets. In the evenings an SS doctor came with his assistants, and then we had to spread the body parts across the ground. From this he would estimate the number of men and women. ¹¹

As Melsen goes on to explain, it was not always easy to guess at the number of people who had died, simply because of the extreme circumstances of their deaths:

I had just cleaned up a cellar when a civilian came up with the unit leader and said, ‘My wife and daughter were here – they must be in this cellar.’ But we had found nothing. The man cried out, ‘They must be here inside.’ It was nothing to do with me, but I had a pickaxe beside me, so we went back and forth, scraping around the entrance with the pickaxe. As I dug at the ground a bracelet sprang up. The people had been burnt right down to their hair and skin – there was nothing left but this piece of gold. ¹²

With some shelters they could make only vague estimates of between 250 and 300 dead; greater accuracy was impossible. ¹³

In such circumstances, identification was a real problem. In a rather harrowing account, Ben Witter describes pulling body parts from the rubble, with wallets, ID cards, wedding rings and other material that might be used to identify the bodies. (In the end he was taken off this duty, because his hands were covered in staphylococcic blisters, brought on by continual contact with the cadavers he was handling.) ¹⁴Gruesome though the work was, it took on a much more personal dimension when he discovered his own grandparents among the dead:

My grandmother was a really stately lady, rather fat. A fat dead lady without a head was lying there: I wondered if it could be her and came to the conclusion it was. My grandfather I found later in the harbour hospital. A lot of unknown bodies had been brought there – parts of bodies too… I examined all of them, and in a basin there was a belly with a watch sticking out from it. That was my grandfather’s watch. There was only so much left of him… The rest was God’s. ¹⁵

Originally the plan was to burn all of the corpses and body parts in the open. But when it was discovered that they did not pose much of a health risk after all, the authorities decided to bury them, and four mass graves were prepared in a corner of Ohlsdorf cemetery in the north of the city. Jan Melsen was one of the concentration-camp inmates who was sent to dig them.

I thought that all the corpses had been put in graves already, but that was not so – they had simply been laid out in a huge heap and doused with lime and chlorine, nothing more. The same people who had fetched the corpses out of the cellars now had to dig mass graves for them. So we dug mass graves in the form of a cross. They are still there, in exactly that form, just as we laid them. ¹⁶

Ben Witter witnessed how the graves were filled. From the back of one of the lorries he saw concentration-camp inmates standing inside the graves among the dead, stacking literally thousands of bodies on top of each other. Round the top of the grave a circle of SS men was standing, for obvious reasons, with their backs to the corpses. They were all drinking, and two became overpowered by the combined effects of alcohol, heat and the stench. While they were thus distracted, a few of their prisoners took some clothes from the corpses, climbed over the edge of the grave and disappeared into the trees. ‘I don’t know how many escaped but I believe half a dozen managed it.’ ¹⁷

* * *

During the first two weeks of August, the authorities became increasingly anxious about the possibility of epidemics breaking out. It was not only the vast number of corpses in the city that fuelled their fears, but several other factors. With the city in ruins, those who remained found themselves living in extremely close quarters, and eating from communal kitchens. The conditions were ideal for the spread of disease, and in an attempt to stop typhus breaking out free vaccinations were offered to anyone who wanted them.

The most worrying thing was the lack of drinking water. Instructions were issued repeatedly through the press telling everyone to boil all water before drinking it, but without any gas or electricity available this was often impossible. The city’s toilets were another problem. The main sewers, remarkably, had remained intact, but without water for flushing, toilets everywhere were hopelessly blocked. The authorities suggested that each surviving community should dig latrines, with strict instructions that they should be sited at least fifty metres from any of the city’s seven thousand artesian wells, which had become important in recent days for supplying water. But outdoor latrines were unpopular, especially during spells of rain, and many people poured their waste into the canals, although this was strictly prohibited. The resulting stench merely added to the catalogue of repugnant odours that now filled the city. ¹⁸

Since most of the city’s dustcarts had been destroyed in the raids, and the streets were impassable, the garbage-collection service was virtually non-existent. Soon, huge piles of rubbish developed everywhere. ¹⁹At the end of August, Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg described the streets as ‘full of dirt and rubbish’. She was still complaining at the beginning of the following year:

In the streets mountains of rubbish are piling up. The big metal dustbins are never emptied and garbage is bursting out all over the place. Paper, potato peel, cabbage leaves – the muck-containers open their lids like gaping throats, vomiting out their evil contents. Then the wind takes it all and scatters it over the wet roads, leaving a stale, foul stench. We are told that every street must dig its own rubbish pit to avoid further contamination. ²⁰

A plague of flies and rats was soon swarming throughout Hamburg. They fed on the corpses, the rubbish and the huge amounts of rotting food that had been abandoned in the ruins. Hans Erich Nossack describes the revulsion he felt whenever he saw these pests:

Rats and flies were the lords of the city. Bold and fat, the rats frolicked in the streets. But even more disgusting were the flies, huge and iridescent green – no one had ever seen flies like this before. They swarmed in great clumps on the roads, settled, copulating, on top of the ruined walls, and basked, weary and satiated, on the splinters of windowpanes. When they could no longer fly they would crawl after us through the tiniest of cracks, soiling everything, and their buzzing and whirring was the first thing we heard in the mornings. This didn’t stop until October. ²¹

The increasing plague of flies began to pose a serious health risk, particularly when latrines and rubbish tips were located close to communal kitchens. People were exhorted to bury their rubbish, but this was very difficult: picks and shovels were in short supply, and the earth had been baked hard by weeks of hot sunshine. ²²So the plague worsened. Supplies of chemicals for killing flies did not appear until the end of September, but it was the onset of colder autumn weather that brought an end to them. The rats, however, remained. With piles of rubbish lining the streets there was little anyone could do to get rid of them.

* * *

Once again, the centre of all this devastation and squalor was the ‘dead city’, where the highest proportion of buildings had been destroyed and the remaining buildings were most unstable. People were warned to walk in the middle of streets throughout the city, in case of collapsing house façades, but they were told not to come into this area at all.

The sheer scale of the damage there was so great that even those eyewitnesses who did venture inside the ‘dead city’ often found it impossible to describe what they saw. Most contemporary descriptions do not even attempt to give an impression of the vast field of ruins. Instead they invariably focus on smaller details in a series of broken images. For example, Gretl Büttner is able to describe what she saw only in a list of images:

Ruins everywhere, as far as the eye could see. Debris on the streets, collapsed house fronts, far-flung stones on kerbs, charred trees and devastated gardens. Over it all a bright blue sky, little white clouds, and a bright sun. This made the picture of endless grief and terrible devastation even more noticeable. And always the sound of new buildings collapsing and the crackling of the ravenous fire still feeding could be heard. Poor, beautiful, beloved, raped city! One was without words. ²³

It is revealing that eyewitnesses like her, who were otherwise eloquent, found themselves so tongue-tied by what they saw. It is as if the scale of the destruction was so great that the only way to make sense of it was by seizing on a handful of tangible details.