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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

According to Hans Erich Nossack, people did this because the bigger picture was unrecognizable. When he tried to take it in he was struck by a sense of unreality: it was as if the city he knew had not merely been destroyed but taken away and replaced with something completely alien. ‘What surrounded us did not remind us in any way of what was lost,’ he says. ‘It had nothing to do with it. It was something else, it was strangeness itself, it was the essentially not possible.’ ²⁴So complete was the transformation that he was unable to navigate his way through the ‘dead city’, even in areas he knew well:

I have gone through all these districts, by foot or by car. Only a few main streets were cleared, but mile after mile there was not a single living house. And if you tried to work your way through the ruins on either side, you immediately lost all sense of time and direction. In areas I thought I knew well, I lost my way completely. I searched for a street that I should have been able to find in my sleep. I stood where I thought it must be and didn’t know which way to turn. ²⁵

That was why people focused on little things. It was impossible to mourn a city that had become so alien: much better to concentrate on something specific – a particular street corner or a ruined shop – as a tangible fragment of a lost past.

* * *

If mourning the city was difficult, then mourning the people who had died was often impossible. The bodies had been removed so hastily that there was often nothing left to mourn – no proof that they had died. Indeed, with almost a million refugees spread out across Germany, most Hamburgers had no way of knowing whether their friends and relatives were not in fact alive. There are countless stories of people fearing the worst, only to discover that their wife, father or daughter was living somewhere in Bavaria. Equally there are stories of those who refused to believe that their loved ones were dead, even to the point of madness.

In the days after the catastrophe, signs appeared all over the city, chalked on the walls of ruined apartment buildings: ‘Where are you, Hilde?’ ‘We are alive’, ‘Aunt Anna is living in Blankenese’. Soldiers on leave travelled from town to town, searching desperately for families who had disappeared.

In an attempt to bring order to the chaos, the police authority began to catalogue the names of the missing and dead. It was hoped that the central register they created would become the first port of call for those looking for loved ones; it was also a way of re-establishing the Nazi Party’s grip on the exact whereabouts of the roving population.

There were two main catalogues. The first was a card index of all the refugees who had fled Hamburg in the days after the firestorm. They were required to register themselves with the local police when they arrived at their destination, so that details of where they had moved to could be sent back to Hamburg. In the first week alone the Hamburg police received more than a million such communications; even in November they were still receiving two to three thousand each day. They used this information to produce a fairly accurate record of where everyone had gone. ²⁶

People returning to Hamburg could consult this index in the hope of locating their lost relatives. If a particular person was not listed on the refugees register, then the second card index listed the details of the dead, starting with where the body had been found and any belongings that might help with identification. Each time some unfortunate relative or friend recognized the details on one of the cards, a name could be matched to one of the bodies that had been buried, without ceremony, in the mass grave at Ohlsdorf. It was a painstaking process. By the end of the year the police had still not discovered the names of even half of the 31,647 corpses they had buried. ²⁷Indeed, many remain nameless to this day.

Some of the missing proved as difficult to track down. By the end of the war two thousand people were still unaccounted for. ²⁸Some, presumably, were happy to slip off the Nazi registers, perhaps disappearing under pseudonyms in other areas of the Reich.

But it is likely that the vast majority were – and perhaps some still are – buried, undiscovered, beneath the ashes of Hamburg.

* * *

At the beginning of August the ‘dead city’ was cordoned off with barbed wire, and walls built with blocks of rubble from the collapsed buildings. Signs appeared round the perimeter: ‘Forbidden zone. Entry allowed only with written police permission.’ ²⁹The few roads into it that remained open were guarded day and night to prevent people coming in. The initial reason for the perimeter fence was to prevent the possible spread of disease from corpses, and to stop looters disturbing the few remaining belongings of the dead. But it was also done for moral reasons: it was considered indecent that the recovery of cadavers should be carried out in public.

Needless to say, the forbidden area soon gained almost mythical status among the surviving population, and terrifying rumours circulated. Some said the voices of the dead could still be heard, screaming as they had when they perished in the flames. There were stories of children who had sneaked into the ruins coming home with sores all over their arms and legs. Although this was probably brought on by chemical residues in the rubble left by the incendiaries, some children believed it was a kind of curse put on them by the malevolent spirit of this ‘forbidden city’. ³⁰Worse, it was said that decontamination squads had to use flame-throwers not only to cremate the decomposing bodies where they were but because ‘The flies were so thick that the men couldn’t get into the cellars: they kept slipping on maggots the size of fingers, and the flames had to clear the way for them to reach those who had perished in flames.’ ³¹

For the rest of the war, the forbidden zone sat in the centre of the eastern quarter like a dark reminder of the catastrophe, emanating a sense of horror and a stench of death to the rest of Hamburg. For years afterwards, the reality of what had happened there, hideous enough in itself, was routinely exaggerated into the grotesque. Myths grew up about the whole area having been doused in a ‘rain of phosphor’ during the attacks – myths that were repeated well into the 1960s. ³²Official death tolls were ignored in favour of higher figures – 60,000, 80,000, 100,000 – as if the city was afraid to admit the truth: that nobody knew how many had died because the number was simply unquantifiable. Even sixty years after the event the final count is uncertain, though the most reliable sources put it somewhere around 45,000. ³³However many had died, the one thing everyone knew for certain was that the vast majority of deaths had taken place in the shattered streets of Hammerbrook, Rothenburgsort and Hamm. It was a ‘dead city’ in every sense of the phrase.

21. Survival

Look not behind thee… lest thou be consumed

Genesis 19:17 ¹

Gradually, people started to return to Hamburg. Foreign workers and slave labourers had no choice: they were herded back and allocated new barracks to live in among the ruins. Workers in essential industries were also required to return and help get the city back on its feet: if they did not, they would be denied ration cards. But the majority drifted back because they felt they had nowhere else to go. They were tired of being tolerated as refugees in other parts of the country – they just wanted to come home. Hans Erich Nossack described it as a law of inertia: ‘The drops that were hurled in all directions by the city’s collapse now flooded back to fill the crater.’ ²

The return to the shattered city was a miserable experience. Even those who found their apartments intact were heartbroken by the destruction in their neighbourhoods. All the places where they had done their shopping, worshipped, socialized and relaxed had gone. The transformation struck even the forced labourers as tragic, as a Frenchman later described:

The damage from July’s bombings was, of course, not confined to the restaurants. There were no more music-halls or cafés with orchestras. The clowns were gone, the pom-pom of the Teutons’ music had been silenced and the horses that circled around a ridiculous rink were nowhere to be found. The brothels had disappeared; there was no more wrangling on the street outside forbidding entry; the whorehouses were diminished to piles of bricks and the women who had not managed to escape in time had perished. Only two cinemas were still working, as a last testimony of former happy times for Hamburg society. The public baths had also vanished. ³

Most of those who returned found they had nowhere to live: they were forced to sleep in the bunkers every night until they found friends or relatives with space to put them up. Those whose houses were still standing often found that other families had moved in while they were away. Rather than turn them out they were often obliged to let them stay, at least until they had found somewhere else to go – but with the sheer lack of living accommodation in the city, this sometimes took months. It was common to find two or three families sharing even the smallest of apartments. ⁴For those who could not find such shelter there was little choice but to return to the ruins. Gradually a shanty-town grew up, as people found cellars to live in, or stacked up debris around ruined walls to create makeshift dwellings.

Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg described the spirit of this grim time with a mixture of incredulity and admiration for the ordinary people of Hamburg:

It is amazing how these poor human beings manage to create something, some kind of homestead, out of the rawest of materials, charred wooden boards and broken bricks. Everybody lends a hand: the husband if he is at home, the wife and all the children. And they are so proud of their achievement, preferring to live like Robinson Crusoe in one single room on the lonely heath, rather than be billeted out amongst strangers. ⁵

They lived without electricity or gas, cooked on open fires, as if they were camping, and washed in the open at water pumps or from buckets. In the absence of any kind of transport, people walked everywhere, often clambering through rubble-lined streets for three or four hours each day just to get to work and back. ⁶And while the adults were at work, the children ran wild, as Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg continues: ‘There are children everywhere, hordes of them. There is no school and they roam the streets all day long… they forage in the garbage, dig tunnels in the rubble and imitate the siren to perfection.’ ⁷Johannes Schoene, the pastor of Christuskirche in Eimsbüttel, also wrote of ‘countless children’ running around the ruins and ‘getting into mischief’. ⁸

Generally speaking, it was the children who adapted first to the new realities of the war. In her diary of the time, Ilse Grassmann tells a story about her son and daughter playing ‘air raids’ under the kitchen table. The table was their shelter, and while one hid beneath it, the other dropped building blocks round it, claiming they were bombs. The sight of her children playing like this filled her with a unique dismay. ‘Is there no escape from this dreadful time?’ she wrote. ‘Not even for the children?’ ⁹But no matter how disturbing such games were, they demonstrated a fundamental truth: huge bombardments were part of everyday life. What had once been considered ‘normal’ no longer existed. There was a different ‘normality’ now: one of bombs, sirens, and ruins surrounded by barbed wire.

The younger children could not remember a time before the war – they had never known a time when the threat of British or Allied bombs had not hung over their city. Even the older ones found it difficult to imagine how things could be different. Since they were powerless to change the way things were, they had to get used to the devastation that now surrounded them.

Eventually the adults were forced to follow their children’s lead: it was surprising what one could get used to, given time. The shock of the first few weeks wore off, to be replaced instead with a numb insensibility to all but the most traumatic sights. In varying degrees, everyone was slowly becoming accustomed to the terrible conditions in Hamburg: ‘You get used to the sight,’ wrote Maria Bartels, to her husband at the front. ‘It’s only when you go through Hamm that you realize once again what we’ve lost.’ ¹⁰Soon, people no longer noticed the rubble. They walked past ruins without seeing them. They no longer even noticed the smell, which hung over the city in a permanent fug. They learned how to cope by keeping themselves busy. Maria Bartels continued:

There is no radio (I dare not think of all the other wonderful comforts we’ve lost); it is too hopeless. It is best to work as much as possible, or go to the cinema for a change; that is the best medicine, so that you don’t need to think. But on Sundays I will come out to see you, to recover, and gradually the year will come to an end and we’ll look forward to a new spring. Hopefully that will bring something better than this year. ¹¹

* * *

After a while life did get better. The bombed-out population were soon issued with new ration cards, and provided with beds, warm clothes and even furniture for their new homes among the ruins. Soon there were signs that a degree of normality was being restored. By 10 August several stretches of main road had been cleared and were open to traffic. The following day the post office reopened, and a week later the city’s three daily newspapers were back in circulation. New shops were trading, a few small bars appeared, and some of the destroyed cinemas were re-established. On 20 August, the Ufa-Palast cinema opened to show Geliebter Schatz( Beloved Sweetheart), a romance starring Ursula Herking and Sonja Ziemann, and people like Maria Bartels could lose themselves for a couple of hours in the harmless flickering of the big screen. ¹²

The city’s utilities were a major priority, and work on them was remarkably rapid. As the Americans discovered after the war, the restoration of the city’s electricity ‘did much to reverse the original pessimistic outlook that fell over Hamburg after the raids’. ¹³It took only three and a half days to repair Tiefstack power station, and Neuhof power station was back in service after only twenty days, although it had been the main focus of 303rd Bombardment Group on the second American raid. Even Barmbek power station, all but demolished on the night of 29 July, was back in service by the end of October. ¹⁴

Hamburg’s other utilities were restored just as quickly. The air raids had hit the gas industry so hard that in the days after the catastrophe it was incapable of delivering even three per cent of pre-raid output. By the end of November, however, it was back up to 80 per cent, and gas services had been restored to all but the worst-hit areas in the east of the city. It was the same story with the water supplies. The raids had destroyed the city’s main pumping station in Rothenburgsort, and put 847 breaks in the water mains throughout the city; but within four months most had been repaired, and the pumping station was up and running. By the following spring the network of water mains was working at 97 per cent of its previous capacity. The telephone system was less of a priority, but even so many phone lines, for business use at least, were working again as early as mid-August. ¹⁵

It was not long, either, before the most important war industries were back in production. By the end of the year, the aircraft industry was operating at 91 per cent of its previous capacity. The manufacture of electrical goods, optics and precision tools was soon surpassing its previous level, and even the badly hit chemical industry was producing 71 per cent of its original total. ¹⁶

The recovery of the all important U-boat industry was even more miraculous. The Blohm & Voss shipyards had been the original target for both US raids, and had also been hit by British bombs on the first night of attacks, yet despite the complete destruction of the administration building, workshop and store buildings, the factory was running almost to capacity within two months. ¹⁷René Ratouis, a French labourer who had been in the shipyard when it was hit, could barely believe his eyes when he returned to work there at the end of September: ‘To our great astonishment, the Blohm & Voss factory hardly seemed to have suffered from the bombardments of July at all. We were completely bewildered by the thought that the incendiaries could have missed the most important factory in Hamburg.’ ¹⁸The recovery of the U-boat yards was underlined on 28 September when the first Walter U-boat Wa 201 entered the water. Far from being knocked out of the war, the Blohm & Voss yards appeared to be flourishing once more. ¹⁹

In the wake of all the physical recovery, the morale of the people of Hamburg also picked up. Hannah Kelson lived in the west of the city at the time, and she remembers the atmosphere becoming quite positive fairly soon after the disaster:

Slowly some form of order returned. In fact, it returned remarkably quickly. I remember reading afterwards that the intention of the air raids had been to break the spirit of the population. And I think I can say with total authority that this absolutely did not happen. People’s spirit was quite tremendous. I know much is made of the spirit of the British during the Blitz, no doubt with every justification, but I think the same could be said about the civilian population, certainly as I saw it and knew it in those days, and I was right in the middle of it. There was no question of defeatism, or a sense of wanting to give up. In fact, if anything I think it strengthened people’s resolve and gave them more backbone. ²⁰

Even in the east of the city the recovery in morale was remarkable. By the end of the year, Pastor Jürgen Wehrmann was able to look back with pride at the way his parishioners had dealt with the crisis:

The population of Eilbek was growing from day to day. One met ever more people in the street, their faces lit up with joy over the reclamation of their home town. I spoke with them and began to visit them in what they often sincerely called their apartments. It was now becoming quite apparent: Eilbek was beginning to rise up out of the ruins. ²¹

The people of Hamburg were coping surprisingly well.

In an attempt to bolster this fragile new sense of resolve, a succession of party leaders came to visit the city. The first was Goering, whose visit on 6 August was the first item of news in the Hamburger Zeitungthe following day. He was followed by Himmler, on the thirteenth, then Goebbels and Wilhelm Frick on the seventeenth. Admiral Doenitz visited the docks to survey the damage done to the Blohm & Voss shipyards. The general panic and dismay that had gripped the higher echelons of the Nazi Party in the days just after the catastrophe had now subsided – so much so that they were already trying to put a positive spin on events. On 19 August, State Secretary Georg Ahrens, who had accompanied Doenitz, was already writing to his relatives about what he called the ‘Miracle of Hamburg’:

The intention of the enemy to strike a blow at the very foundations of the Reich has failed, and though Hamburg and the Hamburgers have received wounds that will bleed for a long time yet, the fact they have survived this blow in relative safety means that the enemy’s method of murdering women and children in the major cities will not succeed in bringing down the Reich, not even if he makes the same attempt on other major cities. Amidst all the pain and hardship there is perhaps a positive thing that has come out of this: many would have believed that such a blow would have meant a complete breakdown… Now we are all convinced not only that our city, our bleeding city, will live, but that the eternal German Reich will never come to an end when the people show such faith, such strength and such courage. ²²

Rhetoric like this might have provoked a sneer from most ordinary Hamburgers, but the essence of the State Secretary’s words was undeniably true: the Allies’ grand strategy of trying to undermine the Reich by bombing had not worked. Nor would it work in the coming years. Despite all they had been through, and all they were still suffering, the people of Hamburg had not given up.

The symbols of their determination to survive were all around them in the gradual clearance of the rubble, the restoration of electricity and water, and the stubborn pockets of life among the ruins. Throughout the city messages were written in chalk on the front of bombed-out houses, saying, ‘Wir leben’ (‘We are alive’). They had been intended to reassure friends and neighbours in the direct aftermath of the catastrophe; now they seemed more like a statement of defiance.

Then, at the beginning of September, just a month after the firestorm, something happened that had a huge psychological effect on the people: the trees began to bloom. There are numerous accounts of this strange natural phenomenon. ²³Presumably it was some kind of defence mechanism in the tree population to ensure the survival of the species, but for the people of Hamburg, the sight of those apparently dead trees springing into glorious life became a unique symbol of hope. As autumn approached, Gretl Büttner wrote:

A miracle happened in the ‘dead city’. By the end of August and the beginning of September the charred, burned trees sprouted new life; light green leaves dared to come out. So close to autumn, it was spring once again over the endless horrors. White lilacs bloomed in the destroyed gardens of the houses. Chestnut trees once more lit their white candles. And in this continuing life something mild and comforting, a change from helpless hatred to sorrow or resignation took place. One not only saw the dark, accusing debris. One saw the future again and learned to hope once more in the midst of the worst time of grief. Like a mantle… Nature spread her strangest spring over the thousands of still bleeding wounds of the city. Hamburg was not dead. Hamburg must not die. ²⁴