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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

22. Famine

Eating no longer seemed a pleasant necessity, but rather a dark law that forced them to swallow, to swallow at any cost, in a hunger that was never satisfied but appeared instead to swell…

Heinrich Böll ¹

Hamburg held on for almost two years before the city was forced to surrender. There were many more raids – a further sixty-eight, to be precise, involving a combined total of more than eleven thousand aircraft. There were many more casualties too: 5,666 men, women and children lost their lives, and a further 6,463 were injured. ²The numbers might have been far worse, but the people of Hamburg were no longer prepared to take risks with air raids. At the first sound of the siren they now headed directly for the nearest reinforced bunker. Even when the sirens were not ringing they did not feel safe in their ruined apartments and makeshift homes: ‘It is like lying in a coffin,’ said one survivor, ‘waiting for the lid to snap shut.’ ³‘We live through a fearful symphony of horror,’ wrote another. ‘There is no day, hardly a night without air-raid warnings… The end is bound to be near, whichever way it comes.’ ⁴

The long endgame of the war began in June 1944, when the British and American armies launched their invasion of mainland Europe. By March 1945 they had fought their way across France to the Rhine, and by the end of April they had reached the west bank of the Elbe, overlooking Hamburg. Along the way they had captured hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, they had crushed the Luftwaffe and inflicted a devastating firestorm on the beautiful city of Dresden. By now it was obvious even to Hitler that the end was in sight. On 30 April he retired to the back room of his bunker and committed suicide.

One of Hitler’s last instructions was a message to all his troops ‘not to give up under any circumstances, but… to continue the fight against the enemies of the Fatherland’. As always, they were to resist the Allied advance to the last man. ⁵To his eternal credit, Hamburg’s gauleiter disobeyed those instructions almost immediately. Having seen his city devastated from the air he was unwilling to stand by while the Allies finished off the job from the ground. On 3 May, Karl Kaufmann handed over the city to the British Second Army without firing a shot. In the midst of a brutal, often insane war, it was an admirable example of common sense. Five days later, the rest of Germany followed suit, and surrendered unconditionally. The Second World War in the west had ended.

* * *

The scenes that greeted the British troops as they marched into the city were shocking in the extreme. Even battle-hardened soldiers were appalled by what they found. Tommy Wilmott, who had fought his way across Europe with the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry sums it up succinctly: ‘All I remember about Hamburg was the smell. Even where we were, standing back looking on it, the smell from Hamburg was awful. The smell of death. It was terrible.’ ⁶

Alongside this frightful odour was the terrifying physical devastation. Dr P. J. Horsey was used to some fairly disturbing scenes – he had been among the group of medics sent to help the victims of Belsen concentration camp in the final days of the war – but he, too, was shocked by the sight of Hamburg when he visited in mid-May:

The city itself was the scene of utter destruction. In the dock area, with one or two exceptions, there were acres and acres of rubble, which showed little evidence of having once composed houses. In many places even the streets were buried. Of the few buildings which did still stand, the majority had been gutted with fire, or were so badly damaged as to be uninhabitable. In spite of this the streets were full of Germans walking about purposefully: what they were doing or where they lived I cannot think… ⁷

There is an implied guilt in Dr Horsey’s account, especially when he describes the people he came across in the street:

Some of the Germans looked away when we passed them: the children looked at us with great curiosity, but were kept well out of our way by their mothers, as though we might kick them. Most of the women looked at us with hate in their faces, but the men looked more cowed and ashamed. ⁸

The truth is that men like Dr Horsey had had no idea what to expect when they came to Hamburg. They might have read in the newspapers about how the city had been ‘wiped off the war map’, but they had no concept of what that meant, and the reality was beyond their wildest imaginings. Another British eyewitness, Philip Dark, remembers the Hamburg landscape with horror. Lieutenant Dark was a prisoner-of-war who had been transported through the city in mid-April, just before the surrender. What he saw there would stay with him for the rest of his life.

… we swung in towards the centre and started to enter a city devastated beyond all comprehension. It was more than appalling. As far as the eye could see, square mile after square mile of empty shells of buildings with twisted girders scarecrowed in the air, radiators of a flat jutting out from a shaft of a still-standing wall, like a crucified pterodactyl skeleton. Horrible, hideous shapes of chimneys sprouting from the frame of a wall. The whole pervaded by an atmosphere of ageless quiet, a monument to man’s power of self-destruction… Such impressions are incomprehensible unless seen… Coventry and Bath, any bombing in England, just can’t be compared to this. ⁹

The last point is perhaps the most important of all. Until they arrived in Hamburg, most British soldiers thought they knew the worst of bombing – they had witnessed it at home in London, Glasgow, Southampton and countless other cities. But the German Blitz on Britain was insignificant compared with what they saw in Hamburg. The rubble, the ruins, the smell – as one British official wrote in 1946, it seemed ‘impossible ever to rebuild this city… Another site must be developed for the traffic of the Elbe, to replace the essential heart of this historic port.’ ¹⁰

Of course, not only Hamburg was affected: by the end of the war the devastation had spread to every corner of the Reich – as the refugees of 1943 had predicted – and post-war descriptions of Germany’s other cities are equally devoid of hope. Cologne was a city ‘recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble and loneliness of complete physical defeat’. ¹¹Dresden no longer resembled ‘Florence on the Elbe’ but was more like ‘the face of the moon’, and planning directors believed that it would take ‘at least seventy years’ to rebuild. ¹²Munich was so badly devastated that ‘It truly did almost make one think that a Last Judgement was imminent.’ ¹³The damage in Berlin was so great that a former envoy to President Roosevelt described it as ‘a second Carthage’. ¹⁴

This, then, was the final result of the bomber dream, the fruit of decades of investment and research. The Allies had perfected the art of devastating cities. As a consequence barely a town in Germany remained untouched by destruction.

* * *

In the aftermath of war, the Allies set about trying to rebuild the shattered country. Under the Marshall Plan the Americans agreed to pour $29 billion into Western Europe, and by far the biggest share was to go to Germany. ¹⁵With the British and the French, they steered the western half of the country towards recovery, and eventually to prosperity. However, while the Allies are fond of congratulating themselves on creating the foundations of the German ‘economic miracle’, it is important to remember that things got much, muchworse for Germany before they improved.

When the Allies had taken over they had inherited an extremely efficient economic system. British observers were astonished to find that, despite all the bombing and disruption, Germans were still spending evenings at the theatre and the opera, hair and beauty salons were still open, and food was still relatively plentiful. The welfare system ensured that every German citizen was fairly well looked after, no matter what had happened to their homes. After Dr Horsey visited Hamburg in May 1945 he was able to write that ‘All the Germans I ever saw were well dressed and looked very well fed.’ ¹⁶

Under Allied control, however, the situation changed dramatically. By the time Victor Gollancz arrived in Hamburg in the autumn of 1946, the people had been reduced to scavenging for food, malnutrition was rife, and children could only attend school on alternate days because they were obliged to share their shoes with their brothers and sisters. ¹⁷Worse still was the threat of disease, which was much more of a danger than it had ever been in the aftermath of the firestorm. Tuberculosis was five times as prevalent as it had been before the war; penicillin was in short supply; there was only enough insulin available to treat a third of the diabetics in the city, and only enough bandages for a fifth of those who needed them. ¹⁸One British medical officer, who mistook Gollancz for a visiting politician, came up to harangue him:

What on earth are you politicians in London up to? Do you realize what’s going on here? Ignoramuses see some people in the streets looking fairly well nourished but don’t realize that they are living on carbohydrates and have no resistance, and they forget that the most seriously undernourished people are at home. The present figure of tuberculosis is appalling, and it may be double next year. An epidemic of any kind would sweep everything before it. We are on the edge of a frightful catastrophe… ¹⁹

Katherine Morris, who worked for the British administration in the city, backs up Gollancz’s observations. When she arrived in 1946 the faces of many Hamburgers ‘were almost yellow with malnutrition’. ²⁰Crowds of German children routinely gathered outside the British clubs and barracks to beg for food, while other, even more hopeless people, were forced to scavenge in the city’s dustbins: ‘Spectral figures, gaunt and ragged, were moving with the lifeless gait of some macabre nightmare along the pavement… drifting from ash-can to ash-can, poking among the contents for something to eat, their rags flapping in the wind. (It became increasingly obvious why one never saw a cat in this city.)’ ²¹Germans had never suffered like this while the war was on. Until now, hardship to this degree had been confined to foreigners and forced labourers – but under Allied occupation, everybody suffered.

The fault lay directly with the policies of the British and American occupying forces. One of the first things the Allies did in the direct aftermath of the war was to arrest senior members of the Nazi Party, and to remove all party members from positions of influence. It is understandable why they did this, but the immediate effect was a breakdown of order. Getting rid of all party members meant sacking virtually the entire administrative workforce practically overnight. At a stroke, all the systems that had been keeping the German economy going so miraculously throughout the war were removed. The efficient German welfare network collapsed. The ration cards issued by the Allies were worthless because there was no food in the shops – the food-distribution systems had disintegrated. The torturously slow German bureaucracy was replaced by an even slower and less well-organized Allied one. And in the administrative chaos that ensued, all those people who would once have been looked after by the state – not only the armies of orphans and homeless people, but now also concentration-camp victims and literally millions of refugees from the East – were effectively left to fend for themselves.

The next thing the occupying forces did was far more shameful. Partly to prevent the Germans rearming, but also to eliminate Germany as an economic rival, they began systematically to dismantle the country’s industrial infrastructure. Factories that had survived the war were now closed, or even dynamited. The docks in Hamburg were blown up, the warehouses emptied, the cranes dismantled and used for scrap. Even fishing vessels were scuttled, in case someone might try to convert them into minelayers – and this at a time when food was becoming desperately short. It can only have looked to the people as though the Allies were trying to carry on where the bombs had left off. In the words of Rudolf Petersen, Hamburg’s first Bürgermeisterafter the war, ‘The sea’s full of fish, but they want to starve us.’ ²²

In such conditions, the black-market flourished. Just as with other cities, the population of Hamburg had no option but to go ‘hamstering’ – that is, taking day-trips to the countryside to find food. Consequently, prices sky-rocketed. Hamburgers would barter anything for a few extra rations of meat or eggs: watches, jewellery, even their all-important winter clothes. There was soon a rather bleak saying doing the rounds in Hamburg: ‘All the farmers need now are Persian rugs for their pig-sties.’ ²³But the black-market was the only thing keeping many people alive. Official rations at the beginning of the winter provided people with only 1,550 calories per day – less than 60 per cent of the recommended amount needed to keep them healthy. In reality, most were receiving between 400 and 1,000 calories per day – a comparable amount to the inmates at Belsen. ²⁴Without the black-market to supplement their rations, the population of Hamburg faced famine.

In desperation, the people threatened riots over food, as they had done after the First World War. Martial law was declared in many parts of the country, and in Hesse the US military governor was forced to issue warnings that the death penalty would be invoked for anyone rioting over food shortages. ²⁵A curfew was strictly enforced to keep the streets clear after dark. There was a growing sense of irony that such draconian methods were being used by the very people who were supposed to have liberated Germany from a totalitarian regime. Throughout the country there were serious concerns that the youth were becoming embittered, even ‘renazified’, out of disillusionment.

Things began to improve in 1948, but in 1946 they looked impossibly bleak. There was widespread despair about what the future might bring, and the goodwill that many in Germany had felt for their liberators had vanished. In Victor Gollancz’s words – which were frequently echoed after the occupation of Iraq nearly sixty years later – the Allies might have won the war but they had ‘all but lost the peace’. ²⁶

* * *

As if the situation was not bad enough, the winter that followed Gollancz’s visit to Germany turned out to be one of the worst on record. At the beginning of January 1947 the temperature plunged to a terrifying –28°C, and remained below –10°C for several weeks. It was so cold that the Alster lake froze solid – according to one British soldier, who was detailed to drill holes through it, the ice was three feet thick. ²⁷The surface of the Elbe froze too, and large ice floes appeared in the North Sea around the Elbe estuary, making it near-impossible for ships to enter. Such conditions would be dangerous at the best of times, but in the aftermath of war they were almost catastrophic. Even those people who had proper homes had no means of heating them. All domestic electricity was cut between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. in order to conserve power, and coal was in such short supply that goods trains from the Ruhr were routinely plundered by hordes of children trying to gather fuel. ²⁸

The temperature did not rise above zero until mid-March, more than three months after the cold snap began. For some people who lived through both events, the terrible winter was every bit as soul-destroying as the night of the firestorm – they were as powerless against the cold as they had been against the heat. Nobody knows how many perished that winter, but the number was certainly in the hundreds, and perhaps even higher. ²⁹

* * *

For Hamburg, things did get better – eventually. Over the next ten years the bulk of the rubble was cleared away, and the huge holes blasted into the cityscape were gradually filled with new streets and buildings. Slowly, the city showed signs of returning prosperity. The shipbuilding industry re-established itself on the banks of the Elbe, and the port began to flourish once more. A new bridge was built across the Alster. In 1948 the Deutschmark was introduced as a stable currency, and a larger variety of goods at last appeared in the shops. By the beginning of the 1950s the city was free to concentrate once more on what it had always been good at – trade – and the only major battles it was forced to fight were those against the ever-fickle floodwaters of the Elbe. ³⁰

Over the coming decades, Hamburg would again become one of the richest cities in Europe. The port on the southern banks of the Elbe regained its status as one of the biggest in the world, and was soon the city’s principal employer. Trade worth billions of dollars every year now passes along the river. The city’s proud tradition as the media capital of Germany also re-established itself: national newspapers and magazines such as Die Welt, Die Zeit, Sternand Der Spiegelare based there, as are several television and radio stations, and literally thousands of advertising agencies, film studios, record labels and book publishers. ³¹Today it is impossible not to be impressed by the wealth, zeal and sheer industry of the place.

And yet, even now, one cannot visit the city without remembering what happened here. The bombsites and rubble have disappeared, but there are obvious gaps in the landscape where buildings once stood. Air-raid shelters still dot the city like a pox. The huge bunker on the Heiligengeistfeld, with its four vast flak towers, could not be demolished – it was designed to be indestructible – and it remains on the site to this day, an embarrassing, windowless eyesore. In the city centre stands the ruin of the Nikolaikirche, its Gothic spire pointing to the sky like an admonishing finger. There are memorials to the catastrophe in every quarter. In the east, in one of Hamburg’s busiest shopping areas, there is a sculpture of a terrified figure cowering in the corner of an air-raid shelter. ³²In the west, there is an ‘Anti-War Memorial’, deliberately placed next to the old Nazi monument that glorifies the patriotism of war. ³³And in the north, in Ohlsdorf cemetery, there is perhaps the best-known memorial to the countless victims of the firestorm: a sculpture of Charon ferrying souls across the river Styx to the underworld. It sits in the midpoint between the four mass graves where over thirty-six thousand bodies lie buried. ³⁴

Perhaps the most poignant legacy of the firestorm is in the attitudes of those who survived its horrors. Klaus Müller still has an irrational fear of fireworks. His sister, who suffered from blackouts in the overpacked bunkers as a child, still cannot bring herself to board a full underground train. ³⁵Some of the people quoted in this book admitted to experiencing flashbacks, especially on the catastrophe’s anniversary, when memories roll before their eyes ‘like some appalling horror film’. ³⁶At least two experienced nervous breakdowns later in life that put them in hospital. ³⁷

For those people, and for countless more like them, the firestorm is not merely something that happened over sixty years ago. It is a continual burden, like a disease without a cure, that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

23. The Reckoning

You can’t have this kind of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets

Dwight D. Eisenhower ¹

After the war, the British and American governments spent a great deal of time and energy trying to discover exactly how effective their bombing had been in Germany. The Americans immediately set up the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, and travelled all over the country interviewing factory managers and gathering captured German documents that described the damage caused by the bombs. Not to be outdone, the British set up a Bombing Survey Unit of their own. Both groups looked very carefully at what had happened at Hamburg in particular – partly because the attacks on this city had been so dramatic, but also because the damage had been so well documented by the Hamburg authorities at the time.

This was what they discovered: over the course of the six British and American attacks, the entire eastern quarter of the city and much of the western quarter had been razed to the ground. The number of homes that were incinerated by the firestorm defies the imagination: 40,385 residential buildings were either completely obliterated or rendered so badly damaged that they were uninhabitable. They contained around 275,000 apartments, or roughly 61 per cent of Hamburg’s total living accommodation. None was rebuilt until after the war. A further 109,471 homes were less badly damaged, but the city’s economy had been wrecked so completely that two-thirds even of those remained unrepaired until after the war was over. ²

Among the homes were the other buildings that make up a city: shops, schools, offices and so on. According to the American bombing survey, 3,785 industrial plants were destroyed by this series of raids, as were 7,190 small businesses, employing 21,000 craftsmen. About five thousand of the city’s seven thousand retail stores were also destroyed. ³The Hamburg chief of police also claimed that 83 banks, 379 office buildings, 112 Nazi Party offices, seven warehouses, 13 public utility premises, 22 transport premises, 76 public offices, 80 military installations and 12 bridges were also completely destroyed. All of those buildings could be considered military targets, at least to some degree. A further 437 buildings were destroyed that had nothing to do with the war whatsoever, including 24 hospitals, 277 schools, 58 churches, 77 cultural centres (cinemas, theatres and opera houses), and one zoo. ⁴

By any normal standards, Hamburg had ceased to exist. Even in those areas where the buildings were still standing many of the streets were blocked with rubble, making travel all but impossible. The trams could not run, and all of the central subway and overground railway stations were out of action. There was no running water, no electricity and no gas. There was no radio, no postal service and no telephone. But, most importantly, there were no people. In the wake of the firestorm almost the entire population had fled, leaving the ruins devoid of human life.

If the material destruction was breathtaking, the human cost was truly tragic in scale. In just one week, 45,000 people had lost their lives. A further 37,439 had been injured, while almost a million people had fled the city and were now officially homeless. ⁵All that they owned – everything from clothes and furniture to ornaments, letters and photographs – had been burned or blown to pieces in the raids.

To put these numbers in context, the death toll at Hamburg was more than ten times greater than that of anyprevious raid. At Nagasaki, where the Americans dropped their second nuclear bomb, the immediate death toll was 40,000 – about five thousand fewer than at Hamburg. ⁶The devastation of this Hanseatic city cannot, therefore, be compared accurately with the sort of destruction