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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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3. City of Rebellion

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Karl Marx ¹

At the outbreak of the First World War Hamburg was no longer recognizable as the small city that had been invaded by Napoleon just a hundred years before. The industrial revolution had transformed it into a metropolis for the region: it was now the second biggest manufacturing centre in Germany after Berlin, and the third largest port in the world after London and New York. The constant influx of immigrants had brought the population to more than a million, and forced the city to expand well beyond its medieval city walls. Whole new suburbs had been built to house its workers, while others had been demolished to make way for a brand new warehouse district, the Speicherstadt. It was home to a wide variety of heavy industries – not just shipbuilding, but engineering and electrical companies, oil refineries, asbestos factories, as well as coffee-roasting plants and rice mills – and one of the most prosperous places in the whole German Reich.

After four years of fighting, however, virtually all of this had been ruined. Not only had the city sacrificed forty thousand of its young men to the trenches, but the rest of the population was starving. The British blockade of the German coastline had caused shortages across the country, but in Hamburg this was compounded by the effect it had on the city’s economy. Trade kept Hamburg working, and once starved of it the city fell apart: industries failed, food and fuel became desperately scarce, and the people increasingly angry with the military regime responsible for their hardship. The atmosphere of Hanseatic conservatism that had characterized the city for hundreds of years was rapidly replaced by radicalism, and strikes and protests erupted all along the lower reaches of the Elbe.

Things came to a head in November 1918, shortly before the Armistice was signed, when Admiral Hipper ordered his ships out on one final desperate attack on the British Grand Fleet. The sailors at the naval bases of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven saw this as a pointless suicide mission, and promptly mutinied. The uprising spread quickly across northern Germany, and on 5 November workers at several of Hamburg’s shipyards voted to strike in sympathy with the sailors. At first the city council managed to pacify them, but that evening ten thousand workers attended a meeting of the radical Independent Social Democratic Party (USDP) and agreed to hold a general strike throughout the city. During the night groups of sailors occupied key strategic positions in the city – the Elbetunnel, the main station, the union buildings and the city barracks – and even boarded torpedo boats in the harbour to disarm them. The following morning a crowd of some forty thousand workers and soldiers marched on the General Command in Altona, and effectively seized power over the whole of the Hamburg area. ²

By the time Germany accepted the Allies’ armistice terms on 11 November, Hamburg, with many other cities, was already in the hands of revolutionaries. The consequences were enormous. In later years, when order had been restored, many Germans would come to remember the end of the war not as a time of defeat at the hands of the Allies – after all, the Allied armies had never reached German soil – but as a period when their country had collapsed from within. With the passing of time, they began to believe that they had not lost the war at all, but had merely been betrayed by their own people: as the German general Paul von Hindenburg said, his army had not been defeated, but ‘stabbed in the back’. ³

In reality, the November revolution had little or no effect on the outcome of the war, which had already been lost. Nor was it a particularly violent revolution. The transfer of power from the old élite to the new republic was relatively peaceful – it was not until well after the war was over that the real problems began. During the winter of 1918–19 the well-ordered society that Germans thought they knew seemed to vanish. In the face of drastic food and fuel shortages, crime levels soared. Violence became increasingly common, inflation spiralled out of control, and transport difficulties made German lives thoroughly miserable.

In Hamburg there was a complete breakdown of the social order. Gangs roamed the city, and there were frequent gun battles in the streets after dark. One British observer witnessed a particularly brutal scene at around this time. Leslie Hollis was a Royal Marine stationed in Hamburg as part of a force brought in to oversee German war reparations in the city, when he found himself caught up in the chaos.

Communist riots under a man named Spartacus had broken out in the city. The weak German government was powerless to restore order. Disgraceful scenes were witnessed. People suspected of being war profiteers were paraded naked round the city in tumbrils, the womenfolk being allowed the dignity of girdles of dead rats. I remember a deplorable scene by the beautiful Alster Lake in the centre of the city. The Spartacists had captured some of their political opponents. They were thrown into the lake and told to swim for it. As soon as they had reached a distance of imagined safety they were shot from the shore. We were powerless to act because this was a domestic affair. Retribution for the Spartacists was very swift. ⁴

By April 1919 food was so hard to come by that people began breaking into shops and storehouses to feed themselves. On one occasion some two thousand men tried to storm a warehouse on Markusstrasse, and had to be fought back by policemen under the cover of machine-gun fire. Police stations came under attack by gangs trying to obtain firearms. On 23 June, after learning that one of the city’s factories had been manufacturing products with rotten meat, thousands rioted in the streets, looted shops, and even tried to storm the town hall. Hamburg was in a state of virtual siege, and relative order was not properly restored until General LettowVorbeck’s Freikorps occupied the city in July and imposed martial law. ⁵

In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that political extremism gained a strong foothold in the city. When so much of the city was going hungry, groups from the far left felt they had a perfect right to plunder stockpiles of food and fuel in the city’s warehouses. Conversely, groups on the far right were in favour of extreme measures to bring the looters under control. The Freikorps, for example, had no compunction about suppressing real or supposed threats to the government in an extremely brutal and bloody manner. Originally set up to bolster the police, the Freikorps was a volunteer military organization that was often little better than a coalition of vigilante groups: it was a magnet for disaffected youth and bitter ex-soldiers, and served as a training ground for many who would reappear as Nazis in the following years. ⁶

However, the extremist group with by far the largest following in Hamburg was the Communist Party. Political groups of the far left had a long history in the city. While the union movement had been fighting for important labour reforms in the second half of the nineteenth century, there were always more radical wings that believed the only way for workers to win a fair deal was to seize power. With the revolution of November 1918 they finally had their way, and ruled the city for several months as the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. After the election of 16 March 1919, they handed power back to the city parliament, but there were always radical groups who wanted to seize it again, and it was not long before they tried. On 23 October 1923, at around five o’clock in the morning, hundreds of Communists attacked Hamburg police stations in a desperate attempt to gain control of the city by force. Led by Ernst Thälmann, the uprising centred on the workers’ suburbs of Eimsbüttel, Barmbek, Schiffbek and Bergedorf. In the end they failed, but not without much loss of life on both sides: seventeen policemen and sixty-one Communists were killed in the fighting, and a further 321 people were wounded. In the aftermath of the rebellion almost a thousand people were arrested. ⁷

* * *

In the following years the atmosphere in Hamburg began at last to calm down. Although Ernst Thälmann retained his seat in the Hamburg parliament, the Communists never came close to ousting the more moderate Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the traditional conservatism of the Hanseatic temperament gradually reasserted itself. Slowly but surely prosperity returned to the city. Despite the severe restrictions of the treaty of Versailles, ⁸Hamburg’s firm links with Britain and America gave it access to capital on favourable terms, and the city recovered much more quickly than the rest of Germany. By the end of the 1920s company business was flourishing once more, and the average worker was back to earning pre-war wages. While a current of radicalism still flowed beneath the surface, an air of relative contentment had returned to the city.

Unfortunately this period of relative stability came to an end during the winter of 1929–30 when the whole world was plunged into an economic slump. As global prices went into free-fall, and exports shrank to almost nothing, Hamburg’s fragile economy began once more to collapse. Within two years unemployment had reached almost 40 per cent, and political radicalism returned. The only difference was that this time it was not the Communists who attracted the protest vote. Radicalism in the 1930s would wear an altogether different face.

4. The Rise of the Nazis

Clear the streets for the brown battalions, clear the streets for the Storm Trooper …

1930s Nazi Party song ¹

In the summer of 1930 an event took place in Hamburg that would soon become a local legend. On 19 August about two hundred people gathered at the ‘Am Stadtpark’ beer hall in Winterhude to attend an election meeting of the Nazi Party. It was an impressive turnout for a minority party. Ever since the recession had taken hold, the Nazis had been enjoying increasing support in Hamburg, and people came from all different sections of society. They were expecting speeches – the usual anti-Semitic, anti-Marxist, antiliberal invective – followed by a debating session, then perhaps a drink in the adjoining pub before they went home to bed. That night, however, there had been rumours that the local Communist Party were planning to disrupt the meeting. As a consequence the arriving audience was greeted by bands of Nazi storm troopers, who had been called in to ‘protect’ the meeting in case of a fracas. As the audience took their seats unease hung in the air.

The meeting started without any disturbance, and for a while it looked as though the rumours were unfounded. But at nine o’clock the door of the beer hall flew open and a large man entered, claiming to be a member of the ‘Red Front’ – a militant wing of the Communist Party. He was followed by a long chain of others: ‘Tall chaps; fists of iron; splendid men. The best of the Hamburg Communist Party.’ ²Fifty or so of these ‘Red Marines’ took their seats in the audience, and a similar number went to stand in a corner at the back of the room, beside an open window.

At first their presence did little to disrupt the meeting, and the speeches went ahead. The trouble began during the questionand-answer session, when the chairman challenged the visitors to announce whether their presence was peaceful or not. He was answered by a flying beer glass, which smashed on the wall behind him. Within moments a storm broke loose across the room. Communists and Nazis attacked one another with whatever weapons came to hand: knives, glasses, bottles, even chairs. In panic, most of the audience fled for the door, but some stayed to join the storm troopers in a desperate battle. An old man used his cane to strike repeatedly at the Red Marines and when it broke he picked up a chair leg and used that instead. His white beard was soon flecked with blood.

The Communists outnumbered the Nazis almost two to one, and they also had a large mob outside who were trying to break down the door. Despite this, the Nazis forced them into a corner, and one by one the Red Marines fell. Of the hundred or so men who had interrupted the meeting, at least eighty were battered to the floor, and those remaining were eventually forced to escape through the open window at the back of the beer hall.

At last the police arrived, with emergency medics, and cleared everyone out. While the crowd outside was being dispersed, the victorious Nazis regrouped on the banks of a nearby river, and congratulated themselves on a job well done: they were convinced that they had won the fight because they had the stronger ideology, and therefore the stronger will, the greater strength, the wilder courage. They eventually marched, singing and celebrating long into the night. The battle they had just fought would soon pass into Nazi myth as a vital stepping-stone in the party’s long struggle to win power in the city.

While this beer-hall brawl in fact had little or no significance in the Nazis’ rise to power in Hamburg, the episode says a great deal about how they saw themselves. From the very beginning, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) was imbued with a sense of struggle against a hostile world. They saw the Communists as a particular threat because they were one of the few groups that actively fought against them, but they could also see other more subtle dangers. Practising Christians exercised an insidious control over the minds of the German people because they respected the passive virtues of humbleness and forgiveness. Foreign immigrants polluted German blood, just as Communists polluted German minds, and the Jews threatened to enslave the ordinary German worker in perpetual bondage to capitalism. All of this was not only tolerated but encouraged by corrupt and spineless politicians, who were little more than puppets to foreign governments and a sinister conspiracy of world Jewry. The Nazis believed themselves besieged on all sides, much as they had been that night in the Am Stadtpark pub, and the only way to save themselves, and Germany, was through violence.

The beer-hall battle was one of the most common images seen in Nazi propaganda. It was a microcosm of what they believed was necessary throughout the whole of Germany: a violent bloodletting to dispatch the myriad enemies of the people, and to purge the nation of weaklings. That the Nazis were almost always outnumbered in such stories was an important part of the myth, and reflected a fundamental flaw that would eventually lead to their downfall. In the years to come senior Nazis came to believe that they would alwaystriumph, no matter what the odds against them, provided they maintained a fanatical belief in the strength of their cause.

* * *

At the beginning of the 1930s the NSDAP had already done far better than most people ever thought possible. For more than a decade it had been a minority party, with little appeal to anyone outside its core fanatical audience. But with Germany reeling in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash, the Nazis began to appeal to a much wider spectrum of people. The country now had over six million unemployed workers – 121,000 in Hamburg alone, or almost 40 per cent of the working population ³– and an increasingly desperate electorate cast about for someone to blame. The Nazi Party was there to provide the answer. Its long list of scapegoats began with its enemies inside the country – Communists, Jews, liberals – and ended with the international community who had crushed Germany beneath the heel of the Versailles treaty at the end of the First World War. Hitler’s invective against all these groups, which had seemed petulant when the country was in recovery, now attracted enormous popular interest.

The success of the party in Hamburg was perhaps most surprising of all. For decades the city had been a stronghold of left-wing politics, with the most serious challenge to the moderate Social Democrats coming from the German Communist Party (KPD). In fact, in 1928 Hitler’s NSDAP had just three seats on the city council, representing only a tiny proportion of the vote. But Hamburg was hit particularly hard by the stock-market crash. The city had borrowed heavily from America during the 1920s, and when American banks called in their debts a host of companies was forced into bankruptcy. Those that survived suffered terribly at the fall in international trade. With unemployment so high, the city’s expenditure on welfare also spiralled out of control.

A disillusioned electorate turned away from anyone associated with the administration that had got them into such a mess. The party they turned to was the Nazis, whose three seats on the city council grew to forty-three in under three years. By 1932 they had fifty-one seats, which made them the strongest voice on the council. ⁴What was happening all over Germany was also happening in Hamburg: a switch in the balance of power so rapid it was breathtaking. As Victor Klemperer, a university professor in Dresden, wrote in 1933:

it’s astounding how easily everything collapses… Day after day commissioners appointed, provincial governments trampled underfoot, flags raised, buildings taken over, people shot, newspapers banned, etc. etc …. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the face of the earth. It is this utter collapse of a power only recently present – no, its complete disappearance (just as in 1918) – which I find so staggering. ⁵

There is a strong view that Hamburg never truly supported the Nazis, despite their victory. The Nazi vote was always several points below the national average, and the other main parties remained strong until the bitter end. ⁶However, if general voters in Hamburg did not take to Hitler in quite the same way as they did elsewhere, those who supported the Nazis were particularly zealous. Actual membership of the Nazi Party was much higher here than the national average, ⁷and brawls like those in the Winterhude beer hall were relatively common. It was as if the very strength of the opposition served only to increase the Nazi Party’s siege mentality.

As Hitler’s power grew, Hamburg won something of a reputation for fanaticism, especially when it came to persecuting other political parties. Even before the Nazis had come to power, storm troopers had already murdered one of the KPD councillors – Ernst Robert Henning was shot in 1931. When civil liberties were suspended in February 1933, Hamburg was one of the first authorities to round up Communist Party functionaries and throw them into prison. This was soon followed by the arrest of Social Democrats, trade-unionists and other opponents of National Socialism, many of whom were later either executed or sent to concentration camps. In the coming years 1,417 men, women and teenagers from Hamburg would be executed for political reasons – twenty of them former members of the city parliament. ⁸Even members of the Nazi Party were not safe. In June 1934, during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, dozens of Hitler’s political opponents within the local Nazi Party were murdered as part of a nationwide purge. The violence of the Hamburg beer hall had expanded to a concerted campaign of brutal control on a national level.

Hitler gained overall control of the national parliament after the elections of 5 March 1933, when the NSDAP seized 44 per cent of the vote. He was quick to consolidate power. With many of his opponents already under arrest, within three weeks of his election victory he had bullied the Reichstag into passing the ‘Enabling Act’. This infamous piece of legislation, officially entitled the ‘Law for the Lifting of Misery from the People and Reich’, ⁹gave him the right to bring in emergency legislation whenever he felt it necessary, without having to refer to Parliament. This effectively granted him absolute power.

Over the next four months he systematically dismantled all opposition to Nazi rule. All other political parties were dissolved, and a law was passed making their re-formation illegal. Trade unions associated with the SPD were banned in May. Newspapers and radio stations that did not agree with the Nazi position were banned, and replaced with Nazi propaganda organs. In Hamburg, which had more newspapers than any other city in Germany, this had a substantial effect: on 29 April the Hamburger Echowas put out of business, quickly followed by the Hamburger Nachrichtenand the Hamburgische Correspondent. Even though the Hamburg city council had complied enthusiastically with almost everything the national government had asked of it, the Bürgerschaft itself was dissolved on 14 October. From that day until the end of the war, absolute power over the whole city passed to the hands of the Nazi gauleiter and Reich governor Karl Kaufmann.

Over the following months and years the tendrils of Nazi control reached into every area of life in Hamburg. Books that displeased the Nazis were burned on the Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer, and works by ostracized artists, such as Ernst Barlach, were removed from Hamburg’s public collections. People in positions of power or influence were replaced with Nazi sympathizers, not only in the city parliament but in police stations, hospitals, schools, and even private businesses. During the course of 1933, 10 per cent of commissioned police officers were dismissed for political reasons. ¹⁰

To ensure that the Nazi message was spread as widely as possible, organizations were set up to cover every area of German life. To replace the banned trade unions, the Nazis set up their own equivalent, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront. Weekend holidays and acceptable cultural activities were organized for the people by Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’). Boys were encouraged to join the Hitler Youth, and girls to join the League of German Girls. While membership of those organizations was supposedly voluntary, it effectively became compulsory as the years went on.

The brave new world of Nazism was felt most keenly perhaps in schools and colleges. Wiebke Stammers, who was a schoolgirl in Hamburg at the time, remembers vividly the changes that took place: ‘We no longer had religious lessons. They disappeared from the timetable… And we had instead what was laughingly called Lebenskunde, which was all about the party and the history of the Nazi Party, the life story of Hitler, all the people in the party, where they came from, what they’d done. It was terribly boring.’ ¹¹Gradually her schoolbooks were replaced with new editions that complied with Nazi ideology: history books propagated the ‘stab in the back’ myth of the First World War, geography textbooks described Germany’s need for Lebensraumby expanding her borders, and biology textbooks emphasized the ideas of racial purity, struggle for survival, and self-sacrifice for the good of the race. ¹²When her headmistress refused to join the Nazi Party, she was sacked and replaced with somebody more compliant to the regime. Likewise, two of her teachers were fired after being denounced by pupils for making anti-Nazi comments in class. Two of her classmates were expelled because they did not join in with the denunciation. What happened to all those people in later years is unknown, but it is certain that, at the very least, they would have been watched carefully by the authorities.

Underlying the actions was the unspoken threat of violence against anyone who did not agree with Nazi ideology. Those who did not fit into the standard Aryan mould were in particular danger. Committed Christians, handicapped people, Gypsies, homosexuals, foreigners: in a cosmopolitan city like Hamburg there were seemingly endless targets for persecution. Even teenage jazz enthusiasts found themselves on the wrong side of the authorities. When American phonograph records were banned early in the war, scores of swing fans in Hamburg were rounded up and sent to the youth concentration camp at Moringen. Their crimes? Sexual promiscuity, dancing ‘like wild creatures’ to ‘Negro music’, and deliberately speaking English, which was also banned at the beginning of the war. ¹³

The first people to suffer, however, were undoubtedly the city’s Jews. Shortly after the Nazis came to power a national boycott of Jewish businesses was declared. Despite intimidation from Nazi vigilantes, many Hamburgers defied the boycott – but the message was clear nevertheless. Six days later, on 7 April 1933, a law was passed banning Jews from the civil service. This was soon followed by similar laws prohibiting them from working in the legal and medical professions, the media, the performing arts and the army. In 1935 the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws were passed, depriving Jews of citizenship and forbidding marriage between Aryan Germans and Jews. ¹⁴Once again, the background to this anti-Semitism was one of constant low-level violence. Random acts of brutality against Jews in and around Hamburg accumulated, and there were incidences of policemen standing by while Jewish shopkeepers were assaulted. The net result was a culture of fear and helplessness in much of the city, but particularly among Hamburg’s Jewish community. They could sense what was coming: those Jews who could afford it, and were able to gain visas, fled to other countries. Within two years of the Nazis coming to power a quarter of the city’s Jews had emigrated.

For those who stayed behind the final proof of their helplessness was not long in coming. On the night of 7 November 1938, in response to the murder of a German diplomat by an expatriate Jew, Joseph Goebbels orchestrated the nationwide pogrom that came to be known as Kristallnacht. During the course of just twenty-four hours more than a thousand synagogues across the country were either vandalized or burned to the ground. Jewish cemeteries, like that at Altona, were vandalized, Jewish homes were set alight, thousands of Jewish shops were looted and their windows smashed, and nearly a hundred people were murdered. Approximately thirty thousand Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Afterwards, in a final absurd insult, Germany’s Jews were ordered to pay a collective bill of one billion Reichsmarks to the government to cover the cost of the damage to their own property. ¹⁵

While most Germans were shocked by the pogrom, few dared to speak out against it. Hamburg, to its credit, was one of the only places where such vandalism was openly condemned. In their ‘Reports on Germany’, the exiled Social Democrats claimed that:

The broad mass of people has not condoned the destruction, but we should nevertheless not overlook the fact that there are people among the working class who do not defend the Jews… If there has been any speaking out in the Reich against the Jewish pogroms, the excesses of arson and looting, it has been in Hamburg and the neighbouring Elbe district. ¹⁶

Those who spoke out against the Kristallnacht pogrom were taking their lives into their hands: the judicial authorities in Hamburg were notoriously harsh when judging political dissidents. ¹⁷However, while Hamburgers might have been unusually vocal about the atrocities they had seen, few people translated their outrage into action. As one Hamburg woman wrote in her diary shortly afterwards, while the persecution of the Jews had ‘inflamed all decent people with anger’, there was depressingly little that any of them did about it:

For me nothing was more devastating than the fact that nobody, not even those who opposed the régime most vehemently, stood up against this, but remained passive and weak. I cannot stress these facts too strongly. It was as if we were caught in a stranglehold. And, worst of all, one even gets used to being half throttled; what at first appeared to be unbearable pressure becomes a habit, becomes easier to tolerate; hate and desperation are diluted with time. ¹⁸

Once the battle against the enemy within was under way, Hitler turned his attention to the enemy without. The treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War had considerably reduced Germany’s power, and imposed severe restrictions on its armed forces, and limited rights to defend its borders. As the main architects of the treaty, Britain and France were considered responsible for Germany’s humiliating status, although the whole League of Nations was implicated. One of Hitler’s first actions on the international stage, therefore, was to pull out of the Geneva Peace Conference, in October 1933, and withdraw from the League of Nations.

In direct violation of the Versailles treaty, Germany now embarked on expansion of its armed forces. In March 1935 the German government shocked the world by revealing the existence of the Luftwaffe, a branch of the Wehrmacht (armed services) that had hitherto been banned. A year later Hitler broke the terms of Versailles once again by marching his troops into the Rhineland on the border with France. His borders secure, he now reintroduced the conscription of men into the army, and embarked on a huge four-year plan of rearmament. It was becoming increasingly difficult to believe that such measures were meant only for Germany’s defence, and many suspected that Hitler was actually inviting a reaction from the rest of the world. In the words of Hermann Goering, Hitler was ‘preparing the German economy for total war’. ¹⁹

Given its shipping links and huge manufacturing capacity, it is unsurprising that Hamburg now became important to the Nazi regime’s plans. In 1936, military contracts suddenly poured into the city’s shipbuilding companies – so much so that HAPAG lodged a complaint that its military commitments were making it fall behind on orders for merchant and passenger ships. Other shipping companies also worried that they were becoming far too dependent on the German Navy for business. ²⁰