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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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5 Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, On the Other Side, trans. and ed. Ruth Evans (London, 1979), p. 81.

6 To add to the huge destruction to the transport infrastructure, 600 of Hamburg’s 1,600 tram cars were completely destroyed, and half of its underground trains either destroyed or very badly damaged. What few trams, buses and trains still existed were strictly rationed at rush-hour: even those who were permitted to use them often could not cram their way in, and were obliged to walk anyway. See Hamburg Police Report, p. 86; and USSBS, Economic Effects of the Air Offensive Against German Cities: A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Hamburg, Germany(November 1945), p. 24.

7 Wolff-Mönckeberg, On the Other Side, p. 81.

8 Johannes Schoene, in Renate Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, p.304.

9 Ilse Grassmann, Ausgebombt: Ein Hausfrauen-Kriegstagebuch von Ilse Grassmann(Hamburg, 2003), p. 28.

10 Maria Bartels letter, 15 September 1943, in Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, p. 314.

11 Maria Bartels, letter to her husband, 8 September 1943, in Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, p. 312.

12 Uwe Bahnsen and Kerstin von Stürmer, Die Stadt, die sterben sollte: Hamburg in Bombenkrieg, Juli 1943(Hamburg, 2003), p. 67.

13 USSBS, Economic Effects, p. 22.

14 Hamburg Police Report, p. 84.

15 See USSBS, Economic Effects, pp. 23–4; and Hamburg Police Report, pp. 84 and 91; and Carl F. Miller (ed.), Appendixes 8 through 19 to the Hamburg Police President’s Report on the Large Scale Attacks on Hamburg, Germany, in World War II(Stanford, December 1968), Appendix 18. For restoration of phone lines, see also Kurt Ahrens and Friedrich Ruppel, in Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, pp. 308 and 318.

16 USSBS, Economic Effects, pp. 44–6; Charts 15 and 16.

17 Ibid., pp. 44–5; Chart 15.

18 Ratouis, Mémoires de guerre, p. 111.

19 Eberhard Rössler, The U-boat(London, 1981), p. 266; see also Bahnsen and von Stürmer, Die Stadt, p. 71. This U-boat, U-792, was finally commissioned on 16 November.

20 Hannah Kelson interview, IWM Sound Archive 15550/5.

21 In Günther Severin (ed.), Briefe an einen Pastor(unpublished), letter 161.

22 Ahrens, in Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, pp. 225–8.

23 See, for example, Nossack, Der Untergang, p. 108; Hans Brunswig, Feuersturm über Hamburg(Hamburg, 2003), p. 305; Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, p. 285; and Hiltgunt Zassenhaus, Ein Baum blüht im November(Hamburg, 1974), whose title refers to this event.

24 Gretl Büttner, in Miller (ed.), Appendixes, Appendix 10, p. 122. There are dozens of other accounts of this happening across the city.

22    Famine

1 Heinrich Böll, The Silent Angel(London, 1994), p. 75. Food, and its lack, is the central theme of this novel about the aftermath of war in Germany.

2 Figures according to Hans Brunswig, Feuersturm über Hamburg(Stuttgart, 2003), pp. 454–6.

3 Hermann Holthusen, diary account, 11 August 1943, in Renate Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe vom Sommer 1943 in Augenzeugenberichten(Hamburg, 1993), p. 235.

4 Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, On the Other Side, trans. and ed. Ruth Evans (London, 1979), p. 88.

5 Adolf Hitler’s political testament, 29 April 1945, in Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, 1939–1945: Der zweite Weltkrieg in Chronik und Dokumenten(Darmstadt, 1961), p. 531.

6 Tommy Wilmott, IWM Sound Archive 19806, reel 9.

7 Dr P. J. Horsey, typescript diary, IWM Department of Documents, Con Shelf.

8 Ibid.

9 Philip J. C. Dark, ‘Look Back This Once: Prisoner of War in Germany in WWII’, typescript account, IWM Department of Documents, 94/7/1. Professor Dark returned to his memories of Hamburg in an exhibition of his paintings at the Honolulu Academy of Arts in 1994.

10 Katherine Morris, ‘Destination Hamburg’, typescript account, IWM Department of Documents, 91/27/1, p. 3. Ruth Evans, a native of Hamburg, expressed much the same sentiments when she returned there after the war: ‘would this town ever be rebuilt? I doubted that’. See Wolff-Mönckeberg, On the Other Side, translator’s epilogue, p. 163.

11 Janet Flaner’s description for the New Yorker, in W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction(London, 2004), p. 31.

12 Herbert Conert, in Frederick Taylor, Dresden(New York, 2004), p. 396. The description of Dresden as moonscape comes from Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5(London, 1991), pp. 130–31.

13 Victor Klemperer, To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942–45, trans. Martin Chalmers (London, 1999), 22 May 1945, p. 596.

14 Harry Hopkins diary entry, in Hans Rumpf, The Bombing of Germany, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London, 1963), p. 126.

15 This was the figure taken before Congress in 1947. The actual investment was somewhat less. See Gregory A. Fossedal, Our Finest Hour: Will Clayton, the Marshall Plan and the Triumph of Democracy(Stanford, 1993), p. 252.

16 Dr P. J. Horsey, typescript diary.

17 Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany(London, 1947), pp. 28–9, 53–5, and plate 143.

18 Ibid., pp. 55–6.

19 Ibid., p. 52.

20 Morris, ‘Destination Hamburg’, p. 15.

21 Ibid., p. 31.

22 Quoted in Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, p. 93.

23 Morris, ‘Destination Hamburg’, p. 15.

24 According to the Food Committee of UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), a normal population required 2,650 calories per day to maintain health. Official rations provided only 1,550 calories, but were rarely delivered. In Belsen the rations provided 800 calories per day. See Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, pp. 28–9 and 35.

25 Undated newspaper clipping from 1946/7 kept by Katherine Morris: ‘Death warning to food rioters: U.S. may invoke military law’, IWM Department of Documents, 91/27/1.

26 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, p. 29.

27 E. G. W. Ridgers, ‘The Life of a Sapper in World War Two’, typescript memoir, IWM Documents, 99/16/1, p. 32. For winter temperatures in 1946/7 and their effects see Eckart Klessmann, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg, p. 595; and Nora Heather, ‘Experiences with Control Commission in Germany immediately after World War Two’, typescript account, IWM Documents 03/1/1 (Mrs Heather kept a diary of temperatures, and even includes an official contemporary temperature chart).

28 For power cuts, see Heather, ibid.; and Klessmann, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg, pp. 594–5. For several stories of children raiding coal trains, see Monika Sigmund et al. (eds), ‘ Man versuchte längs zu kommen, und man lebt ja noch…’: Frauenalltag in St Pauli in Kriegsund Nachkriegszeit(Hamburg, 1996), p. 21.

29 Only eighty-five deaths from ‘exposure’ were entered on official registers, but this is a hopelessly low figure and does not include those who died from other conditions related to the severe cold: see Klessmann, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg, p. 595.

30 In February 1962 the city suffered a catastrophic flood which ruined the underground train network, caused hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks’ worth of damage, and claimed 315 lives. Smaller floods occurred in 1976 and 1983.

31 In 2001 more than six thousand companies were involved in media based in Hamburg, including 3,200 advertising firms, 1,600 publishers and printers, and 700 film companies. See Anna Brenken, Hamburg: Metropole an Alster und Elbe(Hamburg, 2001), p. 45.

32 Hildegard Huza’s memorial to the 370 people who died in the shelter at Karstadt shopping centre, at the junction of Hamburger Strasse and Oberaltenallee in Barmbek.

33 Alfred Hrdlicka’s anti-war memorial at Dammtor comprises one sculpture of the Hamburg firestorm, and one of the concentration-camp prisoners who died when Allied bombs sank the ship Cap Arconathat was transporting them in the last days of the war.

34 Gerhard Marcks’s sculpture, Fahrt über den Styx, is a memorial to the 36,918 bodies that lie in the mass graves.

35 ‘Klöntreff “Eimsbüttel im Feuersturm”’, unpublished transcript of local-history group conversation, Galerie Morgenland/Geschichtswerkstatt, p. 13.

36 Hans Jedlicka, FZH 292–8, G–Kra.

37 Wanda Chantler, interview with the author, 5 July 2004; and Jan Melsen, quoted by Karin Orth, ‘Jan Melsen: “Hamburg beschäftigt mich emotional am meisten.”: Erinnerungen eines KZ-Ü berlebenden an den Hamburger Feuersturm’ in Ulrike Jureit and Beate Meyer (eds), Verletzungen: Lebensgeschichtliche Verarbeitung von Kriegserfahrungen(Hamburg, 1994), p. 153. Wanda Chantler suffered an immediate breakdown as a result of the horrible scenes she witnessed during the first night of bombing (see chapter 10), and years later she was to suffer psychotic episodes that saw her hospitalized. Jan Melsen, one of the concentration-camp inmates forced to clear dead bodies from cellars, also had a breakdown in 1971. This was not the result of the firestorm alone, but of years of abuse in Neuengamme; even so, the events that affected him most deeply were those he experienced in the aftermath of the firestorm: ‘Hamburg damaged me the most emotionally. The work there saved my life, when I was practically dead before I went there – but on the other hand, after the war it was this that most weighed on my mind, especially the corpses of all the old and young people. The worst came back to me as a syndrome – then you have dreams as if it’s happening all over again…’

23    The Reckoning

1 Though this quote refers to nuclear warfare, what happened at Hamburg fits better into a nuclear context than it does into the context of conventional bombing, as I will argue in this chapter. In 2003 Eisenhower’s words were quoted during a debate on nuclear weapons in the US House of Representatives; see ‘Notable Words: S&T Policy Quotations from 2003’, in FYI: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News, no. 2, 8 January 2004.

2 All statistics here and in the following paragraphs are taken from the USSBS, Economic Effects of the Air Offensive against German Cities: A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Hamburg, Germany(November 1945), pp. 7–10. The Hamburg Police Report also contains most of these figures (pp. 17–18), and by and large they agree. Where they do not, I have assumed that the compilers of the former document, who based many of their findings on data from the Hamburg Police Report, also had access to later, more accurate sources of information. The report of the BBSU is slightly less reliable, since the unit was run on a shoestring budget.

3 Ibid., pp. 9–11. The Hamburg Police Report claims that 2,632 ‘commercial establishments’ and 580 ‘industrial establishments’ were destroyed, but this does not seem to square with the huge amount of damage done to residential property, or the figure given by the USSBS of around forty thousand industrial buildings lost.

4 Hamburg Police Report, pp. 17–18.

5 The figures for the number of dead, which had not yet been completed by the time the Hamburg Police Report was finished, are taken from the USSBS, Hamburg Report, pp. 1 and 7A. I have assumed that the majority of the two thousand reported ‘missing’ were also dead, since many bodies were completely incinerated, and corpses were still being discovered in rebuilding works as late as 1951. The Hamburg Police Report has the number of injured slightly lower at 37,214 (p. 17), but it is likely that the real figure was much higher than either estimate.

6 This figure does not include the many deaths in months and years to come from radiation poisoning. For a detailed discussion of casualty estimates at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire(New York, 2001), pp. 285–7.

7 USSBS, Economic Effects, p. 33A. The percentage of industrial workers who still had not returned is slightly lower: of the city’s 250,000 industrial workers, 75,000 (or 30 per cent) had still not returned by the end of 1943 (see USSBS, Economic Effects, p. 1).

8 This unrecoverable loss in production is estimated at about 11.6 per cent. See ibid., p. 42.

9 Ibid., p. 1.

10 USSBS, Economic Effects, Submarine Plant Report no. 2, p. 13. The BBSU put the estimate higher, at twenty-six or twenty-seven U-boats lost: see Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939–1945(London, 1961), p. 287.

11 Hamburg Police Report, p. 84.

12 Solly Zuckerman et al., The Strategic Air War Against Germany, 1939–45: Report of the British Bombing Survey Unit(London, 1998), p. 161. See also USSBS, Economic Effects, p. 2.

13 See for example, Max Hastings, Bomber Command(London, 1979), p. 241.

14 Quoted in ibid., p. 241.

15 For a comprehensive analysis of the shortcomings of the Luftwaffe, as told by the Luftwaffe generals, see Harold Faber (ed.), Luftwaffe: An Analysis by Former Luftwaffe Generals(London, 1979).

16 Adolf Galland, The First and the Last(London, 1955), pp. 241–2.

17 Ibid., p. 243. Cajus Bekker quotes Hitler as having made this same declaration at a situation conference on 25 July, directly after the first Hamburg raid, to his Luftwaffe adjutant, Major Christian: see Cajus Bekker, The Luftwaffe War Diaries, trans. Frank Ziegler (London, 1966), p. 312. It is quite possible that he said it on both occasions: it was a sentiment he had been repeating since 1940.

18 Galland, First and Last, pp. 252–3. In fact, Goering never took him up on this resignation, and Galland retained his post.

19 ‘Cost of destruction of Hamburg 24 July – 2 August 1943’, according to US Statistical Control Division, Office of Management Control, 1 September 1943. This figure does not take into account the huge amount of time spent in planning, administration and so on. Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell, Alabama, film copy A1107, 1654–6.

20 Original figure taken from USSBS, Economic Effects. The website http: //eh.net uses fairly reputable sources and has the historical exchange rate as 1 Reichmark to $0.40, and projects $1 in 1943 to be worth about $11.29 today. (Website last viewed 19 April 2006.)

21 This is A. J. P. Taylor’s figure, in The Second World War(London, 1975), p. 129. While Webster and Frankland’s Strategic Air Offensiveclaims that only 7 per cent of the nation’s manpower was involved in keeping the bomber offensive going, this does not represent the true cost: the bomber offensive monopolized not only the skilled workforce but also the majority of scientific and technological institutions.

22 For reactions to the Butt Report, which showed the bombing war to be a huge drain on national resources for disappointing results, see Hastings, Bomber Command, pp. 108–15.

23 Quoted in F. H. Hinsey et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War(London, 1979–90), vol. III, pt I (1984), p. 44.

24    Redemption

1 Agathon, quoted by Aristotle; see The Nicomachaen Ethics, trans. H. Rackman (London, 1926), VI.ii.6. This is a passage in which Aristotle defines the concept of ‘choice’. It is particularly apt because he uses the sacking of Troy as his example of something that cannot be undone.

2 Hamburger Abendblatt, 24 July 1993.

3 Even in clear conditions their bombing was not as accurate as the Americans liked to believe. All bombardiers were supposed to drop their bombs at the same time as the formation leader, but if they were just a fraction of a second late it could mean that the bombs landed hundreds of yards from where they were supposed to. Cloudy or smoky conditions merely compounded this problem. Towards the end of the year, Hap Arnold finally accepted that precision bombing was rarely possible in the cloudy skies over Germany, and gave a general order instructing US bomber crews to use radar to locate their targets whenever they were obscured – in other words, to employ exactly the same methods of ‘blind bombing’ that the British used. By the end of the following year around 80 per cent of allUS bomber raids over Germany were conducted by means of blind bombing. See Eric Markusen and David Kopf (eds), The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century(Boulder, 1995), pp. 165–6.

4 See Immediate Interpretation Reports S.A.410 and S.A.417, UK National Archives, AIR 24/257.

5 See Bombardier’s Log, 26 July 1943, 351st BG, US National Archives, RG18, E7, Box 1002, Folder 22.

6 For statistics on total war losses for the RAF and USAAF, see Robin Neillands, The Bomber War(London, 2001), p. 379.

7 Statistics from ibid., p. 379. See also Max Hastings, Bomber Command(London, 1979), p. 11. The USSBS estimates casualties at the bottom end of this scale, but is probably overly conservative: see its Economic Effects of the Air Offensive against German Cities: A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Hamburg, Germany(November 1945), p. 1. Likewise, the BBSU estimates the total number of deaths at 305,000: see Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air War Against Germany, 1939–45: Report of the British Bombing Survey Unit(London, 1998), p. 69.

8 Quoted in Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: A Study of His Military Thought(London, 1977), p. 145. For further voices of dissent, see A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities(London, 2006), pp. 179–208.

9 According to Kenneth McDonald of 78 Squadron, in Neillands, Bomber War, p. 389.

10 See Neillands, Bomber War, pp. 402–3. For Churchill’s attempts to distance himself from Harris, see Frederick Taylor, Dresden(New York, 2004), pp. 375–9; and Hastings, Bomber Command, pp. 343–4.

11 Associated Press report, 16 February 1945, in Neillands, Bomber War, p. 368; and Taylor, Dresden, p. 361. There are slight differences in the wording between these two; I have favoured the latter, who cites his source more completely.

12 The huge popularity of anti-war novels like Joseph Heller’s Catch 22and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse5 did a great deal to acquaint America with the arbitrary nature of American bombing in Germany. However, such novels were arguably more about the war in Vietnam than they were about the Second World War. The American burden of shame over Vietnam is the closest equivalent to British shame for the RAF bomber offensive on Germany.

13 Ted Groom, interview with the author, 11 November 2004. Ted Groom’s observation is borne out by all the contemporary diaries and logbooks I have come across.

14 Doug Fry, interview with the author, 16 November 2004. See also Doug Fry’s interview for the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, 27255, Reel 7.

15 Colin Harrison, interview with the author, 8 December 2004.

16 See Martin Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg(London, 1980), p. 352; see also Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, On the Other Side,trans. and ed. Ruth Evans (London, 1979), p. 27.

17 Hans Erich Nossack, Der Untergang(Hamburg, 1981), p. 65.

18 Max Brauer, Nüchternen Sinnes und heiβen Herzens …: Reden und Ansprachen(Hamburg, 1952), p. 430.

19 Bürgerschaft der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg Parlaments-Dokumentation, Elisabeth Kiausch speech, 23 July 1993, p. 3.

20 Frau Bischöfin Maria Jepsen, ‘Predigt am 23 Juli 1993 in der St Michaelis Kirche: “Gomorrha”’. Manuscript of the sermon by courtesy of the bishop herself. For an excellent analysis of the bishop’s speech, see Mirko Hohmann’s dissertation for the University of Hamburg, ‘So wurde die Zerstörung ihres Lebens für uns aile zu einer furchtbaren Anklage’: Die Juliangriffe auf Hamburg in der hamburgischen Errinerungskultur 1943 bis 1993 (University of Hamburg, 2003), pp. 97–9.

21 Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand:Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945(Berlin, 2002).

22 Ironically, these sentiments were echoed in the speech of the bishop of Hamburg, who, unusually, laid the burden of guilt not with the Nazis but with the ‘people’ as a whole. See Jepsen, ‘“Gomorrha”’, p. 3.

23 See, for example, Rainer Hering, ‘Operation Gomorrha – Hamburg remembers the Second World War’, in German History,vol. 13, no. 1 (1995), p. 93.

24 The authors of the USSBS attributed the growth of German pacifism to the horrors they had witnessed during the bombing war: ‘The city area raids have left their mark on the German people as well as on their cities. Far more than any other military action that preceded the occupation of Germany itself, these attacks left the German people with a solid lesson in the disadvantages of war. It is a terrible lesson; conceivably that lesson … could be the most lasting single effect of the air war.’ USSBS, Summary Report (European Theatre), p. 4. In 2003 Germany was among the first to criticize Britain and America for their invasion of Iraq.