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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

The up-side to the story was that rearmament provided Hamburg’s ailing industries with a much-needed tonic. Until now the city had gained little from the change of regime. While the rest of Germany had started to recover as early as 1934, unemployment in Hamburg was still high. The entire Lower Elbe area had always depended on international trade, and Hitler’s policy of restricting imports in favour of German-made goods had had a disastrous effect on the city’s trade and shipping industries. Rearmament, however, brought jobs and money to Hamburg. New businesses were set up, all devoted to preparation for war: oil refineries, engine factories and aviation engineering works. The need for huge amounts of raw materials also increased trade, particularly with Scandinavia.

Hitler had big plans for Hamburg. For centuries it had been surrounded by satellite towns, many of which had worked in direct competition with the city, but on 1 April 1937 this was to change: Altona, Wandsbek, Harburg and twenty-eight smaller municipalities were consolidated into a single industrial and administrative giant that would become known as Greater Hamburg. ²¹With this single action the city became hugely more efficient. It also doubled in size overnight, and its population increased by 41 per cent to 1.68 million.

In keeping with the city’s new status, Hitler drew up grand plans for a new Kongresshalle, a 250-metre high Gauhaus, and a road bridge to span the Elbe. ²²The Hamburg–Lübeck Autobahnwas completed in 1937, and the clearance of the slums in the Neustadt was also carried out as a priority – ostensibly under a programme of housing reform, but actually because the area was a hotbed of Communist resistance to the Nazi regime. The importance of Hamburg’s position to the new Reich was underscored by the fact that Hitler visited this city more than any other during his time as leader of the Nazi Party. ²³

As Hamburg churned out warships and U-boats, the Reich Chancellor was busy provoking the world towards conflict. In March 1938 he marched his troops into Austria to ‘encourage’ her people to vote for an Anschluss(or ‘union’) with Germany. (At the same time he transported more than ten thousand Austrian guests to Hamburg to attend the launch of the troopship Robert Ley– a rare example of his use of the carrot as well as the stick.) ²⁴A year later, in defiance of an agreement made with Britain, Hitler’s tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. A pattern was emerging: Germany was turning on her neighbours one by one.

During his last major visit to Hamburg in February 1939, Hitler hinted that such actions were only the beginning. At the launch of the battleship Bismarckhe explained that his ultimate aim was ‘the future eradication of the enemies of the Reich, now and for all time’. ²⁵The festive atmosphere of a launch was a long way from the beer-hall brawls that had characterized the early years of the Nazi Party, but the themes in Hitler’s speech were the same. Several years on, the Nazis were obsessed with enemies of the Reich, which still appeared to outnumber Aryan Germans on every side.

When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the ‘enemies of the Reich’ stepped forward. Two days after Hitler’s accumulated weaponry began to pour towards Warsaw, France and Britain picked up the gauntlet and declared war on Germany.

The violence of the beer hall had at last expanded to its logical extreme: the treaty of Versailles was dead, extremism was taking over Europe, and the entire continent was spiralling inexorably downwards into a vast, all-encompassing war. At the centre of it all the Nazis, surrounded by enemies, were outnumbered, but fanatically certain that the strength of their ideology would see them through to ultimate victory, whatever the odds against them. Like the staunch defenders of the Nazi election meeting in Winterhude in 1930, the forces of the Fatherland would carry on fighting until there was no one left to fight. For Germany this would result in six years of increasing hardship, followed by the agony of defeat and disgrace. For the city of Hamburg, whose ‘Red Marines’ had long since been battered into silence, it would result in almost total annihilation.

5. Hamburg Prepares for War

Truly, I live in dark times!

Bertolt Brecht ¹

Despite the eagerness with which the Nazis seemed to embrace conflict, there was little enthusiasm for war among the rest of the German population, especially in Hamburg. ²The city had never done well out of war, and the memories of the hardships created in 1914–18 were still relatively fresh in people’s minds. Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg summed up the feelings of many when she wrote in her diary that she and everyone she knew was in ‘absolute despair’ at the outbreak of war. ‘We were convinced that immediate and total annihilation would follow.’ ³

Many in the city’s Nazi administration seem to have shared her fears. Throughout its history Hamburg had been vulnerable to attack from the sea and the surrounding land. Now it faced a brand new danger: a threat from the air. Unlike many other towns closer to the French border, Hamburg had never suffered from bombing between 1914 and 1918. This did not mean that its citizens were unacquainted with the overall concept: in fact, the opposite was true – the city had been a centre for German aviation even before the First World War, and many of the zeppelins that bombed British cities had been based in airfields around Hamburg.

Now, to combat this new danger from the air, city officials immediately set about creating a system of civil protection unlike anything Hamburg had seen before. The first thing they did was to launch a programme of strengthening the cellars of houses and apartment blocks throughout the city, to protect them from the possibility of blast bombs. However, it was soon realized that there were not enough to go round. The soggy, waterlogged soil upon which Hamburg was built meant that whole districts were devoid of cellars – the high water table of the Elbe floodplain would have swamped them – so in these areas extra air-raid shelters were built. Even before the war there were some eighty-eight public air-raid shelters in Hamburg, but by April 1940 this had risen to 549. A year later there were 1,700 shelters, splinter-proof buildings and bunkers across the city, with room for at least 230,000 people. ⁴

The city authorities quickly recognized that the main threat from bombing was fire. While high-explosive bombs caused terrible damage to buildings, it was localized. Fire from incendiary bombs, however, could destroy whole areas of the city. They set about training an army of firemen and air-raid wardens in every suburb. In theory, each block had its own fire officer. The railway authority alone had almost 1,500 firemen, and 15,000 fire-watchers kept a look-out over the port area. More than seven hundred sand boxes were placed in streets and squares, and measures were taken to ensure that a water supply would be available if the mains should fail. New wells were dug, water carts requisitioned, and containers built. In Blankenese the cellars of two derelict buildings were converted into huge water tanks, which could be called upon in times of emergency. ⁵

Everyone in Hamburg knew how quickly a conflagration could spread if it was allowed to get out of control: they had learned about the Great Fire of 1842 at school. In the early part of the war, the entire population set about removing anything flammable from the place in their buildings that was most vulnerable to falling bombs – the roof. They cleared their attics of personal belongings and all superfluous woodwork, such as partitions, was removed. Businesses fitted their buildings with incendiary-proof ceilings, and firewalls were set up, especially in the harbour area, to stop fire spreading.

Finally, in an attempt to throw enemy bombers off target, a city-wide programme of camouflage was put in place. Stations were masked so that they would look like ordinary buildings from above; oil depots were hidden; wharves were disguised to look like insignificant parts of the riverbank. The whole of the inner part of the Alster Lake was hidden beneath a fake reconstruction

of the city centre, complete with imitation streets and false buildings. The idea was that British bombers aiming for the Rathausmight mistake the reconstruction for the real thing, and drop their bombs harmlessly into the lake.

As a consequence of all this activity, Hamburg was probably better prepared for catastrophe than any other city in the world. There was shelter of some description for just about everyone, and by 1942 the entire population had been trained in methods of fire control. In the words of the then chief of police, ‘As far as Air Protection was concerned, everything that it was humanly possible to do was done.’ ⁶

* * *

Yet whenever the sirens rang out above the city streets it was impossible to feel completely safe. Everyone knew the drill. First the Kleinalarmwould sound, warning that hostile aircraft were in the area, and that everyone should get ready to take cover. Then a second alarm would be sounded: fifteen rapid four-second wails from the sirens. As soon as this Fliegeralarmwas heard, everyone should take shelter immediately: they had just twenty minutes before the first bombs fell. On arrival at the bomb shelter they would have to show their Platzkartto the shelter supervisor, and make their way to their own allocated seat. Here they would wait – sometimes for several hours – until it was safe to leave.

Although Hamburg was not attacked until May 1940, and the raids even then were fairly ineffective, the sound of the siren was enough to strike fear into the hearts of all who heard it. Eva Coombes lived in Hamburg during the early years of the war, and remembers being in a state of almost permanent anxiety:

You always had the siren. There were two kinds of siren – the warning siren and then the proper one. When the warning siren was heard I was the first one racing at high speed down the staircase into the cellar. And I was shaking with fright… I always used to say I had a nervous breakdown – I couldn’t have done, because I was much too young for it – but I was absolutely terrified of the bombing. ⁷

In the early days, the damage caused by bombing was minimal compared to the disruption the air-raid alarms inflicted. Night after night, particularly in the summer months, people had to drag themselves from their beds to take shelter, then return to their rooms to snatch a few more hours’ sleep before daybreak. Frustratingly, most of the alarms were false: the bombers changed course, or flew past Hamburg to bomb Kiel, Lübeck or some other city nearby. The British got into the habit of flying ‘nuisance raids’ over Germany for the sole purpose of keeping people awake at night, which often caused more disruption than the bombs did. In his diary, Hitler’s propaganda minister recorded his regular irritation at ‘the absurd fact that ten nuisance planes drove fifteen to eighteen million people out of bed’. ⁸

By the end of 1940, Hamburg had already had more than two hundred air-raid warnings, ⁹most of them in the middle of the night, and the authorities were having to adopt strategies to cope with people’s chronic lack of sleep. Children were allowed to come to school late on mornings after an air-raid warning, or perhaps even miss school altogether. In the end, a scheme known as the Kinderlandverschickungwas set up to evacuate them to safer areas in the interior of the Reich, and tens of thousands of children were sent to schools in places as far away as Bavaria. They stayed away until the following year, when a decrease in the regularity of raids allowed them to filter back to the city.

Adults were not accorded nearly such considerate treatment. They were required to turn up at work no matter how little sleep they had had the night before, and there were severe punishments for absenteeism. With so many men away at the war there were serious labour shortages, and lack of sleep was no excuse for shirking. In fact, as the war progressed, many were required to work even longer hours: in January 1942, for example, the standard working week for public officials was increased from forty-six to fifty-eight hours, and vacation periods all but disappeared. Early in 1943, after much resistance, women were also conscripted for war work. ¹⁰

* * *

With no holidays, longer working hours and sleep deprivation at epidemic levels, grumbling became a part of life: ‘the soul moving its bowels’, as Goebbels called it. ¹¹A tired, grumpy population was much more likely to complain about all the other hardships it had to endure: rationing of food, fuel and tobacco, clothing shortages, travel restrictions, and the ubiquitous queues that meant shopping trips always lasted for hours.

Soon the luxuries of 1939 were only a distant memory. Before the war, Wiebke Stammers would always cut away the fat from her meat: ‘I remember my mother’s favourite saying, “May God forbid it, but if war ever broke out again you would be going down on your hands and knees to eat it. And you would eat anything.” And I said, “I would rather starve than eat fat.”… It never occurred to me that it would ever come true – but she was right.’ ¹²

In fact, the conditions suffered by the people of Hamburg were not nearly as bad as those endured by the British during the first half of the war. But many people remembered the disastrous food shortages of the First World War, and were constantly worried by the spectre of famine. In desperation, large numbers turned to ‘hamstering’ – making trips to the countryside to buy extra rations on the black-market. In the words of Wiebke Stammers, ‘Many a diamond ring went to the country to buy food.’ ¹³

While most people simply got on with life and tried to make the best of things, for some the constant restrictions were too much to bear, and their grumbling became increasingly subversive. Else Baker clearly remembers her father, who was a Hamburg docker, openly criticizing Hitler: her mother was constantly asking him to lower his voice, for fear that he would be overheard. ¹⁴Likewise, whenever twelve-year-old Hannah Kelson complained, her parents would silence her, saying, ‘For God’s sake, don’t let anybody hear that!’ ¹⁵

They had good cause to be concerned. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the SS, had informers in all walks of life, and reports on individuals who criticized the regime went all the way to the top. ¹⁶The authorities were troubled by the small pockets of resistance that were appearing across the country, such as the White Rose movement in Bavaria (which also had members in Hamburg), and various Communist groups in Berlin. In Hamburg the swing movement was gaining in popularity, and there had been incidences of ‘swing youth’ waylaying members of the Hitler Youth and beating them up. ¹⁷Unsurprisingly, the Nazi regime could not tolerate this, and the movements were violently suppressed.

* * *

By the middle of 1943 there was little good news to be had in Germany about the war. German troops had suffered their first heavy defeats in Russia, at Stalingrad and Kursk, and Rommel’s troops had been ejected from the coast of North Africa. While the Nazis and their allies still controlled mainland Europe and huge areas of Russia, some people in Hamburg realized that the tide was turning. ¹⁸

The relative lull in the bombing war between July 1942 and July 1943 was no consolation. ¹⁹With raids increasing in other parts of Germany, the Hamburg authorities sensed that it was only a matter of time before the war would return to their doorstep. As the Hamburg chief of police wrote in a report, all of the air-protection services maintained the highest level of preparedness in the run-up to July 1943. ²⁰Their only mistake, if there was one, was to assume that when the great attacks came they would be similar to those that had gone before.

It appears that the population felt much the same way. Although they feared the next attack, most people believed they had done everything they could to protect their homes – they would deal with each raid as it came. With hindsight, their concerns seem petty: they grumbled about losing sleep because of the air-raid warnings; they sent their children to the countryside, but grudgingly, as a precaution; at night they worried that an attack might damage their roof, or blast their windows, or that a direct hit might destroy their home altogether. However, it never occurred to them that their entire city was at risk. The worst they could imagine was that they might be killed, or perhaps someone close to them.

By day, it was easy to forget that there was a war on. The city had not been bombed during daylight hours since 1940 – why should that change now? – and the fighting was hundreds of miles away. People went about their business as they always had done. The sun was shining – it was a glorious summer – and the streets were filled with children making the most of their vacation.

On the afternoon of 20 July 1943 Fredy Borck was playing in the courtyard of his apartment block in Rothenburgsort when he heard an aeroplane above. Suddenly propaganda leaflets rained out of the sky: ‘We didn’t dare touch [them], because it was said they might be poisoned. So we ran to the house and brought fire tongs and coal shovels, and used those to pick them up. We weren’t supposed to read them either, but we did. It was an appeal to the people to leave the city immediately, because we were to be the next bombing target.’ ²¹

A debate ensued among the family as to what they should do. They had a shack in Krümmel near the coast that they could go to, but there was no guarantee of safety there – a large munitions factory stood nearby, which might easily be an alternative target for Allied bombers. Besides, Fredy’s grandmother refused to leave the city. So they decided to stay, saying ‘It would not be so bad,’ and Fredy went back out into the courtyard to play. The sun shone, scorching the city for the rest of the week, and still the war seemed hundreds of miles away.

PART TWO

Darkness Falls from the Air

6. A Brief History of Bombing

Give us something to destroy…

Don’t despise us; we’re heralds and prophets.

Primo Levi ¹

The one thing that could not be said about the horrors created by the Combined Bomber Offensive is that they were unforeseen. At the beginning of the twentieth century, while most of the world was still celebrating the advent of powered flight as a thing of wonder, there were many who worried that mankind was not yet responsible enough to wield such power peacefully. Their fears were crystallized in 1908 by H. G. Wells, whose hugely popular novel, The War in the Air, described the possibility of a world war in which aerial bombing campaigns would destroy every major city and bring about ‘universal social collapse’. ²His fictional descriptions of the bombing of New York make uneasy reading for anyone acquainted with the effects of British and American bombs in 1943:

They smashed up the city as a child will shatter its cities of brick and card. Below, they left ruins and blazing conflagrations and heaped and scattered dead… Lower New York was soon a furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no escape. Cars, railways, ferries, all had ceased, and never a light led the way of the distracted fugitives in that dusky confusion but the light of burning. ³

Over the next few years, such predictions became increasingly common. When Italian aviators fighting in North Africa dropped the world’s first aerial bombs on Turkish troops in 1911, there was general dismay that the genie had been let out of the bottle.

Reports in English newspapers claimed that such bombing would revolutionize warfare. Gustaf Janson, a Swedish writer, described how aerial bombardment would one day see entire cities ‘burnt, blown to pieces in explosions, annihilated, exterminated’. ⁴Across Europe, the popular imagination was fired with images of a manmade Sodom and Gomorrah. ⁵

At the time, however, such ideas were still fantasy – fairy stories to frighten children. Powered flight was in its infancy, and not a single country was capable of delivering the mass of machines necessary to produce such devastation. The few occasions before 1914 when aircraft were used to drop bombs only seemed to demonstrate how ineffective they were. For example, after the initial excitement over the Italian bombing of Libya died down, most of the world’s press dismissed it as pointless. The German correspondent for the Berliner Tageblattclaimed that the results had been virtually nil, and that Italian aviators had had very little effect on the war. A French military observer reported that the bombs he had seen produced no casualties and no damage. Many fell into the sand without exploding, and those that detonated produced only a small and harmless blast. More importantly, the Turks did not appear in the least bit frightened by the experience. ⁶

Yet the idea that aerial bombardment could be used as a devastating force persisted in the popular imagination and in the minds of military theorists. The image of Sodom and Gomorrah seemed to tap something deep within human nature: not only the nightmare of being on the receiving end, but also the dream of being able to wield such irresistible power oneself. Soon military thinkers across the world were weaving their own fantasies: most seemed to think that bombing would end up saving lives by making wars shorter and more decisive. Some went so far as to claim that the threat of bombing would eventually bring peace and order to the world. ⁷

The outbreak of the First World War destroyed all such benign theories for good. The first bombings of the war were isolated affairs, but it was only a matter of time before those separate attacks were grouped together into full-scale bombing offensives. It was the Germans who first embraced bombing as a strategic weapon.

France was attacked regularly, especially Paris, but it was Britain that received the full shock of the German air offensive. The idea was to attack British ports, stations, arsenals, factories – anything that contributed to the British war effort – methodically and incessantly. Most of the early raids came from zeppelins, which were able to fly incredibly long distances without having to stop and refuel, but at the same time German manufacturers were developing the world’s first effective long-range bomber aeroplane – the twin-engined Gotha.

The effect on the civilian population was dramatic. For centuries Britain had been an island fortress, protected from the rest of Europe by the English Channel, but in a few short years the advent of powered flight had rendered the country defenceless. When the first bombs began to fall during the First World War there were scenes of panic in all of the areas affected. Rates of absenteeism in factories and offices rocketed in the days after an attack, and the quality of the work done by those who turned up was vastly reduced. Skilled workers in armaments factories made a much greater number of mistakes in precision work in the days after an air raid. In Hull, women and children fled the city at the first sound of the alarm and spent night after night huddled in sodden fields outside the city. As one commentator observed, exposure to the cold must have caused far more harm than the few bombs dropped from the Zeppelins. ⁸

Worse was to come with the arrival of the Gothas, flying in broad daylight and strewing bombs as though the country had no defences. On 25 May, a formation of planes bombed a crowded shopping arcade in Folkestone, killing ninety-five people and wounding 260. Two weeks later they attacked London, killing 162 civilians, including sixteen children in an infant school in Poplar. It was the first of seventeen attacks on the city by Gothas.

By the end of the summer of 1917 the British government began to worry that the increased intensity of air raids was having a disastrous effect on morale. An emergency committee, set up under the chairmanship of Jan Smuts, decided that there were only two ways to counter the German attacks. First, the air force should be made independent of both the army and the navy, so that it could respond specifically to the air threat. Second, and most important, the fight should be taken back to the Germans. According to Smuts, the way to total victory over Germany was to launch a massive air campaign on German cities; if not now, then certainly in the near future: ‘The day may not be far off when aerial operations, with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populace centres on a vast scale, may become the principal operations of war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate…’ ⁹The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, backed up this prediction with a solemn promise of revenge for the damage the Germans had caused in London: ‘We will give it all back to them, and we will give it to them soon. We shall bomb Germany with compound interest.’ ¹⁰

In accordance with the findings of the Smuts Report, the Air Ministry set about creating the world’s first independent force of aeroplanes and airships – the Royal Air Force, which finally came into being on 1 April 1918. Five weeks later one of the most influential men in the history of air power, Brigadier-General Sir Hugh Trenchard, was appointed to command an independent force of British bombers in France. His brief was to attack every German railway junction, airfield, factory and iron foundry within 150 miles of his airbase at Nancy. Since most of these targets were in heavily built-up areas, bombing them would have the added effect of undermining civilian morale.

The new commander of the independent bombing force took to his task with gusto. Trenchard was well known among the British establishment for his tremendous efficiency and enthusiasm for air power. Known affectionately as ‘Boom’, because of his booming voice, he was a man of strong opinions who had a talent for finding and nurturing gifted subordinates. His many disciples included the future leader of Bomber Command in the Second World War, Arthur Harris, and the American prophet of air power, William Mitchell, who regularly sought Trenchard’s help and advice in 1917 and 1918.

According to Trenchard, the aeroplane was almost exclusively a weapon of attack, and any use of aircraft to defend against enemy bombers was at best useless, and at worst recklessly wasteful. In 1917 when two squadrons of fighters were withdrawn from the Western Front to defend London he was greatly angered, and argued that the British were merely playing into German hands by diverting men and equipment away from the one place where they were most useful. The destruction the Germans were wreaking on British and French cities had to be borne until the RAF’s own bomber attacks on Germany threw the enemy on to the defensive. Trenchard recognized the limitations of bombers in the First World War, but saw their future potential, particularly in the breaking of enemy morale.

As Trenchard began his bombing campaign on the towns of western Germany, the traditional British restraint over the fate of non-combatants became a thing of the past. There is no question that this policy was sanctioned by the government. In September 1918 the air minister, Lord Weir, wrote to Trenchard: ‘If I were you, I would not be too exacting as regards accuracy in bombing railway stations in the middle of towns. The German is susceptible to bloodiness, and I would not mind a few accidents due to inaccuracy.’ Trenchard’s reply showed no squeamishness for the fate of civilians: ‘I do not think you need be anxious about our degree of accuracy when bombing stations in the middle of towns. The accuracy is not great at present, and all the pilots drop their eggs well into the middle of the town generally.’ ¹¹For Trenchard, the main use of bombers was in breaking the morale of the German people. As he said after the war, ‘The moral effect of bombing stands undoubtedly to the material effect in a proportion of twenty to one.’ ¹²

The seeds sown by the German zeppelins and Gothas in 1917 had grown into a full-blown policy of indiscriminate destruction: ‘area bombing’ had been born. The only blessing for German civilians was that the policy was short-lived. On 11 November 1918 the armistice agreement was signed, and the towns of Germany were spared any further bombardment. However, the spectre of strategic bombing had been released, and would return twenty years later to haunt the entire European continent for six long, devastating years.

* * *

The advent of strategic bombing marked a huge change, not only in the way wars would be waged in the future but in the concept of what constituted warfare. Whereas in the past the devastating effects of war had been confined to a relatively small area – the immediate ‘battle zone’ – now aircraft could leapfrog armies and bring destruction to areas hundreds of miles behind the front lines. Since aircraft could go anywhere, the battlefield had grown to encompass entire nations. Moreover, their targets were no longer specific factories or arsenals, but ‘the morale of the people’. Generals on both sides used these new weapons to take the fighting to the heart of their enemy’s cities, and they did this for the simple reason that now, at last, they could.

It is easy to condemn the actions of people like Trenchard, or the German zeppelin commanders who ordered the bombing of London and Paris, but the opposing sides were waging what the French quickly called ‘ la guerre totale’, ¹³and there was a dreadful but undeniable logic to their actions. When an entire nation’s resources are backing the prosecution of a war, why should a military commander draw any distinction between the soldier at the front and the civilian in a factory that produces weapons? Shortly after the war, studies on air power appeared across the world, and almost all agreed on this point: there was no longer any difference between civilian and soldier. When farmers grow food for the army, miners produce their raw materials, railway workers bring them to the front, and women and children provide soldiers with comfort while they are on leave, all these people become legitimate targets. In an era of total war there can be no holding back, because any action that produces a knock-out blow to the enemy will potentially save the lives of tens of thousands. This logic drove the military strategy of the time.