Berlin at War (31 page)

of foreign labourers with the many millions more prisoners of war

to form an enormous would-be enemy army, which was described by

one commentator as ‘a bomb hanging in the air, which threatens to

crash down in a devastating detonation’.72

Many Germans sincerely believed this idea. The otherwise quite

sensible Ursula von Kardorff, for example, believed that the foreign

unwelcome strangers

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labourers’ ‘army’ was already in existence: ‘[They] are apparently very

well organised’, she wrote in her diary. ‘It is said that there are agents

among them; officers, emissaries from the various underground groups

that are well supplied with weapons and with radios . . . Some people

call them the Trojan Horse of this war.’73 Another commentator

warned ominously that ‘if we do not change this situation, then the

foreigners will stab us in the back’.74

The truth was more mundane. The vast majority of forced labourers

in Germany were not minded to avenge themselves on their German

captors. A few were even keen to stay. Close to the end of the war,

for instance, a Serbian labourer was recalled stating in his best broken

German that ‘If officer come today, and say, you can home. I not go,

I stay here.’75 He was one of the countless thousands who were fearful

of being received as traitors if they dared to return to Tito’s Yugoslavia

or Stalin’s Soviet Union, and were hopeful that they might be able to

forge a better life for themselves in the German capital.

For all such concerns, the majority wanted nothing more than to go

home. As the verse of a female Czech labourer betrayed, homesickness

proved in most cases to be a far stronger emotion than revenge:

We have got used a little

to life in Berlin,

that our stomachs will never be full here

and we will not sleep through the night.

Perhaps the day will come,

when we will see our homeland again,

perhaps the day will come

when we will hear our mother’s voice.76

7

A Taste of Things to Come

The night of Wednesday 28 August 1940 was cool for the time of year.

Those making their way out of the city centre, or wearily heading

home after a day’s work, would have turned their collars up against

the breeze, or else cursed their optimism of that morning, when they

had decided not to take a coat.

Yet despite the unseasonal chill, the public mood in Berlin was

buoyant. The victories of the first half of 1940 had made for a heady

atmosphere in the capital. As the Wehrmacht marched from success

to success, many Berliners had considered that the war was as good

as won: Versailles had finally been smashed, France had been routed

and Germany now stood as the dominant power in Europe. The British

had been defeated in France and many reasoned that they too would

soon be forced to come to terms. But for all their justified optimism,

a good many Berliners hurrying home that evening would have cast

a nervy eye skywards.

The previous Monday, Berlin had been raided by the RAF. It had

been a fairly minor affair. A force of around thirty twin-engine

Hampdens and Whitleys had found the German capital shrouded in

thick cloud and consequently had dropped their bombs over a wide

area – some in the northern suburbs and some beyond the city limits

to the south. The official German reaction to this first raid on Berlin

was surprisingly muted. Despite the outrage that would soon become

common currency, the event appears to have warranted only six lines

in the newspapers the following morning and military communiqués

noted only that a few incendiaries had fallen on the northern suburb

of Rosenthal, where a garden shed was set on fire. There were no

casualties reported and it was asserted that no bombs had been dropped

on the city itself.1

a taste of things to come

137

The American reporter Fred Oechsner recalled that the authorities

‘laughed off [the raid] as a fluke’ and assured the press that such a

‘nuisance would not occur again’.2 Given that a number of farms and

allotments had suffered in the attack, some Berliners even joked that

the RAF was now trying to starve the city into submission.3

Confidential SD reports were a little more forthcoming, recording

that the raid had come in a number of waves, causing the alarm to

be sounded for over three hours, with the all-clear being given only

at 3.30 a.m. The total damage caused by the 150 or so ‘small incendi-

aries’ dropped was estimated at a mere 3,000 Reichsmarks. Though

the capital had certainly sustained ‘its first heavy air attack’, the report

concluded that the results of the raid were ‘extremely small’.4

While the material damage inflicted was minimal, the shock to

Berlin morale was rather more substantial – not least by virtue of the

simple fact that a night’s sleep had been lost. As Helmuth James von

Moltke noted to his wife, ‘it is no joke to lie awake from 12 to 4’.5 In

addition, many simply had to adjust to the new procedures demanded

by the air war. It was not an easy task. A Swedish newspaper corres -

pondent reported that Berliners had initially taken little notice of the

siren, and had only taken the raid seriously – and sought shelter –

when they had heard the sound of the anti-aircraft fire.6 However,

those early raids also posed a deeper and more intangible challenge.

Many had believed the official propaganda and could not imagine that

the war would be played out as much in the skies above their city as

in the skies over London. They found it hard to believe that the British

would have the temerity to attack the German capital, especially as

Britain was itself under threat of invasion. And, after all, hadn’t Göring

joked that if a single enemy bomber reached the German capital, then

his name was not Göring, it was Meyer?* As William Shirer noted:

The Berliners are stunned. They did not think it could happen. When

this war began, Göring assured them it couldn’t. He boasted that no

enemy planes could ever break through the outer and inner rings of

the capital’s anti-aircraft defence. The Berliners are a naïve and simple

people. They believed him. Their disillusionment today therefore is all

the greater. You have to see their faces to measure it.7

* A phrase broadly equivalent to the English saying ‘ . . . then I’m a Dutchman’.

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berlin at war

Berliners would have read the news reports of the German raids on

Warsaw, Rotterdam and London; they had probably also seen the graphic

images in the newsreels. Now, they were no longer the perpetrators,

they had become the victims. This was their ‘baptism of fire’ as one

journalist put it, ‘the first-hand taste of aerial warfare’.8

Until then Berliners had had little experience of the new threat that

they faced. The first ‘raids’ over the capital the previous autumn had

barely been worthy of the name. The alarm that sounded on the

evening of 1 September 1939 had evidently been caused by a single

plane straying too close to the city; some considered it all to be a

propaganda exercise. The alarm on the night of 9 September, mean-

while, would have troubled quite a few Berliners, not least as it was

sounded at four o’clock in the morning. But even then, no planes were

seen and no bombs were dropped. William Shirer recalled a peculiar

episode in mid-October 1939: ‘Last night the inhabitants had a scare’,

he wrote; ‘the anti-aircraft batteries around Berlin started going off

and searchlights scanned the skies. That was the first time the people

of Berlin had heard any gun actually firing in this war, and many of

them went out into the streets to listen. Some expected an air-raid

alarm, but none was given.’9 It later emerged that a German plane

had got lost and flown over the capital.

Yet, false alarms soon gave way to real alerts. While the German

armies were racing across northern France in the spring of 1940, the

RAF was carrying out offensives of its own. The first German city to

be raided was Mönchengladbach in the Rhineland, which was targeted

on the night of 11 May, the day after the French campaign began.

Thereafter, the German public slowly grew accustomed to sporadic

enemy air raids: numerous cities, from Hamburg in the north to

Koblenz in the south, experienced the new horror of aerial bombing.

Though the material damage tended to be minimal, lives were lost.

On 1 July, four civilians were killed in Düsseldorf and eight in Kiel.

Three days later, Hamburg was raided at the cost of sixteen lives,

twelve of those children. The official German reaction was one of

outrage and the Nazi press embarked on a campaign of vilification

of the RAF, routinely denouncing British air crews as ‘pirates of the

air’ or ‘terror flyers’.

Leafleting raids were also common. Throughout that summer, the

RAF dropped batches of propaganda leaflets across northern and

a taste of things to come

139

western Germany. They frequently mocked the Nazi press or official

announcements, by using the same bureaucratic ‘tone’ as the genuine

article, as in the following example from early August 1940: ‘In order

to avert the dangers to the Party (and the people) that would result

from a continuation of the war, the Führer and Reich Chancellor has

invited the English people to sue for peace.’10 Others were altogether

darker, presenting stark statistics or outlining the grim fate that awaited

Germany if Hitler were not removed. The following extract is from

a leaflet that was dropped over the southern suburb of Lankwitz in

the late summer of 1940:

Berliners! Have you lost your minds? When they tell you that only

England now stands against the Axis powers; 47 million against 200

million, do you believe them? Have you forgotten that there is a British

Empire, in which 492 million are united against Hitler? Have you

forgotten that of the 200 million of Hitler’s slaves, 80 million are

conquered peoples, who despise their oppressors and are waiting for

their moment; and that 44 million are only Italians?! Have you forgotten

that the entire industrial and agricultural production of North and

South America is being mobilised against you?

. . .

The war that Hitler started goes on!11

All such leaflets were required to be handed in to the authorities for

safe disposal. Officially at least, the regime was fairly relaxed about

their possible effect on the morale of the German public. An SD report

from late July 1940 claimed that the leaflets were generally ‘dismissed

as ridiculous’ and expressed the opinion that ‘such antics could not

unsettle the German people’.12 Nonetheless, the regime took few

chances. Those who chose to keep the leaflets did so at their peril; if

they were discovered they might be charged with the dissemination of

enemy propaganda or undermining the German war effort. Either

of these offences carried a mandatory death sentence.

Thus the German public had grown accustomed to increased enemy

activity in the skies over Germany in the summer of 1940. And now

even Berlin, though far from the western and northern borderlands

that were most often targeted, had witnessed its first raid. For many

Berliners, the previous Monday’s raid would have been an ominous

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berlin at war

sign and those returning home on the night of 28 August would have

had good reason to anxiously scan the skies above them. They were

right to do so. The RAF was already on its way.

Shortly after midnight, British planes once again appeared over Berlin.

After breaching the outer ring of flak defences to the north and north-

west of the city, a small squadron of aircraft – mainly Wellingtons

and Whitleys – proceeded to the southern suburb of Kreuzberg, one

of the most densely populated districts of the capital, and released

their payloads. Unencumbered by heavy flak fire, their pilots were

able to hit their targets with a degree of accuracy. One of them even

claimed that ‘it was just like a bit of practice bombing’.13

The results on the ground were devastating. The area around

Kottbusser Strasse, Skalitzer Strasse and the Görlitzer Station was the

worst hit. A stick of bombs fell down the middle of the main street,

leaving four-foot craters in the thoroughfare, and twisting and buck-

ling the tram lines. A high-explosive bomb also destroyed two floors

of a large house on Kottbusser Strasse, sending shattered glass, window

frames and rubble tumbling into the courtyard below. One eyewitness

noted ‘the worst fires were caused . . . where the Görlitzer railway

goods yard near the Wiener Strasse was set on fire’.14

According to government records, over nine hundred Berliners

were rendered homeless by the raid.15 Many of them congregated

beneath the raised railway line that cut thorough the district, along

Skalitzer Strasse, or else made their way to a local school, where a

makeshift soup kitchen and first-aid station had been established.