The German War (64 page)

Hitler’s enthusiasm for this campaign was enormous. Treating his Propaganda Minister to a long disquisition on
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
– about whose authenticity Goebbels had previously harboured some reservations – the Führer ventured on to an extended analogy between Jews and potato beetles. This latest in a long line of parasitical metaphors soon travelled from the privacy of the Führer’s luncheon table across the European airwaves when Goebbels spoke in the Sportpalast on 5 June promising retaliation against Britain for the bombing: ‘Just as the potato beetle destroys potato fields, indeed has to destroy them, so the Jew destroys states and nations. Against this there is only one remedy: radical removal of the threat.’ Again, he left no doubt about what this meant: ‘The complete elimination of Jewry from Europe is not a moral question but one of the security of states.’
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To the delight of the Nazi leaders, Katyn created strains in the Allied coalition, with General Sikorski’s Polish government-in-exile in London endorsing German calls for the International Red Cross to investigate the massacre and challenging the denial which the Soviet Information Bureau had issued. Stalin responded by breaking off diplomatic relations with the London Poles. But it did not break up the Allied coalition. Whatever their private misgivings, Churchill and Roosevelt blocked the involvement of the International Red Cross in the investigation of the massacre, at the same time as they resisted Soviet pressure to withdraw recognition from the Polish government-in-exile. But for the Western Allies, Katyn remained an enduring embarrassment, because it challenged their own claim to be fighting for all mankind. By mounting a case for the human rights of the Poles, Goebbels scored a propaganda coup on the international stage.
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German audiences found it all rather confusing. Suddenly the ‘Polish trash’ who had massacred ethnic Germans at the outbreak of the war deserved their sympathy. This new-found solidarity only made sense, according to the SD, to those ‘in intellectual and religious circles’ who felt guilty on account of the ‘far greater numbers of Poles and Jews eliminated by the German side’. It was easier to hold to the view formed in the autumn of 1939 that the Poles deserved what they got because they had ‘murdered 60,000 national comrades’. As the SD also noted:

A large section of the population sees in the [Soviets’] elimination of the Polish officers . . . the radical extinction of a dangerous opponent, unavoidable in war. One could set it on the same plane as the bombing attacks of the English and Americans on the German cities and, finally, also our own battle of annihilation against the Jews.

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Just before 1 a.m. on 25 July, Klaus Seidel’s flak battery in the Hamburg city park went into action. Flying from north to south over the city, 740 RAF bombers dropped 1,346 tonnes of high explosive and 938 tonnes of incendiaries, while the 54 heavy and 26 light flak batteries – supported by 24 searchlight batteries – shot over 50,000 rounds into the night sky. During the 58-minute raid, they brought down only two planes. That night the RAF had used ‘Window’ for the first time, dropping a cascade of short aluminium strips cut to a length which jammed the radar guidance for the searchlights and guns. At 3 a.m., 16-year-old Klaus Seidel was called to fight the fires at the Stadthalle. Dressed hastily in his ‘pyjamas, tracksuit, steel helmet and boots’, the young air force auxiliaries attempted to salvage goods and fight the fire with hoses. Luckily another boy had sprayed Klaus for a lark and this protected him from the sparks from falling timbers. After an hour and a half, they returned to the battery, where Klaus ran messages until 6 a.m. He snatched three hours’ sleep and returned to duty, preparing the guns in the Stadtpark again.
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The next attack came much earlier, at 4.30 p.m., when ninety American ‘flying fortresses’ appeared over Hamburg. Another fifty-four followed at midday on 26 July. That day Ingeborg Hey’s parents wrote to Wehlen on the Elbe, where the young teacher had been evacuated with her pupils, telling her that they were safe and sound. They wrote again the next day describing how the sirens kept sounding in a confused succession of signals – pre-warning, alarm over, alarm, alarm over. Despite the stream of people leaving the city, they decided to follow the authorities’ advice and stay. Exhausted by the last three days and nights, they asked Inge and her friends to keep their fingers crossed for them. After two nights in which the RAF had only sent out six fast-flying Mosquitoes, just after midnight on 27–28 July, 722 bombers came. Flying from east to west, they targeted neighbourhoods which had gone virtually unscathed till now. In Rothenburgsort, Hammerbrook, Borgfelde, Hohenfelde and Hamm, freak weather conditions and the intense heat of the fires transformed the conflagration into a firestorm of unprecedented proportions. Objects and people simply vanished. Trees up to a metre thick were flattened. Those who stayed in their cellars and air raid shelters risked being asphyxiated by carbon monoxide gases or baked inside them. Those fleeing often did so below ground, breaking through walls and doors into other cellars as the buildings above them caught fire. Those who fled on to the streets risked being hit by debris from collapsing house fronts or trapped in the melting road surface. Many jumped into the canals to extinguish falling sparks which caught in their hair and clothes. Among the 18,474 people killed that night were Ingeborg Hey’s parents.
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The next day, Klaus Seidel wrote to his mother advising her against returning from her summer holidays in Darmstadt. Although he could report that the flak had proved to be more effective this time, he had to tell her that Hamburg had suffered large-scale destruction. That day the Gauleiter of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann, reversed his earlier orders to remain and issued instructions to enlist every available means to evacuate the city. As the Stadtpark filled up with those who had been bombed out and were waiting to be evacuated, Klaus Seidel watched as lorries simply dumped large heaps of bread on the ground for them. It had become policy to issue extra food and materials in areas affected by air raids – without counting them against ration entitlements – in order to shore up morale. Yet Seidel was shocked by the way the refugees, so accustomed to wartime shortages, wasted the extra food: he found tins of half-eaten meat slung into the bushes and heaps of plums left to rot on the ground.
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On the night of 29–30 July, the RAF returned in force again. That night Klaus wrote to his mother without candlelight, by the glow of the ‘fire-cloud’. On 31 July he finally had enough time off duty to check that his mother’s flat was intact and carry their valuables down to the cellar. Klaus professed not to understand why their neighbours still wanted to leave, arguing with cool logic that they were protected by a firebreak now that the surrounding buildings had been destroyed.
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By the time the final wave of British bombers dropped their payloads at 2.55 a.m. on 3 August 1943, the Reich’s second-largest city lay in ruins. Half of its buildings had been destroyed during the previous week and 900,000 people had fled. On 1 August, Gauleiter Kaufmann had spoken of ‘people in their panic running in a kind of psychosis like animals into the flames’. He struck Goebbels as ‘a broken figure’. As the authorities panicked, the Chief Prosecutor even released 2,000 convicts and remand prisoners, including fifty members of an underground Communist group. Stories abounded of Party ‘big shots’ misusing the refugee transports to ship out their furniture and belongings. When enraged civilians harangued Party officials, even ripping off their insignia, the police did nothing, preferring, as Hamburg’s chief of police and SS told Himmler, to take a ‘deliberately cautious’ approach.
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A trio of Gauleiter Kaufmann, his deputy, State Secretary Georg Ahrens, and Mayor Krogmann quickly recovered their nerve and improvised the evacuation and clean-up operation with their own style of pragmatism. Using whatever personnel they could find, including soldiers, forced labourers and concentration camp inmates, the Hamburg authorities moved to extinguish the fires, clear the rubble from the streets and reconnect the main utilities. Fire brigades were sent from Kiel, Lübeck and Bremen, with volunteer firefighters arriving from the rural hinterland. It had been clear for over six months that the ‘self-protection’ system developed by the Reich Air Defence Association, with buckets of sand on every landing and human chains for passing buckets of water from street pumps, could not cope with severe air raids. But its mass organisation, counting 22 million volunteers nationwide, offered a crucial reservoir of labour, alongside the Hitler Youth, the SA, the National Socialist People’s Welfare, and the Party’s women’s organisations. They set up first aid points, found shelter for the bombed-out, fed orphaned children and evacuated refugees. On 10 August, sections of Hamburg’s tram line began running again. On 15 August, the water mains were back; by the beginning of September, gas was being delivered to industry and most sections of the city; and by mid-September all habitable houses were receiving electricity.
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Special brigades of concentration camp prisoners, for the most part forced foreign workers who had fallen foul of their German employers, did the dirtiest jobs. Seventeen-year-old Pavel Vasilievich Pavlenko was sent from the nearby camp at Neuengamme to defuse bombs in Wilhelmshafen. His squad would dig a circle around the unexploded device before one of them was chosen by lot to unscrew the detonating fuse. Pavlenko was also one of the prisoners sent into the firestorm area, a 4-kilometre-square ‘dead zone’ comprising Rothenburgsort, Hammerbrook and Hamm-Süd. Here the streets were littered with dead bodies, often clustered in groups of twenty-five to thirty where a fireball had caught them. Some, overwhelmed by heat, were hardly scarred; others were charred beyond recognition. By 10 September, 26,409 corpses had been recovered, mainly from the streets and squares. But the most difficult and dangerous work was opening up the cellars in which people had sought refuge, and where most had died of carbon-monoxide asphyxiation as the oxygen was consumed in the fires. Pavlenko recalled how ‘we collected the bones in a bucket and carried them outside’. Elsewhere, workers found ‘doll-like’ corpses, reduced to less than half their normal size and yet still quite recognisable, a phenomenon attributed to the proportionate dehydration of all the internal organs as the cellars turned into ovens.
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To Georg Henning Graf von Bassewitz-Behr, the city’s police president, it was like a modern-day Pompeii and Herculaneum. The Protestant Bishop of Hamburg, Franz Tügel, turned to biblical imagery, writing in his pastoral letter that ‘Some have been reminded of images from the Old Testament when the summer sun is literally darkened by the clouds of fire and brimstone.’ Addressing his shattered parish of Hamm, Pastor Paul Kreye considered the story of Sodom and Gomorrah:

‘I am reminded of the story of Lot’s wife,’ one of you wrote to me. ‘The Lord let fire and brimstone rain down from the heavens and covered the cities. And he spoke to Lot: Save your soul and do not look back, so that you perish not.’ And his wife did look back and became a pillar of salt. – No glancing backwards, only forwards.

Kreye and Tügel could not know that Arthur Harris, with his penchant for biblical code names, had called Bomber Command’s raids on Hamburg ‘Operation Gomorrah’.
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The authorities erected a wall around the ‘dead zone’ and barred all unauthorised personnel from entering it, but parts of the devastated area were visible from the single-track railway line which began running again on 15 August through the ruins of Hammerbrook and Rothenburgsort to the Hauptbahnhof. Rumours abounded of 100,000 to 350,000 dead. The real number, 34,000–38,000 people, still dwarfed the destruction caused by any air raids in the war so far. Many soldiers who returned on compassionate leave to search for family members, the Hamburg police president reported, ‘found only a few bones’. As survivors searched provisional morgues full of dismembered bodies for relatives, often only the chance recognition of a wedding ring or a fob watch made it possible to identify a severed arm or torso. It took Klaus Seidel a fortnight to discover that his grandparents had survived.
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Evacuation was still under way when the population began to return. In mid-August, numbers climbed from 600,000 to 800,000. By the end of November, over a million residents were back in the city, creating an acute housing crisis. The densely packed working-class neighbourhoods which had burned down could not be rebuilt, and even the rushed production of prefabricated, two-room wooden cabins fell pitifully short of the one million new homes per annum promised for the whole of Germany in September; by June 1944 only 35,000 homes had been completed, with a further 23,000 under construction. Forced to rig up makeshift accommodation in half-destroyed buildings, people dubbed them ‘cellar quarters’. Others took up permanent residence in Hamburg’s concrete bunkers or their workplaces. More than half the city was still standing, including much of the belt of middle-class villas beyond the city centre, prompting much bitterness amongst workers at the reluctance of the better-off to give up their privileges. Wehrmacht and SS officers had to be exhorted to get their families to take in the bombed-out wives of their own comrades.
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With the emphasis firmly on restarting production, the Hamburg docks were able to boast their highest output figures for U-boats that year. It scarcely seemed to matter that the battle for the Atlantic was over and the submarines had been called back to their bases. Gauleiter Kaufmann handed over the reconstruction of industry to leading members of the Hamburg economic elite such as Rudolf Blohm, whose famous naval shipyard employed thousands of concentration camp prisoners from Neuengamme. Blohm requisitioned school buildings for housing, turned the Museum for Hamburg’s History into a department store, and set up a community hall where dances and concerts were held and films screened. Crucially, the employers now became responsible for allocating housing and food as well as emergency clothing, household goods and furniture for their workforce. But labour discipline remained poor, with even the new economic managers appreciating that ‘People don’t have any possessions any more and want to buy something first.’
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