The German War (68 page)

Liselotte Purper was able to call in favours, securing two bright rooms in a quiet eighteenth-century country house in the Altmark. It belonged to a relative and it was where Liselotte and Kurt had held their wedding back in September. With its elegant facade and its half-mile of wooded parkland with winding walks around the fishing lake, it was the right place to recuperate. As she settled in, she prayed that she would become ‘hard’ and that the ‘new weapons’ would come soon. As a bombed-out husband, Kurt was granted compassionate leave, and the couple were able to spend Christmas and New Year together.
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Three weeks after Kurt had returned to Army Group North, Liselotte began to hope for a baby and started thinking of children’s names. She was unpleasantly struck, on a shopping expedition with her friend Hada in Prague, by ‘the extraordinary fertility of the Czech women’: even the 19- and 20-year-olds all seemed to be pregnant – just ‘like rabbits’. It was a eugenics propagandist’s bad dream and Liselotte duly fell back on well-worn nationalist expressions, writing to her husband that ‘the best of our nation are being lost without producing any progeny or only one while in the East the inferior are propagating themselves by the dozen’. She confessed to Kurt that she did not know whether she really wanted children for herself, or whether they would only distract from their perfect relationship. An attractive young woman of 30, with a successful career as a photojournalist and well-connected, amusing friends, Liselotte was also profoundly lonely.
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She made up for it by taking the night-sleeper to Vienna with Hada, where, enchanted to be in a city ‘without rubble, without ruins and without permanent threat of air raids’, they put up at the smartest hotel they could find. By late February 1944, she was busy at a photo shoot of soldiers convalescing in the Austrian Tyrol. Her hair bleached by the sun off the snow, her face tanned and her blue eyes once more clear and relaxed, Liselotte’s only worry was how people might react to her appearance when she returned to Berlin. In her search for new home furnishings to replace the ones she had lost, she braved an air raid warning to make a special trip to Braunschweig to buy a table lamp from the same craft workshop which supplied Göring and Hitler. Liselotte was delighted by her coup.
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RAF’s Bomber Command continued its ‘battle for Berlin’ until 24 March 1944, launching a total of sixteen major attacks on the city, interspersed by seventeen smaller ones. These were the heaviest, most prolonged bombing missions on a single target in the European theatre. But Berlin survived. Despite the massive fires that engulfed parts of the city in late November, Berlin was not Hamburg or Kassel, which had been destroyed in a firestorm on 22 October. Much of the city had been built with steel and brick, rather than half-timbered medieval houses, and its wide avenues served as firebreaks. Berlin was also beyond the range of ‘Oboe’, the land-based guidance system on which Bomber Command relied. The Pathfinders’ on-board radar sets were often not accurate enough to find the city, and unanticipated strong winds also blew the bombers off course. Although the same central and south-western districts of Charlottenburg, Kreuzberg and Wilmersdorf were hit again on the night of 16 December, on 2–3 and 23–24 December many of the planes missed the city altogether or bombed the southern suburbs. Raids on the first two nights of January resulted in major losses for the RAF, as the German fighters followed the bomber stream all the way to Berlin. On 20–21 January, the RAF did not find the city at all. So heavy was the winter cloud cover that, during the whole five months of the ‘battle for Berlin’, only two reconnaissance flights yielded aerial photographs of the bomb damage. Instead of creating a single great catastrophe, the bombing of Berlin turned into a war of attrition, in which both sides tried to calculate their respective rates of loss of aircraft – and both speculated how long civilian morale would hold.
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Paradoxically, as the raids continued and the tonnage of bombs and the material damage mounted, casualties began to fall. On the night of 15 February 1944, over 800 bombers reached Berlin, pounding a wide swathe from the working-class districts of Wedding and Pankow in the north to leafy Zehlendorf in the south-west. This time, 169 people were killed – a far cry from the 1,500 killed in the much smaller raids of August and September 1943. Berliners had become adept at navigating the city with an eye for where and when to take shelter. Visitors were struck by the new atmosphere of humour, vitality and resistance. In February, Liselotte Purper returned to the capital for the first time since being bombed out in November. The building she had occupied in Schöneberg was so badly damaged that she barely recognised it: the whole of the front facade and entrance were gone. Climbing across piles of stones and planks, she found a middle-aged neighbour in the cellar, wearing a black cap and boiler suit as he tried to rescue the family’s belongings. ‘Covered in dust and run-down but with a bearing like a soldier at the front,’ she wrote to Kurt. ‘And that is just how it is in Berlin too. It is a life at the front, if one can still speak of life.’
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As the battle for control of German airspace continued, Milch and Speer disregarded Hitler’s injunctions to concentrate on producing bombers, and quietly shifted resources towards ground defence and the Luftwaffe’s fighter squadrons. Production of single-engined fighters peaked at 851 planes per month in the second half of 1943. Up to a third of Germany’s optical industry and half of its electronics industry were diverted to home-front defence, as each side kept leapfrogging the other’s innovations in the radar war. By the end of 1943 the flak artillery had built up 7,000 searchlights and 55,000 guns, receiving three-quarters of the 88 mm guns which had earned a fearsome reputation as tank-busters on the eastern front. Manning the guns occupied the majority of the 1.8 million air force personnel as well as 400,000 auxiliaries, including 80,000 schoolboys and 60,000 prisoners of war. Mixed crews served each of the large cannon, with Soviet prisoners of war fetching the shells, boys acting as gun-layers and soldiers acting as master gunners. The flak was consuming 12 per cent of total German ammunition production, twice as much as the army’s field guns, even though the success rates were relatively low, with 16,000 artillery rounds needed on average to shoot down a single plane. But they gave civilians a greater sense of security.
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By late March 1944, RAF Bomber Command was forced to call off the ‘battle for Berlin’, because of mounting losses to German defences. Harris had estimated what he would need for the operation relatively correctly. The RAF flew 14,562 sorties where Harris had called for 15,000. He had predicted that the battle would cost 400–500 aircraft; in fact, 496 bombers were shot down, with a further 95 crashing on their return to England. By February and March 1944, Bomber Command’s losses from individual raids on Leipzig and Berlin were over 9 per cent; a few days after the 24 March raid on Berlin, they climbed to 11.8 per cent during a raid on Nuremberg. For the crews themselves, these statistics meant that they had a low chance of surviving a tour of operations. Berlin was a defeat for the concept that strategic bombing alone could defeat Germany.
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To the Germans this turning point was not immediately evident, because it coincided with the USAAF’s resumption of the bombing campaign it had halted in the autumn. The Liberators and Flying Fortresses were now accompanied by new long-range Mustang fighters, which could take on German fighter squadrons over German airspace. Although the Americans bombed Berlin in March, their principal objective remained defeating the Luftwaffe, targeting aircraft factories, airfields and, with great effect, synthetic oil installations. As the character of the air war changed in the spring of 1944, many Germans drew comfort from the end to the nightly onslaught on the cities.
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The writer and journalist Margret Boveri chose that moment to return to the capital from Madrid, where she gave up a plum job at the German embassy. Against the advice of friends and family, including her American mother, Boveri committed herself ‘to stay in Berlin and really get to know German life under the bombs’ and started writing for
Das Reich.
In April, Goebbels devoted one of his own articles in the weekly to the ‘indestructible rhythm of life’ and ‘unbreakable will to life of our metropolitan population’, setting a theme which the paper’s editor, Boveri and others expanded upon as they celebrated the capital’s ability to hold out.
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The great prize of strategic bombing was always psychological and political: to spread defeatism and engineer the collapse of regimes. In retrospect, Harris’s over-confident claims that Germany would capitulate by 1 April 1944 appear hubristic. But he did have a precedent. Bomber Command had started attacking the northern Italian industrial cities of Genoa, Turin and Milan in the autumn of 1942 and, by the following spring, the campaign had provoked mass flight, violent riots and spontaneous demonstrations against the Prefects and the Fascist Party, with demands for political rights. During August 1943 it looked as if the bombing of Hamburg might have a similar effect in Germany, as people openly discussed copying the Italians and installing a military regime. But that was as far as the parallel went: talk and a few symbolic assaults on Party officials did not turn into collective action.

What made Germany different from Italy? An estimated 50,000–60,000 people died as a result of the air raids in Italy throughout the war; this was comparable to the losses sustained in Britain and France. By September 1944, the civilian death toll from bombing in Germany was closer to 200,000. What made Germany so different from Italy was not the absolute number killed, but the social impact of bombing. Italian cities lacked civil defences: there were few shelters, little antiaircraft artillery and almost no fighter squadrons. Their absence made people feel utterly undefended. As the Fascist state failed to organise adequate defensive and evacuation measures, the population turned to the extended family, the black market and the Church for shelter, food and security.
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Nazi Germany did not implode in this way in 1943–44. Not only were German cities better defended and supplied, but – despite all the inefficiencies and rivalries engendered by their overlapping jurisdictions – the institutions of the state, Party, local government and the military co-operated effectively to mobilise millions of Germans to participate in civil defence and mass evacuation. This was a triumph of organisation and mass mobilisation. Young German women were mobilised in ever greater numbers. Alongside the 400,000 female Red Cross auxiliaries, by 1944 there were 500,000 women serving with the Wehrmacht. Most of them – 300,000 – became air force auxiliaries, mainly on the home front. A slightly older cohort served with the Reich Air Defence Association, the Reichsluftschutzbund. In the town of Aschaffenburg, these were mostly married women, aged between 25 and 30, who did not work. Despite the patriarchal values of Nazism, there were too few men to fill all the higher positions in air defence and more and more active duties fell to the young women. In the town of Trier, all the full-time personnel were women; in Füssen, two-thirds were. Some women continued to avoid service, pleading age, poor health or having to care for young children or elderly relatives. Others enjoyed their new responsibilities. One young Red Cross nurse who had rescued twenty-one people from a collapsed cellar recalled how proud her whole unit was when she was awarded the War Merit Cross in the summer of 1942: it was the first time a woman was decorated with this medal. With their military-style jumpsuits, steel helmets, belt buckles and norms of duty, obedience and sacrifice, these women had literally joined the nation under arms. By 1944 there were 620,000 of them, almost all unpaid volunteers.
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Since 1942, soldiers at the front had to get used to female radio announcers addressing them as ‘comrades’. ‘We’re happy to be spoken to by girls with delicate, whispery soprano voices or other young ladies,’ one soldier complained, ‘but don’t you think it’s a bit ridiculous when a (hopefully!) well-brought-up, dainty little thing like that speaks to us rowdies as “comrades”?’ By late 1943, the neat demarcation of men ‘out there’ and women and children ‘back home’ had broken down in much of urban Germany. ‘Home’ had ceased to be a place of automatic safety. Women and teenagers had become ‘heroic defenders’ to be mobilised and militarised.
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During 1944, a young psychiatrist in Leipzig studied his patients to determine whether or not bombing had led to a rise in ‘psychological and nervous reactions’ among German civilians. A 50-year-old businessman described how he had started having speech problems a week after rescuing his mother from the flames and being knocked unconscious by the blast of a bomb. ‘I find it particularly difficult to get out words that begin with a vowel and I have to force them out or else I would be completely unable to speak,’ he explained to Dr Feudell. Since then, air raid sirens produced an immediate reaction, with ‘blood rushing to the head, heart pains and trembling’. Feudell was sympathetic to his patients but he concluded that they tended to be people who had been nervy and fragile before the war. He was also mindful that ‘the demands of the community must take precedence over subjective suffering’, postulating that the ‘impetus given by a
völkisch
attitude’ had helped to mobilise the nation’s psychological resources and that there were in fact fewer ‘hysterical’ people than during the First World War – the common reference point for measuring when ‘hysteria’ had triggered defeatism and revolution. Feudell also concluded that rumours, especially the ‘irresponsible passing on of horror stories and exaggerated statistics’, were more dangerous than the actual experiences people had undergone. So he recommended that patients should repress their experiences and deal with them in silence rather than talk about them and stir up anxiety in others. A parallel study conducted in Erlangen was even more upbeat, marvelling at Germans’ powers of psychological resistance and discounting the notion that the bombing had given rise to any new or specific kind of illness: rather, the terrifying experiences which healthy people had gone through would soon fade.
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