Cities at war: Hamburg
As Germany’s largest port and second largest city, Hamburg was the target of a series of devastating air raids, as Jonathan Trigg explains
Sitting on the River Elbe, the ancient Hanseatic city of Hamburg had always been a bustling centre of commerce and industry. Dubbed ‘Red Hamburg’ after World
War I, the city was a bastion of left-wing politics – it’s 14,000 Communist Party members staged a short-lived uprising in 1923. The advent of World War II saw it become a key hub for German industry with its oil refineries and shipyards, especially the mammoth Blohm & Voss yard where almost one in five U-boats were built, making Hamburg a target for Allied bombers.
1940-June 1943
RAF Bomber Command first attacked Hamburg on the night of 17 May 1940, although according to the author William Shirer the chief impact seemed to be ‘that the British raids robbed them [Hamburg’s residents] of their sleep’, and only 125 people were killed throughout the year from a population of two million. Those raids were met by Hamburg’s defence structure, including its police and fire services as well as significant anti-aircraft forces provided by the Luftwaffe. To combat the threat of fire the city had no fewer than 402 water pumps manned by fire-crews and trained civilian volunteers, along with an army of firewatchers and Blockwächter (Block Wardens) – nominated individuals responsible for ensuring all apartment buildings had water and sand available on every floor. Uwe Köster was a 13-yearold Hitler Youth messenger in the city in 1943, “I was stationed in an air raid bunker built both above and below ground. When an alarm sounded, we had to be there and open the bunker with the Blockwart. We had to then care for the children, give them milk and so on, if the alarm lasted a long time. I also ran messages from one bunker to another if the telephones went dead. We had to go out at all times, even when the bombs were failing.”
Alongside the Reich’s day and night fighter forces there were some 54 heavy and 26 light flak batteries defending the city, including 166 x 88mm guns and three Flaktürme (Flak towers) – huge concrete towers crowned with massive dual-barrelled 128mm guns. There were also 22 searchlight batteries, three smoke generator units and a number of dummy sites built around the city to confuse enemy bombers. By 1943 most regular Luftwaffe personnel had been drafted
to the front, and their places taken by men either too old or medically unfit to fight, along with teenage members of the Hitler Youth, female auxiliaries (Flakhelferinnen) and even Prisonersof-War, mostly captured members of the Red Army. One flak commander addressed his unit by saying ‘Ladies and gentlemen, fellow workers, schoolboys and tovarischi!’. The former PoWs mixed with over 60,000 other non-Germans in the city, mostly Fremdarbeiter, volunteers come to work in Germany, and Ostarbeiter, forced labour, mainly from the occupied east. As Lusie Schmolz noted in her diary there was: ‘A confused babble of languages wherever you hear people speaking.’
The city’s people had to adjust to new routines, as Uwe Köster explained, “We had six hours of school a day Then we were sent out to collect junk that could be recycled. In our district we collected scrap metal, old newspapers and bones. Oil was made from the bones, which was made into grease for weapons.” However, the biggest impact of the war on the people of Hamburg was the rationing of everything from clothes to coal and even bicycle tyres, but most of all food. By the spring of 1943 an adult resident was limited to 9kg of bread per month, along with just under 2kg of meat and 600g of cereals. A macabre joke at the time was that you could no longer commit suicide by hanging yourself as you didn’t weigh enough. It also rankled among working-class residents that while most went hungry the well-heeled could still dine out in the exclusive Four Seasons grillroom or Schumann’s Oyster Cellar.
To add to the city’s woes Bomber Command, despite its earlier lack of success, persevered, raiding the city no less than 98 times by the end of
June 1943. Louise Schäfer, a Hamburg resident, described the effect on the city’s population, “Summer nights always meant a threat of raids, there was constant fear. But it was a fear we had learned to live with, a case of what can’t be cured must be endured.”
Hamburg burns in Operation Gomorrah
Louise Schäfer didn’t know at the time, but Hamburg had already gotten lucky at the end of May 1942 when heavy cloud cover over the city had forced Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, Commander of RAF Bomber Command, to switch its first ever 1,000 bomber raid to Cologne instead. It would not be so lucky again.
Given the heavy losses Bomber Command had suffered at the beginning of the war carrying out daylight raids, and the inability to accurately hit specific targets, British policy was aimed at de-housing the civilian population of
Germany and breaking their morale. In other words, area bombing by night. By late July 1943 Harris was determined to hit Hamburg with a hammer blow.
On the night of 24 July 791 bombers, mainly four-engine Lancasters, took off from 42 English airfields, laden with blast bombs and incendiaries, although 45 turned back before reaching the coast of Europe due to mechanical problems, even as the first German night fighters began to attack.
As the rest of the strike force came within 35 miles of German territory the bombers unleashed a secret weapon, codenamed Window. Strips of black
paper, 27cm long and 2cm wide, with aluminium foil stuck to one side and pre-packaged into bundles of 2,200 strips which would separate when dropped to form vast clouds that effectively blinded German radar, at a stroke totally disabling their night fighter and flak defences. Otto Kutzner, a night fighter pilot with Nachtjagdgruppe 3 (night fighter group 3), was left aimlessly flying around, “I was picking up targets everywhere that didn’t exist.” A fellow flyer declared that, “We were all helpless and bewildered.” Hamburg was effectively defenceless.
Ben Witter, a Hamburg journalist, recalled how, “I heard no sirens, but it was no longer night, it was as light as day after the first bombs fell and I took my parents into the cellar, which wasn’t reinforced, and it seemed as if its walls were moving all the time.” That first night the RAF only lost 12 aircraft while 1,500 Hamburg residents were killed and 200,000 rendered homeless. As the war correspondent Erich Andres described: ‘The day after it was still dark by noontime due to the smoke and dust. Altona district had been particularly hard hit.’
Daylight brought no respite as the Americans joined in, with 68 bombers hitting Hamburg’s U-boat yards, an attack they repeated on 26 July, swiftly followed that night by another, smaller, RAF raid. Harris’ plan of a sustained offensive to overwhelm the defenders was in full swing.
Irmgard Burmeister was 12 at the time, “We sought refuge in our basement, which wasn’t totally underground, and we even had shell fragments on our basement stairs. My grandmother knew how to tell fortunes with playing cards and she’d tell us nothing is going to happen to us. Everything is going to be all right.”
Gertrude Löhr had a four year old son, “I was terrified. I felt like a rat being smoked out of a hole. I remember sitting in the basement with my son on my lap, clinging to him for dear life.”
Then came the night of 27 July. This time it was 735 RAF bombers that flew in from the east and dropped 2,326 tons of bombs on an already burning city. After more than three days and nights of raids Hamburg’s emergency services were exhausted and unable to cope. Water mains had burst, and streets were still full of rubble, making reaching and tackling the growing number of fires impossible. It had been a hot summer and everywhere was tinder dry, and as the individual fires linked up the conflagration sucked the air from the surrounding area at hurricane force creating a firestorm that uprooted trees and raised the temperature to an astonishing 800 degrees Celsius in its centre.
15 year old Traute Koch was wrapped in a wet sheet by her mother in their air raid shelter, pushed out the door and told to run, “I hesitated at the door. In front of me I could see only fire, everything red, like the door to a furnace. An intense heat struck me. A burning beam fell in front of me but then it was whirled away
by a ghostly hand. I had the feeling I was being carried away by the storm.”
Another young Hamburg teenager saw the asphalt melt on the street she was running down, “There were people on the roadway, some already dead, some still alive but stuck in the asphalt, their feet had got stuck, they had put out their hands to try to get out again. They were on their hands and knees screaming.”
Ben Witter was still in the city and saw, “People running away, they were burning like torches. Because of the heat the bodies had shrunk, and we thought they were children, but they were adults.” Even those sheltering in the air raid bunkers weren’t saved, with thousands killed by carbon monoxide poisoning as the very oxygen around them was sucked away. They were later found still sitting on their bunker benches in serried ranks.
Aftermath
Uwe Köster survived and was part of the gruesome clear up, “We cleared out the corpses, sometimes the burned bodies of people in cellars as well as those on the streets. We stacked the bodies in 30 to 35 layers on top of each other. The air was absolutely still. We didn’t have any sun at all for three or four days.”
Meanwhile, Bomber Harris was determined to press on, rightly understanding that further attacks would devastate what remained of the city. On the night of 29 July another
786 bombers took off to hit Hamburg. Returning bomber crews were awed by the sight of the dying city as Maurice
Flower remembered, “We could see the fire from 150 miles away, we could see Hamburg burning. It was just awful, a terrible sight.”
A final major raid was launched on the night of 2 August, after a couple of days of poor weather, but ended up doing relatively little damage as an electrical storm scattered the bomber stream all over the sky. But the damage had already been done. Over half of Hamburg’s houses and apartments had been destroyed and 900,000 people made homeless. Even worse some 40,000 had been killed and another 125,000 injured, many with burns.
As a result, the city emptied, with refugees streaming out of the city to go and stay with friends and relatives all over Germany.
Irmgard Burmeister saw them leave, “An almost endless number of refugees began to pass by our house. The thing that impressed me the most was the total silence. They just kept passing by, not uttering a word.” A friend of her grandfather arrived at their house, “I will never forget the frightened look in his eyes. He had witnessed the inferno. ‘It’s all in ruins, everything is gone. Hamburg no longer exists.’ Was all he said.”
Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch said of Gomorrah, “What has happened in Hamburg has never happened before, not even during our attacks against Britain. These attacks strike deep at our nation’s morale. If we don’t succeed in smashing these terror attacks, very soon, then we must expect a very difficult situation to arise for Germany.”