The regular bombing nevertheless forced the German government to accelerate the programme for better protection and to ensure regular welfare. Since the attacks were small and irregular, the costs could be absorbed with relative ease. From the start the government agreed that compensation would be paid for injuries or losses sustained as a result of enemy air action, perhaps unaware of what such a commitment might mean in the long term. After the first raid in mid-May 1940 the Interior Ministry reminded all local authorities that compensation for bomb damage, or loss of livelihood or removal of personal possessions, was a direct charge on the Reich.38 The question of loss of earnings was more difficult, since it would mean paying workers for doing nothing while they sat in the air-raid shelter, or took time off while their work premises were repaired. Random though British bombing was, the social geography of the raids showed that the key targets were industrial and port cities, and the majority of victims likely to be workers. The air-raid legislation of 1 September 1939 promised payment of 90 per cent of wages lost, but this had not anticipated the long periods of alarm when there were no attacks. One solution was to change the alarm system to ensure that as little time as possible was lost from productive work, and eventually the two-tier system of general alarm, followed by all-clear, was changed in favour of a series of step alarms in which the local civil defence would be notified first, followed by a ‘raid possible’ siren, then a general alarm. Industries were expected to work through the general alarm until a final six-minute warning was sounded to give workers time to get to the shelters.39
In summer 1940 it was decided that the 90 per cent wage compensation should be changed into an obligation to work extra time to make up for lost production or to help in repair and debris clearance after a raid, to make sure that workers were being paid for actual work. But this decision produced many anomalies and provoked working-class resentment, as had other restrictions on pay introduced with the onset of war.40 Salary-earners, for example, were paid 100 per cent loss of earnings, while in February 1941 the Ministry of Labour agreed that porters and ancillary staff were also entitled to pay during alarms, but could not be expected to make up lost time for non-productive work. By contrast, it was decided that home-workers were entitled to nothing since they could work extra hours when they chose.41 The consequence was that some workers were paid compensation for doing nothing whereas others were paid nothing and made to work extra hours. It was evident that the escalating air attacks in 1941 made working-class morale a critical issue. A meeting in October between the Labour Ministry, the giant Labour Front union (representing 26 million workers), the Propaganda Ministry and the Party Chancellery concluded that morale was more important and insisted that the Labour Ministry find ways of improving compensation and assistance for workers faced as a result of bombing with increased travel costs or short-term unemployment; though not before the Labour Ministry representative had argued that workers saved money sitting in the shelters because there was nothing for them to buy there.42 The issue remained unresolved, since firms were free to interpret themselves whether workers ought to be paid at all for interruption to their work or should earn only by working more. Pressure was applied increasingly by the Party through the local Gau Economic Offices to ensure that the law was not applied at the workers’ expense. By late 1943 there had been 19 different pieces of legislation to try to cope with the consequences of work interrupted by bombing.43
Anxieties about compensation for German workers and German households were not extended to Germany’s Jews. A decree in December 1940 instructed all local labour offices to ensure that no compensation for loss of earnings would be paid to Jewish workers on the grounds that the war ‘to a not inconsiderable extent can be traced back to the influence of World Jewry’.44 A second order on 23 July 1941 excluded German Jews or Jewish-owned businesses from making any claim for damage compensation under the ‘War Damage Order’.45 Efforts were made from early in the RAF campaign to help the bombed out (Obdachlose) by housing them in apartments owned by German Jews. In the Rhineland city of Soest the decision was taken in the late autumn of 1940, and although the Interior Ministry highlighted the possible legal problems with doing so, the policy of replacing Jewish householders with ‘Aryans’ became established by the time of the heavy raids in spring 1942.46 In Cologne the Jewish occupiers were removed to crude barracks while Jewish houses and apartments were redistributed. The Party Chancellery confirmed in April 1942 that if British raids continued, ‘we will pursue this measure completely and clear out all the Jewish homes’.47 By this stage the preparations were well under way for transporting Germany’s Jews to camps in the east and seizing the remaining Jewish housing and assets. Rules published in November 1941 made it possible to sell expropriated Jewish furnishings and possessions to survivors in bomb-damaged cities. Between October 1941 and March 1942, 60,000 German Jews were sent east, most to their deaths, and in the next three months a further 55,000.48
The bombing also forced the pace in providing more effective shelter and protection. Because of the poor accuracy of British bombing, many bombs fell in the open countryside or on villages, a result that had not been anticipated when planning air-raid protection. By the summer of 1940 it was evident that the emergency services would have to supply units to help with rescue, bomb disposal and repairs ‘even in small, or the smallest localities, and outside them’.49 Villages were helped by the local police, but the rural population was expected to form ‘rural air-protection communities’ as well, even in outlying areas with scattered homesteads. The blackout was strictly enforced in rural areas, though villagers could sometimes be the victims of bomb attacks on the many decoy sites set up across western Germany in country districts.50 For farmers, the Reich Air Protection Law provided a statutory veterinary first-aid chest, one for the first 10 animals, two for more than 20, and three for farms with over 40 horses, cattle or pigs.51 The destruction of housing, in town and countryside, was relatively small-scale in 1940 and 1941 because the RAF were not yet using incendiaries systematically on a large scale, but the regime was sensitive to the need to show that rehabilitation was an urgent priority. On 14 September 1940 the General Plenipotentiary for Construction, Fritz Todt, published a decree on repair to bomb-damaged housing, which gave it top ranking ahead of the list of urgent war-essential construction projects, as long as the repairs could be carried out quickly and the labour and materials found easily from local contractors. Todt’s deputy for construction in Berlin, Albert Speer, promised in December 1940 that all lightly damaged houses (windows, roofs, etc.) would be repaired in 36 hours, and all plasterwork repaired in four days. These were promises not difficult to fulfil as long as the damage remained modest.52
The onset of bombing highlighted particularly the inadequate protection offered by the converted air-raid room and the modest amount of public shelter. In Hamburg an emergency programme was started which saw the number of places in public shelters expand from 51,000 in April 1940 to 233,207 a year later; by the time of Operation Gomorrah, the bombing of the city in July 1943, around three-quarters of the cellars had been converted to air-raid rooms.53 In other cities, schemes were set up to strengthen the air-raid rooms by providing a reinforced ceiling, props and escape routes, but shortages of material and labour made it difficult to complete the work. In Münster around 5,000 cellars were improved between autumn 1940 and spring 1941, but a survey in early 1942 showed that still only 4.7 per cent of the population had rooms that were considered entirely safe in a raid.54 In Berlin in the autumn of 1940 only one-tenth of the capital’s population had air-raid rooms, partly on the assumption that it was relatively safe from long-range bomb attack, which it was not. Following the first raids on the capital in August 1940, Hitler ordered a programme to build between 1,000 and 2,000 bunkers in the capital, each capable of holding 100 people. He told the air-protection authorities that ‘damage to property was bearable, but in no case were human losses’. Every house had to have its own air-protection roo
m, if possible with light, heating and somewhere to sleep, and the cost would now be borne by the state.55 On 10 October Hitler finally published an ‘Immediate Programme’ empowering the Air Ministry to undertake an extensive programme to ensure that the urban population had access to a proper air-raid room, as well as bunkers and shelters for businesses, schools, museums, galleries and ministries.56 The cost in labour, cement and iron in an economy already facing rigorous restrictions and priorities proved impossible to meet and in mid-1941 and again in December that year, work on larger bunkers was curtailed where possible in favour of blast-proof trenches and reinforced cellars.57
Nevertheless, concrete bunkers were built both above and below ground in the major threatened cities, particularly in the Ruhr-Rhineland. In Cologne a total of at least 58 were built between 1940 and 1942, 15 of them concentrated in the inner city centre.58 In all, some 76 cities undertook to construct a total of 2,055 bunker shelters between November 1941 and 1943, of which 1,215 were finished by early 1942, though not yet fully equipped. Shortages of material and the competing claims of armaments production, the Atlantic Wall defences (which consumed twice as much concrete as the bunker programme), and the giant concrete pens for submarines, meant that much of the programme remained incomplete by the time the heaviest raids began in 1943.59 Even this number of new shelters could provide only a fraction of the population with protection. The first wave of building up until summer 1941 provided places for 500,000; a second, smaller wave resulted in places for 740,000 by summer 1943, or only 3.87 per cent of the population in the 76 cities involved. There were in addition converted cellars and ‘air-raid rooms’ for 11.6 million, though many were scarcely bombproof. For millions of Germans there was no immediate prospect of secure shelter, particularly in the cities ranked in Zone II and III, which became the object of heavy attacks in the last year of the war.60
A few weeks before the ‘Immediate Programme’, Hitler had also ordered the construction of six vast ‘Flak-towers’ in Berlin. The extraordinary scale of the buildings appealed to his sense of the architecturally gigantic, like the plans for the rebuilding of the capital. Their solid design, modelled on a towered Gothic castle, was deliberately intended to express both grim defiance and grotesque physical power, a blend of function and ideology, ‘like a fantastic monstrosity,’ one eyewitness wrote, ‘from a lost world, or another planet’.61 They were planned to provide not only enhanced anti-aircraft fire but protection for up to 20,000 people, artworks, museum collections, essential defence services, hospitals and a Gestapo office. Towering above the surrounding Berlin townscape, coated in green paint to make them less visible from the sky, the colossal towers were prestige buildings. Their cost in labour and resources was prodigious, the ‘Berlin-Zoo’ tower consisting of almost 200,000 tons of concrete, stone and gravel. The first was completed by April 1941, the second by October and the third by spring 1942. Hitler approved two more tower sets to guard the port in Hamburg; one was finished by October 1942, a second just before ‘Gomorrah’, in July 1943. Between them they could hold 30,000 people. Two more tower pairs were built in Vienna in 1943 and 1944, capable of holding not only the cultural treasures of the city, but at least 40,000 of its inhabitants. The Vienna towers were to be literally monumental; the ornamental marble to cover the exterior walls was quarried in France but in the end could not be shipped because of the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944.62
The development of effective protection and compensation was a reaction to the onset of British bombing, rather than a result of advanced planning for the possibility. Until well into 1941, while there was still a prospect that Britain would abandon the war, the plans for civil defence might still be regarded as temporary; the war against the Soviet Union made it clear that Hitler had abandoned the prospect of defeating Britain quickly and that the bombing offensive was likely to increase in intensity before German forces were free once again to concentrate on the British enemy. This strategic reorientation made it more important for the German state and the Party to be able to provide sufficient support to prevent bombing from damaging domestic support for the war effort. In 1940 only 950 people had been killed in all the bomb attacks (which suggests that the air-raid cellar offered better protection than the authorities feared). In 1941 the level of civilian casualties and damage to property began steadily to increase. In Münster there were 24 raids between July and December 1940, which killed 8 and wounded 59; just three raids in July 1941 killed 43 and injured 196. In Hamburg 69 attacks in 1940 had resulted in 125 deaths and 567 injured; a further 143 raids up to the time of ‘Gomorrah’ in July 1943 killed 1,431, injured 4,657, and left 24,000 temporarily homeless.63 In 1941 an estimated 5,029 were killed and perhaps 12,000 injured in a total of 295 raids across Germany. Small though these statistics are by comparison with the casualties of the Blitz, it represented the first serious loss of civilian life for a population more accustomed to the roll-call of the military dead.64
During 1941 the pattern of RAF bombing also changed. From spring onwards bombers carried a higher proportion of incendiaries and began to concentrate them more effectively. Training in fighting incendiaries had been part of routine civil defence education, but now detailed pamphlets were issued on every type of British incendiary device with instructions on how to tackle them, including the recommendation to wear a gas mask. The schedule for ‘self-protection’ classes was changed so that almost all the practical elements were devoted to fighting fire and extinguishing incendiaries. Training centres had an ‘air-protection exercise house’ where trainees learned to overcome any anxieties about tackling a real fire by exposure to a controlled blaze.65 Göring put his name to a list of ten principles to observe when combating incendiaries, under the slogans ‘Incendiary bombs must be tackled immediately!’ and ‘Everyone fights for his own property and goods!’66 A greater effort was made to get householders to remove clutter and stores from all attic spaces to prevent the rapid spread of fires. Hitler Youth groups and other Party organizations were detailed to carry out house-to-house clearance of all unnecessary stocks and furnishings, while local civil defence authorities were instructed to remove stored grain and foodstuffs from endangered storerooms. Air-raid wardens were authorized to set up small gangs of two or more residents to go out, even before the all-clear, to check on fires and try to get them under control. Anyone who refused to help was liable in the worst cases, according to the Air Ministry, to a spell in a concentration camp. No house was to be left empty and unwatched.67 In March 1941 Hitler’s Supreme Headquarters issued an order to local military commanders to establish an Armed Forces Emergency Service to provide military assistance in cases of major raids where the local civil defence and police units were not sufficient to cope with the scale of the damage or where fires threatened to destroy militarily important stocks or buildings. Armed forces stationed at home were to become an important source of emergency assistance over the following three years.68
The impact on popular opinion of the increased bombing is difficult to gauge in a state where the media was centrally controlled and public expressions of anxiety were likely to bring severe reprimand. In the spring of 1941 the authorities began to think about more formal programmes of evacuation from the most bomb-threatened regions, though the preference was for movement to safer suburban areas of the same city, or to the immediate rural hinterland. It was only available for women, children and the elderly, but not for any German Jews, for whom no official provision was allowed.69 Evacuation remained voluntary and was presented to the population as a welfare measure, run exclusively by the Party through the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV), another vast Party organization, with 15 million members, mostly volunteers and predominantly female. The first wave of evacuation from Berlin, Hamburg and the Ruhr cities involved only a small fraction, perhaps 10 per cent, of the children and mothers who qualified. Most parents preferred to wait and see what the risks were or were unenthusiastic about handing their children over to Party
organizations.70 The SD Reports for 1941 show a declining concern among the wider public over the air raids, but regular interest in the wider news of the war, particularly the successful campaigns against Yugoslavia and Greece and then against the Soviet Union from June 1941, all of which once again raised the possibility of a rapid end to the conflict, which would make all the effort at air-raid protection suddenly redundant. Bombing nevertheless persisted whatever was happening elsewhere in Europe. In July 1941 von Schröder sent a report to all Luftschutzbund officials praising the ‘decisive bravery’ and ‘will to resist’ of the German population subjected to bombing. The aim, he continued, was to overturn the ‘legend’ that the English held the record for steadfastness by demonstrating to the world the inner resolve of the German people.71
‘GREAT CATASTROPHES’: 1942–3
The German home front was suddenly rocked in March 1942 by the first concentrated and heavy incendiary raid on the coastal town of Lübeck. Two-thirds of the 400 tons were firebombs, dropped from only 2,000 feet on the old city centre, consisting of half-timbered houses. Rumours immediately circulated in the surrounding area that 3,000 had been killed and 30,000 rendered homeless (just over 300 died in the raid, the worst casualties so far); reports to Berlin observed an immediate improvement in air defence discipline in other cities.72 The raid was swiftly followed by a series of devastating incendiary attacks on the port of Rostock, which produced for the first time an outcome classified under the term ‘great catastrophe’.
The first attack on Rostock, on 23–24 April, was relatively limited. The Gauleiter reported to the Party chancellery that the population was calm and the raid well under the control of Party and state authorities. But three more raids in quick succession imposed more serious dislocation, damaging three-quarters of Rostock’s 12,000 buildings. A state of emergency was declared and troops and SA men were brought in from the surrounding area. By the third day 100,000 of the population had been evacuated or had fled into the surrounding countryside. Rumours began to spread that Sweden had suddenly declared war on Germany and bombed Rostock as the first act.73 When on the fourth day an alarm went off in error in the afternoon, the population began to panic and armed SS men were called in to make sure order could be maintained. Two looters were caught and one condemned to death within a day. Loudspeaker vans toured the area to call for calm while supplies of chocolate and butter (both commodities that had almost disappeared) were handed out from stocks found hoarded in the city. Fifteen military field kitchens were brought in to hand out hot meals, while an emergency supply column with 100 tons of food was sent to the stricken city from the ‘catastrophe stores’ kept for just such an occasion.74 By 2 May the population was starting to return to collect goods stacked in the street while groups of artisans were brought in to begin work on reroofing and reglazing damaged buildings to make them habitable again. It was observed that among the 165 dead were six Hitler Youth, eight local National Socialist political leaders and three SA men. The regional authorities found little evidence of ‘hostile opinion against Party or state’. Their aim was rapidly to recreate ‘the normal conditions of daily life in every area’.75
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