Although the authorities in Rostock judged that the civil defence services had coped well with the consequences of the raid, the onset of ‘catastrophic air attacks’ prompted a fundamental overhaul of the way civil defence and post-raid welfare was organized. The driving force behind the change was the Party hierarchy, which understood that the social and psychological consequences of heavy bombing were likely to have wider ramifications for social cohesion and war-willingness. During 1942 the balance in the air-protection structure swung heavily towards the Party and away from the Air Ministry and the police. The key figure was the Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. In late April Hitler agreed to give him special responsibility as commissar for organizing immediate help measures for those areas where the local authorities could not cope. All local Party Gaue (and not the Regional Air Commands or the Order Police) were to notify Goebbels’ ministry at once if help were needed. Goebbels told the Gauleiter that the watchwords were ‘unity and planning’.76 The choice of the new commissar was not an obvious one and his actual powers, as so often in the Third Reich, were poorly defined, though he evidently benefited from direct and regular access to Hitler. Goebbels’ principal claim was his concern with monitoring and moulding popular opinion, which his local propaganda offices watched closely. Reports on raids were routinely sent to Goebbels’ office as Party Reich Leader of Propaganda, which left him better informed about the national picture than most other political or military leaders. Moreover, Goebbels was a Gauleiter himself, representing Berlin; his new office was designed to ensure that the local Party leadership should play a fuller part in managing bombed communities. His appointment confirmed the increasing ‘partification’ of the whole civil defence project.
The roots of this new configuration could be found much earlier in the war. The Party Chancellery, directed by Rudolf Hess, had a ‘Mobilization Department’ (Abteilung-M), which drew up guidelines for the role of Party organizations in the event of war. The NSV was detailed to take on responsibility for providing post-raid welfare, including evacuation, and to wear green armbands with ‘Luftschutz-NSDAP’ sewn on them, to show that they were independent of the air force or police. In autumn 1940 Martin Bormann, Hess’s deputy, drew up a list of nine civil defence activities formally under Göring’s authority, in which the Party claimed a role. They included controlling behaviour in shelters, checking on the blackout, supplying candidates for air-raid warden who possessed impeccable racial and Party credentials, and providing morale support when it was needed.77 These claims had at first a nominal value, given the limited raiding activity and the extensive civil defence organization already in place. But Party insinuation was insidious and remorseless. By the time Goebbels was granted his new powers, the Party had already made itself conspicuous in supplying SA and SS assistance when needed, Hitler Youth as messenger boys, the NSV as the organizers of evacuation, and the necessary pomp and ceremony at the burial of bomb victims. The post of Reich Defence Commissar (Reichsverteidigungs-Kommissar), established on 1 September 1939 and generally given to the local Gauleiter as a largely nominal title, was elevated by the war into an instrument for Party leaders to play a fuller part in home front mobilization. On 16 November 1942 the posts of commissar and regional Party leader were formally merged and the Gau became the administrative unit for the home front. The Gauleiter of Munich later recalled that from 1942 onwards his work came to consist almost entirely of ‘defence from the enemy air war, activation of civilian air protection’.78
The claims of the Party had the paradoxical effect of demilitarizing the home front, as the air force role was confined progressively to the more evidently military aspects of air defence. Goebbels was to be the direct beneficiary of this process, though Bormann, now director of the Party Chancellery following Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland in May 1941, resented Hitler’s choice and took every opportunity to increase his influence over post-raid policy. The other competitor was Göring, whose role as general overseer of air defence was challenged by Goebbels’ new powers. In May 1942 Goebbels, Göring and Wilhelm Frick, the Interior Minister representing the interest of the police and local authorities, drew up a formal document confirming the new pattern of responsibility between them. ‘Pure air defence’ was left in the hands of the Air Force and the police; all civil administrative tasks were the province of the Reich Defence Commissars (usually the local Gauleiter); the job of managing the care and morale of the population in the face of bombardment was the sole responsibility of the Party. Goebbels was confirmed in his new capacity as emergency commissar, for when the existing system could no longer cope.79 The arrangement made explicit the shift of responsibility towards the Party and the collapse of the Air Force monopoly, but the demarcation left a great many grey areas. In December 1942 Göring issued a further directive to try to make the set-up clearer: in the event of a catastrophic raid, beyond the scope of the Reich Defence Commissar or the Air Protection Leader, help should be requested from the Party Chancellery, the Propaganda Ministry and the Interior Ministry. But this arrangement merely confirmed a state of improvised confusion.80 At the beginning of 1943 Hitler finally agreed to set up an Inter-Ministerial Air Protection Committee (ILA), based in the Propaganda Ministry, with Goebbels as nominal head. The object was at last to create a single, national clearing-house for all emergencies, with no new powers and limited organization, but with a sufficient overview to be able to send resources in a crisis where and when they were needed.81
The struggle over competency between the power-brokers of the dictatorship proved less damaging than it might have been because intervention from the centre was confined principally to the most conspicuous and damaging raids, where the role of the Party or the political leadership could be effectively advertised. At local level the onset of heavy raiding provoked a greater effort to ensure that the local administration and Party organs were better prepared to meet the demand to provide effective welfare and emergency rations, re-house the homeless, and compensate those who had lost everything in the raids. The watchword was Einsatz, a difficult word to render in English, suggesting action that is decisive and purposeful. After the bombings of Lübeck and Rostock, cities were encouraged to develop an ‘action-mentality’ by creating an Einsatzstab (Action Staff) under a designated Einsatzführer (Action Leader), who was to be chosen from among the local air protection leaders as an individual of outstanding merit. The staff was to consist of representatives of all the local state and Party offices for welfare, food, building, repair, transport and local economy, but the Leader was the key figure, given temporary emergency powers to get help from within and outside the raided area and to apply it swiftly and ruthlessly to the catastrophe.82 ‘Self-protection’ was to be strengthened by creating local ‘self-protection squads’ (Selbstschutztruppen) run by yet another, lower-level Einsatzführer whose job was to tackle raids on streets and small communities in a more coordinated and vigorous way. An ‘action plan’ was made a legal requirement for all Einsatzführer in October 1942. In August 1943 service in a self-protection squad was made a legal obligation for every German citizen, man and woman.83 In practice, not everyone was required to serve, but the proportion could be very substantial. In the small Rhineland town of Bingen with a population of 16,600 people, 4,783, more than one quarter, were enrolled as active civil defenders.84
According to yet another Hitler decree, published in August 1943 after Operation Gomorrah, the aim of all the new emergency arrangements for coping with air raids was ‘the restoration of normal life as quickly as possible’.85 Though this was not easy in the few major cities where repeated heavy bombing began in 1943, the object of the new ‘action culture’ was to make sure that one way or another the problems of welfare, compensation, re-housing, damage repair and evacuation allowed an adequate community life to continue. A good example of how this worked was the post-raid activity in the Berlin suburb of Schöneberg, bombed heavily on 1–2 March 1943, leaving 11,000 temporaril
y homeless. They were gathered first in the 71 emergency rest centres, with room for between 25,000 and 40,000 people in converted cafés, schools, restaurants and boarding houses.86 Here they were given food, spirits, cigarettes, substitute ration cards and a provisional sum, in cash or vouchers, for the most urgent replacement clothing and household goods. Those who could not be placed with friends or relatives at once could be found substitute housing, particularly former Jewish homes, with priority for families with children whose houses had been completely destroyed. Evacuation was recommended only in exceptional circumstances, and then to areas if possible within the same urban region, or the same Gau. Over 7,000 were re-housed within two days. The salvaged goods had to be left in the street, clearly marked (to prevent looting), where they were collected in municipal street-cleaning lorries or military vehicles and stored in requisitioned warehouses or shops. Glass from the shattered windows was quickly cleaned up and returned to glass-makers for recycling.87
The guidelines for re-housing, house repair and compensation were laid down in a number of decrees issued by the Interior Ministry and the Organisation Todt in the course of 1941.88 In Schöneberg housing was tackled at once by a special unit (Baugruppe Pfeil) organized by the city mayor. The unit turned up the morning after a raid to classify all housing into four categories of totally destroyed, badly damaged, partially damaged and lightly damaged. The first had to be made secure, the second repaired if possible, the last two restored to a habitable state. The Interior Ministry instruction was to do no more than ensure that the buildings could be lived in – roofs covered over with boards or broken slates and tiles replaced.89 In the aftermath of the Berlin raid there were 300 roofers, 460 glaziers and 485 bricklayers at work at once, covering over roofs first to protect the rooms exposed to the elements, then covering windows and doors temporarily with card or wood, and covering damaged walls with a coat of paint instead of wallpaper. Though there were complaints about the standard, most of those rehabilitated, according to the official report on reconstruction, showed the necessary resoluteness in returning to homes that were now far less comfortable places to live.90 Most of the light damage from Allied bombing consisted of broken windows and damaged roofs. Three raids on Nuremberg in 1942 and 1943 destroyed 1.75 million square metres of glass and 2 million square metres of roofing; but out of 19,184 bomb-damaged buildings, only 662 were totally destroyed and 973 severely damaged, making it possible for those rendered homeless, as in Britain, to return to where they had lived after first-aid repairs were completed.91 It was calculated that 324,000 homes had been destroyed or badly damaged throughout Germany by November 1943, but by then 3,184,000 people had been successfully rehabilitated or re-housed.92
The most complex procedure was to provide compensating goods for those who had lost some or all of their possessions and to calculate the extent of war-damage compensation to which people were entitled. The evidence from Schöneberg shows that the population took this issue more seriously than any other and that it gave rise to a greater degree of friction.93 The procedures were time-consuming and the regulations irksome to those who saw themselves as victims. At the emergency centres, the bombed-out were given preliminary vouchers for clothes, shoes, soap and washing powder, without having to make a formal written application. Clothes included a suit or a dress, underwear, stockings, handkerchiefs and nightwear, and one pair of sturdy shoes. In March 1943 the welfare offices handed out 10,432 textile vouchers and 10,810 for shoes and 750 furniture certificates. So complex was the rationing system in Germany set up in September 1939 that bomb damage could destroy cards for household articles, furniture, coal, petrol, soap and tobacco, all of which had to be queued for, often for hours, in order to argue for a replacement. The new card or voucher was an entitlement only, whose redemption depended on the local supply of goods. Schöneberg was fortunate since there were stocks of second-hand goods and Jewish possessions, as well as goods from occupied or Axis Europe, France and Hungary in particular. In spring 1943 Hitler had ordered that labour and materials needed to overcome bomb damage and losses should be secured first from the occupied territories.94 Berlin still had a large number of small traders and manufacturers who could supply what else was needed, and the stocks used up in March 1943 were soon replenished.95
The claims for financial compensation were altogether more fraught. A report from the Schöneberg regional office explained that the officials and the claimants worked in different directions, the first seeking to limit what had to be paid out only to genuinely verifiable losses, the victims with an interest in setting their claim as high as they could. Forms had been distributed to householders so that they could list in detail all their possessions in anticipation of a raid.96 Some filled out the claim form in only the most general terms, others supplied a detailed description of what was lost including, at times, photographs of the missing objects. Where the owner had been killed, legatees gave their own description of what they had expected to inherit. The officials based their assessments on the credibility of the claimant, including estimates of social class and likely earnings, as a guide to what a claimant might possibly own. One Berlin toolmaker claimed 12,000 RM of furnishings from a one-room apartment, including 143 separate items; the claims office dismissed the claim and paid out 1,500 RM. A building engineer living in a four-room household with his wife and four children claimed a loss of 50,000 RM, including a table valued at 4,800 RM (around three times the annual wage of a semi-skilled worker); he was granted just 6,000 RM pending further investigation. The harassed office staff treated few claims as deliberately false, but the bombed-out all over Germany inflated the value of their losses once their possessions could no longer be checked.97 The total number of cases involved and the sums claimed represented a major administrative and financial effort for the state to cope with in the middle of a major war. In Nuremberg alone, there were 27,977 claims for compensation by spring 1943 amounting to 44.8 million marks; of this sum 8.8 million were paid out in cash, 14 million in kind.98 By late 1943 payments at national level were running at over 700 million RM a month; claims totalling 31.7 billion RM had been filed, of which 11.6 billion had already been paid out.99 These were sums that could never have been imagined when the initial commitment was made to pay for the direct costs of the bombing war.
The greatest test of the evolving civil defence and emergency structure came with the bombing of Hamburg in July and August 1943. The 212 small raids (and 782 air-raid alarms) up to July 1943 had given Hamburg more experience than most cities in coping with the consequences of bombing.100 The idea of an Action Staff for catastrophic raids had been pioneered in Hamburg. By July 1943 there was public shelter available for 378,000 people; attics had been cleared, fire-risk stocks had been stored safely, and a programme of fire-retarding wood treatment – the ‘Fire Protection Chemical Scheme’ – had been ordered in spring 1943 for completion by the summer. There was a large cohort of 9,300 Luftschutzpolizei, and a citywide fire-watching scheme, which involved 15,000 people in the dock area alone. There had been 11,000 demonstrations organized in the city on how to extinguish incendiary bombs. Some 70,000 men and women had been trained for first aid by the German Red Cross. Hamburg’s police president later in the year described the city as ‘one large Air Protection community’.101 The heavy British raids on other cities earlier in the year gave little indication of what Hamburg could expect in Operation Gomorrah. An attack on Stuttgart on 14–15 April had killed 118; a heavy raid on Dortmund on 28–29 May left 345 dead; another on Krefeld in June resulted in 149 deaths.102 Hamburg itself had suffered 626 deaths in 42 raids in 1941, 494 deaths in 15 raids in 1942, and 142 deaths in 10 small raids in 1943. The first reports to reach Berlin of the Hamburg bombing gave little indication of how much more serious the raids in Operation Gomorrah proved to be.103
Hamburg was not unprepared for its ordeal, but the scale of the three nights of attack on 24–25, 27–28 and 29–30 July overwhelmed the thousands of trained personnel. After declar
ing a state of emergency, the Reich Defence Commissar, Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann, called in mutual assistance from outside the city from as far away as Dresden. At the height of the crisis there were 14,000 firefighters, 12,000 soldiers and 8,000 emergency workers, but although they were able to achieve limited containment of the fire area, the conflagrations soon grew out of control, consuming everything in their path.104 The firestorm caused by the second raid fed on the oxygen in the thousands of cellars used as ‘air-protection rooms’, where people sat slowly asphyxiating from carbon monoxide poisoning or were burnt so completely that doctors afterwards had to estimate the number of dead by measuring the ash left on the floor. Others died with apparently no external injuries because their body temperature rose above 42 degrees centigrade, causing the body’s natural regulator to collapse from ‘over-warming’.105 By the end of the year it was estimated that 85 per cent of deaths in German cities were caused by fire rather than high-explosive bombs.106 The Hamburg police president later wrote that ‘speech is impotent’ to describe the scene that he confronted after the fire had ebbed away, but the description in his official report is vivid enough:
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