The streets were covered with hundreds of corpses. Mothers with their children, youths, old men, burnt, charred, untouched and unclothed, naked with a waxen pallor like dummies in a shop window, they lay in every posture, quiet and peaceful or cramped, the death-struggle shown in the expression on their faces.107
By the end of November 1943, records had been compiled to confirm 31,647 dead, of which only 15,802 could be identified; a further 2,322 were known to have died outside the city. The final death toll will never be known with certainty, but it is generally assumed to be between 34,000 (shown by police records) and 40,000 (the figure widely used in Germany before the end of the war). The Hamburg Fire Department calculated that all the wartime bombing in Hamburg, from 1940 to 1945, resulted in the deaths of 48,572 people.108
The aftermath of the raids saw an awful calm descend on the damaged city. One million people fled unorganized over the course of the week and had to be absorbed into the surrounding countryside and small towns; 315,000 houses and apartments were destroyed or badly damaged, 61 per cent of the city. Over the course of the war 902,000 people in Hamburg lost all their possessions, including the novelist Hans Nossack, who by chance had gone to a summer cottage outside the city just before the raids began. He watched the columns and truckloads of refugees, some still in their nightwear: ‘They brought with them an uncanny silence … crouched and remote … No lamenting anywhere, no tears.’ Nossack returned to the city a few days later, losing his way through the ruined landscape, and the swarms of rats and flies, ‘insolent and fat’.109 The heat that had allowed the firestorm to take hold persisted after the bombing. Another eyewitness, Gretl Büttner, found the contrast uncanny between a deep blue sky dotted with pretty white clouds and the ‘image of unending misery and terrible devastation’, made starker by the fickle weather. She joined hundreds of others searching through the corpses, laid out in neat rows in squares free of debris, to try to find her companions.110 The police set up a record-card index divided into four categories: identified and registered dead, unknown bodies and their place of discovery and burial, property salvaged and assigned to bodies, and articles found but unclaimed. Any goods that were not claimed were sold second-hand to the homeless. There were hundreds of orphaned children, or children separated from their parents, who had to be identified and housed. In the aftermath of the Hamburg bombings the Inter-Ministerial Committee made it compulsory for all children up to age four to wear a wooden or cardboard tag with their name, date of birth and address.111
The most urgent need in Hamburg in the first days after the firestorm was to supply clean drinking water and to avert a health disaster as refugees began to return to the devastated areas and in some cases to reoccupy the ruined remains of their homes. The drinking-water system was destroyed in the raids and regular water sources contaminated. The emergency services brought in disinfected street-cleaning lorries filled with fresh spring water immediately the bombing had finished. Water lorries were sent from as far afield as Stettin, Breslau, Berlin and Leipzig, mostly cleaned and converted petrol-tankers. The level of hygiene was poor and the population was warned to boil water even from the lorries. Two days after the last raid the local Hygiene Institute laboratory was working again, monitoring the quality of water from the main springs and the wells which were opened up for use. Epidemic illness was avoided.112 The medical conditions in the city were nevertheless far from ideal. Instead of the usual 20,000 hospital beds there were now only 8,000 following the destruction of 24 hospitals. Emergency medical stations were set up to give immediate treatment. The many corpses were covered in quicklime and buried in mass graves, or doused with petrol and burnt.113 The most damaged areas of the city were walled up to prevent people returning to areas where there was a risk to health; buildings which had been checked for bodies and cleared were marked with a blob of green paint.114 Much of the gruesome work was carried out by camp prisoners whose survival worried the authorities less. Looters were few since the penalties were severe. By 5 August the first seven had been sentenced to death; in total, 31 cases were tried in the four months following the raids and 15 looters executed.115
Operation Gomorrah represented a profound challenge to German society and the German war effort but not one that could not in the end be met. Hermann Göring visited Hamburg on 6 August to an apparently enthusiastic welcome, though informers also heard widespread criticism of his leadership of the air force. The SD Report following the raids spoke of the ‘exceptional shock effect’ across the whole country, but also recorded the still widespread belief that Germany had the means to ‘end the war victoriously’.116 Albert Speer famously recalled in his memoirs his claim at the time that after six more Hamburgs, Germany would be finished. But he also remembered Hitler’s reply: ‘You’ll straighten it out again.’117 Following the raids, Speer was authorized by Hitler to set up yet another emergency organization based on three Air Raid Damage Staffs stationed in Hamburg, Berlin and Stuttgart. In the event of a new catastrophe, he would move in mobile columns of workers, relief supplies and equipment to get workers provided for as soon as possible and damaged industry and utilities working again.118 Over the course of the year following Gomorrah, 50,000 emergency homes were built for Hamburg’s workforce. Though small (between 30 and 40 square metres) and crudely built, the new housing clustered near the factories, which supplied the workforce with subsidized electricity at one fifth of the regular price.119 The number of households in Hamburg fell from 500,000 to 300,000, reducing pressure on local amenities and housing so that within months around 90 per cent of the remaining population could be accommodated in regular housing.120 The social consequences of the raids, which had killed around 2.4 per cent of the city’s population, were gradually absorbed as services were restored, the rationing system reinstituted, and urgent house repair completed.
There were important lessons to be learned from the worst of Germany’s air raids. Although he concluded that the city’s civil defence system was basically sound, the police president added 20 pages of helpful advice to his report on practical and technical improvements to aspects of air-raid protection. His most urgent recommendation was to ensure that there were adequate escape routes, known to all shelter users, to prevent the mass deaths that had occurred in apparently safe air-raid rooms. The problems this presented were advertised in a Luftschutzbund report in July 1943 about a woman who succeeded in the nick of time in saving her fellow-shelterers:
There was darkness in the cellar. We were all thrown on top of each other. The light failed. If we had only put ready an axe for opening up the break-through at a fixed point on the wall, we would have saved ourselves fearful minutes of alarm. We found the axe only after a good quarter of an hour. As the air in the cellar quickly became worse, I bashed at the break-through like someone possessed. Now it got its revenge, because we had never bothered particularly about the added bit of wall. Only after 20 minutes had I cut a hole just large enough to slip through.121
In the months after the bombing of Hamburg, air-protection instructions sent out monthly by the Air Ministry to local police authorities emphasized repeatedly the need to keep cellar shelters clear of obstacles, with a clearly marked break-through point, made of shallow mortar. More difficult was the realization that the constant repetition of the slogan earlier in the war that ‘the air-protection room is the safest place’ was no longer always the case. Air-raid wardens and Action Leaders were now encouraged to teach their communities the right moment to leave a shelter if a fire threatened to run out of control. When leaving a cellar in a firestorm, people were advised to wear a coat soaked with water and a damp hood. A coat, it was claimed, was more difficult for the fiery wind to tear off the body.122
After the experience of Hamburg, priority was given to finding more effective ways to prevent or to fight a firestorm, challenging though this was. Civil defence and firefighting units were instructed to start attacking fires as soon as they appeared, even during the raid, since casualties were
certain to be lower than they would be once a firestorm took hold. ‘The first half hour is of decisive importance in the development of fires,’ ran the Air Ministry instructions. ‘It is possible to prevent the genesis of a major conflagration, under circumstances where the fires started by the bombs are extinguished along whole streets.’123 If a firestorm took hold, firefighters were told to concentrate on the area around the edges, where buildings were not yet completely on fire, in order to contain it; at the same time they were encouraged to search for pathways through the waves of fire which could be opened up to allow some of the trapped inhabitants to make their escape. In Hamburg, few of the population engulfed by the hurricane of fire survived relatively unscathed in blastproof surface shelters.124 All self-protection leaders were charged with making sure that householders in every building or apartment kept adequate quantities of water available to tackle a small fire before it spread. The more water stored, the better; use was to be made of ‘all available containers whatever, not only buckets, pails, bathtubs and rain barrels, but even washbasins, washtubs etc.’ Water could even be removed from central-heating systems.125 Each air-protection room now had to contain its own supplies of water and sand. Self-protection units also had to appoint groups to go out during a raid to spot fires and to tackle them at once; empty buildings were no longer obliged to observe the blackout, so that fires could more easily be identified through the uncovered windows. ‘Fires,’ ran one piece of Luftschutzbund advice, ‘always look much worse than they are, and are much easier to extinguish than appears in the first moment.’126
How effective civilians were in tackling a fire clearly varied from case to case, and it placed a heavy responsibility on householders, whose first thought was often for their own family and possessions. A Cologne journalist recorded in his diary how well his neighbours coped with the 1,000-bomber raid in May 1942: ‘The incendiaries which clattered down around our house: one on the balcony of our neighbour Feuser, immediately extinguished by our neighbour Brassart, one in front of the garage of our neighbour Uhlenbruck, which the coal merchant snatched up, one by the garage of neighbour Gessert, which the householder put out.’127 For the regular fire service, the onset of heavy firebombing raids placed a strain on units that were already depleted by regular culls of manpower for the armed forces. In September 1943 a second national inspector was appointed for the fire service, Hans Rumpf, who made it his job to visit more than 150 fire-service units over the following year, checking their equipment and practices. The system depended increasingly on volunteer firefighters, around 1.7 million by 1944. After the heavy fire raids in 1943, the local volunteers were organized in ‘firefighting emergency units’ so that they could be summoned at once from the surrounding area to help with fires in the major cities, an estimated 700 units made up of 100,000 firefighters. They were all brought under police jurisdiction, and those who were also members of the SS were permitted to wear the familiar silver runes on their uniform. The numbers of German men in the service fell steadily, so that during 1943 it became necessary to recruit foreign workers – Poles, Czechs and Ukrainians – into the fire service. In Hamburg by the end of the war around one-quarter of the regular fire service was made up of Ukrainians. A more radical departure was the call in April 1943 for women to volunteer for the fire service, not only in auxiliary roles but as regular firefighters. From October 1943 they could be subject to compulsory mobilization and by autumn 1944 an estimated 275,000 female firefighters, aged between 18 and 40, took their part in combating Allied incendiarism.128 The popular myth that German women did nothing more than guard hearth and home during the war is demonstrably untrue for this most dangerous of activities.
Hamburg also signalled the onset of widespread urban evacuation following the first two years of war in which it had been discouraged or temporarily indulged. The veiled evacuation permitted under the Kinderlandverschickung organization tailed off during 1942 and 1943; from a peak of over 160,000 children in organized camps in July 1941, there were only 40,000 by May 1942, and a similar number in spring 1944. The peak figure accounted for only 2 per cent of all eligible 10 to 14-year-olds. Most stayed for no more than a few months in the Hitler Youth camps before returning home because the accommodation was not suitable for winter; mothers and younger children sent away to the country also stayed for short periods or tried to find friends or relatives to stay with as an alternative to close supervision by the National Socialist People’s Welfare. Altogether the Party organizations accounted for around 2 million temporary refugees from the cities, but not for a system of permanent evacuation.129 In July 1942 local authorities were reminded that ‘re-housing’ (rather than evacuation) would be approved and covered by public funds only if it was necessary to remove the population from areas of severe bomb damage or unexploded ordnance, or in cases where population transfers were socially useful, and only with Göring’s approval.130 In February 1943 Hitler finally agreed that whole school classes could be evacuated from danger areas, but insisted that parents should have the choice whether or not to split the family. Numbers of schoolchildren formally evacuated remained small. In August 1943 in Berlin out of 260,000 eligible schoolchildren, only 32,000 were in organized evacuation, 132,000 placed with relatives or acquaintances.131
Only in the spring of 1943, with the onset of the heavy bombing of the Ruhr-Rhineland, did evacuation begin on any scale. On 19 April the Interior Ministry published a decree on organized evacuation (Umquartierung), either to accommodation in the same city, or in the rural hinterland, or, for the population not essential for the war effort, transfer to a more distant and safer region.132 There were no firm plans in place to cope with the growing stream of refugees from the heavily bombed areas who were evacuating themselves. To avoid a growing chaos, the Interior Ministry finally published in July 1943 a list of city populations scheduled for evacuation and quotas for the regions (based on the Party Gaue) where the evacuees – mainly the old and the very young – would be sent. It was the crisis in Hamburg that shocked the German population into greater acceptance of evacuation as a clear necessity. Up until June 1943 the German railway authorities estimated that no more than 140,000–150,000 people had been moved under formal schemes to more distant areas; by the end of 1943 more than 2 million people had been transferred under official programmes.133 The immediate evacuation of 900,000 from Hamburg was a result of the panic that occurred as Operation Gomorrah intensified. By the end of September 1943, 545,000 had been settled in regions across Germany, more than one-quarter in the neighbouring rural areas of Schleswig-Holstein, almost one-third in and around the south German town of Bayreuth.134 The firestorm in Hamburg provoked widespread fear that Berlin would be next. From a marked reluctance to accept transfer away from the city, Berliners now flooded out, 691,000 by mid-September. Around 1.1 million altogether left the German capital, one-quarter of the pre-war population.
The urban exodus provoked widespread problems, not least because it had not been systematically planned for, as it had been in Britain, and finding and allocating spare accommodation – often just a room in a village house – had to be improvised at short notice. There were obvious sources of friction between a small-town and rural population, not yet much exposed to the physical effects of the bombing war, and an urban population used to different standards or from a very different social milieu. A report sent to the Party Chancellery from Upper Silesia in May 1943 highlighted some of these issues:
The attitude of these racial comrades towards the guest region appears incomprehensible, for it must be observed that at the moment the women, scarcely having set foot on the soil of Upper Silesia, exclaim: ‘If I have to come to a nest like this, then I’d rather go back to a heap of ruins’; another woman declared, ‘I am surprised that the sluttish wives that crawl around here can still attract men’ … The Germans from the west have often criticized the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting with the remark that people don’t greet each other like that in the old Reich.135
; In August 1943 Goebbels’ Inter-Ministerial Committee sent recommendations out to all Gauleiter to combat the ‘spiritual depression’ evident among the evacuee populations in their new surroundings, including the provision of a well-heated community room, with a radio, games, magazines and newspapers from the evacuated cities, as well as film shows, using equipment salvaged from bombed cinemas.136 But the temptation to return home was strong. By the end of November 1943, 217,000 Berliners had returned despite efforts of the authorities to use compulsory ration-card registration in the evacuation areas as a means of ensuring that the rail network would not be overburdened with those who chose to return. In some areas the quota for evacuees from the major cities had to compete with local evacuation from small towns and cities not yet threatened. In Württemberg in southern Germany, out of 169,000 evacuees in February 1944, at least 52,000 (and perhaps as many as half) had abandoned the region’s own towns for safety in the countryside. In other areas, the number of evacuees threatened to overwhelm small communities, which were expected to accommodate evacuee populations that were not far short of the number of permanent residents. In some cases, an apparently safe rural retreat was bombed anyway by aircrew who could not see where they were aiming, making both inhabitants and evacuees into refugees together.137
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