The evacuation crisis following Operation Gomorrah also exposed the serious state of the German medical service as it wrestled to cope with a much-reduced medical profession, the destruction of hospitals and clinics, and a sudden increase in the number of casualties, many of them serious, brought about by the intensified bombing. After the Hamburg firestorm, many doctors and nurses left with the evacuees; clinics and medical practices were destroyed, leaving doctors with few alternatives but to find occupation away from the stricken city. When evacuation set in elsewhere, doctors were among those who accompanied the transferred communities. By late August an estimated 35–40 doctors a day were leaving Berlin, some with the evacuees, some with the 11,500 bedridden patients who were transferred to hospitals in safer areas.138 The evacuation from the Ruhr-Rhineland had been carried out too quickly to match medical needs to the evacuee community, and since the majority were children, old people and women, many of them pregnant, the need for doctors, child nurses, and midwives was more rather than less urgent. In the reception areas the problem was made worse by the fact that the armed forces had taken many of the doctors from the zones classified II or III, not having realized the extent of the later bombing threat.139 The aim of the Reich Health Chief, Leonardo Conti (one of those responsible for the T4 ‘euthanasia’ programme), was to try to keep an acceptable proportion between the population and the number of doctors, but by October 1943 the profession was down to 35,000 for the whole population, from a pre-war level of 80,000. Around 5,500 were too old to practise effectively and 3,883 died between 1939 and 1942, some in military service. The ideal of one doctor for every 2,000 or 2,500 people could not be met, and of those available, many were themselves the victims of overwork, tiredness and illness. For evacuees Conti’s aim was only one doctor for every 10,000.140
The onset of heavy bombing made it necessary to find a solution or risk a breakdown of effective medical services. Military casualty rates rose sharply during 1943 and 1944, making it more necessary to find ways to rationalize the civilian system. Lorries and vans were requisitioned as less than adequate ambulances, while efforts were made to find hotel or guest-house accommodation to use as hospitals. Doctors were ordered to place their instruments and medicines in bomb-safe basements every evening to avoid damage, while equipment from ruined clinics was given or sold to doctors still practising.141 The German Red Cross, which controlled most of the ambulance service, instructed local branches to set up an emergency controller in major cities, with responsibility to call in emergency medical columns, prepared in advance with lorries, temporary barracks, beds, stretchers, sanitary materials and water filters, and a staff of one or two doctors and up to six nurses. Most bomb victims who survived were only lightly injured, a great many with eye injuries from glass, smoke, soot and dust from debris. It was decided that these walking wounded would have to be treated in first-aid centres rather than hospitals, which would be used for the serious cases. Operations were suspended for hopeless cases so that resources could be devoted to those who might survive.142 The main shortage was hospital space, since both military and civilian victims competed for this. In August 1941 Hitler authorized construction of emergency hospitals in bomb-threatened areas at the expense of the state.143 The scheme made slow progress and in May 1943 Hitler approved the appointment of one of the doctors on his staff, Karl Brandt, as General Commissar for Sanitary and Health Issues, with responsibility for creating additional emergency hospital space and planning its distribution. Conti immediately objected, since Brandt’s appointment trespassed directly on his own role, but the purpose of the new appointment was to focus on hospital beds rather than areas of general medical policy. Brandt immediately bustled about planning 19 new hospital sites and 54,000 more hospital beds, but the ‘Brandt Action’ cut across existing planning, creating, in Conti’s words, ‘a permanent state of chaos’. Allocation of hospital space continued on an improvised basis.144 The one area where extra provision proved unnecessary was psychiatric casualty. As in Britain, the assumption at first was that bombing was bound to increase the degree of serious mental disorder, particularly as many of those subjected to bombing were female. Yet it soon became clear that although fear and nervous anxiety were widespread, this did not lead to evident psychotic states. Psychiatric casualty was generally nursed in private. Only after the war were the traumatic consequences of exposure to the bombing threat eventually observable.145
Along with the evacuees came not only problems of welfare and medical provision but a treasure-trove of rumours spread by an urban population that suddenly found itself the centre of attention in the reception areas. Rumours performed a number of functions: they gave the evacuees a sense of temporary importance as they regaled their hosts with overblown accounts of the horrors of being bombed; they were a safety valve for people whose opportunity for criticizing the authorities was severely circumscribed; and they acted as an instant form of information and communication for communities who were starved of anything other than the official line peddled by German propaganda. Responsibility for controlling and combating rumours lay with Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. As in Britain during the Blitz, the decision about how much information to release was a difficult one, not only because the effect on the public had to be monitored, but because hard information could be used by the enemy. The heavy raids on the Ruhr-Rhineland in spring 1943 immediately opened up, according to the Party propaganda office, ‘the worst outcome, a flood of rumours’.146 In areas that had not been bombed, rumours often reinforced a self-interested sense of immunity. Common rumours centred on the invulnerability of a region thanks to unspecified British interests in leaving it intact, or the depth of industrial and urban smog covering the area, or the excessive distance from British bases. Others focused on the most likely time to be bombed – on Fridays, on national festivals, on Hitler’s birthday, on days specified in Allied leaflets.147 One rumour involved lurid tales, which spread across Germany, of people stuck in melted asphalt and burned alive, or ignited by some form of phosphorous rain, half-truths from the sight of those struggling against the firestorm.148
In other cases rumours took on a more solid shape. In Munich following a heavy raid in September 1942, strong rumours were overheard, first that it was Germany’s fault that civilian bombing had begun in the first place; second, and more significant, the view that bombing was God’s punishment for having ‘pushed the Jews over the frontier and thrown them into poverty’.149 In July 1943 the rumour took root that volcanoes were to be bombed to bring about the end of the world. Rumours about the apocalypse were, Goebbels thought, quite understandable when faced with the sight of dead children laid out after a raid, but had to be contested nonetheless.150 One child, hearing adults talking about ‘the end’ in a shelter, was unsure whether they meant the end of the war or in fact ‘the end of the world’.151 The summer of 1943 encouraged a sense of extremes. The news from Hamburg, which reached Bavaria in August, was, wrote one diarist, ‘beyond the grasp of the imagination … streets of boiling asphalt into which the victims sank … 200,000 dead’. He witnessed a group of Hamburg refugees trying to force their way into a railway car, until one battered suitcase carried along by ‘a half-crazed woman’ dropped open to reveal clothes, a toy and the shrivelled, carbonized body of a child. He reflected that the terrible news from Hamburg meant the end of the old world for good: ‘this time those riders now saddling their black steeds are none other than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’.152
The issue of rumours was bound up with the more profound question of how to sustain popular commitment to the war effort and avoid more serious social or political crisis. These issues came to the forefront only in 1943 when casualty lists grew longer and the means to obstruct Allied bombing became clearly ineffectual. In the Ruhr-Rhineland in spring 1943 the first evidence of possible social crisis emerged as the authorities struggled to cope with homelessness and temporary unemployment. Information fed into the Propaganda Ministry highlighted a growin
g sense of desperation. The raid on Duisburg on 19–20 March 1943 left thousands homeless, destroyed the city’s major department stores, and left just two restaurants still functioning for 200,000 people. The local population complained that the promise of revenge against British cities had not been met while the Ruhr was reaching breaking point: ‘We see no end. We cannot keep this up for long. How will it go?’153 Even Goebbels was affected by the evidence of the first really sustained bombing campaign. On 13 March he wrote in his diary that ‘Air warfare is at present our greatest worry. Things simply cannot go on like this.’154 The difficulty for those charged with the psychological welfare of the population – the Party called it Menschenführung – was to separate out the different factors affecting the public mood, of which bombing was just one. In February 1943 Goebbels had delivered his famous speech about total war in Berlin to a selected Party audience, an oration designed to reinvigorate the war-willingness of the population after the defeat at Stalingrad. But its impact was limited and failed to address the question of how to cope with the consequences of air attack upon morale, though the speech was popular with the armed forces, who wanted the civilian population to grasp the true dimensions of the conflict.155 The SD Reports showed that some of the population blamed the intensified bombing on Goebbels’ speech, which seemed to be an invitation to the enemy to wage unrestricted war against the German people. Resentment against Berlin as the source of the ‘total war’ idea provoked a verse that soon had wide currency in western Germany: ‘Lieber Tommy fliege weiter/wir sind alle Bergarbeiter./Fliege weiter nach Berlin/die haben alle “ja” geschrien’ [‘Dear Tommy fly on further/we are all miners here./Fly further to Berlin/they have all screamed “yes” ’].156
From spring 1943 onwards the regime for moulding opinion in Germany struggled to find a way to influence the response to bombing in ways that were more positive for the German war effort. Rumours were tackled by insinuating SA or Party officials into crowds and queues with instructions to challenge the substance of rumours; some rumours were deliberately started by propaganda officials to counter a local mood of depression or hopelessness; home intelligence regularly recommended tackling rumours at source by publicly announcing their false nature and providing some nuggets of more plausible information.157 The difficult thing was to gauge how much hard information should be given out. The formal policy, approved by the High Command, was to announce no details about the number of casualties and the damage to buildings. In March 1943 a brief but clear communiqué was given about a raid on Berlin, immediately winning wide public approval.158 But only in the case of the raid on the Rhineland dams were precise casualty figures given, to stop the rumours that 10,000–30,000 people had died.159 Rather than give in to public pressure to give precise information, public anxiety was to be mediated by propaganda that highlighted the achievements of the German Air Force against the bomber offensive. Propaganda-Companies from the military propaganda arm began to work in the bombed cities from June 1943 to provide local stories on successful air defence or air-to-air combat. Goebbels had already orchestrated a campaign to convince the public that the German Air Force was taking revenge on the enemy population and would do so with new, powerful but secret weapons in the near future.160
The idea of vengeance (Vergeltung) was itself problematic, since it depended for its propaganda success on more than just promises. In 1943 the German Air Force activity against British targets reached its lowest point. Goebbels hoped that the successful test launch of the V1 and the V2 by early 1943 indicated a rapid move to large-scale revenge attacks; the substantial time lag meant that the public became first sceptical, then widely critical of the regime’s promises. In late April 1943 the SD Reports noted widespread longing for the ‘revenge announced “already so often” ’, and popular calls for revenge punctuated all the weekly reports throughout the year. By September the following joke was in circulation in the Ruhr and Berlin: ‘The English and the Americans were given an ultimatum: if they do not cease the air war at once, another vengeance speech will follow.’161 By then rumours about a new missile were in circulation and popular hopes that a definite deadline would be announced for its use. Goebbels had by then realized that vengeance propaganda was counter-productive and on 6 July 1943 he ordered the German press to stop using the term, though it retained its public currency. The armed forces’ propaganda branch set up a commission to study the potential of the new weapons and concluded that they were not capable of turning the tide of war and should no longer be used for propaganda purposes.162 Instead Goebbels used the Jewish question both as a way to explain the bombing war and as an instrument to encourage German resistance. In a speech on 5 June 1943 he denounced British bombing and the ‘Jewish instigators’ behind it. After Operation Gomorrah, Party propaganda played on ‘the Jews’ will to extermination’ expressed through the ‘bombing murder of the Jewish-plutocratic enemy’, and called for a fanatical defence of German race and culture.163
On some issues the German public felt strongly, though it is not widely evident that the struggle against ‘world Jewry’ meant very much to the population in the front line against bombing. There were strong demands that the dead in bombing raids should be marked in the newspapers with an iron cross, like the military dead. The Propaganda Ministry approved of the idea in December 1941, but it was overturned by Hitler in January 1942 (who did not want women to be honoured that way) and rejected by the armed forces, who thought that it would diminish the value of the symbol for the military dead.164 Attempts to describe the bomb victims with the military terms ‘fallen’ or ‘wounded’ (Gefallene or Verwundete) were also rejected by the armed forces, since many of those who died did so from wilful failure to seek shelter, including a notorious case in Bremen when 14 partygoers were killed because they wanted to finish their food and drink before going down to the cellar. In the end a compromise was reached, allowing civil defence workers of either sex who died while carrying out dangerous duties to have their death notices marked with an iron cross. They could also be described as ‘fallen’ for the Fatherland, but the rest of the bomb victims could not, a distinction confirmed by Goebbels in May 1943.165
Opportunity for more serious political or social dissent was limited, given the willingness of the regime to impose severe punishment on any open or dangerous forms of protest; where it existed, political resistance was fuelled by ideological difference rather than by bombing. Nevertheless, a growing pessimistic realism about the future jostled in public opinion with evidence of a firmer resolve and persistent confidence in Hitler’s capacity to stabilize the situation. The SD Reports speculated, as did British intelligence, that the mass of homeless and disgruntled evacuees might be a possible source of an ‘inner collapse’ if the bombing got worse, but an estimated one-third of the evacuees returned home. Those who remained, mainly women and children, were unlikely instigators of revolt, though there were isolated acts of protest against the treatment of evacuees or the withholding of ration cards. The most famous case was in October 1943 at Witten in the Ruhr, where the police refused to intervene.166 In some ways bombing actually created a safety valve for popular disaffection. Rumours could represent a surreptitious challenge to prescribed public discourse without amounting to serious dissent. In the shelters it was sometimes possible for the small communities that inhabited them to complain about their hardships or to satirize the regime without fear of punishment. In one Berlin bunker, Hitler was always referred to as ‘The Hitler’, an intentionally less flattering epithet than ‘our Führer’. The local warden turned a blind eye both to this and to harsher complaints directed at the dictatorship.167 For the bombed-out, the opportunity to let off steam could also be tolerated. One generic story, cited by a number of observers, told of a hysterical woman evacuee challenging the police to arrest her for some trivial offence because at least she would have a roof over her head. In each version of the story, the police do nothing.168 The SD Reports noted a widely circulating rumour in August 1943
that the Allies had promised to stop the bombing if the government was changed; this was a brave rumour to pass on, but it was overheard in towns as far apart as Innsbruck and Königsberg.169 It was also evident that the anxieties and fears generated by bombing in particular affected not only the home front but the fighting front as well. Censors intercepted letters giving painful details of the effects of heavy raids; soldiers on leave could see these effects for themselves. An SD Report in early September 1943 described a typical front-line response: ‘What is the point in defending the homeland at the front if everything at home is smashed to pieces and there is nothing left afterwards when we come back.’170 Efforts were made to ensure that news reached soldiers quickly to allay their fears. Special ‘bomb postcards’ could be written from raided towns with express delivery to military units.171
The heavy bombing of 1943, and the shock effect of the destruction of Hamburg in particular, did not in reality provoke serious political or social crisis, though it prompted growing public criticism and anxiety, and occasional, local acts of grumbling protest, which could be tolerated by the authorities. There is no single explanation for this, since the response varied a great deal between different regions and cities, or between different social groups and public organizations, but a number of factors played a part. The bombing was geographically concentrated still in 1942 and 1943, principally on the coastal towns and the industrial regions of western Germany, though an estimated half of British bombs fell in open country. Although regular warnings, compulsory sheltering and waves of morbid rumours affected much of the rest of the population, bombing was not directly experienced. For those who were principally affected, the chief concern was to survive the catastrophe, to find adequate welfare, food and shelter, and to protect and re-establish the private sphere. Hans Nossack found among his fellow Hamburgers a preoccupation with the mundane: ‘if by chance a newspaper came into our hands, we didn’t bother to read the war bulletins … We would immediately turn to the page with the announcements that concerned us directly. Whatever happened outside of us simply did not exist.’172
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