Allied bombing was at its most dangerous in 1944 when it targeted large capital projects in oil and chemicals which could not easily be moved or substituted, unlike ball-bearings or aircraft. Following the first bombing, Hitler on 31 May 1944 approved the appointment of Edmund Geilenberg as yet another emergency manager, this time as General Plenipotentiary for Emergency Measures, with the task of putting fuel production underground or moving it into less exposed above-ground installations. The plan was to create 98 dispersed sites, 22 of them under the earth, capable of producing up to four-fifths of all aviation fuel and 88 per cent of diesel fuel for tanks. By the end of the war around three-fifths of the preparatory work had been done, but only a small amount of equipment had been installed. German fuel supply relied in the end on being able to repair quickly enough the damage to the existing plants.217 The problems posed by trying to repair damage and supply replacement components were critical in explaining the final collapse of the German war economy under the remorseless punishment inflicted in the last months of the war. Even before the onset of the transportation plan in September 1944, random interruption to an overstretched communications system led to regular hold-ups in getting damaged plant repaired, machines replaced or vital components and equipment supplied. The weekly reports on economic conditions produced by the Economics Ministry throughout 1944 reiterate the problems presented by interrupted rail lines and damaged rolling stock.218 The department heads from Speer’s renamed War Production Ministry all highlighted in their post-war interrogations the damage to production imposed because repairs could not be effected or components and parts supplied.219 This situation was exacerbated by the decision to disperse production often long distances from the main plant. At the Henschel aircraft works 200 couriers were on hand to collect and distribute vital materials and parts to and from subcontractors in order to keep production going at all.220
Given the artificial concentration on war production at all costs, the chronic stress on the workforce labouring 60–70 hours a week, and the rapid contraction of the European supply base, there were limits to how far the German war economy could be pushed, even without the effects of bombing. The economist J. K. Galbraith, drafted in to assess the German economy at the end of the war, judged that in 1944 German production, bombing or not, was approaching ‘what might be called a general bottleneck’.221 The weight of attack from September 1944 on a taut economic structure confirmed that the German war economy had reached its limit. There was a sudden increase in the number of firms reporting air-raid damage. In July there were 421, of which 150 were totally or severely damaged; in September there were 674, with 253 in the worst categories; in November 1944, 311 out of 664 firms had suffered total or severe loss.222 The economy kept going during the last eight months of war using accumulated stocks to compensate for the slow decline in the supply of basic materials – steel, iron, aluminium, machine tools – and the cumulative effect of the loss of rail and water transport for the supply of coal. As a result, peak wartime production for artillery, armoured fighting vehicles and fighter aircraft was actually reached in the last three months of 1944.223 After that, production collapsed rapidly as the encircling armies and the enveloping air fleets tightened their noose around the German neck.
The German leadership continued, nevertheless, to throw emergency solutions at a collapsing structure. On 1 August 1944 an Armaments Staff responsible for eight priority production programmes was established, bringing together under the direction of Speer and Saur 25 department heads with supreme authority to squeeze what weapons they could out of the shrinking economic base. In December 1944 Germany was divided up into seven Armaments Zones (Rüstungsbezirke), in each of which an autonomous military economy was supposed to flourish. Production declined by more than half. During the last weeks of the war the system continued to hover between fantasy and reality. The army planned a slimmed-down ‘Storm-Programme’ for army weapons, deciding what the forces could do without while still able to keep on fighting successfully.224 In early March Speer set up an emergency ‘Transport Staff’ to coordinate all communications; on 8 March he finally established three Armaments Plenipotentiaries in areas he thought were suitable for an ‘autarkic economy’. One was based in Heidelberg, one in Prague and one in the Rhine-Ruhr, just days before its surrender.225
Bombing critically affected the German productive economy only during the last months of the war, but even though a ceiling was placed on further expansion, war production continued to increase until the crisis provoked by the loss of territory, the failure of the dispersal schemes and the collapse of the repair cycle. A combination of effective work protection, control of the workforce, concealment and deception, dispersal of key production, and insistent policies on concentration and rationalization, had succeeded in limiting the damage air attack could inflict on industry, though not on the cityscapes and urban populations that surrounded it. On 19 March 1945 Hitler published his ‘scorched earth’ decree in which he ordered the destruction of all that remained of Germany’s industry, transport network and food supplies. It was never implemented, thanks partly to the intervention of Albert Speer, but it would certainly have imposed a higher level of damage on the industrial economy and infrastructure than the bombing. Hans Rumpf, chief inspector of the German fire service, later observed that the dismantling and reparation regime established by the Allies in the occupied zones of Germany after the war’s end took a much higher proportion of German industrial capacity than the fraction destroyed by bombing. Of German engineering capacity, 20 per cent was destroyed from the air, 70 per cent by Allied requisitioning.226
‘WILL GERMANY CRACK?’: 1944–5
In February 1944 Heinrich Himmler, appointed Minister of the Interior in August 1943, in addition to his other offices, announced that ‘no German city will be abandoned’ as a result of bombing.227 The situation facing Germany’s urban area in 1944 was nevertheless a daunting one. In the last 17 months of the war three-quarters of all bombs were dropped and approximately two-thirds of all bombing deaths were caused. In Munich, 89 per cent of bombs on the city fell in 1944 and 1945; in Mainz, 93 per cent of the deaths from bombing occurred in the same two years.228 By spring 1945, no part of the contracting German Empire remained untouched. Bombing by day and by night did not affect every area simultaneously and many towns were bombed just once, but bombing and its social and cultural consequences came to dominate the daily lives of millions of Germans, a majority of them female. One young schoolgirl in Berlin, Waltraud Süssmilch, subject to compulsory civil defence training and playground demonstrations, surrounded by bombed areas of the city, straining to distinguish the different rush and explosion of each type of bomb, later recalled the bizarre wartime world in her memoir: ‘Bombs belonged to my life. I was confronted with them daily. I could not do otherwise … I was no longer a child.’229
The presence of Himmler as Minister of the Interior as well as Chief of German Police continued a process begun in the 1930s to extend the responsibility of the SS and police system over all areas of air-raid protection and civil defence policy. During 1944 Himmler continued to undermine the position of the Air Ministry and in August the Air Force Inspectorate 13, responsible for air-raid protection, was abruptly abolished at Hitler’s insistence. Responsibility for air-raid protection and the air-raid warning service transferred unconditionally to the SS and police. On 5 February 1945, just weeks before the end of the war, Himmler also succeeded in removing the Regional Air Commands from any responsibility for civil defence, leaving only a handful of mobile ‘Air Protection Regiments’ under air force control.230 His new role introduced a fresh element of menace into the regular work of civil defence. On 14 April he published a decree threatening tough punishment for any civil defender who failed in their duty. While most citizens were said to display an ‘exemplary self-sacrifice’, the slackers and feckless were to be dealt with sharply under the terms of the Air Protection Law. Persistent negligence, malice or deliberate defiance was
to result in a court appearance, which by 1944 meant facing a justice system dominated by a narrow ideological outlook and a search for vengeance.231 For many of those engaged in civil defence, whether Ukrainians in the fire service or camp prisoners detailed to clear up urban debris, the SS was effectively their lawless master.
Goebbels found it difficult to maintain his position in the face of Himmler’s ambitions. In December 1943, frustrated that the Inter-Ministerial Committee had too little power, Goebbels convinced Hitler to make him Reich Inspector for Civil Air Protection. With the Gauleiter of Westphalia-South, Albert Hoffmann, as his deputy, and a collaborator from the committee, Alfred Berndt, as his office director, Goebbels used his new position to review civil defence all over Germany and to insist on improvements in self-protection organization and communal services.232 By this stage the local responsibility for coping with the aftermath of raids had passed entirely to the Reich Defence Commissars, with whom Goebbels kept in close contact. In September 1944 the Commissars were formally acknowledged as the key coordinating figures in the defence of the Reich, at which point the Party also assumed the public political role of preparing the German people for their final ordeal. By this time Goebbels had abandoned the Inspectorate, which had done little more than report the state of affairs rather than initiate action; on 25 July 1944 he was named Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War, another emergency appointment which bore little relation to the conditions on the ground for which he was now ostensibly responsible.233 It is questionable whether Goebbels’ initiatives did anything more than simply confuse the existing structure. In February 1944 the Gauleiter of the Sudetenland complained that there was ‘an alarming confusion’ of orders issuing from a system that had become ‘more and more bureaucratic’. The Reich Defence Commissar in Hanover-East pointed out in August that he was the subject of five separate streams of instructions on air-raid questions, producing simply a ‘flood of paper’ rather than a single, clear administrative path.234
The evidence on the ground suggests that the real responsibility for coping with air raids and their consequences still lay principally with local authorities and the millions of civilian volunteers who fought as best they could against the rising tide of destruction and demoralization. In August 1943 the police authorities issued an order compelling every resident or visitor in an air-protection zone to take part in self-protection action during a raid. Every street and apartment block had its wardens, self-protection troop, house-fire defenders, lay helpers and messengers, led by the local Leader of the Self-Protection Area.235 In January 1944 Hitler approved further measures to increase the active participation of the population in their own defence, despite the growing risks they faced. He compared their experience with the front-line soldier who had to get over his fear of attacking tanks at close quarters: ‘the one who has actually seen and practised extinguishing incendiary bombs, loses a large part of his fear of this kind of weapon’.236 The schoolgirl in Berlin whose life was dominated by bombs was expected to tackle and extinguish one of a number of types of Allied incendiary (‘Would you trust yourself to extinguish such a bomb?’ asked the fireman demonstrator. ‘Yes,’ she replied.)237 In May the Luftschutzbund issued instructions to air-protection officials to undertake home visits to every house and apartment in their sector to provide up-to-date information for each householder, to ensure that every resident was materially prepared to assist, and to try and strengthen the ‘spiritual resolve’ of the community for the difficult task ahead.238
The priority by 1944, with heavy raids on Berlin and other cities deeper in German territory, was to try to save as much as possible of German urban life and the populations still living there. Even while Allied aircraft remorselessly reduced the habitable areas of major cities, the effort to repair or recondition damaged housing continued so that workers who remained could have some kind of shelter. The repair of bomb-damaged housing was governed by two decrees issued by Speer as General-Plenipotentiary for Construction on 15 and 16 September 1943, which gave priority to getting working-class housing habitable again to reduce lost work-time. Only those houses that could be repaired easily and immediately were to be tackled; nothing was permitted that took more than three months.239 Local repair was allocated to a construction team organized by the Reich Defence Commissar, with help from mobile columns of skilled workers organized by the Reich Group Handwork. These motorized emergency units – for doors/windows, roof repair, shop windows and room interiors – were functioning by October 1943 and fully funded by July the following year. They arrived in a bombed town, parked their vehicles in undamaged streets or squares, and began work on reconstruction at once.240 The quantity of residential housing destroyed in 1943 was estimated at 5 per cent of the housing stock, but during 1944 the figures mounted sharply, making it difficult to keep pace with the programme of repair. In the most heavily bombed cities, houses that were lightly damaged in one raid might be hit again in the next more seriously. In the Ruhr city of Bochum residential damage by spring 1944 was 147 per cent of all homes, in Düsseldorf 130 per cent, in Essen 126 per cent, a result of counting some repaired houses two, three or more times.241 Between January and October 1944 the number of destroyed or heavily damaged residential buildings was 311,807 against 119,668 in the first nine months of 1943, leaving 3.5 million temporarily, or in some cases permanently, homeless.242 From autumn 1944 it became difficult any longer to construct an accurate statistical picture of housing losses. The last recorded figures, in November, showed the loss of 57,000 buildings in one month.243
The urban population also depended on the survival of services – gas, electricity and clean drinking water. The problem of water supply became acute by the summer of 1944 and emergency measures were prepared for a population that had to share water with the fire service. In all cities under attack the authorities were told to put up notices indicating where people could find a stand-tap with clean water, and warnings where water was not drinkable and would have to be boiled.244 The Interior Ministry drew up a list of all tanker lorries available nationally to help distribute clean water; the Reich Inspector for Water and Energy sent out detailed instructions in August 1944 on how to keep the water supply going by protecting or establishing plants that could filter and purify contaminated water.245 In Berlin the local association of brewers was asked in autumn 1943 to supply a complete list of the water sources (springs, streams) used in brewing and mineral water production; by June 1944, 286 usable sources had been identified. The same month the Interior Ministry drew up an inventory of unused bottles that could be requisitioned to supply water, which included 357,000 beer bottles and 312,000 used for Coca-Cola.246
Gas supply, on which a large number of German households depended, faced the same problems of random but cumulative damage to the gas network. It was found in 1943, even in heavy raids, that the loss of supply could be kept within manageable boundaries. Surplus capacity in the network actually exceeded by a significant margin the damage done by bombing. A heavy raid on Berlin on 3–4 September 1943 resulted in the loss of gas in some districts for only a few hours, in others for only a day. It was possible to find supplies from other parts of the network when local gasworks were damaged; after the raid on Leipzig on 3–4 December 1944, the main gasworks, supplying 250,000 cubic metres of gas, was temporarily put out of action, but long-distance supply managed to restore 90 per cent of what was needed.247 But the expanded raiding in 1944 resulted in widespread and unpredictable damage to both the gas and water networks. By June 1944 there were 94 badly damaged gasworks and waterworks countrywide; by the autumn gasworks were forced to cease operation in many places because of the loss of vital pieces of equipment that could no longer be supplied.248 Millions of householders found that by 1945 gas supply was non-existent or confined to a slender stream. ‘The gas is running on a tiny, dying flicker,’ wrote one Berlin woman in her diary in April 1945. ‘The potatoes have been cooking for hours … I swallowed one half-raw.’249
The damage
done to German cities in 1944 and 1945 was extensive and indiscriminate. Goebbels ordered lists to be compiled of the destruction of all cultural monuments and cultural treasures. Church authorities sent in regular reports of damage to ecclesiastical property.250 Table 7.4 shows the tonnage of bombs dropped by both Allied air forces on major German cities (by comparison total tonnage on London in the Blitz was 18,800 tons, and on the second most heavily bombed urban area, Liverpool/Birkenhead, only 1,957 tons). The detailed histories of individual cities show the extent of the cumulative losses inflicted in the final raids. Munich, unscathed for the first three years of war, suffered 30 major raids from September 1942. This involved the loss of 10,600 residential buildings; only 2.5 per cent of all buildings in the city remained completely unscathed by the bombing. Some 45 per cent of the physical substance of the city was destroyed, an average figure that disguises wide differences: areas of the central old city were three-quarters destroyed, but in the industrial zone of Munich-Allach only 0.4 per cent. Of cultural and religious buildings, 92 were totally destroyed, 182 damaged, including the cathedral, the old town hall, the council room, the state library (losses of half a million books), the Residence, the Maxburg, the National Theatre: and so on. In total, Munich had 7.2 million cubic metres of rubble that needed clearing away at the end of the war.251 These statistics could be repeated for almost all German cities or towns by the war’s end, large or small. The small community of Bingerbrück, on the Rhine, had 470 buildings; 327 were destroyed or heavily damaged, and only 2 avoided any damage at all.252
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 64