Table 7.4: Bomb Tonnage Dropped on Major Urban Targets in Germany, 1940–45
City Bomber Command USAAF Total
Berlin 45,517 22,768 68,285
Cologne 34,712 13,302 48,014
Hamburg 22,583 15,736 38,319
Essen 36,420 432 36,852
Duisburg 30,025 510 30,535
Kiel 16,748 13,198 29,946
Frankfurt am Main 15,696 12,513 28,209
Bremen 12,844 12,669 25,513
Mannheim 18,114 7,067 25,181
Stuttgart 21,014 3,905 24,919
Dortmund 22,242 2,541 24,783
Nuremberg 13,020 7,381 20,401
Munich 7,858 10,993 18,851
Source: Olaf Groehler, Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland (Berlin: 1990), 432.
The heavy destruction of the infrastructure and residential districts of German cities and towns made it increasingly difficult to protect the population from death, injury and enforced displacement. The evacuation programme was expanded rapidly to try to reduce the risk to sections of the population who were not regarded as essential to the war effort. It was now evident that nowhere was safe, so that the proportion of the population who might need to move was unmanageably large. In January 1944 Hitler told Goebbels that not everyone eligible to move could go, since this involved an estimated 8 million children, mothers and the old from the 32 million inhabitants of every city over 50,000 people.253 The following month Himmler sent out guidelines on evacuation with the object of limiting it as far as possible in order to avoid too much pressure on reception areas that in some cases were already full, and to ensure that work and air defence could be maintained. City dwellers were encouraged to move away from city centres, where the majority of deaths from fire were caused. In an ironic reversal of the RAF zoning system, Himmler ordered local authorities to move people away from the inner zone, with its narrow, tightly packed streets, to the less densely populated outer zones, the commuter suburbs and the farthest ‘weekend commuter’ belt; the priority was to ensure that most evacuees stayed close to the cities they had left.254
In practice restrictions were difficult to enforce and the rising tide of urban casualties accelerated the pace of both official and unofficial evacuation. Arrangements had to be made between the Party regions to see how many people could be accommodated and what transport was available for them, but by September 1944 there were 5.6 million evacuees, by November 7.8 million and by the beginning of 1945, 8.9 million. Not all of these were evacuees from bombing. Of the final figure for 1945 an estimated 1.76 million had left, while 2.41 million had been compulsorily evacuated or had fled from the frontier areas imminently threatened with invasion and 841,000 had been moved with dispersed factories.255 No figures are available for those who remained in the suburbs or commuter belts of damaged cities, but in Hamburg the numbers displaced from the destroyed central areas to other parts of the city numbered half a million, leading to a sudden increase in the level of population density in the unbombed zones.256 During the last half of 1944 and the first months of 1945, Germany was an exceptionally mobile society; Germans moved westwards from the threat of Soviet invasion, eastwards from the approaching Anglo-American armies, away from the bombed cities and, in an unknown number of cases, back again. Accommodation became rudimentary, food and welfare supplies exiguous, and pilfering and petty crime more widespread. Those who returned to living in familiar cellars and ruins could tell themselves that life was preferable there, for all the risks and violence of the air war. ‘My cellar home in Hamburg,’ wrote a woman evacuated to Linz, ‘was a thousand times better.’257
For those who remained in the cities, fighting the raids and their consequences was only one of the problems confronted in the last year of the war. The problems of poor health, the difficulty of obtaining rationed goods, long hours of work, and declining transport all owed something to the effects of bombing, but were also derived from the exceptional demands made in the last year of war to sustain war production and military campaigning from an exhausted people. For almost 8 million forced foreign workers and prisoners of war, and the 700,000 concentration camp prisoners, there was no choice about running the risks of being bombed or the dangers of its aftermath. German cities changed their social geography markedly over the last year of war. The population of major cities in the Ruhr-Rhineland shrank to a fraction of their total before the bomber offensive: Essen, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt had less than half their pre-war population by May 1945, but Cologne had just 20,000 left out of 770,000. The population of Munich declined by 337,000 (41 per cent) between 1939 and 1945, the population of Berlin by 1.7 million (40 per cent), that of Hamburg by half a million (35 per cent).258 Among those who remained were a rising proportion of non-Germans, or of German workers transferred from other industrial sites, but a shrinking number of young and middle-aged men. This was the population that suffered the high casualty rates of the last 18 months of the war.
The exact figure of deaths from bombing up to the end of the war has never been established with certainty, partly because of the sudden influx of refugees from the eastern regions in the last weeks of the conflict, partly because figures for casualties were collected by a number of different agencies – the Air Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the Economics Ministry and the Party Chancellery – and partly because in the final weeks of the war accurate record-keeping was no longer possible. The statistical series collected during the war differed from each other because some distinguished between civilian casualties, uniformed casualties, POWs and foreign workers, whereas others listed only civilian casualties. In August 1944, for example, Air Ministry records show 11,070 dead, but Economics Ministry records show 8,562; the first includes all categories of bomb victims, the second only civilians.259 Table 7.5 shows the full record for November 1944 provided by the Air Ministry Air Protection Staff.
This source was used by the United States Bombing Survey after the war to estimate German casualties. The total number of dead for 1943 and 1944 from Air Protection Staff records was 100,107 in 1943, 146,300 for 1944, and 13,553 for the month of January 1945. The overall figure for those injured is 305,455. No further aggregate statistics are available for the last three months of the war. Using the same proportions as November 1944, it can be estimated that of this 259,960 dead, approximately 80 per cent were German civilians.260 There are also archive records to show deaths from bombing in the years 1940 to 1942, a total of 11,228, of whom 6,824 died in 1942 and approximately 4,000 in 1941.261 Based on these archive sources, the figure for those who died from May 1940 to January 1945 comes to 271,188. No doubt this does not include all those who were killed or died of wounds, but it does include uniformed personnel, POWs and foreign workers, and it applies to the whole of the Greater German area, including those territories incorporated from March 1938 onwards.
Table 7.5: The Dead and Seriously Injured from Bombing, November 1944 (Greater German Area)
Category Dead Injured
Armed forces 1,118 1,680
Police/Air Protection 129 161
Civilians 14,590 22,145
POWs 371 372
Foreign workers 1,232 1,677
Source: BA-B, R3102/10031, Air Ministry, LS-Arbeitsstab, ‘Übersicht über Luftangriffe und Bombenabwürfe’, Nov 1944.
It is difficult to reconcile these figures with the much larger totals arrived at in post-war calculations. The difference can largely be explained by the speculative nature of the estimates made for the number who died in the last four months of heavy bombing. In 1956 Hans Sperling published in the German official statistical journal Wirtschaft und Statistik (Economy and Statistics) a detailed account of his reconstruction of the dead from bombing. His total of civilians killed came to 570,000 for the wartime German area. Together with 23,000 uniformed dead and an estimated 32,000 POWs and foreign workers, his sum reached 625,000, the figure commonly quoted today for the total killed in Germany by Allied bombing.262 Sperling’s figures rested on speculations about the number o
f German civilians and foreign workers who died in the last four months of war, and in particular on the number of refugees fleeing westwards into the path of the raids. He guessed that 111,000 of them died between January 1945 and the end of the war, including the greatly inflated figure of 60,000 dead in Dresden. This would mean that around 300,000 people in total were killed in Germany in the final flourish of bombing, a statistic that has no supporting evidence. In 1990 the East German historian Olaf Groehler published revised figures. Although acknowledging the speculative nature of some of his own calculations, particularly for those who died in 1945, Groehler suggested a much lower figure of 420,000 for all categories of victim and for the enlarged German wartime area.263
There are ways to arrive at a more plausible total. If it is assumed that the figure of 271,000 dead by January 1945 is a realistic, if not precise, total (and there are archive figures which suggest a lower sum), it is possible to extrapolate from the last five months of heavy raiding for which records exist (September 1944 to January 1945) in order to find a possible order of magnitude for deaths in the last three months of the war. The average death toll for these five months was 18,777, which would give an aggregate figure for the whole war period of 328,000, though it would not allow for the exceptional casualty level at Dresden, confirmed by the latest research at approximately 25,000. Adding this would produce a total figure of approximately 353,000, representing 82,000 deaths in the last months. Detailed reconstruction of deaths caused by Royal Air Force bombing from February to May 1945, though incomplete, suggests a total of at least 57,000.264 If casualties inflicted by the American air forces are assumed to be lower, since their bombing was less clearly aimed at cities, an overall death toll of 82,000 is again statistically realistic. In the absence of unambiguous statistical evidence, the figure of 353,000 gives an approximate scale consistent with the evidence. It is a little over half the figure of 625,000 arrived at in the 1950s.
The lower figure of 353,000 still represents an exceptional level of unnatural deaths compared with the impact of bombing elsewhere, and with the much lower level of casualties in Germany up until the summer of 1943. The obvious explanation is that repeated raids with 600 or 700 heavy bombers will eventually overwhelm the capacity of civil defence to limit casualties. This was certainly true for smaller cities hit just once, such as Pforzheim or Hildesheim, but also large cities such as Hamburg, whose defences could not cope with the firestorm, though they could cope effectively with raids of lesser intensity. But there are other reasons for an escalating level of casualties. Shelter provision had never been ideal, but in 1943 and 1944 resources were no longer available for a comprehensive shelter programme. Towns in Zones II and III became victims of bombing with inadequate public shelters. The air-protection room yielded mixed results, but in areas already heavily bombed, the cellar or basement under a heavily damaged building offered much less protection than a shelter under an intact building. Medical aid, despite the exceptional efforts of the profession, was a declining resource in 1944 and 1945, increasing the risk of death from infection or loss of blood. Finally, the mobile population was more exposed to risk, particularly once Allied aircraft began routine strafing of vehicles and trains, and evacuees found themselves in areas thought to be safe from bombs, but now subject to random attack. With at least 9 million people accommodated away from their homes, where they had had air-protection rooms and established self-protection routines, the risks of higher casualty levels increased. People who stayed in Berlin, despite the bombing, had established shelters to which they could go. ‘Finally we’re in our shelter,’ wrote the Berlin diarist, ‘behind an iron door that weighs a hundred pounds, with rubber seals around the edges and two levers to lock it shut … the people here are convinced that their cave is one of the safest. There’s nothing more alien than an unknown shelter.’265
The reaction of the population to this wave of destruction was never uniform. Over the last year of war ordinary people had many different pressures with which to cope, so that distinguishing what was particular about the bombing war from wider fears about defeat, dread of the arrival of the Soviet armies, fear of the security apparatus, and anxiety about the mounting military losses, is historically complex. Popular opinion was diverse and fluctuating. On bombing, the SD Reports in late 1943 and early 1944 show a pendulum swinging between hopes that the air terror would be ended by German retaliation and pessimistic realization that it was likely to get worse. In April 1944, for example, home intelligence found alongside anxious fears for survival and doubts that the war would end well, the hope expressed that Fate would still take a hand in Germany’s favour because ‘one simply cannot believe that everything had been in vain’.266 For much of the year the principal source of anxiety was the state of the war on the Eastern Front; from June 1944 onwards the invasion from the west temporarily eclipsed it. Popular concern with bombing briefly revived with the onset of the V-weapons campaign in the summer, but the unrealistic expectation that it would reverse the tide of the air war at once was disappointed and by late June the intelligence reports found a widespread scepticism that anything could stop the bombing. By July, when every German front line had collapsed, in Belorussia, Italy and France, ‘pessimistic opinion’ prevailed everywhere. It was judged that this did not mean that the ‘will to resist’ had evaporated, simply that there was widespread doubt that it would be of any use.267
The German population lived through this period with a sustained sense of drama in which the experience of bombing played only a part. The Party played increasingly with the idea that the German people were bound in a ‘community of fate’ (Schicksalsgemeinschaft), in which the final struggles would test their racial qualities to extremes. Some of this propaganda may explain the evidence of a popular mentality of ‘Victory or Death’ detected by the SD, but most of the home intelligence reports over the last year of the war show that ordinary Germans felt themselves to be trapped between a rock and a hard place – unable to give up because of the consequences expected from a coercive and vindictive dictatorship, but fearful of the consequences of defeat, particularly at the hands of the Red Army. There is little evidence from the intelligence reports that bombing as such strengthened the resolve of the urban population to hold out longer or fight harder. Bombing was a demoralizing and exhausting experience: ‘nervous anxiety’, ‘fear’, ‘worry’, ‘searching for survival’ punctuate the reports of popular reaction to the air raids.268 Regular air-raid alarms forced civilians to shelter for hundreds of hours in what were often uncomfortable and airless rooms. The American post-war morale survey found among the cohort of interviewees that 38 per cent experienced ‘intense fear, nervous collapse’, 31 per cent ‘temporary or less severe fright’. One woman gave a vivid account of her ordeal: ‘I saw people killed by falling bricks and heard the screams of others dying in the fire. I dragged my best friend from a burning building and she died in my arms. I saw others who went stark mad.’269 These experiences were no doubt what the survey was looking for. In answer, however, to the question about why people thought the war was lost, only 15 per cent identified air raids as the reason, 48 per cent military defeats.270
What bombing did do was to increase the dependence of the population on both the state apparatus and the Party organizations responsible for welfare, reducing even further the space for more serious dissent. Survival depended on not challenging the system. Throughout the heaviest period of bombing both state and Party, assisted increasingly by the armed forces stationed in the Reich, were able to sustain the supply of replacement goods, the distribution of food and water, planned evacuation and rehabilitation, though transport difficulties and the declining access to European food supplies meant that living standards continued to fall throughout 1944.271 Indeed, for most of the urban population official sources were the only ones available. The risks from black-marketeering and looting grew greater as the war drew to a close and the terror more arbitrary for the German people; military policemen shot o
r hanged those they caught on the spot. Even in Berlin in the last days before the Russians arrived, hungry survivors were able to find supplies of food dispensed by whatever authority was still functioning. It proved impossible at this stage to re-establish ‘normal life’ as had been attempted earlier in the war (and had been the aim in Britain, too, during the Blitz), but routines did not break down completely. Rather than greater communal resolve, accounts of the bombed populations show a growing apathy and demoralization: ‘a weight like lead hangs on all our actions,’ wrote one diarist in January 1945.272
The more surprising result of the bombing was the absence of sustained popular hatred directed towards those who were carrying it out. A long report on popular attitudes to the enemy produced in February 1944 indicated occasional evidence of anger directed at British aircrew, but concluded ‘hatred against the English people in general cannot be spoken of’. The Soviet people were feared rather than hated, driven by ‘an alien and incomprehensible mentality’. Paradoxically, wide popular hostility was reserved almost exclusively for the Italians for betraying Germany in 1943 by surrendering to the Allies.273 There were, nevertheless, acts of spontaneous violence directed by the bombed population against aircrew who were caught after they had to bale out and land on German soil. The number who became victims of ‘lynch murder’ has been estimated at between 225 and 350, a small fraction of the total of air force prisoners of war. The first recorded incident was during Operation Gomorrah on 25 July 1943, when two American airmen were killed. The pressure from above for people to take the law into their own hands increased during 1944 after Hitler endorsed popular vengeance against pilots guilty of strafing civilians, trains or hospitals. The peak of popular lynching occurred in March 1945, with 37 killings.274
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 65