In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  During the German bombardments of England, 60,000 civilians were killed, 90,000 were badly wounded and another 150,000 were injured. The Allied raids of Germany claimed eight times that number, around half a million victims, including 75,000 children. Almost 800,000 people were badly wounded. Seven million Germans were left homeless, and a fifth of all the country's houses were destroyed.

  The effect of the bombings on the German war industry, however, was far less severe. Albert Speer estimated the total loss of production in 1943 at no more than nine per cent, a decrease for which the country could compensate. During later interrogations, he said he found the Allied tactic ‘incomprehensible’: why hadn't they attacked the country's basic industry (steel and oil) and transportation network? Now, despite the enormous fires, the industrial capacity of a city like Berlin remained almost intact until the final months of the war. It was only the Americans who finally began to focus systematically on oil refineries and other vital parts of the German war machine.‘The British left us with deep and bleeding wounds,’ Marshal Erhard Milch said after the war. ‘But the Americans stabbed us in the heart.’

  This disproportion between industrial damage and civilian casualties was no accident. It was a conscious policy. Even before the war began, the British had developed the tactic of ‘strategic bombardment’, a method of eliminating the enemy by destroying his centres of population. The bombardments of Germany were therefore not a reaction to the German bombings of London, Coventry and other British cities, but part of a strategy that had been drafted long before that. Coventry was not an immediate cause, merely a justification.

  Generals, as the old saw goes, always tend to win the war that's over, and this was no different in 1939–45. The losing strategists of the First World War, the Russians and Germans, looked back on the struggle as a missed opportunity. They had ‘almost’ won, and with bigger and better-equipped armies the same large-scale attacks would, in their eyes, succeed this time.

  The victors, the French, British and Americans, remembered 1914–18 primarily as an unparalleled massacre of their own young people, a repetition of which was to be avoided at all costs. Hence the bold campaign in Germany in May 1940 and the similar Russian strategy in spring 1945. And hence, too, the French Maginot Line and Eisenhower's caution. Hence too the enormous investment by the British – almost a quarter of their entire war budget – in the ‘strategic bombardments’.

  So arose the Allied variation on the war's ‘radicalisation’. In the eyes of Harris and others, German citizens were not merely hapless souls who accidentally got in the way, but were in fact their principal target. Their strategy of ‘moral bombing’ assumed that the death of as many German civilians as possible would shorten the war, because it would cause morale on the home front to collapse much more quickly.

  It should not be forgotten, as the British military historian John Terraine puts it, that the term ‘moral’ in a bombing directive means the reality of ‘blowing men, women and children to bits’. In the archives, Terraine came across a memorandum from RAF Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal in which he detailed the ‘production possibilities’ for his superiors. Within the next two years, he boasted in November 1942, he would be able to drop almost 250,000 tons of bombs on Germany, destroying 6 million houses and a corresponding number of industrial installations, killing 900,000 Germans, badly wounding a million and leaving 25 million homeless. Terraine: ‘What is one to think of the calm proposal, set down in a quiet office, to kill 900,000 civilians and seriously injure a million more? One thing emerges, with absolute clarity: this was a prescription for massacre, nothing more nor less.’

  This ‘moral bombing’ did indeed take place on a massive scale. For every ton of bombs that landed on London, Coventry and a few other places, the British and the Americans dropped more than 300 tons back on Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Nuremberg and other German cities. The Allies knew what they were doing: one of the most powerful bombs, weighing over 2,000 kilos, was normally referred to as ‘the Cooker’, because, as people said:‘it literally brings the folks on the ground to boiling point’.

  The bombardment of civilians became a special science. Although the British bombed more or less at random in 1940–1, from 1943 the targeted districts were first studied carefully on aerial photographs. A pronounced preference arose for residential neighbourhoods, as being most susceptible to ‘demoralisation’. Specialists calculated which bomb could best be used to destroy which building, how a firestorm could be created by first using a blockbuster to blow out all doors and windows, how a house could quickly be set alight by adjusting a bomb to explode only after it had first crashed through three floors. To kill firemen and other helpers, time bombs were dropped that went off only 36, 72 or 144 hours after deployment.

  Ironically enough, it was the Germans themselves who had done the pioneering work in these developments. They had evaluated their own bombardments of Warsaw (25 September, 1939) and Rotterdam (14 May, 1940), and applied their findings to the Luftwaffe's bombardment of Stalingrad (23 August, 1942). In the firestorm created in that city, more than 40,000 people were killed within a few days, a number equal to that in Hamburg.‘The report from Luftflottenkommando 4 [concerning Warsaw] reads like a recommendation for Bomber Command,’ writes Jörg Friedrich in Der Brand, his impressive account of the bombing war against Germany. He cites the Luftwaffe specialists: ‘The explosive bomb paves the way for the firebomb. It forces the population into the cellar, while the houses burn down above their heads. If they are not rescued, they die of suffocation. Moral resistance is completely shattered by the impressions experienced. Destroy water supplies at the first attack! Do not drop firebombs piecemeal but in huge quantities, thereby creating ferocious “hearths” everywhere that can no longer be dealt with.’

  The infamous bombardment of the open cultural city of Dresden – which many later labelled an Allied ‘war crime’ – was therefore no incidental excess. It was part of a well-considered strategy that had been applied for a long time … and which also began to meet with increasing repugnance from Britons themselves. As early as spring 1944, Vera Brittain, working under the auspices of the Bombing Restriction Committee, wrote a pamphlet calling on the RAF to resume normal military practices and cease bombing civilians. ‘Owing to the RAF raids,’ she said, ‘thousands of helpless and innocent people in German, Italian and German-occupied cities are being subjected to agonising forms of death and injury comparable to the worst tortures of the Middle Ages.’

  The protests had no effect whatsoever. That summer, Harris and Portal, with the approval of Churchill and Eisenhower, began Operation Thunderclap: a massive bombardment which would kill more than 100,000 people in a single night. It would, according to Harris, definitively destroy German morale, despite countless indications that the bombardments had little or no such effect.

  A Thunderclap attack on Berlin failed. Instead of the hundreds of thousands of victims planned, only a few thousand were killed during the great bombardment of February 1945. Five days later, the strategy was tried anew, this time over Dresden.

  Today Dresden is the city of the Frauenkirche, a ruin which under the former DDR was referred to as a ‘Mahnmal für die Opfer des Bombenkrieges’, but from the ashes of which a house of prayer has slowly arisen anew since the Wende, the turning point after which communism collapsed. The broom cupboard was the only thing that emerged unscathed from the rubble, with all the buckets and mops which had been put away there so neatly after work on the afternoon of Tuesday, 13 February, 1945. In 1999, Dresden is a city of vacant plots of land, of strange little parks full of grass, bushes and old stone foundations that wouldn't belong in any normal city. There are lovely buildings in Dresden, restored and rebuilt, lying spread out like the cards in a game of old maid, but they do not form a city. They are, at most, colourful shards in a vase reconstructed of plaster. The city, that is the vacant lots, and nothing more.

  On the night of 13 Feburary, 1945, Dresden was ful
l of refugees from the East. The city had no war industry to speak of, but that was not the point. Precisely according to plan, a firestorm raced through the streets within half an hour of the first bombs falling. To maximise the number of victims, the British and American strategists had devised a double whammy. They knew that, in a burning city, bomb shelters provided protection only for about three hours. After that the ground and the walls became so hot that everyone had to go back outside. It was at precisely that moment that the second attack came. The citizens of Dresden had to choose between the sea of fire outside and the oven-like bomb shelters within.

  The Stadtmuseum contains silent witnesses to that night: a few melted bottles, a half-melted bench vice, photos of bodies, some of them in a fountain that had boiled and run dry, naked, their clothes burned off.

  At the start of the first attack on Dresden, just after 10 p.m., Victor Klemperer and his wife Eva were sitting in the ‘Jewish house’ at Zeughausstrasse 1–3, sombre and exhausted, drinking ersatz coffee. The professor was doing forced labour in a factory, and he expected to be deported soon along with the last of the Jews. When the bombardment continued, he picked up his bag of manuscripts and walked downstairs with his wife to the special ‘Jewish’ bomb shelter. As they were going in, the professor was injured by a splinter of shrapnel and lost sight of Eva. Along with a few Russian prisoners of war he fled the glowing hot cellar, ended up in a huge open square that he did not recognise, climbed into a bomb crater, found an acquaintance with a young child there, lost sight of both of them, then began wandering aimlessly. The intoxication of those moments can still be felt in the entries in his diary. ‘Pounding, daylight, concussions. I couldn't think, I wasn't even afraid, I felt only a great tension, I believe I thought that was the end.’

  He wound up on the Brühlsche Terrasse, the ‘Balcony of Europe’, a high spot along the Elbe in the centre of town. ‘Around me, as far as I could see, there was nothing but a sea of flames. On this side of the Elbe the extremely clear torch of the buildings on Pirnaischer Platz, across the Elbe, glowing white and clear as day, the roof of the ministry of finance.’

  When it finally grew light, he took his bag and stumbled down along the lower wall of the Terrasse. Suddenly he heard someone call his name: in a row of exhausted survivors he found Eva, sitting unharmed on their suitcase, still wearing her fur coat. ‘We hugged, we didn't care at all that we had lost all we owned, and that's still the way we feel about it.’

  Today, local historians – who are often best informed about such matters – estimate the number of people killed in the bombardment of Dresden at 25–30,000. In the old market square in the centre of town, a funeral pyre was built that burned for five whole weeks. The cremation was supervised by SS Sturmbahnführer Karl Streibel, who had gained his experience burning bodies at the Treblinka death camp.

  Chapter FORTY-SEVEN

  Berlin

  ON HITLER'S FIFTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY IT WAS, AS THE PEOPLE OF BERLIN had been wont to say in better days, Führerwetter. Friday, 20 April, 1945 was a glorious, sunny spring day. ‘Yes, the war rolls on towards Berlin,’ a woman in her early thirties wrote in her diary. ‘What sounded yesterday like drumming in the distance has today become a constant pounding. You breathe in the noise of the cannons. The ear grows deaf, now you hear only the reports from the heaviest-calibre guns. It's no longer possible to tell where the sound is coming from. We live inside a ring of gun barrels that is drawing tighter by the hour.’

  It was 4 p.m. when she wrote that. The Berlin radio had stopped broadcasting four days earlier. People were starving in the city. The anonymous writer called herself ‘a pale blonde, always dressed in the same salvaged winter coat, employed at a publishing house’, she was seriously engaged to a man by the name of Gerd who was fighting at the front, she never wanted to reveal her name, but her diary was finally published. We shall hear more from her.

  It was at almost that same moment that the last images of Adolf Hitler made their way onto film: he walks stiffly along a row of Hitler Youth scouts being decorated for their suicide attacks on Soviet tanks, he caresses the cheek of the youngest of them, and tries to hide the tremor in his hand. That evening he went to bed early, while the rest of his entourage left for the chancellery. More than half a century later, Hitler's junior secretary, Traudl Junge, described that bizarre birthday party to Gitta Sereny: the dining room was deserted, there was only the huge table set for a party, everyone drank champagne, Hitler's personal physician Morell, Bormann, Ribbentrop, Speer and Goebbels danced with the secretaries to the same scratchy tear-jerker, ‘Blutrote Rosen erzählen dir vom Glück’. There was a lot of hysterical laughter. ‘It was horrible; I'd soon had enough of it and went to bed.’

  The mood in the city, in the words of Norwegian journalist Jacob Kronika, was that of a gigantic passenger liner about to sink. Berlin was caught up in a feverish ‘hunt for pleasure’. In the cellars and bunkers, in the dark bushes of the Tiergarten, between the shelves of the audio archives of the Grossdeutsche Rundfunk, everywhere it was a ‘sexual wilderness’. The girls and the soldiers all said the same: ‘We want everything now: the Knochenmann, the Grim Reaper may come for us tonight.’

  Late that evening in her bomb shelter, our anonymous diarist noted: ‘No electricity. The oil lamp flickers from the rafters above me. Outside a dark roar, growing louder.’ A few minutes later the cellar walls shook from the explosions.

  That same weekend, Russian war correspondent Vassily Grossman entered Brandenburg with the advancing Red Army: ‘Everything is covered with flowers, tulips, lilacs, apple trees, plum trees.’ He passed a column of freed prisoners of war on their way home, carrying improvised national flags, pushing carts, prams and wheelbarrows, on foot, limping along on crutches. ‘The birds are singing; nature shows no sympathy with the final days of fascism.’

  A total of 2.5 million men, 14,000 pieces of artillery and more than 6,000 tanks were involved in Operation Berlin. In the eyes of the Red Army, Berlin was the ‘main prize’ to which the Soviets had a right after all their hardships. In the West, on 7 March, the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine had fallen intact into American hands; the Allies could now move through the Ruhr, and the end of the war was suddenly a matter of weeks away rather than months. That gave the Soviets a sense of urgency. Stalin was convinced that the British and Americans would try to take Berlin before he could.

  Churchill and Montgomery were indeed inclined to push on as quickly as possible: they saw the steady advance of the Soviet troops as a new threat to Europe. The Americans were not interested in that; they had enough problems on their hands already. Very few policymakers in Washington realised that the political boundaries of post-war Europe were being drawn up during those last weeks of the war. Eisenhower's reasoning was simple: he wanted to be done with the war in Europe as soon as possible, and with as few casualties as possible, in order to turn his attention to the war against Japan. To do that, he needed Stalin's support and he had absolutely no desire to endanger that relationship by unleashing a race for Berlin. As far as he was concerned, Stalin could do as he pleased, and he let him know that as well. Eisenhower shifted his attacks to southern Germany and Hitler's Alpenfestung. Churchill was furious.

  Yet the race for Berlin was about more than prestige; it was also about the nuclear research being carried out there. Thanks to the communist spy Klaus Fuchs, the Kremlin had known since 1942 about the American Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and about its German counterpart at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Dahlem. The Soviets were keen to get their hands on as many atomic researchers and laboratories – and as much research material and uranium and other raw materials – before the British and the Americans arrived. Then the Soviet Union could finally make an atom bomb of its own within the foreseeable future. Four years later, indeed, that objective had been realised.

  On Monday, 23 April, our anonymous diarist went out in search of coal. Her neighbourhood was still in German hands. The viaduct under the S-Bahn had
been closed off: people said a soldier had been hanged on the other side with a sign around his neck: TRAITOR. Barricades had been thrown up on Berliner Strasse, and were being guarded by members of the Volkssturm in their makeshift uniforms. ‘You see mere wisps of children there, baby faces under oversized helmets, you're startled to hear their high voices. These boys can be no older than fifteen, so thin and puny in their flapping uniforms.’

  It was clear to everyone that the war had been lost once and for all. Victor Klemperer, who collected Nazi jargon the way others collect stamps, added a few marvellous specimens to his collection in those final days in Berlin. A propaganda paper, the Panzerbär (Armoured Bear), continued to appear to the end. The final edition, on 29 April, spoke of ‘der Schicksalkampf des deutschen Volkes’ (the fateful struggle of the German people), and about ‘neue Eingreifkräfte’ (new interventionary forces) being brought in day and night. The worse the situation became, the more strident the language: a chunk of concrete containing explosives – particularly dangerous to the one throwing it – was labelled a Volkshandgranate 45. A unit ordered to attack the enemy almost unarmed was a Sturmzug. A group of youngsters sent to fight against Soviet tanks on foot or by bicycle was a Panzerjagdkompanie. The panicked press-ganging of the last remaining schoolboys and old men was called the 800, 000 Mann-Plan.

  For Albert Speer, the crucial turning point had come much earlier, in late January, with the fall of Silesia: a region full of mines, foundries and steel factories. It was then that he understood that within a few weeks the German war economy would grind to an irretrievable halt. Yet he calmly continued to take part in the broadcasting of comforting reports. Arms production would ‘run like clockwork’, all kinds of new weapons were on their way: he hinted at things including rockets and jet fighters.