Destined to Witness

by Hans Massaquoi

The seeming defection of as high-placed a Nazi as Rudolf Hess proved a gigantic embarrassment to the Nazi government, and no pains were spared by the Goebbels propaganda machine to put a benign spin on the entire affair. Part of that effort was the official explanation on the air and in the press that Hess had been under a severe mental strain and acted while not really himself. This gave rise to hundreds of jokes about “crazy Hess,” including the one in which a down-on-his-luck man enters a Nazi employment office and asks for a job.

  “What kind of a job do you have in mind?” the Nazi official wants to know.

  “I hear there’s a vacancy for deputy Führer,” the man replies.

  “Are you crazy?” the indignant official shouts at him.

  “No,” the job-seeker replies. “Is that a requirement?”

  To compare the BBC broadcasts with their German counterpart, I also listened, quite legally, to the nightly reports of William Joyce, also known as Lord Haw-Haw, an American-born, Irish-reared radio personality who was beaming Goebbels’s propaganda in English from Berlin. Unfortunately, my English at the time wasn’t advanced enough for me to understand everything Lord Haw-Haw had to say, but I did catch his threats of pending doom and dire consequences for the British people if they didn’t surrender posthaste. He made these threats in spite of the fact that Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe had already been handed a crushing defeat in the Battle of Britain, with which Hitler had intended to establish German air supremacy as a prelude to his planned invasion of the British Isles. As it turned out, the British never forgave Lord Haw-Haw for his attempts to undermine their fighting spirit and unceremoniously hanged him as a traitor in London after the war.

  In addition to British radio reports, there were other, more tangible signs that indicated to me that Hitler’s war effort was in serious trouble. From the time I had begun my apprenticeship, Meister Neumann had always held my coworkers and me to the highest standards of German workmanship in our production of ammunition trailers. To assure that only flawless vehicles were certified for front-line duty, a small army of military inspectors were constantly going over every welding seam, every rivet, and every screw. The slightest deviation from specifications resulted in immediate rejection of the vehicle by the inspectors and a chewing out of the person responsible by Meister Neumann. Literally overnight that procedure was changed. Explaining that the draft had produced a serious manpower shortage at the plant and that, as a result, we were running dangerously behind production schedule, Meister Neumann instructed us that henceforth our main objective would be to turn out as many vehicles as we could in the shortest amount of time. Then he shocked everyone with words we thought we’d never hear coming from the mouth of the plant’s most obsessive perfectionist and arch-enemy of Murks (sloppy workmanship). “Never mind if the trailers aren’t perfect,” he said. “Perfect ammunition trailers that don’t reach the front line in time are useless in our effort to win the war.” Also gone with the high production standards were the military inspectors, who, we were told, had been reassigned to the front, where the army high command felt they were needed more urgently.

  Being swept up, like everyone else, by the swiftly moving events of the war, I had hardly noticed that the three years of my apprenticeship were up and that it was time for me to take my Gesellenprufung (journeyman exam), consisting of two days of practical and theoretical tests. Although I had looked forward to the day when I would move up and join the ranks of skilled machinists, the thrill was gone by the time I was told that I had passed the exam and was handed my Gesellenbrief (journeyman’s diploma). Under restrictive war regulations I was unable to follow the tradition of my trade and move to another job. That meant that I would have to stay at my old job, where, regardless of my new official status, I would never be given the proper respect by my former superiors and frequent tormentors. Besides, I was sick and tired of making ammunition trailers whose assembly-line manufacture no longer offered any challenges to me. Even the thought of receiving full journeyman’s pay instead of the puny weekly apprentice allowance did little to boost my morale.

  I wished that something would happen that would put an end to the drudgery and boredom I felt, something that would bring change and perhaps some excitement into my humdrum life. Nobody warned me at the time to be careful what I wished for because I might get it. Little did I know that a disaster of monstrous proportions would soon provide me with enough change and excitement to last me for the rest of my life.

  OPERATION GOMORRAH

  “Imagine more than fifty percent of metropolitan Boston smashed into ruin and filled with decaying bodies. Take every single building in the corporate limits of Boston proper, and pound it to wreckage; burn everything that can be consumed by fire; kill tens of thousands of people. Imagine Boston destroyed in this manner, left in ruins and ash and pestilential stench. Imagine all this in its worst—and you understand Hamburg in its reality.” Thus wrote military aviation writer Martin Caidin in his 1960 book The Night Hamburg Died, in which he chronicles the horrors wrought by “Operation Gomorrah,” the code name for ten days of relentless attacks by heavy British Lancaster and Halifax bombers in the summer of 1943. It was my good fortune to be among those who survived without a scratch the “utter hell of sustained fire” that, Caidin wrote, “not even Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suffering the smashing blows of nuclear explosions, could match.”

  For me and my mother, “the utter hell” started on hot, sweltering July 29, 1943, a Thursday, sometime around 9 P.M. At that time, the sirens howled their familiar pre-warning, indicating that enemy aircraft had once again crossed the British Channel and were headed in the direction of Hamburg. As more than a hundred times in the past, my mother and I had each grabbed two suitcases that contained our most essential belongings and headed for the public air-raid shelter half a block down the street. For us, as for the rest of the city’s population, nightly shelter visits had become a way of life. But this night was different. Vast portions of the city had been leveled and thousands of people had been killed by enemy bombs during the preceding two nights, and so the sound of the sirens had acquired a new, more ominous significance.

  Some of our neighbors, frightened by the prospect of additional air attacks, had grabbed as many of their belongings as they could carry and left the city to stay with friends or relatives. Gretchen, her mother, and her brother were among them. The previous night, Gretchen had told me in the shelter that they were already packed and would leave at daybreak for Göttingen, in lower Saxony, where they had relatives. My mother and I had considered the option of leaving the city also, but decided against it since rail transportation out of Hamburg was in virtual chaos because of the sudden mass migration of panic-stricken people. Getting hit by strafing aircraft while stuck in an overcrowded train, we knew, was as likely as getting hit in an air-raid shelter. We decided to take our chances in the city.

  For the first couple of hours following the sounding of the alarm, things were deceptively calm. I had gone to the main entrance gas-sluice, a tiny foyer, where about a dozen men had gathered to smoke and to look at the starry sky through the open hatch. To my delight I discovered among the mostly older men a former neighborhood chum of mine, Jack Spederski, whom I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. Smartly dressed in the uniform of the vaunted Panzer Division Gross-Deutschland, Jack explained that he had the dubious pleasure of being home on furlough from the eastern front. The impressive collection of medals and combat badges on his tunic let me know that he had had more than his share of front-line action. When I complimented him on being a bona fide hero, he scoffed, “I’m fed up with the war, but I’ve learned to make the best of a bad situation.”

  Jack told me that, contrary to conventional wisdom, his “elite” division was not made up entirely of eager volunteers but included a sizable number of reluctant draftees like himself. He said that his unit’s reputation as one of the most formidable German combat teams was well deserved and due, in part, to its frequent refusal to take priso
ners. At first, Jack said, he felt squeamish when ordered to shoot unarmed Soviet soldiers who had surrendered, but after seeing so many of his own comrades killed or maimed, killing became easier and easier until he could do it without giving it another thought. “It’s either them or us,” he rationalized, “so you do your best to make sure it’s them. You do what you have to do.”

  Jack conceded that his unit’s ask-no-mercy, give-no-mercy reputation had a down side. It not only struck fear in the hearts of the enemy, he explained, it also made the enemy fight harder and resist longer in order to escape certain death.

  I had a difficult time imagining that the soft-spoken, gentle, and somewhat withdrawn Jack I had known as a boy had become a tough, unfeeling killer of unarmed fellow human beings. But looking at his medals, his firmly set jaw, and the glint in his blue eyes, I realized that the Jack Spederski I had known and the one who stood before me and casually talked about some of the liberties he and his comrades-in-arms had taken with Russian women were two entirely different persons.

  Conveniently forgetting that it was the Germans who had invaded the Soviet Union and not the other way around, Jack assured me that the Russians really had it coming, since they refused to fight fair. As example, he recalled how some of his tank units had been decimated in battle by Russian kamikaze-type dogs. He explained that the dogs, which had explosives strapped to their bodies and were equipped with antennalike devices, had been trained to seek their food beneath tanks. The moment German tanks approached, the unleashed dogs would rush toward the tanks in anticipation of food. Once their antenna made contact with a tank, the explosives would detonate and dog, tank, and crew would be on their way to Valhalla. Jack, who seconds earlier had let me know that he saw nothing wrong with shooting Russian prisoners who had surrendered, waxed indignant about such “inhuman cruelty” to animals.

  I was revolted by what I had just heard, but I felt it was pointless trying to make him see the flaws in his reasoning, with which he tried to justify his and his unit’s atrocities.

  Turning my attention from Jack to the conversations of the other men in the small room, I was in for some more horror stories, but this time they were much closer to home. Discussing the previous week’s air attacks on Hamburg, one man said that he had been looking for his brother and sister-in-law who lived in the Hammerbrook district, but that he had given up all hope of ever seeing them alive again after he discovered that the entire district had been literally wiped out. Another man related how hundreds of people met with a slow, agonizing death after they had been set on fire by bombs containing a phosphorous liquid. He then gave a sickeningly graphic description of how the unfortunates had tried to save themselves by jumping into the canals, but that as soon as they would try to leave the water, the phosphorus would reignite in spontaneous combustion, forcing them to stay in the water until they became too weak to hold on or lost consciousness and drowned.

  Although the mere voicing of doubt in a Nazi victory had officially been deemed a treasonous offense, the people openly speculated as to how long Germany could withstand this kind of massive destruction of its major industrial centers. One man, apparently indifferent to the presence of a soldier, gave the Nazi regime only “one more month, if that much.” No one disagreed. It seemed that the more the German “man in the street” perceived the regime to be in trouble, the more emboldened he became to speak his mind. Unfortunately, his prediction of the Nazis’ imminent demise was still two years premature.

  One man suggested that there might not be another attack on Hamburg, because the British would probably want to capture the city as intact as possible. Little did he, or I, for that matter, know that months before the fate of Hamburg had already been sealed by the planners of Operation Gomorrah, which called for the total destruction of Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest industrial city and its largest seaport. It didn’t take long for us to find out.

  I reentered the shelter to report to my mother that things were quiet outside and that, at least this night, we would probably be spared. Inside, the occupants—mostly women, children, and elderly men—who had been quiet and tense at the outset, had begun to relax and were chatting as usual. Suddenly, shortly after midnight, all hell—in the most vivid meaning of the term—broke loose. Amid the droning of what sounded like thousands of heavy bombers, we could hear the shrill crescendo of whining bombs threading their way downward before crashing with elemental force into the ground. With every explosion, the entire shelter shuddered as if rocked by a massive earthquake. Each explosion was followed by loud screams of frightened women and children. They became even louder when, within minutes of the initial attack, the lights went out and the Dratfunk (wire broadcast) went dead, apparently because of bomb damage. After that first pounding, there was a short moment of quiet followed by another pounding and another moment of silence. Gradually, the quiet intervals between the sound of detonating bombs became shorter and shorter until they had ceased altogether, giving way to a continuous hail of what sounded to us like exploding bombs of every size and description. Postmortem reports released by the Allies after the war confirmed that during Operation Gomorrah, the city had been struck by some twelve hundred land mines, thirty thousand heavy high-explosive bombs, more than three million stick incendiary bombs, eighty thousand hundred-pound liquid-phosphorus bombs, five hundred phosphorus canisters, and five hundred incendiary flares.

  Reassessing the success of their bombing raids on Hamburg after the war, the British credited the effectiveness of their mission on their gambling on a new technology: metal strips they literally rained on the city. Released by the ton prior to the release of the bombs, the metal strips wreaked havoc on German antiaircraft artillery radar, making it virtually impossible for the flak to zero in on their targets. Whereas during all of their previous air attacks the British had suffered heavy losses, the metal strips permitted their bombers to maneuver above Hamburg with near impunity.

  About an hour after the bombing started, the temperature in our shelter began to rise rapidly. We concluded that the factory above us had been hit by incendiary bombs and was on fire. Our suspicion was confirmed a few moments later, when thick smoke started oozing through several cracks in the ceiling. At this point, our neighborhood tailor-turned-air-raid warden made his presence known by shining a flashlight on himself. During less trying moments, he had often been the target of behind-the-back ridicule because of his officious pseudomilitary bearing. But this time, nobody felt inclined to snicker as he explained the gravity of our situation and, after setting up several battery-powered emergency lights, ordered all able-bodied men, including Jack and me, to man the manual air pumps and start pumping.

  Jack and I started pumping away, but it soon became obvious that our efforts were counterproductive. Instead of fresh air, we were pumping in thick, acrid smoke from the outside and had to quit. Jack told me that facing Ivan in combat with frostbitten hands and feet was no fun, but that waiting like sitting ducks to be roasted alive or to choke to death in some “goddamn hole in the ground” like ours was worse.

  Eventually, the bombing stopped. All we could hear outside was a loud hissing noise that we took for the sound of fire hoses in action, but which was actually caused, we learned later, by the firestorm that had been unleashed by the incendiary bombs, which had turned the streets above us into an inferno of up to fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Slowly but surely, the shelter filled with smoke and people began to cough and wheeze. Through the dim emergency lights that were getting dimmer as the batteries weakened, we could see thick smoke enveloping us. We were now faced with two alternatives, either stay in the shelter and suffocate or leave the shelter and become human torches. But with the sudden, thunderous collapse of the outside walls of the factory and the subsequent blocking of the exits, even those two horrifying options were cut down to one. That is, until we became aware of another threat to our lives. Someone touched the ceiling and discovered that it was burning hot, leaving us with the dismal pros
pect of its collapsing over our heads. With the news of another peril making the rounds, a wave of resignation settled over the shelter as people, huddling closely together in little family groups, seemed to give up hope of ever getting out alive. Except for continuous hacking coughs, there was silence. Even the children’s crying had ceased.

  I was sitting on the cement floor beside my mother, who, like me, was experiencing breathing difficulties and burning eyes. Although we had been told that our gas masks were no protection against smoke, we felt so desperate that we decided to put them on anyway, just in case they might do some good. We soon discovered that the gas masks were no help at all. If anything, they made breathing more difficult. But in our state of mind, we refused to admit their ineffectiveness and clung to them as if they were the only thing that stood between us and death.

  While I fully grasped the seriousness of our predicament, I was unable to fathom that this was the end—that whatever my mission had been on this earth would end in this “goddamn hole in the ground.” Even recalling the many corpses I had seen during the past few days in other parts of the city failed to convince me of the strong possibility that my luck, too, had finally run out. I felt neither optimism, pessimism, nor fear, just incredulity that this was going to be it. With my breathing under the gas mask becoming increasingly laborious, I became more and more detached from my surroundings, but without actually losing consciousness. I was still aware of the presence of my mother beside me and the fact that we were holding hands, but with her gas mask, she looked unreal to me, like a stranger from another planet.

  How long I remained in this apathetic stupor, I don’t know. The next thing I remember is that a man was pulling at my gas mask while shouting at me to take it off. At first, I believed that it was someone who wanted to save his own neck at my expense and I started holding on to my mask with all my might. Only after I noticed that he was wearing a Nazi uniform did I let go. Blindingly bright daylight was pouring through the front entrance of the shelter, and as soon as I took off the gas mask as I had been ordered, fresh air started pouring into my oxygen-famished lungs. My mother, too, took off her gas mask and was instantly revived. According to my wristwatch, it was 9 A.M. Our ordeal had lasted exactly twelve hours.