Bomber Command (58 page)

In the shelter where Karl Deppert lay near the main post office, the lights survived through the first stage of the attack. Then there was a single heavy explosion, and blackness descended. There was a choked cry from the next cellar: ‘Break through – we’re trapped.’ The men scrambled to the jumble of brickwork and struggled in the glimmering torchlight to clear a hole. After a few minutes’ fevered labour, dust-covered bodies began to crawl through the wreckage. A sudden strong draught of air brought behind them a rush of smoke and sparks. Somebody yelled: ‘Get out! The town’s in flames!’ Deppert picked up his small son in his arms, seized his wife’s hands and gave her the bag holding the most vital family papers and some bread, then stumbled up the steps into the night.

All around them, flames were roaring through houses, shops, offices. Timbers sagged, window-frames and doors gaped empty, furniture blazed furiously. The 40 per cent slaked-lime fireproofing of roof timbers which had saved acres of Kassel in the great raid a year before could do nothing for Darmstadt. A paper factory crumbled and collapsed before the Depperts’ eyes. They stood hesitating for a moment, uncertain which way safety lay. They thought of the castle, then saw that upper Rheinstrasse, through which it lay, was already an inferno. They began to run the other way, up Mathildenhohe. Their hair smouldered as embers fell upon their heads, and they brushed them away. A girl ran to them begging: ‘Take me with you – I’ve just come from the pastry shop, and all the sugar is melting and no one dares to get out.’ They linked arms to avoid falling among the debris, and fled through the spirals of fire and the corpses that already decked the streets.

Young Hanna Schnaebel crawled from the cellar beneath her family’s little shop on Elizabethstrasse when the heat became unbearable, into that of the house adjoining, and then on down the cellars of the street. She ran up the stairs of the last one, into the midst of a shop whose counters were already on fire. An unknown man forced open the door for them to escape, then she stood alone on the streets shouting for the rest of her family and their little shopgirl, Annie. She began to run, a wet blanket over her head. She saw people crowding for shelter into a little workman’s hut in the midst of the grass of the Palaisgarten. She ran to join them, and together they cowered panting and silent with their terror until someone shouted: ‘The hut’s on fire!’ They staggered out, to find flames entirely encircling them, leaping towards the sky:

Suddenly I saw my mother. It was a miracle. We embraced, then we got to the wall of the Palaisgarten and crept beneath it. My blanket had been swept away. I lay half across her to shield her. Suddenly the bushes around us began to burn. We crawled to a big tree. I began to shake, to feel sick. Then I was sick, and I felt better. There was a momentary blast of icy air before the heat descended again. There was a gale of ashes as houses collapsed. No one spoke. All we could hear were the terrible screams for help from the cellars of the streets around us. But no one could move . . .

The first fatal misfortune for the people of Darmstadt after the departure of 5 Group that night was that an ammunition train in a siding near the central station began to burn. At intervals for the next hour, its cars exploded, convincing the terrified city that the bombardment was continuing either from aircraft above, or from delayed-action bombs, whose value Bomber Command had learnt from the Luftwaffe in the 1940 Blitz on Britain. Thousands of Darmstadters lay motionless, numb in their cellars when their only hope of survival lay in flight. The last of 627’s Mosquitoes had dumped its incendiaries more than half an hour before the fires of the
Todesfacher
, fuelled by the superlative tinder of the old town and the stiff breeze, combined to create a firestorm.

This was the terrible hurricane of flame and wind that
destroyed Hamburg, and which was to raze Dresden. As the fires leapt a mile into the sky, they sucked in cold air to bellow the blaze, sweeping from street to street in an irresistible rush of heat. Darmstadt was overwhelmed by a great roaring sound that induced deadly paralysis among the thousands in the shelters. They peered briefly out at the city, light as day amidst the flames, and lacked the will to step forth. So there, in their underground refuges, they died – whether of suffocation or by incineration it mattered little. The only people who lived that night were those who summoned the courage to fly.

Even among those who tried to escape, hundreds were sucked into the fires by the force of me wind, a snowstorm of ashes whirling around their heads. By 2 am, a Force 10 gale was driving through Darmstadt, while at the heart of the fires temperatures reached an incredible 1,500, perhaps 2,000 degrees centigrade. No one knew with certainty which way to run for safety. After Hamburg, the big city streets were everywhere adorned with arrows pointing the way to flight in a firestorm, but there were no such refinements in Darmstadt. Those who sought to carry their great bundles of possessions or pull their handcarts behind them were doomed. Many fell as they ran, and could not rise again. Their corpses sank into the asphalt as it melted, and were mummified long before morning. Jacob Schutz, the man in whose cellar a child had appealed for divine intervention, dipped his coat in the water tank in the shelter, then ran up the stairs and down the street, clutching it to his head. After a few minutes, he sank down to rest by a garden fence. Looking up past the flames, for a curiously tranquil moment he marvelled, like so many bomber crews, at the sight of the stars and the thin moon, crystal clear and wonderfully cool above Darmstadt’s fires. Then he regained his composure, and ran back to the cellar.

I urged the others to move. Four women had already gone, led by another man. No one else would go. I went back to lie under a big advertising hoarding in the street. For perhaps fifteen minutes I stayed among the children there, trying to help to make them feel safe, wrapping them in blankets. Then I went to look for a better place for us. I was forced back again and again by the smoke and the flames. Then I found a wall in Heinrichstrasse where perhaps a hundred people were sheltering. When I returned to the hoarding, it was in flames. With one child in my arms and leading another by the hand, I took twenty people to the wall. I saw a few faces I knew: a husband and son who had lost his wife and daughter. A cow had wandered in from somewhere, and stood calmly among the people . . .

Schutz found his way to a nearby fountain, and threw himself into its blissful coolness. Then he filled his helmet with water, and carried it carefully back to the beleaguered survivors in Heinrichstrasse. They dipped their scarves and handkerchieves into the water, and pressed them to their lips to deaden the terrible heat beating at their faces. Again and again Schutz made the journey to the fountain. At last, when all the group had been tended, in a moment of pity he went back once more for water for the cow. He met a friend who had recently given him two packets of precious tobacco. Now it lay in the abandoned embers of his house. They laughed absurdly about the tragic loss. Then they lay down to wait for the dawn. ‘It was not death that was terrible that night,’ said Schutz, ‘but the fear of death – the whimpering, the shrieks, the screams . . .’

All over Darmstadt, men, women and children were being asphyxiated where they sheltered, slowly slipping away into unconsciousness. One cellar lay beneath a house that received a direct hit from a ‘cookie’. Every inhabitant was killed instantly by blast except a single survivor, a chemist. He was found later with a razor in his hands. He had slit his own throat. Fifty people took refuge in one fountain, lying amidst the surrounding smoke and flame in a few inches of water beneath a great statue of Bismarck. In the morning, twelve survived. In a communal shelter beneath
an apartment block in Rheinstrasse, a central-heating boiler burst, drowning sixty people whose bodies were discovered in the morning, perfectly cooked. Two pregnant women collapsed as they fled through the streets and gave premature birth. Their bodies and those of their infants were found incinerated where they lay. Corpses were everywhere, the horror increased by the remains of long-dead Darmstadters blasted from their graves by a 4,000-lb bomb that had exploded in a cemetery. Schutz saw the body of a young woman ‘lying like a statue, her cold heels in their shoes stuck up in the air, her arms raised, parts of her face still visible, her mouth and teeth gaping open so that you did not know whether she had been laughing or crying . . .’

There were the usual multi-coloured corpses, stained every shade of the rainbow by pyrotechnics. ‘One fat air-raid warden lay, his little lantern beside him, his hands peacefully folded on his enormous chest. He looked like a sleeper replete after a banquet in some wonderful country.’ Since the earliest raids on Germany’s cities, there were strict laws forbidding the storing of solid fuel in cellars, which had contributed to so many terrible fires in the wake of bombing. But in this as so much else, Darmstadt had been complacent. Many cellars were packed with wood, coal and coke. Now these fuelled their owners’ funeral pyres.

The castle, with its priceless library, was blazing furiously. In Mathildenplatz, seven stallions which had broken out of their stables careered around the ring of flame encircling the square, maddened with terror, striving in vain to break out. Seven of Darmstadt’s eight Evangelical churches were already gone, and firemen were struggling hopelessly to save the Technical University, the museum and the theatres. Georg Dumas had to watch the priceless panelling of his home in Mathildenhohe burn before his eyes. His beloved grand piano sank into the flaming floorboards ‘with a final beautiful chord like the last trump’. His little dachshund crawled under the stove and whined hysterically until at last the fires silenced it. One of his neighbours cried ceaselessly for the loss of her beloved paintings, including a Tintoretto and a Salvator
Rosa. It was entirely beyond her to grasp what was happening to the entire city.

In Maria Tevini’s cellar, the doors burst from their frames after a near-miss early in the attack. Her eighteen-month-old son was hidden beneath a cushion in a laundry basket, while her 4½-year-old huddled beside her. She heard voices outside yelling to them to escape at once if they hoped to live. Clutching the children, she stumbled out into the garden to see their rabbit hutch and chicken-coop blazing, and molten debris from the roof of the museum next door smouldering on the grass. A fireman appeared from somewhere, and helped her to carry the children through the rubble and the flames to the Herrengarten park, fighting to walk upright in the face of the gale of wind and ash and heat.

I saw people tearing off their clothes as they caught fire, amidst the terrible music of the storm. The Herrengarten looked like an enormous medieval military camp, inhabited by the most ragged army in the world. Incendiaries burned everywhere, and no one was certain whether they were dangerous. Our eyes smarted with the smoke. I was given a handkerchief – a great prize – to soak in the water of the fountain. My son hung motionless, silent beside me. My arms ached with the weight of the baby. Then I met some women who soothed the children, and promised that there was a house intact nearby where we could shelter. It sounded like a fairytale . . . I found my father, sunk on a grassy bank, sleeping exhausted with his steel helmet perched on top of his hat. I should have laughed. But in the past few hours, I had forgotten how . . .

Ludwig, Prince of Hesse, was at his castle outside Darmstadt when he heard the assault on the city begin. He went outside and stood in the darkness, watching the sky lightening into a great red and yellow glow over the town. Too old for this war, he still possessed his army uniform from the last. Now, he went indoors and put it on, together with his helmet and jackboots. There was no petrol for the cars, so he helped his old coachman Helmuth to
harness the horses to a cart. They loaded two bicycles in the back. Then with great fear in their hearts, they climbed aboard and Helmuth whipped the team towards the fires.

Darmstadt Castle was still burning as they approached, beside its grey walls a huge charred Wellingtonia, decapitated by blast. ‘My only satisfaction was that the New Palace which I had sold to the Gestapo was utterly destroyed. It had always been a terrible thought to me that in cellars where my brother and I had played so happily as children, people were now tortured and imprisoned . . .’ They moved among numbed survivors checking piles of corpses. One woman said, ‘Is that father?’ but her son shook his head: ‘He was wearing different trousers.’ The Prince helped an enormous old lady to clamber over a wall from the ruins of her house:

I told her to imagine that we were both a few years younger, and that I was a charming cavalier into whose arms it would be a pleasure to fall. The old lady instinctively wanted to go to the old cemetery, where she joined hundreds of people sitting amidst the graves on rescued sofas and mattresses, gazing hypnotized into the fires . . .