Bomber Command (59 page)

A Russian prison-camp at the edge of the town was totally destroyed. 200 Italian internees sought to escape from the Concordia Hall in Waldstrasse through a narrow archway into the street. It collapsed upon them as they battered at the doors. The town treasury was gutted. A soldier on leave from the Russian front stood crying by the burning castle: ‘I have never seen this,’ he said. ‘This is hell.’ Else-Marie Ullrich was a sixteen-year-old lawyer’s daughter who had been sheltering with her parents in the basement of the Dresdner Bank, above which they had an apartment. They were a cheerful, easygoing family who seldom bothered to go down to the shelters when there was an alarm, and joked about it when they did. After attempting to escape and finding flames and debris all around them, they made a conscious decision that it was better to suffocate than to burn. One woman who tried to flee was
never seen again. The others sat in silence as the air thickened and grew stifling. Else-Marie’s sister suddenly blurted out: ‘Oh! I’ve found my lucky penny! It’s all right, we’re all going to be all right!’ But water was pouring into the cellar from the wrecked boiler-room next door. They lay on the floor, gasping for the dwindling breaths of air. One by one they lost consciousness. They were very close to death when at the imprecations of a bank employee, in the early hours of daylight, a gang of soldiers dug through the wreckage to free them. ‘Many people struggled to help and gave unstintingly that night,’ said Fraulein Ullrich. ‘Others, who had much, offered nothing. We have forgotten neither kind.’

One of Darmstadt’s principal tragedies that night was that no outside help could reach the city through the ruins and the flames until the firestorm was far beyond checking. There was an elaborate nationwide organization to support local town fire-brigades in crises such as this. There were fifty-three Luftwaffe fire-fighting battalions, and the men of the Mobile Reserve Service – part of the Fire Protection Police – were stationed at strategic points all over Germany to race down the
autobahns
to a city under attack. There were also relief columns which went to the assistance of devastated cities with personnel and equipment capable of providing 30,000 meals a day. All these organizations worked with efficiency and dedication until the last weeks of the war, but on the night of 11 September they could do nothing. By 3 am the following morning, a great mass of vehicles and men from neighbouring towns and villages and from as far afield as Mannheim, Mainz and Frankfurt stood helpless on the
autobahn
that the Führer had opened himself almost exactly ten years before, gazing towards the tormented city. In Darmstadt itself, the fire service did its pathetic best. But they were without orders and short of petrol for their pumps. Scores of fire hydrants were blocked by rubble. Scores more were linked only to fractured mains.

In the Marienhospital in the midst of the city, doctors and nurses worked amidst the blast-broken window frames to do what they could for thousands of terribly injured Darmstadters. The
hospital’s patients were evacuated to the cellars when the attack began, and there in the candlelight they remained. Two babies were delivered in the basement even as 5 Group delivered their attack. Now, queues of adults and children sought treatment for eyes tormented by the smoke and fumes. The doctors worked by emergency lighting powered by batteries – mains power and water were gone. For scores of horribly burned casualties, there was nothing to be done but ease their dying. Nurses soaked their sheets in salad oil to calm the pain. Most ended their sufferings by morning.

The firestorm died around 4 am. A yellow-grey light began to break over the city. Houses and public buildings still burned, but without the ferocity of the night. Prince Ludwig met a friend near the Inselstrasse who described how his old tutor, Professor Eugen Koser, had run headlong through the blazing darkness, cursing the rulers of Germany. People began to pick their way between the smoking buildings, through the melted asphalt of the streets to their houses, searching for life or property. The first terrible discoveries were made: cellars crammed with suffocated bodies – worse still, with amorphous heaps of melted and charred humanity. There were whole families whose remains could be removed in a laundry basket. Some bodies had shrunk to a quarter of life-size. Dr Fritz Kramer had been in France with the Kaiser’s army thirty years before, ‘yet this was worse than anything I had ever seen in Champagne’. There were blue corpses and purple corpses, black heaps of flesh and protruding bones. Kramer saw a man carrying a sack containing the heads of his entire family; the body of a girl lay on a pavement with one naked leg broken off beside her, ‘looking like some obscene joint of cold meat’. Loose hands and legs, the head of a man buried in rubble to the chin with his eyes open and empty, lay in Ludwigstrasse. Bodies were already piled in the Palaisgarten. The bleak humour of disaster began to assert itself. ‘Well, at least we have nothing to worry about now,’ said Ernst Luckow’s wife Wilma, ‘because we have nothing left at all . . .’

Rudolf Vock ran into the Mayor of Wamboldt, which was one of the outlying suburbs of Darmstadt. ‘Vock,’ said the Mayor, ‘you’ve got to get a hundred spades and go at once to the Waldfriedhof cemetery. There are a hundred Russian prisoners who’ve got to be started digging graves.’ As he went, Vock passed a column of lorries in Rheinstrasse already piled with corpses. Two French prisoners ordered to help the sisters at the Marienhospital to remove their dead proved too nauseated by the stench to do the job, and now the nurses pushed a cartload of corpses to the Waldfriedhof themselves. At the cemetery, a silent crowd of men and women watched as the Russians unloaded the corpses, and began dumping them in hastily-dug pits, each covered with a layer of quicklime. A squad of armed SS troopers guarded the prisoners. Police detectives were stripping bodies of valuables and placing these in envelopes, labelled if there was any clue to identity. Hour after hour, the lorryloads trundled in. They laboured on, without food or rest. A gang of Gestapo prisoners were brought to reinforce the Russians, and that afternoon 5,000 men of the Wehrmacht moved into the city to support relief operations.

In four years of bombing, Germany had evolved a detailed procedure for dealing with the unspeakable realities of mass death. In the wake of the great raid on Kassel in 1943, the local Police President circulated a long list of suggestions that he believed other cities might find helpful: protective overalls, rubber gloves, goggles and disinfectants were essential for handling corpses; supplies of alcohol, candles, tobacco and torch batteries should be stockpiled for use in the first days after the raids; as many witnesses as possible should be brought to central collecting points to assist with identification of bodies. Identification teams should be equipped with shears and bolt-cutters for removing jewellery. It was useful to print in advance supplies of death-registers, corpse-cards and pro formas for individual personal descriptions, and to prepare supplies of envelopes for valuables. Bodies were best labelled in pencil, for ink ran in the rain. Dismembered corpses should be reassembled whenever possible, to avoid double-counting of loose limbs if
they became separated. The Darmstadt authorities, therefore, had a useful body of case-history to draw upon. They needed it all in the days that followed.

At lunchtime on 12 September, Wilhelmine Wollschrager hurried into the city from her suburban home to look for her grandparents, equipped with bread and a thermos of tea. She made her way down the narrow avenue through the rubble on Rheinstrasse, a moistened pad over her mouth amidst the lingering smoke. She was awed by the tramlines hung crazily over the road, the stream of empty-eyed refugees fleeing down the street against her, seeking the East Station. On the corners, little knots of blackened firemen and rescue workers sat exhausted, while others still laboured amidst the debris. At last she reached her grandparents’ house.

Thank God! The cellar windows were open. In my excitement I ran forward calling ‘Grandmother! Grandfather!’ Then I looked through the windows and saw small flames licking at the floor. Somebody pulled me back, shouting that the building could collapse at any minute. I rushed through the yards to the neighbour’s house next door. I saw him lying dead in the yard, his bicycle and briefcase against a tree beside him. I never saw my grandparents again.

‘There was a deathly silence in the town, ghostly and chilling,’ wrote Martha Gros, the doctor’s wife who had fled from her blazing cellar at the height of the attack.

It was even more unreal than the previous night. Not a bird, not a green tree, no people, nothing but corpses . . . We climbed over the wreckage into the garden and proceeded to the burnt-out cellar. The ashes were almost two feet deep. I found the place where I had dropped our cash box, picked it up and opened it. The 1,000 Reichsmark note which I had saved for emergencies was a heap of ashes. The little boxes of jewellery had been burned. The best piece, a large emerald, had cracked. Around our safe lay large lumps of melted silver, and in the wine-racks, there were melted bottles hanging in bizarre long ribbons. For this to have happened the temperature must have been something like 1,700 degrees.

‘One was afraid of losing one’s reason,’ said Jacob Schutz:

People from the rescue service were collapsing into nervous hysteria. It was a privilege to have a coffin, or even the means to make one oneself. Most of the bodies were put on a lorry or wheeled in little handcarts to the mass graves in the cemetery.

The hospitals were crammed. All preparations counted for nothing. You could travel without a ticket on the train, bicycle on the pavements. There were no windows in the trains, no schools, no doctors, no post, no telephone. One felt completely cut off from the world. To meet a friend who survived was a wonderful experience. There was no water, no light, no fire. A candle was of priceless value. Little children and old people collected wood from the ruins for cooking. Every family dug its own latrine in the garden. There was no more absolute ownership of anything. Many people moaned about their losses, yet others seemed almost relieved by their freedom from possessions. This had suddenly become a city of proletarians . . .

Half-dressed people struggled to the stations in the great surge of anxiety to flee. Loudspeaker cars toured the city broadcasting evacuation instructions. The relations of the dozens of pregnant women who had given birth under the strain of the night sought desperately for a doctor or a midwife. Carolin Schaefer had covered the eyes of her children as they fled through the corpse-strewn streets ‘because I felt that if the boys were to see this, they could never grow up to lead happy lives’. But by dawn she was compelled to abandon her efforts to save them from the sight of horror, because it was everywhere. A friend passed her in the streets pushing a bicycle, the melted rubber on its rims all that was left of the tyres. On the luggage rack was a soap box. ‘Silently she embraced me. Then she began to cry, pointing to the box. “In there is my husband,” she said.’ Frau Schaefer’s father and sister heard on the radio about the fate of Darmstadt, and travelled the
breadth of Germany from their home in Chemnitz to look for her. Her husband was granted five days’ leave from the front, and reached home in a Wehrmacht staff car: ‘When he arrived, he said that nothing he had seen on the battlefield had ever pained him so much.’ She found her father-in-law in the crowded ward of a city hospital, blind and terribly injured, ‘a wreck of a man looking expressionlessly through his bandages’. He had been found wandering through the streets, dazed and unseeing.

Chalk scribbles on buildings were the only indication of the fate of thousands of Darmstadters. ‘Where is Doctor Kutz?’ Jacob Schutz saw scrawled on the broken wall of a house. Another hand had written briefly beneath: ‘DEAD’. Men, women, children wandered the streets, searching for lost relatives and friends, struggling to save a few charred possessions from the ruins of their houses. Others were more fortunate. Passers-by were enraged to see a working-party of prisoners from the jail, under guard and in prison-striped uniform, labouring to rescue hundreds of cases of wine from the cellar of the local
Kreisleiter
’s house.

The troops who cleared the city of its corpses were openly plied with alcohol to enable them to complete their ghastly task. The living stumbled through the streets pushing handcarts laden with luggage, or piled their remaining sticks of furniture until some vehicle could break through to collect them. People of every age and background pillaged ruthlessly what they needed to survive. When Martha Gros miraculously found a coffin for one of her relations, she was compelled to chain it to the railings outside the house until they could carry out the burial.

Soup kitchens were established at strategic points, and businessmen and lawyers, shopkeepers and industrialists learnt to commute in a new pattern, from canteen to cellar, cellar to canteen. Many left the city altogether, some walking miles past the crowds of awed spectators who came from scores of surrounding villages to gaze on Darmstadt. ‘And so we went like gypsies out of our dear, burning town,’ wrote Hanna Schnaebel. Thousands of people clogged the railway station, where, by the afternoon of the
12th, packed refugee trains were running out of the city. Vast numbers of postcards were distributed, supposedly to let distant relatives know the fate of their families, but although they were filled in and collected for postage, none seemed to reach its destination.

At lunchtime on 13 September, to the stupefied disbelief of the survivors amidst the ruins, there was an air-raid warning. A great cry went up: ‘They’re coming again!’ Carolin Schaefer saw the shattered faces around her in the street gaze appalled into the sky. Voices shouted in horror: ‘Why have they come back?’ ‘What do they want?’ ‘There’s nothing for them here.’ High in the clear sky, they saw the glinting wings of a formation of the 8th Air Force’s Flying Fortresses. The black puffs of flak began to burst around them. Moments later, the earth shook once more with explosions as people huddled with their hands to their ears, cowering amidst the rubble of the city, for only a few surviving deep shelters cut into rock were still of value to the people of Darmstadt.