The German War (61 page)

For the RAF’s Bomber Command, the Essen raids marked the beginning of an entirely new phase in the air war, the battle of the Ruhr. As the headquarters of the Krupp armament empire, Essen had been given pride of place in the string of major offensives against industrial targets. Throughout 1942, navigation equipment had proved too inaccurate to find the targets and even when pilots could see through the clouds, the enormous conurbation of the Ruhr made identification difficult. British losses to the strong anti-aircraft batteries had also been heavy. The March 1943 raids changed the balance back in the attackers’ favour, the culmination of technical breakthroughs which made navigation and targeting far more accurate. The bombers plotted their route to Essen with the help of ‘Oboe’, a new radio guidance system. Bomber Command avoided following a straight beam towards a target. Because of the large number of potential targets within range of the North Sea coast and western Germany, plausible feints could be deployed to direct the Luftwaffe night fighters to decoy targets. By February 1943, the Pathfinders were also starting to carry ‘H
2
S’, an on-board radar-imaging system which revealed whether the ground below was a built-up area or not. It was still trouble-prone, leading the Pathfinders to mistake the radar image of mudbanks in the Elbe at low tide for sections of the Hamburg docks: the bombers dropped their loads 21 kilometres downstream of the city centre. What made the raid on Essen on the night of 5–6 March more destructive than usual was that the high-speed Mosquitoes and the Pathfinders managed to mark the city accurately. For the first time in the RAF’s entire bombing campaign, 153 planes, nearly half the attacking force, succeeded in dropping their bombs within 5 kilometres of the target zone. Over the next four months, most of the cities of the Rhineland and Ruhr would be repeatedly bombed with similar levels of accuracy. The Krupp workshops in Essen would be picked out again a week later, setting a pattern for the months to come.
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Even in cities like Essen, where huge ferro-concrete bunkers had been built from 1940 onwards in expectation of air attack, the great majority of the civilian population had to take refuge in the cellars beneath their apartment blocks. That first night of 5 March, a doctor and his wife were sharing a deckchair in their cellar in Essen-West when a bomb blast blew the doors and windows in. The wife stopped reacting to her husband’s words of comfort and simply stared straight ahead of her, uttering a short prayer as each new bomb whistled through the air nearby. Holding her tightly, the doctor felt her whole body shake and before long it transmitted itself to him and his legs began to twitch uncontrollably too. He became one of the neuralgic cases referred to Dr Friedrich Panse, an expert in war neuroses at Bonn. Small children in particular felt the tremors of each explosion and blast as they took shelter in the cellars. Here they learned to listen for the different sounds, recognising the high explosive bombs from their ‘Crash bang!!!’ and the ‘muffled crack’ of the incendiaries, whose ‘Clack, clack clack’ reminded one child of ‘when someone got a juicy slap’. They also learned fear from the adults around them. As one boy described it, ‘Then it started in the bunker where people were crammed into every corner and crevice. With every bomb that fell the “Our fathers” sounded louder.’
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The raid of 5 March knocked out all eight of Essen’s emergency soup kitchens. With only three small ones left functioning, the People’s Welfare rushed in large canteens from neighbouring cities, providing an average of 73,000 meals per day. Local military units provided sixty field kitchens of their own, adding a further 25,000 litres to the daily capacity. To Carola Reissner, it was also ‘really amazing with what heroic resilience and lack of complaint everything is endured here’.
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The build-up to the attacks on Essen had begun the previous year when the RAF conducted the first ‘thousand bomber’ raid on Cologne on 30–31 May 1942, a demonstrative action in which even training planes had been pressed into service in order to show the British Air Ministry what Bomber Command could achieve if only it was given the resources. Afterwards the editor of the local paper wrote that everyone who walked through those streets realised ‘that they had taken their leave of their Cologne the day before’. Unlike Essen, indistinguishable from the built-up conurbation of the Ruhr, Cologne was easy to find. With the soaring twin spires of its Gothic cathedral rising beside the train station on the left bank of the wide, silver strip of the river Rhine, the city served as a convenient landmark on the flight path of the bomber stream. Even when it was not their target, the planes turned east over the city to bomb the industrial centres of the Ruhr, or south towards more distant targets like Nuremberg. At the end of February 1943 one young woman complained, ‘the English are driving us crazy!’ Every day and every evening ‘alarms three, four, five and more times’. On 28 February, Heinz Pettenberg counted the 500th alarm since the start of the war and confessed, ‘we are dead tired’. Many people simply fell asleep as soon as they sat down, whether it was on the tram, in the doctor’s waiting room, or at a government office. There were dreadful-looking barracks on the squares to give emergency shelter to the bombed-out. Rosalie Schüttler noted the many boarded-up shops, women driving trucks and trams and the endless piles of rubble on the Neumarkt where two mechanical diggers loaded up trucks running on the tram lines. The city was emptying, its population down from 770,000 to 520,000, as people sought safety and undamaged housing in the surrounding towns and villages. The commuter trains could scarcely cope with a further quarter of a million people trying to come into work and school each day. Even before the RAF’s ‘battle of the Ruhr’ began, the Swiss consul in Cologne, Franz-Rudolf von Weiss, described civilian morale as ‘well below zero’.
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As the RAF bombing grew in scale during spring 1943, Rosalie Schüttler was able to ‘watch the cruel game over the Ruhr’ each night from her home in the south-eastern suburb of Rath-Heumar. She heard too that the raids on the Möhne and Eder reservoirs on 16–17 May had released an ‘incredible deluge’ and ‘destroyed whole villages and caused great loss of life’. She could only guess at the death toll: while the papers printed a figure of 370–400, there were rumours of 12,000. When Dortmund was attacked on the night of 24 May, the noise of the bombing and flak was audible in Cologne, as the horizon was lit up first with the tracers and flares and then the deeper glow of the fires burning out of control 80 kilometres away. The raid made a ‘profound impression’ on the population, the Swiss consul concluded, not least because they felt the British had broken another rule of ‘fair play’: breaching the Möhne dam had flooded air raid shelters in Dortmund.
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As the first anniversary of the thousand-bomber raid approached, the terrified inhabitants of Cologne lay awake, waiting for the ‘big one’. In the event, it was Wuppertal that was hit. In the early hours of Sunday 30 May, 13-year-old Lothar Carsten jotted down in his diary: ‘In the middle of the night, at twelve o’clock, the sirens sound. This is nothing new, you turn over and go on sleeping.’ He repeated what everyone said: ‘The Tommies won’t find Wuppertal. We lie in the valley and at night there thick fog lies over the city.’ Luckily, his father did get up and rouse the family. They ran into the cellar as the first bombs fell. His mother brought their tracksuits but, in the rush, forgot the suitcase with all their important papers. As soon as it was safe to go out, Lothar immediately joined his neighbours, who formed a human chain and passed buckets from hand to hand to extinguish the fires; the water mains had been hit and the hydrants would not work. ‘The whole horizon is blood red,’ Lothar wrote later that morning. A total of 719 planes, most of them four-engined bombers, had succeeded in concentrating their loads on the eastern end of the long, narrow city of Wuppertal, setting the old town centre of Barmen ablaze and destroying as much as 80 per cent of its buildings. For the next few days, Lothar Carsten had no time to write up his diary. Together with the other boys in his Hitler Youth branch, he helped the bombed-out rescue their belongings and ran messages.
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When two SA men in Barmen went to comfort a woman who stood weeping in front of the ruins of her house where her son, daughter-in-law and 2-year-old grandson lay buried, she turned on them, shouting: ‘The Brownshirts are to blame for this war. They should have gone to the front and made sure that the English could not come here.’ Barmen had been totally unprepared. Within a day, news reached Rosalie Schüttler that people who had caught fire had ‘jumped into the Wupper to escape the heat’. In that one night 3,400 people had been killed, by far the greatest number of casualties in a single raid until now. For Bomber Command, Wuppertal was a minor target. Its main point was to force the Germans to disperse anti-aircraft batteries from the well-defended industrial centres of the Ruhr.
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Listening to the constant appeal by the authorities for everyone to leave Cologne who was not employed there, Rosalie concluded that the government had decided ‘to sacrifice the Rhineland’. In the city, a strange calm set in. For the next twelve days, the alarms did not sound and strange rumours flew about. There was talk of a ‘secret accord’ between the governments, and an Allied leaflet was said to be circulating promising to spare Cologne, because the Jews who had emigrated ‘want to live there once more’. Such shared fantasies helped to create a powerful set of reference points between the persecution of the Jews and Allied bombing. Then, on the night of 11–12 June, the alarms went off again, but this time the bombers passed overhead and soon the sky to the north over Düsseldorf was ‘bright with the conflagration’. On 15 June, the Swiss consul reported to his superiors, ‘we are all living here on a powder keg and in Cologne everyone believes that the next major attack will be directed at us’. People were desperate to be admitted to the ferro-concrete bunkers. Meanwhile, rumours about bombing with poison gas were multiplying once again, a key indicator of plummeting morale.
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As news of the bombing of western Germany spread, the SD reports on the national mood became so gloomy that Goebbels took the matter up with Himmler. He tried – and failed – to persuade him to have the reports jointly vetted by the Propaganda Ministry before circulating them within the top echelon of the Nazi leadership. Goebbels did at least succeed in drastically reducing the number of government officials who were entitled to read this most prized source of news. In the Ruhr, a ditty made the rounds which pilloried the audience of Goebbels’s ‘total war’ speech in February:

Dear Tommy, fly further

we are all mine workers.

Fly further to Berlin,

all of them cried ‘Yes’.

This was not a mood of entrenched hostility, however. When Goebbels toured Dortmund and Essen that spring and promised ‘retaliation’ for the air raids to packed halls of armaments workers, he was cheered to the rafters. Rather, it was a demand for release from the torment of air attack: in optimistic moments, many people imagined repaying the British with interest; at more pessimistic ones, they simply wished the deadly payloads would fall somewhere else. At the beginning of March, the news that Berlin had endured its heaviest raid of the war had been greeted in Cologne ‘with relief and even joy’, according to the Swiss consul.
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As chairman of the Interministerial Committee for Air Raid Damage, Goebbels was now playing a key role in organising civil defence, even though Hitler had refused to make him ‘Plenipotentiary for Total War’. Responsible for bringing mobile workshops and kitchens, household goods and furniture, clothing and food supplies to the bombed cities, the committee cut red tape and requisitioned supplies from Wehrmacht stores for the ‘emergency relief’. On 5 June 1943, at the height of this new campaign, Goebbels made another Sportpalast speech, promising massive retaliation against the British people. It was they who ‘would have to pay for the bill marked up by [Britain’s] leaders who have betrayed their own blood at the behest of those Jewish rabble-rousers and agitators’. The press began to talk about extraordinarily powerful new weapons and Goebbels’s promise would remain central to orchestrating German hopes for the rest of the war: ‘the hour of retaliation will come!’
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Four weeks after the devastating raid on Barmen, the Elberfeld end of Wuppertal was hit too. Armament workers in Zella-Mehlis near Weimar began to sing a new song, adding their own voices to the clamour for revenge:

Retaliation:

The day is coming, when the crime of Wuppertal will be avenged

And it will break over your land in a hail of iron.

Your murderers bore no sorrow in this town and its burning

Killing the child on the mother’s breast

That goads us on now with wildest fervour, to hate

For you bear with all Jewish races the Wupper’s mark of shame.

The dead call out for vengeance! And we stand firm by our word

And build weapons that will finally answer for this murder.

In vain, Catholic bishops urged restraint. On 10 June, Archbishop Frings of Cologne issued a pastoral letter, stressing ‘that the extraordinary hardships of war are a consequence of human sins, a punishment for their far-reaching falling away from God and His commandments’. As usual, Bishop Galen was more explicit, preaching a sermon at the pilgrimage site at Telgte on 4 July in which he directly challenged the ethics of ‘retaliation’: ‘For once I must speak out in public: I can and will not make my own the calls for hatred and retaliation which have appeared repeatedly in the German press, nor may you make them your own!’ Calls for revenge were ‘un-Christian and, above all, un-German, because they are unworthy, ignoble, unchivalrous!’ Revenge was a Jewish principle, ‘the old Jewish law of “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, expressly rejected by Christ’. Despite tarring Nazi ‘
Vergeltung
’ – retaliation – as a ‘Jewish’ response, Galen struggled as much as the other bishops to get this old-fashioned and ‘chivalrous’ version of the Christian message across to his flock. He blamed the bombing and the war on the arrogance of a secular modernity which had turned its back on divine truths. His answer to the question ‘How can God permit this?’ was to pose another question: ‘In which country is God’s supremacy still publicly recognised and is He still accorded the honour He deserves?’ Nationalists to a man, the Catholic bishops had used the same kinds of arguments in the previous war to urge contrition and repentance, hoping that the death of so many young men on the battlefield would lead to the resurrection of Christian society in Germany.
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