The German War (67 page)

In other respects, the Hamburg memorial was unusual. Mass graves were deeply unpopular: like paupers’ graves, they seemed shameful and their anonymity left no individual headstone for relatives to visit and mourn. In Berlin and other cities, the bombing dead continued to be buried individually – thanks to a combination of family pressure and official sensibilities. The bodies were laid out in a ‘respectful’ way in the huge halls for identification and families were then permitted to have their relatives buried by private undertakers: the right to provide a private coffin had been upheld in an emergency decree of July 1943. Only those at the bottom of the race hierarchy were shovelled into anonymous collective graves: 122 ‘Eastern workers’ were interred at one such site at the Wilmersdorf cemetery in Berlin. Avoiding such ignominy had been one of the aesthetic challenges in designing the Ohlsdorf memorial in Hamburg.
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In Hamburg on Remembrance Sunday 1943, the Party was able to marginalise the Church, something it set great store by. But while Party leaders insisted on their prerogative to deliver the news of military deaths to families in person, the bereaved continued to turn to their local churches. A month after Gertrud L. received the news of her husband’s death, his memorial service was held in the church where the couple had married eight years earlier, presided over by the same pastor. He posed the question of faith directly: ‘You have to ask yourself is there a Lord God, who permits the loving husband of such a young woman to be taken and four children to lose their father?’ Where another widow might have doubted, Gertrud felt ‘comforted’ by his answer. ‘God’, he assured them all, ‘does not place greater burdens on us than we can carry.’ It was May and the church had been decorated with branches of laurel. As the congregation filed out, they passed a single steel helmet and a pyramid of rifles, representing the fallen soldier and his absent comrades.
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Pastors and priests drew upon a repertoire of texts and prayers which had stood the test of the wars of national unification and the First World War, often taking their theme from Matthew 5:4: ‘Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted’. One sermon closed with a contemporary soldier’s prayer:

All who have fallen on sea and on land

Have fallen into your hand.

All who fight in a far-off place

Your mercy face.

All who in the dark night weep

Are by your mercy shielded.

Amen.

In their competition to serve grieving communities, the Party and the churches borrowed from each other, with the SD noting that church memorials generally used a swastika flag draped over the empty coffin in front of the altar, topped by a steel helmet and ‘two crossed sidearms, or, for officers, swords’. And the churches preached patriotic defiance too: there could be no escape from death and mourning, for ‘Our nation is engaged in a war of life and death’. In the Rhineland, Catholic priests gradually realised that the turnout for funerals and services of remembrance was greater than it was even on high holidays, including Good Friday services. Bishops started to worry that such large congregations said more about Catholics’ need for collective acts of remembrance than it did about their religiosity.
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The first weeks after the Hamburg air raids saw an upsurge in Protestant church attendance. Members of the civil and military elite came, wearing uniform for the first time in ages, and workers, ‘long closed to religion’, felt a need to talk and engage with pastors. The churches explained the bombing as a trial sent by God. As Pastor Heinrich Zacharias-Langhans told his congregation in Fuhlsbüttel:

Our home town is dying. Should we accuse the Royal Air Force? . . . But where is the sense in that? Here it is more than the English . . . The hand!! The Hand, not of the enemy. No, His hand! And all complaining is out of place now. For here . . . at the end, in darkness about His mysterious guidance, we are called by God to end our Godlessness. To return to Him with our innermost convictions.

The Lutheran demand for repentance differed little from the pastoral letters issued by the Catholic bishops to their flock in the Rhineland. Both Catholics and Lutherans laid the blame for the sufferings of the air war not on the enemy so much as on godless materialism and hubristic secularism. Both denominations called on the German people to return to God.
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It was a message which was ill equipped to deal with communities of the bombed. Whereas battlefield deaths were remote and letters readily sanitised – soldiers’ final moments becoming pietà-like accounts of men cradling their dying comrades in their laps – the reality of the bombing dead was not so easily cleansed or sacralised. Too many people had seen scattered limbs on the street or gone to identify charred, semi-naked corpses in the morgues. No familiar language or set of rituals was adequate to express what the population of Germany’s north-western cities had experienced. To many, the bleak message of religious repentance did not offer comfort. It did not channel their outrage. And it did not promise protection. Protestant attendance in Hamburg rapidly fell again. After the three massive raids on Cologne in late June and early July 1943, Archbishop Frings convened a special meeting of Catholic clergy. In the words of one Gestapo informant, ‘The outlook is general within the clergy that the bombing is not accompanied by a renewal of religious thought. Threatened to the core of their being, people are becoming like animals, turning back to their primal instincts.’ Theologians and religious leaders of all Christian denominations had hoped for the ‘spiritual rebirth’ of the nation, just as they had in the First World War, but they feared they were witnessing the triumph of ‘materialism’.
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While both the Party and the churches continued to provide the public rituals of commemoration, neither found that they enhanced their own moral authority. By the autumn of 1943, Catholic parishioners regularly walked out of church in the middle of the sermon, and citizens turned angrily against uniformed Party officials in the street. While there was no questioning the basic legitimacy of Germany’s war, a change was taking place as momentous as any of the waves of political hope and fear sweeping the country. Neither the churches nor the Nazi Party could provide a meaningful interpretation of mass death. The crises of 1943 precipitated a search for personal meaning.
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On the night of 22–23 November 1943, the government district of the German capital burned. Unlike previous heavy raids in late August and early September, this one was concentrated and most of the payload of 1,132 tonnes of high explosive and 1,331 tonnes of incendiary bombs fell on Berlin’s central districts. A sharp, frosty wind threatened to turn the fires into an inferno. When the all-clear sounded, a young woman living just south of the Tiergarten near the epicentre of the raid noticed that ‘the sky on three sides was blood-red’. Forewarned that the danger of a firestorm would become greatest in a few hours’ time, she and her father went back inside and filled every available container in their apartment with water. As the smoke grew thicker and the air hotter in the streets outside, the father, an imperturbable, ageing Russian émigré, climbed out on to the roof to watch for fire. His daughter finally lay down to sleep in the early hours, assailed by wind whose ‘roar outside was like a train going through a tunnel’. Shortly afterwards, RAF planes returned to drop leaflets, repeating the threat that they would ‘Hamburgise’ Berlin.
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To the north of Berlin’s central park, the working-class district of Wedding was badly hit. The school for apprentices offered shelter and food to the silent, almost apathetic victims – a ‘flood of misery’, as the teachers described them. A Red Cross nurse brought in a young woman hugging a small child, her face an expressionless, staring mask. ‘My sister, where is my sister?’ she kept on asking. Terrified horses from a carter’s yard were brought into the school compound and calmed down by girls on air raid duty. Four cows stood quietly to one side chewing the cud. As the flood of homeless people continued, the school building filled from the cellar to the third floor. A woman who had been brought in unconscious came round and could not find her child. A clean-up squad arrived, deathly pale and utterly exhausted. Trucks delivered bread, butter and sausages to the school hall where women volunteers prepared them for general distribution. Men stowed people’s possessions in the gym.
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The photojournalist Liselotte Purper was one of those bombed out: ‘The most terrible night! We have lost everything save our lives,’ she wrote to her husband on the Leningrad front the next day, pleading with him, ‘If you can come – I need you utterly’. Liselotte had been lucky to be caught by the raid at Anhalter station, trying to collect her suitcase of valuables from the left luggage. Once again, their guiding star had protected her, she wrote. She had been quickly shepherded down to the station’s four-storey concrete bunker, where she had sat the raid out. Afterwards, with surrounding buildings ablaze and railway lines blocked, all she could do was to check her suitcase back into left luggage and make her way along partially blocked streets to Schöneberg. Their faces covered in handkerchiefs, she and her companion picked their way through the broken glass in the dark streets, sheltering behind stationary trams, ambulances and advertising pillars from the smoke, sand, cement and plaster dust blown by the rising wind. Near the Nollendorfplatz the storm became too much for the two women and they ducked into the entrance of a house, where they rested on upturned buckets in the foyer, unexpectedly plied with cups of tea by acquaintances who lived there. At dawn, the wind fell and they continued towards the flat belonging to Liselotte’s parents in Martin Luther Strasse.
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As they approached the corner, her heart dropped: ‘My God! Now I see it! Burnt out, totally burnt out!’ Other houses were still on fire. There were beams strewn over the street, empty windows gaping out of the brick facades which were threatening to topple over. The school opposite had been hit by a high explosive bomb. In the middle of the street Liselotte met her parents’ caretaker and was relieved to learn that they had escaped the building alive. Later that day she found them staring at the ruins of their home, starting to count their losses. All of Kurt’s letters and war diaries were gone. Her professional archive of 6,000 photos, the negatives from their wedding, a mere two months earlier, had all been destroyed – as had her books and pictures, the mementoes from her travels, her collector’s edition of
Faust,
her record collection, ‘the beautiful lamp, oh everything, everything which I loved’. Worst of all was the loss of her violin, her ‘dear friend’. For months afterwards, in between her recurring nightmare of being caught in the open during air raids and watching buildings go up in flames, Liselotte dreamed of her violin.
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Kurt Orgel, an adjutant with an artillery regiment besieging Leningrad, had followed the bombing of Berlin with growing alarm. Liselotte’s two letters about the raid arrived at the end of three weeks of anxious waiting. He was elated at her good fortune. Everything she had lost could be replaced, even his letters: ‘I will write you new ones, as many as you like’ – ‘Our wedding photos – we have enough prints! Pictures of our honeymoon – we’ll have a new, still more beautiful one . . . Books, pictures, radio, lamp – everything can be and will be replaced – by us two. We are just beginning! And no one can take our memories from us.’ It was different for her parents who had lost so much more, he added dutifully.
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Army units and the fire brigades arrived in Berlin from as far off as Stettin, Magdeburg and Leipzig, but the destruction in the city centre was so great that they could hardly get through. The fires were only extinguished shortly before the bombers returned the next night. Between 22 and 26 November, 3,758 people were killed in the capital; a further 574 were listed as missing and nearly half a million were made homeless. To cope with the enormous numbers bombed out and with nowhere to go, the municipal authorities erected temporary shelters in the city’s outer suburbs and its green belt.
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When Ursula von Kardorff reported for work at the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
on 23 November, she realised that ‘Berlin is so big that many colleagues have seen nothing of the attacks’. Her house had survived, although she had no gas, electricity, running water or any way of silencing the banging of the empty window frames. Nightfall felt like ‘the witching hour’, and she fled to the security of white sheets and a clean bed with friends in Potsdam. On 29 January, her father’s flat was hit. Just as the bookcases in their living room caught fire, friends arrived in time to throw beds, books and pillows down from the windows. Then they carried what they could down the staircase, over the charred beams which had fallen from the roof. They slung silverware, cutlery and porcelain into laundry baskets, as the blue-green phosphorus-tinged flames began to lick the window frames. Unable to return to their floor, they helped salvage their neighbours’ heavy furniture, passing around the remaining bottles of schnapps. With fire hoses trained on the upper storeys, an impromptu party unfolded under the protection of umbrellas on the first floor. Washing at a street pump afterwards, as the smoke and mist mingled in a dawn drizzle, a gaunt woman asked Kardorff and her friends: ‘When will the retaliation come? When we’re all dead?’
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After four days of rest in the country, Ursula von Kardorff rebounded: ‘I feel a wild vitality welling up within me, mixed with defiance – the opposite of resignation.’ She felt the indiscriminate attacks, ‘which fall on Nazis and anti-Nazis alike’, were welding the population together, and the special distributions of cigarettes, real coffee and meat after each attack helped people bear it all too; the young woman concluded: ‘if the English believe they can undermine morale, then that’s a miscalculation.’ Within a week she was back in Berlin in a tiny but beautiful ground-floor flat next to the Foreign Ministry, thanks to her patrician connections. Her newspaper, whose offices had been destroyed in the same raid, had also relocated and continued to appear daily.
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