The Third Reich at War (74 page)

14,000 firemen, 12,000 soldiers and 8,000 technical experts laboured night and day to deal with the fires and repair the worst damage, bringing in emergency supplies of food and water. People began to flee the city already after the first raid. There was, as Mathilde Wolff-M̈nckeberg noted in an unsent letter written for her children abroad, ‘panic and chaos . . . There were no trams, no Underground, no rail-traffic to the suburbs. Most people loaded some belongings on carts, bicycles, prams, or carried things on their backs, and started on foot, just to get away, to escape.’
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840,000 of the homeless wandered out of the centre of the city and were guided by the police to still-intact railway stations or river jetties on its outskirts. Nazi Party Regional Leader Karl Kaufmann arranged for them to be evacuated to rural areas to the north and east. 625 trains carried off more than three-quarters of a million people to new, mostly temporary homes. Despite Kaufmann’s plea for officials to stay at their posts, many of these fled too. Three weeks after the raids, 900 out of 2,500 officials of the city’s food distribution office were still away from their posts, absent or dead. Many local Nazi Party bosses acted on their own initiative, commandeering trains for evacuees from their own city precinct, and not a few seized cars and lorries to get their own families and what they could of their own possessions out of the city. The Party apparatus seemed to be in a state of collapse. In the all-embracing paternal state of the Third Reich, people had come to expect assistance in a crisis as a matter of course, and its widespread failure in the catastrophe aroused much hostile comment. Popular anger was directed not against the British for their ‘terror raids’, although Goebbels’s propaganda did its best to arouse feelings of revenge, but against G̈ring and the German air force, which had patently failed to defend the homeland, and against the Nazi Party, which had brought this destruction on Germany. ‘People who were wearing Party badges,’ noted Mathilde Wolff-M̈nckeberg, ‘had them torn off their coats and there were screams of “Let’s get that murderer.” The police did nothing.’
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The raids so shocked Luise Solmitz that she was unable to find words to describe them. When she and her husband ventured out of doors on to the streets of the city at the beginning of August 1943, they saw ‘nothing but rubble, rubble in our path’. In horror and fascination she observed the slowness with which the superheated buildings gradually cooled:

The coal bunker at Rebienhaus on the corner finally, finally burnt out. A fantastic drama. The shops [on top of the bunker] destroyed, glowing red and rosy-red. I went into the cellar staircase, it was an irresponsible thing to do; the enormous house loomed steeply above me, all destroyed, and down below I could see the lonely, blazing hell, filled with flames raging with their own life. Later only the bunker shafts were aglow, the shops were black, dead caves. At the end the flame was burning blue. During the daytime the air was shimmering with heat.
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Visiting Hamburg a few days earlier, on 28 July 1943, the soldier and former Nazi stormtrooper Gerhard M., as always travelling with his bicycle, found it deserted. ‘Where are all the people now?’ he asked himself. In the working-class area of the Hammerbrookstrasse, near the harbour, he encountered

a deathly quiet. Here there are no people looking for their belongings, for here the people too are lying underneath the rubble. Here the street is no longer passable. I have to carry my bike over my shoulder and clamber over the rubble. The houses have been levelled. Everywhere I cast my eye: a field of ruins, still as death. Nobody got out of here. Here incendiaries, air-mines and time-bombs have lodged at the same time. You can still see dead bodies lying on the street. How many must still be lying on what used to be the surface of the street, under the rubble?
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When, he asked himself, would it all be rebuilt and people live there again? As a long-time stormtrooper, he knew only one answer: ‘When we have won the war. When we can once more go about our work in Germany undisturbed. When a stop has been put to the envy of people abroad.’
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He took comfort in the fact that Hamburg had recovered from the previous devastation of the Great Fire of 1842, just over a century before. And - forgetting, perhaps, the damage and loss of life caused by the Blitz - he imagined that London, where people were rejoicing ‘in ignorance of the strength of Germany’ and living a ‘carefree’ life, would some day soon suffer the same fate: ‘one day arrogant London will feel the effects of war, and it will do so far, far more than has now been the case in Hamburg’.
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Yet such a reaction was unusual. In the air-raid shelters, attempts to fan the flames of hatred against the British frequently met with rebuffs. ‘Almost 3 hours in the bunker,’ Luise Solmitz reported on a subsequent occasion. ‘Bunker warden S̈ldner: “The Londoners have to sit in their bunkers for 120 hours. I hope they never get out - they deserve not to!” - “They’ve got to do what their government wants. What else are they to do?” said a woman’s voice.’
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‘Despite everything that we have suffered in the attacks,’ she wrote later, ‘there’s not much hatred in Hamburg for the “enemy”.’
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What people did feel was despair. ‘We have lost courage and are filled only with a dumb kind of passive apathy,’ wrote Mathilde Wolff-M̈nckeberg. ‘Practically everyone knows that all that bluff and rubbish printed in the newspapers and blazoned out on the wireless is hollow nonsense.’
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The Security Service of the SS reported that ‘large parts of the people are
sealing themselves off against propaganda
in its present form’.
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Many people eventually returned to Hamburg, so that the population of the city recovered from 600,000 to over a million by the end of the year, but large numbers of refugees remained in other parts of the Reich, intensifying what the Security Service of the SS called the ‘shock-effect and huge consternation’ in the ‘population of the whole territory of the Reich’. ‘The stories the evacuated national comrades have been spreading about the effects of the damage in Hamburg have strengthened existing fears even more.’
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The anxiety was intensified to a degree by the common Allied practice of dropping leaflets on German cities, warning people that they would be destroyed: sometimes they contained menacing rhymes, such as ‘Hagen [a town in the Ruhr], you’re lying in a hole, but we’ll still find you all.’ In 1943 Allied planes dropped huge quantities of forged food ration cards, which did indeed cause confusion among ordinary citizens and made extra work for the local authorities. The destruction caused in the Hamburg raids of July - August 1943 dealt a severe blow to civilian morale, already weakened as it was by the catastrophic defeat of the German army at Stalingrad. After August 1943, people carried on less out of enthusiasm for the war than out of fear of what might happen if Germany lost, a fear played on increasingly by the propaganda pumped out by Goebbels’s co-ordinated media.
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At the same time, the Propaganda Ministry’s exhortation to ordinary Germans to redouble their efforts in the campaign for ‘total war’ were undermined by the obvious lack of preparedness of the regime. ‘They’re lying to us through their teeth,’ complained one junior army officer after his family home had been bombed in Hamburg. ‘The events in Hamburg demonstrate that “total war” might have been proclaimed but it hasn’t been prepared.’
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On 17 June 1943, following raids on Wuppertal and D̈sseldorf, people, as the Security Service of the SS reported, were ‘totally exhausted and apathetic’. But some (or so the SS cautiously guessed) blamed the regime. In Bremen two stormtroopers had come upon a woman weeping in front of the cellar of her bomb-damaged house, in which lay the corpses of her son, her daughter-in-law and her two-year-old granddaughter. As they attempted to console her, she shouted: ‘The brown cadets are to blame for the war. They would do better to have gone to the front and made sure the English don’t come here.’
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It was noteworthy, the report went on, that people in bombed cities were using the old-fashioned ‘Good morning!’ instead of ‘Hail, Hitler!’ when they met. A statistically minded Party member reported that the day after an attack on Barmen, he had greeted fifty-one people with the words ‘Hail, Hitler!’ and had the same greeting returned by only two. ‘Anyone who brings five new members into the Party,’ went a joke reported by the SS Security Service in August 1943, ‘is permitted to join it himself. Anyone who brings 10 new members into it is even given a certificate saying he never belonged to it.’
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Another popular joke told in many parts of the Reich went as follows:

A man from Berlin and a man from Essen are discussing the extent of the bomb damage in their respective cities. The man from Berlin explains that the bombardment of Berlin was so terrible that window-panes were still falling out of the houses five hours after the attack. The man from Essen answers, that’s nothing, in Essen, even a fortnight after the attack, portraits of the Leader were flying out of the windows.
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In D̈sseldorf someone had hung a picture of Hitler from a home-made gallows.
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Disillusion with Hitler was particularly strong in towns such as this, where the Social Democratic and Communist labour movements had been entrenched before 1933. But it had been widespread in virtually all large towns and cities, including Hamburg and Berlin. Discontent came easily to the surface here because belief in the Nazi system had never gone very deep into the masses.

III

The mass evacuation of Hamburg’s inhabitants had its parallels in other towns and cities of the Reich. Every major attack led to an exodus. But there was also in each case an evacuation plan. It focused initially on the young, on people in other words who were not directly useful to the war economy. An elaborate programme of ‘Children’s Evacuation to the Countryside’ (
Kinderlandverschickung
) was developed, with urban children over the age of ten being sent to camps in south Germany, Saxony, East Prussia and to some extent also Poland, Denmark, the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Baltic states. By the end of 1940 some 300,000 had already been sent to a total of nearly 2,000 camps, most of them for a few weeks; children under the age of ten were billeted on local families. By 1943 they were staying for longer periods, sometimes months on end, and there were more than a million children in some 5,000 camps at any one time.
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The scheme was intended not least to allow the Hitler Youth, who ran it in conjunction with the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization, to remove children from the influence of their families and especially the Church, and provide them with a rigorously Nazi education. Priests and pastors were banned from the camps, and bishops began complaining about the absence of religious education in them.
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So successful did the scheme appear in this respect to Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler Youth leader, and his staff that plans were even drawn up to extend it after the war had been won.
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However, the scheme ran up against considerable hostility from countryfolk, especially those on whom cheeky and unruly children and teenagers from run-down working-class areas of Germany’s great cities were billeted, and many refused to accept them even when offered financial inducements to do so. The closure of bomb-damaged urban schools and the evacuation of pupils and teachers to the countryside remained relatively limited in scope. Even at the end of 1943 only 32,000 school pupils had been evacuated in this way from Berlin, out of a total population of 249,000 school pupils; 85,000 remained in the city, while 132,000 had been sent by their parents to stay with relatives in other parts of Germany. Thus, up to this point, self-help remained more important than state or Party direction in the removal of children from bombed-out areas of German towns and cities.
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Throughout 1944 and early 1945, as bombing raids intensified and made ever larger numbers of people homeless, the number of evacuees and refugees increased until it reached more than 8 million, including not only children but mothers and babies, and old people.
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On 18 November 1943 the Security Service of the SS summarized the effects to date. While most of the women and children who had been evacuated were reasonably satisfied with their lot, it noted that a minority were not, particularly those who had been forced to leave their menfolk behind. Similar complaints could be heard from men, especially in the working classes, whose families had been evacuated to the countryside: they felt abandoned and neglected, lonely and deprived. One miner in the Ruhr was reported as saying to his mates after his shift had ended: ‘ “I am in agony again thinking about the evening ahead. As long as I’m in the factory, I don’t think about it, but when I come home I’m overcome with dread. I miss my wife and the laughter of my kids.” And,’ the report went on, ‘the man wept as he was saying this, openly and without shame.’
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Particular problems were caused by the tensions that arose between working-class families evacuated to Catholic areas and the pious local inhabitants upon whom they were billeted. ‘We can thank you Hamburgers for that,’ some Bavarians were said to have remarked to people evacuated from the north, after Munich and Nuremberg had been attacked as well. ‘That’s happened because you don’t go to Church!’
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Added to such tensions came the fact that, as the report noted, ‘Most of the evacuated women and children have been accommodated in small villages and rural communities in the most primitive circumstances. ’ They often had to walk miles to get supplies, ‘in wind and weather, ice and snow’, leaving their children unsupervised and so causing further anxiety. Local and Party authorities in rural areas were often felt to be unhelpful. Widespread resentment was caused by the obvious fact that middle- and upper-class houses were left with empty rooms while peasants and craftsmen had to make room for evacuees in their cramped cottages. Evacuation caused further worries about the fate of the damaged property people had left behind in the city.
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