The Third Reich at War (76 page)
The police and the courts are getting down to the job energetically and in continual session are succeeding ever more in giving their just deserts to all those who have selfishly exploited the distress of our comrades by looting. Anyone who loots and thereby offends in the most serious way against the community will be eradicated!
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A minor, insignificant case of looting might lead to a period of one or two years’ imprisonment in a state penitentiary, but repeated or large-scale thefts carried with them the sentence of death, particularly if the offender belonged to a clear-up detachment.
The Special Court at Bremen sentenced a man to fifteen years’ in a penitentiary on 4 March 1943 on fifteen counts of stealing clothing, radio sets, food and other items from bomb-sites after dark and selling them on to a fence. The court noted he had previous convictions and declared him to be a dangerous habitual criminal. The prosecutor considered the sentence too lenient, however, and appealed for it to be increased to death by decapitation. The day before the appeal was due to be heard, the offender committed suicide.
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In another case, heard on 23 January 1945, a labourer with ten previous convictions was sentenced to death for stealing from the bodies of people killed in an air raid the previous June. His haul consisted of a wristwatch, a pipe, a tin of tobacco, a shaving-brush, a bunch of keys, a pair of nail-scissors, two lighters and a cigarette-holder and case. He was executed on 15 March 1945.
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Such cases came before the Special Courts with growing regularity. Thirty-two out of fifty-two death sentences passed by the Special Courts in Dortmund, Essen and Bielefeld in 194 1 were for crimes against property; in 1943, a quarter of all death sentences passed in Germany as a whole were for property offences, the great majority of them looting from bomb-sites.
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But this was a losing struggle. The more the fabric of Germany’s cities was destroyed, the more the fabric of German society began to fall apart. In 1943 it began the transition from a ‘people’s community’ to a ‘society of ruins’. It was to end in 1945 in a state of almost complete dissolution.
IV
The successful bombing operations carried out by the Allies in the spring and summer of 1943 were a serious indictment of G̈ring’s air defences. Not only his standing in the Nazi leadership but also his reputation in the population at large began to decline steeply. Soon jokes of all kinds were circulating about him. Since he had once boasted that he would change his name to Meier if so much as a single enemy bomb fell on the Fatherland, people now began habitually calling him ‘Mr Meier’. However, the Reich Marshal, as Speer reported later, merely buried his head in the sand. When General Adolf Galland, in charge of the fighters, reported the alarming development that American fighter planes with added-on fuel tanks had been able to accompany bombers as far as Aachen, G̈ring dismissed the report. He himself was an old fighter-pilot and knew this was impossible. A few planes must have been blown east by the wind. When Galland persisted, noting that some fighters had been shot down and identified on the ground, Göring lost his temper: ‘I herewith give you an official order that they weren’t there!’ he shouted. Galland, a long cigar clamped between his teeth, gave way with deliberate irony. ‘Orders are orders, sir,’ he replied with, as Speer noted, ‘an unforgettable smile’. The raids were so serious that they left the Chief of Staff of the German Air Force, Hans Jeschonnek, in a state of deep depression. On 18 August 1943 he committed suicide, leaving a note saying that he did not want Göring to attend his funeral. Of course, the Reich Marshal could not avoid doing so, and indeed he laid a wreath on Hitler’s behalf. But the suicide, coming after that of Ernst Udet two years before, was another indication that G̈ring’s sublime complacency was driving his subordinates to despair.
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Instead of continuing their attacks on the Ruhr in 1943, however, the Allies turned their attention to Berlin. As well as being the Reich’s capital city, it was also by some distance the largest industrial centre in Germany. But it was much further away from the English airfields than Hamburg or the Ruhr, and bombers had to travel a long and roundabout way to get there. Thus German defences had time to locate them. Berlin was also beyond the range of the most effective navigational aids because it was hidden by the curvature of the earth. Undaunted, more than 700 bombers flew over the capital on the night of 22-3 November 1943, dropping their payloads through heavy cloud, guided by radar. Although many missed their target, the raid destroyed a large number of familiar landmarks, including most of the major railway stations, and ironically also the former British and French Embassies. Watching a raid from a flak tower, Albert Speer had a grandstand view of ‘the illumination of the parachute flares, which the Berliners called “Christmas trees”, followed by flashes of explosions which were caught by the clouds of smoke, the innumerable probing searchlights, the excitement when a plane was caught and tried to escape the cone of light, the brief flaming torch when it was hit.’ When day dawned, the city was shrouded in a cloud of smoke and dust rising to 20,000 feet.
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Over the next few months, Bomber Command attacked the capital a further eighteen times. In all, the raids killed more than 9,000 and made 812,000 people homeless. But the cost to the Allies was high. More than 3,300 British pilots and crew were killed, and nearly 1,000 had to bale out into captivity. In the raid of 24 March 1944, 10 per cent of the bombers were destroyed and many others hit. This was the last of these British raids. Earlier in the month, the Americans had begun to mount daylight attacks, which continued through April and May 1944.
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By this time, the Americans had learned to reduce their losses by getting fighter planes to accompany the raids in order to deal with German defences in the air. But the fighters’ limited range forced them to turn back at the German border. On 14 October 1943 a fleet of nearly 300 B-17s flew into the German Reich via Aachen. As soon as the escorting American fighters had turned back, a swarm of German fighter planes appeared, aiming cannon and rocket fire at the bombers, breaking up their formations then finishing them off singly. 220 American bombers reached Schweinfurt and caused further devastation to the ball-bearing factories, but altogether 60 were shot down and another 138 damaged. Similarly, in a raid on Nuremberg on 30 March 1944, 795 bombers, flying on a clear moonlit night, were identified by their vapour trails before they even got to Germany, and attacked by squadrons of night-fighters as they flew the long route towards their target. 95 were destroyed, or 11 per cent of those who had set out. Harris warned that such losses could not be sustained.
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Bombers clearly needed to have fighter escorts to deal with the German night-fighters. American P-38 Lightning and P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes had already been fitted with extra fuel tanks under the wings, but the real difference was made by the P-51 Mustang, a plane built with an American frame and a British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Equipped with extra fuel tanks, it could fly up to 1,800 miles, allowing it to escort bombers all the way to Berlin and get back with fuel to spare. Soon thousands of these aircraft were rolling off the production lines. The first flew into Germany on a raid on Kiel in December 1943, and soon all bombing raids were escorted by squadrons of fighters that were fast and manoeuvrable enough to deal with their German counterparts despite the extra load of fuel they were carrying. Already in November 1943, German fighter-plane losses were beginning to climb as the new tactic began to be employed. In December nearly a quarter of the strength of the German fighter fleet was lost. Production could not keep pace with these losses, which were running at something like 50 per cent a month by the spring of 1944; aircraft factories too were affected by bombing raids, with production falling from 873 in July 1943 to 663 in December 1943. Moving fighter planes to the west to deal with the bombers denuded the Eastern Front, where by April 1944 the German air force had only 500 combat aircraft left, confronting more than 13,000 Soviet planes. The German Air Ministry thought that 5,000 planes a month would have to be produced to stand a chance of winning these confrontations. Instead, Allied bombers destroyed not only airplane factories but also oil refineries and fuel production facilities, leaving the German air force dependent on stockpiled fuel by June 1944. By this time, indeed, the German air force had effectively been defeated and the skies were open to a further escalation of the strategic bombing offensive.
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Of course, even with the reduction of German fighter defences to no more than a marginal threat, bomber squadrons still had to contend with anti-aircraft batteries in large numbers, and flying over German towns and cities continued to be a dangerous and often deadly business. But losses were reduced to numbers that Allied air force chiefs found acceptable, and were more than made good by a huge expansion of aircraft production in Britain and America. By March 1945 there were over 7,000 American bombers and fighter planes in operation, while the British were deploying more than 1,500 heavy bombers in virtually continual sorties across the whole of Germany. Of the 1.42 million tons of bombs dropped on Germany during the war, no fewer than 1.18 million tons fell between the end of April 1944 and the beginning of May 1945, the war’s final year. But it was not merely a matter of quantity. The decline of German defences allowed smaller fighter-bombers to come in and attack their targets with more precision than the Lancasters or Flying Fortresses ever could, and in the second half of 1944 they directed their attention at the transport system, attacking railways and communications hubs. By the end of the year, they had halved the number of goods journeys on the German railway system. Arms factories suffered even more severely than before. By the end of January 1945 Speer’s Ministry calculated that the economy had produced 25 per cent fewer tanks than planned, 31 per cent fewer aircraft and 42 per cent fewer lorries, all because of the destruction wrought by bombing. Even had those production targets been met, they would in no way have matched the staggering military-industrial output of the United States, let alone the additional production of the war economy in Britain and the Soviet Union. Moreover, the need to combat the bombing absorbed more and more German resources, with a third of all artillery production going on anti-aircraft guns by 1944, and 2 million people engaged on anti-aircraft defence or repairing and clearing up after raids. German air superiority was lost on the Eastern Front, where fighters and bombers were no longer present in numbers sufficient to offer the ground forces the support they needed to defeat the Red Army, support that had played such a key role in the early stages of the war. Allied bombers were able to pulverize the roads, bridges and railways behind the Normandy beaches in 1944, making it impossible for the German army to bring up adequate reinforcements. Had the German air force retained the command of the skies, the invasion could not have taken place.
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It has been argued, therefore, that bombing helped save lives by shortening the war, and in particular that it saved Allied lives by weakening German resistance. Nevertheless, it also caused between 400,000 and half a million deaths in Germany’s towns and cities, the overwhelming majority of them civilian. Of these people, some 11,000 were killed up to the end of 1942, perhaps 100,000 in 1943, 200,000 in 1944 and between 50,000 and 100,000 in the last months of the war, in 1945. Around 10 per cent were foreign workers and prisoners of war. All these figures are extremely approximate, but about their concentration in the last two years of the war there can be no doubt. On the Allied side, some 80,000 airmen were killed in the bombing raids, along with 60,000 British civilians in German raids, and quite possibly as many again in German aerial attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade, Leningrad, Stalingrad and other European cities. About 40 per cent of housing stock in German towns and cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants was destroyed; in some cities, like Hamburg and Cologne, the figure was as much as 70 per cent, and in some smaller towns like Paderborn or Giessen virtually every single dwelling was rendered uninhabitable. The devastation was enormous, and took many years to make good.
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The German dead were not mere ‘collateral damage’, to adopt the phrase made familiar by wars in later years and other places. Undermining civilian morale, even wreaking revenge on Germany and the Germans, unquestionably belonged among the aims of the strategic bombing offensive, although attacks on civilians have customarily been regarded as a war crime. Even if one does not accept that the entire bombing campaign was unnecessary, then it is at least arguable that it was continued longer than was strictly necessary, and conducted, especially in the final year of the war, in a manner that was too indiscriminate to be justifiable.
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Arguments will no doubt continue to rage over this difficult question. What is undeniable, however, is that the bombing had a huge effect on civilian morale. The hope of some in Britain that it would inspire ordinary Germans to rise up against the Nazis and bring the war to an early end by an act of revolution was unrealistic. Most Germans affected by the bombing were too busy trying to survive amidst the ruins, to reconstruct their shattered homes and disrupted lives, and to find ways of avoiding getting killed to bother about things like revolution. Asked after the war what the hardest thing had been for civilians in Germany to put up with, 91 per cent said the bombing; and more than a third said that it had lowered people’s morale, including their own.
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It did even more than the defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa to spread popular disillusion about the Nazi Party. One not untypical example in this respect can be seen in the correspondence of the paratrooper Martin P̈ppel, by now serving in a unit fighting the invading Allied forces after D-Day. In 1944 he was receiving increasingly despairing letters from his wife at home in Germany. She could no longer understand or support the Nazis. ‘What have they made of our beautiful, magnificent Germany? ’ she asked. ‘It’s enough to make you weep.’ Allied bombs were destroying everything. It was surely time to call a halt to the war. ‘Why do people let our soldiers go to their death uselessly, why do they let the rest of Germany be ruined, why all the misery, why?’
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