Waves of raids over the course of the next three months were deadlier still. A big attack on the night of November 22/23 dumped 2,501 tons of bombs on the city, and subsequent raids in December, including an especially lethal one on Christmas Eve, caused severe damage. These raids killed more than 8,000 people, destroyed 68,226 buildings, and rendered a quarter-million Berliners homeless. Especially hard hit were the city center, Alexanderplatz, and Charlottenburg. Among the prominent buildings to be damaged or destroyed were Speer’s War Industry Ministry, the Naval Construction Headquarters, the Charlottenburg Palace, the “Red Town Hall,” the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the KaDeWe department store, the Technical University, and the Romanisches Café. Also hit was Hitler’s private train, which was parked at a railway siding.
To reduce the human casualties occasioned by the bombing, and to relieve the strain on resources in the capital, Goebbels ordered the evacuation of children, non-working women, and the old. Berlin’s designated Aufnahmegaue (receiving areas for evacuees) were Mark Brandenburg, East Prussia, and the Wartheland. In order to resettle in one of these areas, Berliners needed to secure a departure certificate, which entitled them to a living allowance and free travel. At first most of the evacuees were children, since women and older Berliners were reluctant to leave their friends and trusted turf. This also irritated Goebbels, for he wanted to rid the city as much as possible of “superfluous eaters.” On November 25, 1943, he complained in his diary that the first evacuation train was not full, all too many Berliners preferring to stay “in order to save their most necessary goods and to wait to see what happens next.”
What happened next was bad enough to generate a full-scale exodus. In July 1943 about 3,665,000 registered inhabitants remained in the capital (there were thousands more unregistered residents: forced laborers, displaced persons, people in hiding); but by January 1945 the figure had dropped to 2,846,000. Over the course of that period Berlin’s schools were shut down, resulting in the wholesale transfer of students and teaching staffs to the hinterlands, whose residents worried about strains on their own resources. Also transferred out of Berlin were many vital industries, including parts of the giant Siemens operation, which were dispersed around the country. This proved to be the beginning of the end of Berlin’s dominant place in German heavy manufacturing.
Many of the people who chose to stay in Berlin sought relief from the pressures of steady bombardment by attending cultural events, which remained surprisingly plentiful despite the growing destruction of concert halls, theaters, and cinemas, and the loss of performers to the Wehrmacht or to bombs. It was a testament to the strength of Berlin’s cultural heritage—but also to the Nazis’ continuing determination to exploit culture for their own political ends—that the city’s offerings stayed so rich.
The State Opera, which had been wrecked in an air raid in early 1941, was hastily rebuilt on Hitler’s orders as a matter of public urgency. Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted Wagner’s Meistersinger at the gala reopening on December 12, 1941. To his credit, however, the maestro refused to participate in a Goebbels-sponsored propaganda film about the Berlin Philharmonic entitled Sinfonie und Liebe (Symphony and Love). The film claimed that the Nazis alone had made the Philharmonic great, predictably failing to mention any of the Jewish musicians and conductors who in reality had helped to make the orchestra the dominant institution it was.
Furtwängler’s bitter rival, Herbert von Karajan, who was kept from the draft on orders from Goebbels, conducted free concerts for wounded soldiers and arms workers with the State Opera orchestra during the 1942/43 season. Over Furtwängler’s objections, these performances took place at the Philharmonie on Potsdamer Platz. Although the building was severely damaged by bombs in late 1943, the Philharmonic continued to perform there until January 1945, when further raids destroyed it entirely. Shortly after the Philharmonie was reduced to rubble, the State Opera was wrecked for the second time. Karajan was forced to move to the Beethovensaal, giving his last performance there on February 18, 1945. At that moment he had a visa for Milan in his pocket, which he used to escape the Nazi capital during its final weeks of agony.
In the interest of maintaining morale, the Nazis allowed a number of nightclubs to stay open that featured that officially despised music—jazz. However, only the most dedicated enthusiasts braved the frequent blackouts and bad liquor that were an inevitable part of the wartime jazz scene in the German capital. On the positive side, increasing losses of native musicians to conscription mandated the importation of superior foreign players from the conquered countries and fascist Italy. The Italian tenor sax player Tulio Mobiglia led a hot sextet at the Patria and Posita bars. Berliners could also hear jazz over foreign radio, which they listened to despite an official prohibition. (Cleverly, the British mixed jazz segments with their news broadcasts to Germany.) As he had in the mid-1930s, Goebbels encouraged German stations to play “rhythmic dance music” on the air to combat the influence of the foreign programs. He explained his tolerance for this music by saying that “at war, we need a people that has managed to preserve its good humor.” In an effort to provide reliable artistic content for these broadcasts, the regime authorized a new German-style swing orchestra on the model of the defunct Golden Seven. Inaugurated in early 1942, the German Dance and Entertainment Orchestra (Das Deutsche 348 Tanz-und Unterhaltungsorchester, DTU) recruited its players from the best remaining jazz musicians in Germany. The band was based at Berlin’s Delphi-Palast, where it gave occasional concerts, but mainly it provided musical fodder for radio broadcasts. Like the Golden Seven, the DTU was forced to wear an artistic straitjacket, all the tighter now because of the war. Improvising was out, as were all American tunes.
For the Nazis, the most important cultural weapon was film, and never more so than during the war, when movies could be used to promote ideals of endurance and togetherness in the face of adversity. Images of Berlin as a bastion of patriotic unity were prominent in a film called Wunschkonzert (Request Concert, 1940), which recalled the heady days of the 1936 Olympics. The message it sent was that, by holding together, the Germans could win this new contest just as they had triumphed in 1936. Die grosse Liebe (The Great Love, 1942) told the story of a Berlin diva (played by the beautiful Sarah Leander), who through a love affair with a German officer learns the value of keeping up morale, which she demonstrates by singing songs like “I Know That Sometimes a Miracle Will Happen.” The Wehrmacht objected to this film because the officer sleeps with the singer, but Göring pointed out that any officer who missed a chance to sleep with Sarah Leander was not fit to serve. Another inspirational film, vastly more expensive to make, was Veit Harlan’s Kolberg, a reenactment of the heroic Germans’ defense of that town against Napoleon’s French invaders in 1806/7. To produce this epic, shooting for which commenced in 1943, Goebbels persuaded the Wehrmacht to provide 187,000 soldiers as extras and 6,000 horses. The budget was eight and a half million marks. The film took so long to make—actual fighting got in the way of the staged fighting—that when it finally premiered, in 1945, Berlin lay in ruins.