Hoping to stiffen morale by inflaming hatred for the enemy, Goebbels ordered the papers to decry the “brutality” of the British pilots in attacking defenseless women and children. One paper even accused Churchill of ordering the RAF to “massacre the population of Berlin.”
While Churchill certainly had no objection to killing Berliners, the purpose of the Berlin raids, at least at the outset, was less to decimate the population than to take out some of the city’s vast array of military and strategic installations. Berlin, it must be remembered, was not just Germany’s administrative capital but also the nerve-center of its military-industrial complex. It housed almost one hundred barracks and depots as well as the headquarters of all the service branches. With its rail lines, airports, and canal system, it was the hub of the German communications network. It dominated the national electrical industry with its huge Siemens complex, its ten AEG plants, its Telefunken, Lorenz, and Bosch outlets, all of which made vital military components. The sprawling Alkett factory in Spandau produced self-propelled guns and half of the Wehrmacht’s field artillery. Borsig, one of Berlin’s pioneer industrial firms, made rolling stock, locomotives, and heavy artillery. A DWM (German Weapons and Munitions) factory in the northern district of Wittenau produced small arms, ammunition, and mortars. Tank chassis rolled off the assembly lines at the Auto-Union factories at Spandau and Halensee. BMW’s Berlin branch produced a variety of military vehicles, while Heinkel, Henschel, and Dornier made bombers, attack aircraft, and airplane components.
Fully aware of the capital’s crucial strategic significance, the Nazi regime went to great lengths to protect it. Fighter squadrons stationed around Berlin were ordered to intercept enemy planes before they reached the city. Because the flak installations that had been built at the outset of the war were deemed insufficient to cope with the threat of large-scale raids, orders went out in 1940 to erect better defenses. Over the course of the following year a new military-construction agency run by Albert Speer laid out batteries of flak and searchlights in a concentric pattern. The inner ring consisted of three of the largest flak bunkers ever constructed. One was near the Zoological Gardens, another in Humboldthain Park in the north, and another in Friedrichshain Park east of Alexanderplatz. The hulking structures looked for all the world like latter-day Crusader castles, with concrete walls 2.5 meters thick, window slits sheathed in steel, and towers bristling with 128-millimeter antiaircraft guns mounted in pairs. Beneath the roof level were smaller gun turrets housing multibarreled quick-firing “pompom guns” and 37-millimeter cannons for cutting down low-flying aircraft. No wonder British fliers came to regard attacks on Berlin as a nerve-wracking experience. As one Lancaster bombardier put it: “The run-up seemed endless, the minutes of flying ‘straight and level’ seemed like hours and every second I expected to be blown to pieces. I sweated with fear, and the perspiration seemed to freeze on my body.”
In addition to their role as flak platforms, the massive towers also served as airraid shelters and aid stations. All had their own water supplies, air-conditioning systems, generating plants, and hospitals. Each stored enough food to last its occupants for a full year. The Humboldthain tower had underground passages leading to the exceptionally deep Gesundbrunnen subway station, which likewise became a shelter. (Other subway stations and tunnels also served as shelters, but most of the Berlin lines were built so close to the surface that direct hits easily penetrated them.) The zoo tower, the largest of the three bunkers, devoted one entire level to the housing of some of Berlin’s most precious art treasures, including the loot Heinrich Schliemann had stolen from Troy.
The flak tower in the Tiergarten, photographed in 1945
The Nazis did not rely solely on flak and fighters to protect their capital from enemy “air pirates,” as Goebbels called them. They sought to confuse the attackers by camouflaging prime targets and by erecting dummy government buildings on the outskirts of the city. They enshrouded the “Ost-West Axis” under a camouflage net replete with lawnlike greenery and fake fir trees. (The netting, however, did not hold up well; the first big wind tore large holes in it, leaving pieces of wire and canvas dangling from tree branches all over the Tiergarten.) The Victory Column at the Great Star was likewise draped in netting, and the golden goddess on the top was painted a dull brown, which left her looking as if she had just come back from a Caribbean vacation. The Deutschlandhalle, which during the war was used to store grain, disappeared under a giant tent painted to look like a park from the air. Because enemy planes used Berlin’s lakes as navigational guides, the authorities covered parts of them with giant wooden rafts designed to give the impression of housing projects. The main government district was “moved” to a vacant lot beyond the Ostkreuz railway station by way of a collection of wooden and canvas structures vaguely resembling well-known buildings. Another major decoy site was established at Staaken on the western approaches to the city; it was built of movie sets from a prewar film studio.
In the end, the elaborate decoys and camouflage probably made little difference. With the heavy flak, frequent cloud cover, primitive bombing sights, and frayed nerves, bombardiers rarely hit what they were aiming at anyway. As late as 1943, an Allied bombing assessment admitted that out of 1,719 bombers so far sent to Berlin, only twenty-seven had managed to drop their bombs within three miles of the target. Assessing one of its raids on Berlin, the RAF’s 83rd squadron commented: “The success of the attack was not due to our accurate bombing but to the Germans for building such a large city!”
If the early Berlin raids were not particularly accurate, or, for that matter, particularly deadly—there were only 222 fatalities in 1940, 226 in 1941—they were nonetheless psychologically unsettling. Howard K. Smith, who reported from Berlin for the United Press, noted that “Mornings after raids, people were in a miserable mood from lack of sleep and nervous strain. . . . Friends parting at night created a new farewell term, in place of Auf Wiedersehen, wishing one another Bolona which is short for bombenlose Nadt (bombloss night).” Marie Vassiltchikov, a Russian émigré who worked as a secretary in the German Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, certainly longed for a Bolona. She wrote in her diary on September 16, 1940: “These nightly raids are getting exhausting, as one gets in only three or four hours’ sleep.” She added on September 9: “Another raid. I slept through the whole thing, hearing neither the siren, nor the bombs, nor the all-clear. This shows how exhausted I am.” On March 12, 1941, a single raid did significant damage to the heart of the city, partly wrecking the State Library and Royal Palace, and gutting the State Opera. According to one witness, the fire that ravaged the opera was “so bright that you could read a newspaper by it.” Inspecting the remains of the building, Harry Flannery, who replaced Shirer as CBS’s man in Berlin after the latter left in December 1940, noticed that the golden eagle of the kaisers, which had once stood atop the royal box, now lay discolored and partly burned under the ruins.
Camouflage netting on the East-West Axis (formerly Charlottenburger Chaussee, currently Strasse des 17.Juni), 1941
Aggravating as the air raids were, they were probably not the worst feature of life for most Berliners during the second winter of the war. To judge from complaints recorded by the Gestapo and the SPD’s underground information network, SOPADE (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands im Exil), poor food and shortages of coal were the most pressing issues. Now even the Hotel Adlon abided by “Casserole Day,” as Marie Vassiltchikov discovered to her dismay when she ate there in December 1940. Flannery saw the first signs of a beer shortage in May 1941. Taverns and restaurants announced that they would serve beer only between 11:30 A.M. and 3 P.M., and from 7 P.M. to 10 P.M. Because vintage wines were in short supply, the Kempinski restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm began a policy of selling Spatlese, Auslese, and Trockenbeerenauslese only to regular customers. As in World War I, ersatz goods began to proliferate. Berliners now ate stuff made from puree of pine needles, powdered chestnut, and ground-up ivy leaves. A new cocktail called the “Razzle-dazzle” consisted of wood alcohol and grenadine. Tobacco was not yet replaced by any vile substitute, although a popular brand called “Johnnies” tasted so bad it was said to contain camel dung, courtesy of General Rommel’s Afrika Korps.