19 A typical formation of B-17 Flying Fortresses, with German fighter aircraft above (US Air Force)
20 The lead crew of the USAAF’s 303rd Bomb Group before their mission to Hamburg on 25 July (Mighty Eighth Museum, Georgia)
21 American bombs fall on Howaldtswerke shipyards, 26 July (US Air Force)
22 Hamburg women and children run for cover during an air-raid warning (Studio Schmidt-Luchs)
23 German propaganda poster, 1943: ‘The enemy sees your light. Black out!’ (Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz)
24 The ‘Michel’, a symbol of Hamburg (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)
25 A group of men clears the rubble on Grosse Bergstrasse in Altona, shortly after the opening raids (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)
26 Elbstrasse (now Neanderstrasse) before the raids (RAF Museum)
27 Elbstrasse after the raids (RAF Museum)
28 and 29 Even before the evacuation order was given, the Ausgebombtenbegan to flee the city (above, Studio Schmidt-Luchs; below, Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)
Section Three
30 The face of the victim: the trauma of being bombed scarred an entire generation of Germans (Ullstein)
31 Some of the city’s 45,000 dead litter a street in the suburb of Hamm (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)
32 According to the late W. G. Sebald, in the immediate post-war years shopkeepers would pull photographs like this from under the counter with a furtiveness usually reserved for pornography (US National Archives)
33 The changeful nature of the firestorm produced some gruesome contrasts (IWM)
34 The clean-up operation: Hamburg workers clear the entrance to a buried air-raid shelter (IWM)
35 A prisoner from Neuengamme concentration camp loads charred body parts into a bucket (Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz)
36 Survivors being issued with emergency rations at one of the refugee assembly points (Josef Schorer/Archiv für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg)
37 Chalk messages appeared on many of the ruins, listing the whereabouts of those who used to live there (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)
38 Ruined landscape: after the Gomorrah attacks, Volksdorfer Strasse in Barmbek was little more than a pathway cleared through the rubble (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)
39 In Hamm only the façades of buildings still stand: everything else has been turned to ash (IWM)
40 Life among the ruins: for the rest of the war, and for years afterwards, families were forced to live in the most basic conditions (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)
41 and 42 The memorial at Ohlsdorf cemetery, and one of the four mass-graves where 36,918 bodies are buried (Private collection)
Introduction
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not
become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss
also gazes into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche 1
In his eyewitness account of the Hamburg firestorm and its aftermath, Hans Erich Nossack admitted to feeling a mixture of awe and elation whenever he saw the fleets of British bombers flying over the city. Despite his natural fear during an air raid, he often found himself willing the bombers on, almost hoping for the opportunity to witness a truly catastrophic event. Rather than going to the shelter he would stand spellbound on his balcony watching the explosions rising above the city. He did not blame the British and American airmen for the havoc they were wreaking, but saw it rather as the inevitable expression of man’s urge to destroy – an urge that was mirrored in his own morbid fascination. That this fascination was accompanied by revulsion, both at what was happening before him and at his own emotions, did not lessen the power of his darkest cravings. 2
There is a sense in which the whole of the Second World War can be seen as a battle between these dark cravings – the human urge to destroy – and the desire to keep such instincts in check. From the victors’ point of view the war has often been portrayed as an almost mythical struggle by the ‘free’ world to rein in the destructive urges of Hitler’s regime. And yet the Allies were just as destructive towards their enemies as the Axis powers ever were – necessarily so, since destruction is the very business of war. The tragedy of this particular conflict was that both sides should so completely abandon all restraint, until there was no way out of the war but by the total devastation of one side or the other.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the bomber war. Each side began bombing with relative caution – especially the British, who promised early on that all bombing would be confined to strictly military objectives. Each side gradually descended into varying degrees of what the Germans called Schrechlichkeit(‘frightfulness’) – the deliberate terrorizing of civilian populations. And each side accompanied their bomber raids not only with increasingly bloodthirsty calls for the utter destruction of their enemy, but with jubilation whenever that destruction was partially achieved. The uncomfortable elation experienced by Nossack at the bombing of his own city was merely a token of what was happening across the whole of Europe.
At the end of the war, when things had returned to ‘normality’, both sides tried to distance themselves from these events. This denial of the past has been most pronounced in Germany, where it seemed that the only way the population could cope with the horrors they had witnessed was to pretend they had never happened. In 1946, the Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman described travelling through the moonscape of Hamburg on a train: despite the massive expanse of ruins not a single other passenger looked out of the window. Dagerman was immediately identified as a foreigner precisely becausehe did so. The story is an apt metaphor for the way Germans have collectively avoided looking at the ordeal they experienced. Until recently, few German authors have been willing to engage emotionally with the subject because to do so would open too many wounds. The peculiar mix of collective guilt for being a part of a nation that unleashed war upon the world, and anger at the heartlessness of their own treatment – so that they were simultaneously both perpetrators and victims of atrocity – has made it much easier to turn away and pretend that life continued as normal. 3
In Britain and America there has been a corresponding avoidance of the consequences of our bombing war. We know all about what it was like for our airmen, and the bravery they displayed in the face of formidable German flak and fighter defences is a strong part of our collective folklore. Triumphant films have been made about it, such as The Dambusters, or Hollywood’s Memphis Belle. There are countless books about the airmen’s experience – about the stress of waiting at dispersal, the nerves of the long flight into battle, the terror of flying through flak, or even of being shot down by fighters. That is as it should be – those were the things we did, and it is important that we remember them. But after the bombs have been dropped, and the surviving bombers have returned home, the story tends to end. What happened on the ground, to the cities full of people beneath those falling bombs is rarely talked about; even when it isdiscussed, it is usually only in terms of the buildings and factories destroyed, with a cursory mention of civilian casualties. We, too, like to pretend that nothing terrible came of those bombs. (I am talking here about our collectiveconsciousness – the airmen themselves are among the few of us who seem to have thought about it, understood what they were doing, and either come to terms with it or made a conscious decision not to try to square the impossible: there was a war on, and they know what we don’t, that war is a terrible thing out of which no oneescapes looking good.)
The one exception to this rule, of course, is Dresden. The disproportional amount of attention Dresden gets is our one act of contrition for the destruction we rained on the cities of Germany. There are various reasons why this city has become the emblem of our guilt – it was truly beautiful, the scale of its destruction over just a few days was awe-inspiring, and since it occurred towards the end of the war many people have wondered with hindsight whether it was not an unnecessary tragedy. All this is worthy of discussion, but it does not excuse our forgetfulness about other cities in Germany. What about Wuppertal, Düsseldorf and Berlin? Berlin suffered more bombing destruction in terms of area than any other city in the war: almost four times as much as Dresden. 4And what about Hamburg? Just as many people died in Hamburg as in Dresden, if not more, and in ways that were every bit as horrific.