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With the fires under control, the heavy pall of smoke that had smothered the city all day on Sunday began to disperse. Hiltgunt Zassenhaus described the scenes of utter devastation she encountered as she walked into the university on Monday morning to attend her physics exam:
Along the way furniture was piled up outside the burning houses. Cushions and mattresses were singed, mahogany scratched and scorched. Their owners sat beside them, as if they were waiting for removal vans. But no vehicle could have come along the torn-up streets; and where the streets were clear cars and lorries drove through at top speed. Their vibrations sent a trembling through the broken walls; façades crumbled together and blocked off one street after another. 7
The threat of falling façades was not the only danger she encountered as she tried to pick her way through the city:
Rubble blocked the streets, so we had to go round it; we climbed over broken walls and charred wood, one after another, like a line of ants… ‘Watch out!’ shouted a voice from the side of a mountain of rubble. ‘There are unexploded bombs all over here!’ But in blind indifference the crowd continued. What was the point of closing off the way? There were unexploded bombs everywhere. Each step back was just as dangerous as each step forward. 8
Because of the widespread destruction to electricity cables and gas and water mains, even those living outside the worst-affected areas found their lives beset with difficulties, as Dr Franz Termer described in a letter to a friend at the time:
Organization has quickly fallen apart. A shortage of bread is now beginning to take hold. One cannot cook, there is no gas as yet; one can only wash sparingly as there is no water in our homes. We cook at a neighbour’s house – she has an electric oven. We have the advantage that on one of the plots in our road there is a pump in the garden, to which the entire neighbourhood traipses. My wife pushes the pram with water containers, I carry buckets. 9
In devastated districts the daily journey to the water hydrant was not only depressing, it was downright dangerous. Just south of the Hagenbeck zoo a coal depot on Steenwisch was still ablaze, as was a floor-polish factory that had suffered a direct hit. The
polish was flowing down the road: residents had to step barefoot through the hot liquid to get water from the hydrant on the other side of the road. 10
There were other blows to morale. Thousands of people’s homes had been destroyed, but so had the places where they worked, shopped, or spent their leisure time. In all the cutbacks ordered by Joseph Goebbels after his proclamation of ‘Total War’, Germany’s cinemas and theatres had remained unrestricted, because the Nazis recognized how important they were for keeping up people’s spirits. 11Now many of Hamburg’s best-loved theatres lay in ruins. The Opera House in St Pauli was completely burned out, as were parts of the Staatstheater, and the front of the Thalia-Theater in the town centre had been seriously damaged by a bomb that had exploded opposite. Many cafés and dance-halls, such as the Trichter dance-hall in St Pauli, were now little more than rubble. Even the theatre museum in Altona had been destroyed. 12
One of the most poignant episodes in this tragic period involved the famous Hagenbeck zoo, which was hit in the British attack on Saturday night. Four keepers died during the struggle to put out the fires, and five more were killed when the zebra house received a direct hit. But it was the animals that suffered most. A hundred and twenty large animals were lost during the night, along with countless smaller ones. When an 8,000-pound blast bomb landed near the big-cat house several of the occupants escaped: two jaguars and a Siberian tiger had to be shot the next morning. All the big cats that stayed inside burned to death in the fire.
In the zoo’s official report the writer’s weariness is plain:
Everything that was not burned down was destroyed by explosive bombs: the main buildings, both restaurants, the cattle sheds, the deer and goat house, the aviary, the walkways and superintendent’s house, the zebra stalls, the ticket office, the country house opposite the main entrance, the business yards, the baboon enclosure, the monkey bath, the Rhesus monkey enclosure, the aquarium. The remaining buildings were partially destroyed by fire and explosion, and have been provisionally repaired by hand. 13
Curiously, none of the animals was driven wild by its experiences, and few tried to escape from their broken cages and enclosures – it is probable that they were every bit as shocked as their human counterparts. There were a few exceptions: some of the monkeys escaped into the surrounding area, and a stallion used his new-found freedom to play with a circus mare, even though he had lost an eye.
In the following days, the animals were either rounded up or shot. The most valuable beasts were put on to a train to be transported to safety in Bavaria. They never made it. While their train was in sidings in the east of the city it was caught in the next air raid, and the animals perished. 14
The city’s spiritual institutions did not fare well either. In destroying the city’s churches, the RAF had succeeded where Hitler had failed. Christuskirche on Holstenplatz was a wreck, as was St George’s church to the east of the Alster. 15The huge Gothic Nikolaikirche was so badly damaged that Hamburgers to this day swear that it was the main aiming point of the British attack. The claim is without basis: the RAF Pathfinders were told simply to mark the area between the Alster and the river Elbe, and could not possibly have made out the spire of the church from 20,000 feet in the dark. But the church was, and is, such a potent symbol for the city that it was easy to imagine that the RAF would use it as their main target. In July 1943 many such rumours were born; indeed, the vicar of Michaeliskirche in the west of the city claimed after the bombings that hischurch was ‘undoubtedly the main target of the enemy attack’. 16The area around it was so badly damaged that he could not help but take the raid personally. In fact the ‘Michel’, as the church is affectionately known, was the only major church in Hamburg to survive the war intact.
Rumours flew round the shocked and anxious city. People claimed that Churchill had given Hitler an ultimatum: capitulate, or Hamburg will be bombed into oblivion. 17Others said that Turkey had declared war on the Axis powers, or that Romania and Hungary were looking to make peace with the Allies. 18In the absence of any proper newspapers it was difficult to know what was fact and what was merely speculation. 19The real news that Mussolini had resigned was scarcely more extraordinary than the stories. With such large parts of their city in tatters it was easy for Hamburgers to believe that the entire Reich was falling apart.
Some of the most potent rumours concerned the RAF’s foil-paper strips of which intact bundles had landed all over the city. Nobody had the slightest idea what they might be. Children gathered them up enthusiastically, just as they collected shrapnel splinters, but adults were more wary. When Martha Bührich was waiting for a tram on Monday afternoon she saw that ‘The ground was covered with silver strips which the aeroplanes had dropped. A woman from the bank explained that a professor had said we should not touch them, as they had been covered with typhoid bacillus. I told her that I had picked up countless strips on Sunday morning, and that she should not spread such rubbish.’ 20Fredy Borck, who was eleven at the time, remembers being told not to play with them because they were poisonous. 21In the end the Hamburger Zeitungused precious space on its single sheet for an article entitled ‘The Paper Strips are Harmless’. 22The following day it was entreating people not to believe those who claimed that the RAF had dropped threatening leaflets, or that the water supply had been poisoned. 23That the city’s only functioning newspaper had been driven to print such articles is a measure of how panic-stricken the people of Hamburg had become.