Fifteen-year-old Herbert Wulff was sheltering in a basement in Süderstrasse, right at the centre of the main attack. He was huddling with his mother and sister when the sound of the bombs became unbearable: unlike Fredy Borck, his instinct was to leave the shelter and take his chances outside. His sister was still recovering from a gall-bladder operation – she had been discharged from Barmbek hospital early because the room where she had been recuperating was destroyed in the first night of attacks. Even so, Wulff recalled, she too was determined to get out of the basement shelter:
Shortly after everyone in the building had filled the cellar, the whole building shook, right down to the foundations, from the explosion of a huge bomb. I can still see it, how the foundation walls moved between the buttresses and swayed dangerously. Then the lighting went out abruptly, and a cry rang out through the cellar room, and I thought for a moment that my final hour had come. After that first terrifying second we had only one thought: to get out of there. Instinctively my mother, my sister and I grabbed each other’s hands and pushed our way through to the cellar stairs. 14
Some people – the foolish and the brave – were already outside their cellars watching events unfold. Most houses and factories had a fire warden who would make regular patrols for incendiaries, and call for help from the shelters when a new fire needed to be put out. 15Many of those brave men and women died before they had a chance to do anything useful. The survivors found themselves quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of incendiary bombs falling around them. The German authorities estimated that 96,429 stick incendiaries fell on every square kilometre of ground, plus a further 2,733 larger incendiary bombs. This was over five times as concentrated as the previous large-scale attack. 16To give some idea of what this meant on a human scale, imagine a large attic room, about ten metres long and ten metres wide. On average, in this attic room alone, ten incendiary bombs would fall, each crashing through the ceiling to set the roof timbers alight.
The incendiary bombs were of two main types. The most common were the four-pound thermite stick incendiaries. They fell nose down, to strike roofs so hard that they would either lodge in the roof cavity or pierce through to the rooms below where they would burst into flame. Some were also fitted with an explosive charge, so that if a fire warden came across it in time to shovel it out of a window it would explode, killing or maiming him or her. The second type of incendiary was bigger, weighing thirty pounds, and was heavy enough to crash through the roof space into the lower storeys. They were filled with a liquid mixture of Benzol and rubber, designed to splash across whatever the bomb hit, setting fire to everything within ten metres. German civilians tended to call them, and all incendiaries, ‘phosphor bombs’, which gave rise to a number of gruesome myths. Phosphorus is a particularly evil substance: it sticks to the skin and is impossible to put out as long as it is in contact with the air. In fact, while a small number of bombs contained phosphorus, the vast majority were made from other substances, less immediately terrifying, but much more effective at starting fires. 17
With dozens of apartments catching fire simultaneously, whole blocks were soon ablaze. Henni Klank, a young mother, was one of those who ventured out of her shelter.
I don’t know why, but suddenly the Devil possessed me; I wanted to go into our house one more time. Perhaps I thought I could still get some things out, like papers, photographs, and such things. But as I stood in the corridor the ceiling was already crackling, and I wanted to go to my father’s desk in the living-room, but there I saw only fire. The blazing and burning curtains flew in the room, the window panes burst and there was a hissing and crashing all around me. I couldn’t manage the few steps to the desk, which stood at the window, my legs felt paralysed. While dashing out of the apartment I hadn’t grabbed even a single article out of the wardrobe. I was in such a panic that I rushed back to the shelter as quickly as possible. The streets were already burning, the firestorm was now raging through all the streets! 18
Downstairs she found her friends and neighbours close to despair. They all knew that they must leave the building, but when one had tried to go out by the front entrance he had been blown by the wind into the fire. The front of the building was ablaze, and a timber business opposite was burning so fiercely that they would not be able to get through to the relative safety of the canal beyond it. Eventually somebody came up with the idea of breaking through the back wall of the building – Frau Klank’s husband had remembered a pickaxe that stood in the corner of the basement. They smashed a hole through the wall big enough to push through the pram that contained their newborn baby.
The vision that greeted them on the other side of that wall was worthy of Hieronymus Bosch: ‘We came out at the Stadtdeich but into a thundering, blazing hell. The streets were burning, the trees were burning and the tops of them were bent right down to the street, burning horses out of the Hertz hauling business ran past us, the air was burning, simply everything was burning!’ 19
The bombardment had been so fierce that many people found themselves in similar situations: their houses were on fire, yet their escape routes were blocked by rubble or flames. That was what happened to Erich Titschak, a professor of entomology, who lived on Dimpfelsweg in the centre of Hamm. At 1.15 a.m., in the middle of the attack, an incendiary set the cellar stairs alight making escape from the shelter virtually impossible. He and some others broke through to their neighbouring cellar, only to find that the way out there was also blocked by flames. In desperation they got through to the basement on the opposite side. That house and the one beyond it had been burned down in a previous raid, so they thought it would be easy to find a way through to the street. In a letter to his children shortly afterwards, he described what he found:
A labyrinth of cellars, hallways, corners and sheds opens before us… All kinds of useless junk block our way. We break through eleven doors, one by one, hoping to finally find the exit on to the Hammer Landstraße… there must be a safe way out of here, the corner house, for our wives and children. Some cellar doors fly open at the first hit, but now we are faced with two heavy doors, which resist all our efforts. We take it in turns, sweat running in streams from our foreheads, but without success. The doors are probably lined with iron on the other side. The bolts are strong, our axe glances off the concrete without leaving a trace. 20
Disappointed, Titschak and his companion, Herr Bläß, returned to their own cellar, knowing that the only way out was up the burning stairs. On the way back they caught a view of what they were up against.
In one of the adjoining rooms, I knock out the cellar window and catch my first glimpse of Dimpfelsweg and the gardens. What I see takes my breath away. Not just our building and the neighbouring building: no, the entire Dimpfelsweg, the buildings opposite, the Wagnerische Villa, the big building by the cinema, the cinema itself, the Claudiastraße – it all is one enormous sea of fire. A tornado-strength storm sweeps through the streets, pushing a rain of embers before it as thick as a snowstorm in winter. We were supposed to go through there? We’d never make it! Our clothes would instantly catch fire. The Hammer Landstraße, which was supposed to save us – the same picture. As far as I could see through the iron bars of a small cellar window, all the big beautiful buildings were burning from top to bottom. 21
Back in their cellar they instructed everyone to wrap wet towels round themselves and do their best to escape up the burning stairs. At that point, while they could see the immediate danger, they had no real idea of the hell that lay outside. Each person in the cellar made the short run through the flames, Titschak leading. As they stumbled out on to the street, they were confronted by the sight of their entire neighbourhood on fire.