More and more pieces of debris were falling around us from above, and it became obvious we couldn’t stay there. Some stayed because they could think of nothing better to do, but my mother had a feeling we should leave. So she grabbed me by my shoulders and swam with me across the canal. And on the other side it was idyllic! There was grass, there were shallow banks and there were a dozen other people who had escaped there. They were sitting there like in a theatre box: nothing could fall down from above, and around them there was the panorama of a burning city which they could watch from a safe position. How wonderful! Believe it or not, it’s true, I still had my little bucket in my hand. And as there was a good lid on it nothing bad had happened to it even when I fell into the water… We opened the lid and it was the most wonderful mirabelle jam of my life – little wonder when your throat is sore, from the smoke, from the fire, from all the dirt, from all the anxiety! We passed the bucket around, so that everybody could take a taste of its syrupy sweetness. It was paradise on earth, in the middle of hell! 44
From their position on the bank they had a grandstand view of the blazing buildings that stretched on all sides as far as the eye could see. Directly before them lay Hammerbrook, the centre of the firestorm, and the glow of Hamm beyond. To their right the docks were in flames, all the way down to the riverside suburb of Rothenburgsort. To their left, Borgfelde, Hohenfelde, Eilbek and Wandsbek were all burning.
* * *
It is impossible to tell precisely when the firestorm started, but certainly it was before the bombing finished. The word ‘firestorm’ was not written in the chronological record at Fire Service Headquarters until 2.40 a.m., but Hans Brunswig, the chief engineer on duty that night, remembers that by two o’clock the winds were so strong that it was impossible to walk through the fire-station courtyard: the men had to crawl on their hands and knees. 45From the study he made both at the time and after the war, Brunswig estimates that the firestorm probably began as early as twenty or thirty minutes after the first bombs fell. 46His suggestion is backed up by the accounts of eyewitnesses.
By 1.30 a.m., the fires already extended from the Berliner Tor on the edge of the city centre to the Hammer Park in the east, and from the banks of the river as far north as the Wandsbeker Chaussee. In half an hour the RAF had created a single fire that had engulfed several square miles of the city. Had it been left to itself it would
probably not have spread further. A feature of firestorms is that, because all the winds blow inwardsto feed the flames, there is little spread from the main centre. But the fire was not left to itself. The RAF continued bombing for almost half an hour after the firestorm had taken hold, dropping incendiaries across the entire eastern quarter of the city. Large parts of Eilbek, Barmbek and Wandsbek were badly hit, and soon the fire service was receiving reports that the flames had spread as far as the main railway station to the west, and the suburb of Horn to the east. 47
The centre of this burning hell was in Borgfelde, around the point where Ausschläger Weg crosses the Mittel Kanal. 48This was where the Lotze Engineering Works was situated, which the British War Office suspected of producing underwater mines for the Wehrmacht. However, the Nienstadt timber yard lay on the other side of the canal, and it is possible that the intense heat given off by huge stacks of burning wood acted as the first catalyst to the firestorm. 49
For four and a half hours this unassuming corner of the city was the eye of the hurricane – the centre of a city-wide furnace that was burning at temperatures of over 1000°C. By dawn there was little left to burn. In many areas the house façades were all that was left standing, like blackened empty shells above the glowing rubble. Everything else – floors, ceilings, furniture, the stuff of people’s everyday lives – had been consumed. In some buildings the fires would continue to burn for a long time, particularly those in which the occupants had stocked up early on coke and coal for the winter, but in most cases it was gradually burning itself out. As it ran out of fuel, the raging heat diminished, and the wind died down.
Morning broke darkly over the city, just as Sunday had, the sun blotted out by smoke, and no light beyond that which came from the fires. In the gloom it was impossible for the survivors to see the extent of the city’s devastation. The damage immediately around them, though, was plain: buildings reduced to shells, cratered roads, burned-out cars and trams. And, most distressingly, there were corpses everywhere. Almost all eyewitness accounts of this terrible morning have in common a deep sense of shock at the gruesome and ubiquitous presence of death.
Max Kipke remembers the sight that greeted him when he came to one of the underground shelters in Hammerbrook:
I went to the shelter and wanted to see if people had already come back out. But I saw only corpses, corpses, corpses. They must have wanted to reach the shelter, but did not make it. Even today, I do not understand why they were already dead. I was still in pretty good shape. The staircase that led down to the entrance of the shelter had a bend in it, and shortly after, another: the shelter was built practically two storeys underground. The staircase was covered with bodies. The door to the shelter opened outwards, and because it was blocked by the corpses, the people could not open it. After a while the next living being arrived, a marine. I asked him if he could help me. The shelter was full of people and they probably could not open the door. A third man joined us, and together we managed to clear the entrance enough, so that we were able to open the door a short way. The first people came out; they felt their way up, because there was no light – all the power lines were destroyed. Maybe it was better that they did not see anything. 50
The sensitivities of those leaving the bunkers would not be spared for long. Once they found themselves at street level they were greeted with the most gruesome sights, as Ruth Schramm remembers:
When we had clambered up the stairs, our first glance fell on the stacked corpses to the left of the shelter entrance. It was a double row, around ten metres long. I can still clearly see these completely blackened bodies before me. There was no time to waste thoughts on them; we were forced to protect our hair… 51
Parents did what they could to shield their children from the horror. Else Lohse was a young mother who had literally thrown her children out of a ground-floor window on to the Hammer Landstrasse to save them from the flames. Now she was doing all she could to keep them safe, both physically and emotionally:
The little ones kept asking, as we stepped over the dead: ‘What is that, mama?’ I said to them, ‘Don’t step on that or you will fall. It is a branch, fallen from a tree.’ ‘Mama, here is another one,’ and so it went on from Meuthien to Biederbeck, one after another. Some hugged themselves, others folded together or their limbs spread… You cannot imagine the scene, how the Hammer Landstrasse looked. Burned-out cars stood at angles in the road, dead upon dead. 52
Traute Koch also remembers the corpses on Hammer Landstrasse. She had spent the night in a house that was relatively safe because it had been burned out in a previous raid. Now her mother was trying to lead her away from the fires to safety:
We came to the junction of the Hammer Landstrasse and Louisenweg. I carried my little sister and also helped my mother climb over the ruins. Suddenly, I saw tailors’ dummies lying around. I said, ‘Mummy, no tailors lived here and, yet, so many dummies lying around.’ My mother grabbed me by my arm and said, ‘Go on. Don’t look too closely. On. On.’ 53
It is impossible to imagine the trauma that such sights inflicted on the exhausted people, who were already in shock from their experiences of the night. Many were driven to the brink of madness. Erich Titschak, who had spent the night out in the streets remembers seeing a woman screaming, ‘They’re coming to kill us!’ repeatedly, although the bombers and the firestorm had long gone. 54