It now seems plain that Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, our bomber chief, has set himself the task of wiping out completely the town of Hamburg from the enemy’s war effort… Bombs went down at the rate of about 50 tons a minute for 45 minutes, and nothing the guns and night fighters could do could stop them. 9
In America, the headlines were equally triumphant: ‘Hamburg Pictured in Ruin and Death,’ wrote the New York Times; ‘Swedes Report Hamburg Has “Ceased to Exist” ’ claimed the New York Herald Tribune; while the Washington Postwent with ‘Heaviest Raid Dumps Death on Hamburg’. 10To add weight to their reports, they quoted statistics and eyewitness statements from the neutral press in Sweden and Switzerland. Lest the German people missed out on the news, propaganda leaflets were printed, showing photographs of the devastation, to be dropped across Germany over the next few weeks. The photographs’ caption read, ‘Das war Hamburg’ (‘This was Hamburg’), the verb deliberately in the past tense. 11
The Soviets also appreciated the propaganda value of the catastrophe. In the days after the firestorm Russian soldiers erected loudspeakers along the front to broadcast the news across no man’s land to the German troops. The announcements came with the suggestion that, since the Germans were suffering as badly at home as they were at the front, they should surrender. Most German troops did not believe what they heard, of course; they were used to enemy propaganda. It was not until they were able to return to Hamburg on leave that they discovered the truth for themselves. As one veteran from the Russian Front remembers, their first view of the city left them in a state of shock, despite the warnings. ‘When we saw it [Hamburg] we just stood there in the train and thought, This cannot be. It was not only me, but all of us were completely shattered by it. We thought, that’s it, the war’s over.’ 12
Soldiers caught up in the bombing said that it was far worse than being at the front. 13Some claimed that it was worse even than the military disaster at Stalingrad. Martha Bührich remembers meeting a soldier in the street who said that ‘he had witnessed the hell of Stalingrad, but that it was nothing compared to this terrible night’. After the war, many others said exactly the same thing. 14
Looking back, the implication of such statements is clear. If Stalingrad was the great turning point of the war for the German Army, then Hamburg was the equivalent for German civilians. Before the firestorm most people believed that their towns were largely safe from Allied bombers; afterwards they realized that they would be lucky to escape erasure from the map. Hamburg made it clear that the Allies, and the British in particular, were intent on annihilating one city after another until Germany capitulated. It was beginning to look as though the terrible predictions that Douhet had made in the 1920s were at last coming true: the home cities had become more dangerous than the battlefields. 15
* * *
While government ministers were panicking over how to handle the disaster, the city authorities in Hamburg could not allow themselves such a luxury. With vast swathes of the city still on fire, and tens of thousands abandoning it in panic, something had to be done immediately. Early on the morning of Wednesday, 28 July, Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann officially announced the evacuation of Hamburg. Women and children were told, not asked, to leave the city within the next few hours.
As Goebbels had suspected, the evacuation of Hamburg was a logistical nightmare. According to the city’s disaster plan, displaced people were supposed to be evacuated by rail – but since all the train lines in the centre of Hamburg and most of the city’s stations had been destroyed, this was impossible. The roads were not much better. Throughout the main disaster area the streets were full of craters, and rubble from collapsing buildings had made many impassable. To make things worse, whole districts were still on fire. In such circumstances the only course of action was for refugees to make their way to the edge of the firestorm area on foot. They would be guided by the emergency services, and evacuation would take place from there. 16
In an attempt to bring order to the chaos, the city authorities were forced to improvise wildly. Almost all of the collection centres for the homeless had been destroyed or damaged, so the authorities designated four huge refugee camps: at the Moorweide Park, at the horse-racing courses in Horn and Farmsen, and at a large open space in Billstedt. Since nobody knew about them, loudspeaker vans were sent to roam the outer edges of the firestorm area telling people where to go. At the same time dressing stations were set up on all the major exit roads to cope with the huge numbers of injured staggering out of the destroyed city. Enormous amounts of food and drink were brought in to feed everyone. On the first day alone half a million loaves were given out, along with sixteen thousand litres of milk, beer, tea and coffee. 17
Meanwhile, the authorities commandeered lorries, buses and horse-drawn carriages from every possible source to get people out of the city. Ten thousand men from the armed forces were brought in to help with the operation, along with all the police and SS forces that neighbouring areas could spare. They shuttled people from the refugee camps to the nearest major stations – more than three-quarters of a million people in total – then sent them to cities throughout the Reich. A further fifty thousand were evacuated on the river, and thousands more were flown out from Fuhlsbüttel airfield. Within a few days more than a million people had been evacuated from the city, the largest such transfer ever carried out in Germany at such short notice.
* * *
The figures are undeniably impressive. On a grand scale it seems that the evacuation worked smoothly and efficiently – incredibly so, given the extent to which the authorities had to improvise. But this was not how most people experienced it. As they stumbled out of the burning suburbs, the streets strewn with corpses and rubble, many refugees were too exhausted to walk as far as the collection centres. Occasionally lorries arrived at seemingly random locations to help them on their way, but there were too few to make much difference. Many mothers were forced to stand with their children on street corners hoping to catch a ride on an army truck or in a private car. 18
Huge numbers of people did not wait to be processed through the official collection centres, but made their way to nearby towns and villages in the hope of finding shelter there. It is important to remember that not everyone was supposed to go: officially, it was only the city’s women and children who were evacuated, while the men were meant to stay behind to continue working. In reality, many men left to take their families to safety. Nobody considered stopping them.
Within hours, all the satellite towns of Hamburg were swamped with refugees. Even those further away were unable to cope with the numbers: it was one thing to take people away from Hamburg, but another to find them places to stay. For example, when Heino Merck fled to his sister’s house in Kellinghusen he found it already full of refugees. 19Ilse Grassmann and her children were unable to stay with her sister-in-law in Wittenburg because the house was jam-packed with other relatives in the same plight. 20Erwin Krohn described the scene when he arrived in Neumünster as ‘unparalleled chaos. Forty thousand inhabitants and 160,000 Hamburgers. Nobody knew where to go.’ 21
With so many people on the move, the city authorities were terrified of a breakdown in law and order. To prevent possible riots they stationed extra police and even SS units in the refugee-collection points. Helmuth Saß describes the scene he witnessed when he arrived in the Stadtpark on Friday morning:
On one side of the grass, I saw a detachment of the SS marching. They set up heavy machine-guns every two metres. As I approached this row, I was curtly sent away. I asked Mr Lukas what the SS were doing here. He answered: ‘They are supposed to guard us.’ And so it was that we, the Ausgebombten, were not to make a stand against the Nazi Party, otherwise we would be shot. 22