However, the police could not be everywhere at once, and there are countless examples of ordinary people expressing hostility openly towards the Nazi authorities away from the main collection points. Hans J. Massaquoi describes an incident at a station where ‘a man in a brown Nazi uniform came into sight, and a woman screamed at him from the train, “You pigs, it’s all your fault!” ’ She continued shouting similar accusations until someone from her company ‘literally gagged her by holding a towel over her mouth’. 23He also tells of a soldier friend who was determined to desert the army, on the grounds that in the wake of this catastrophe ‘the war can’t last longer than a couple of weeks, perhaps only a couple of days’. 24Another refugee, Lore Bünger, remembers hearing a man proclaiming loudly, ‘That Hitler! The pig should be hung!’ before his wife warned him to be quiet. 25
There was little the authorities could do about such outbursts. They certainly could not have arrested everyone who voiced their anger – in the desperate atmosphere that prevailed in the wake of the firestorm, to do so would have risked causing riots. People no longer felt they had anything more to lose; consequently, for the first time in ten years, they were defying the Nazis without fear of reprisal. Hans Erich Nossack recounts a scene that speaks volumes: ‘In the Harburg railway station I heard a woman who had broken some rule or other screaming, “Go ahead, put me in prison, then at least I’ll have a roof over my head!” and three railway policemen didn’t know what else to do but turn away, embarrassed, leaving the crowd to calm the woman.’ 26
Had they known how common such outbursts were, the Allies would have been delighted. This was exactly what was supposed to happen in the wake of a huge bombing raid: anger at the authorities leading to open defiance and, finally, revolution. But the final link in the chain never materialized. The speed and relative efficiency of the evacuation was certainly a factor in avoiding serious civil unrest: by carrying people away from the city the authorities dispersed potential trouble. Besides, the disaster had left most people too exhausted and apathetic to cause much more than a token fuss. It was simply too big an event to blame wholly on the Nazis. It seems that most people regarded the firestorm almost as an act of God: in such circumstances the state was ‘something completely irrelevant that could neither be blamed for a fate such as Hamburg had suffered nor be expected to do anything about it’. 27
* * *
The evacuation of Hamburg was a huge event for Germany, arguably more important to the course of the war than even the firestorm. Terrifying as it had been, the firestorm had affected only a single city. The evacuation, on the other hand, affected the entire Reich – indeed, until the Allied invasion in 1945, the mass migration of refugees from Hamburg was probably the biggest single event on the home front of the war. Until now, many ordinary Germans in the smaller towns and cities knew of the scale of Allied bombing only through what they read in the newspapers or heard on radio broadcasts. But as a deluge of refugees poured over the country, even those in rural areas came face to face with people who had suffered the most unimaginable horror. The stories they brought with them could not be dismissed as rumour, and the message was clear: nobody was safe. What had happened in Hamburg would soon happen, in some degree, to every city in Germany.
The psychological effect this had on the country is incalculable. Years later, many would remember it as a defining moment of the war. For example, Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe’s most senior fighter general, claimed in his memoirs that the constant stream of shattered, frightened refugees spread what he called the ‘Terror of Hamburg’ to even the remotest villages of the Reich: ‘A wave of terror radiated from the suffering city and spread throughout Germany… Psychologically the war at that moment had perhaps reached its most critical point.’ 28
Accounts from ordinary civilians back up his claim. ‘I’ll never forget the scene,’ says Margret Klauß, who was sixteen at the time. She had turned out at Lübeck station with the League of German Girls to hand out food and drinks to the refugees. ‘Most of them just sat there full of apathy, the horror still in their faces. Others hurried from wagon to wagon, calling the names of missing relatives in the desperate hope of finding their spouses, parents or siblings again. It was heart-breaking.’ 29
Hiltgunt Zassenhaus saw the beginning of the exodus after the first night of attacks, as lines of bizarrely dressed people traipsed past her window:
There were women who dragged along in their winter clothes, who had draped themselves in fur coats. They panted in the heat. There were women in flimsy summer dresses with stockings of differing colours. The bombs had torn them out of their sleep. In their mad haste they had pulled on whatever they found as they fell out of their burning houses. They pulled their children along with them; little feet that couldn’t keep in step with their big ones. The men dragged suitcases and boxes tied up with string. They lay down on the paving stones. They pulled their shoes off. Or they lay down on the surface of the road and stared up into the darkened sky. Hardly anyone cried or complained. In their faces all life had been extinguished. 30
Hannah Voss saw a later stage of the evacuation, on Wednesday afternoon, as trains full of refugees arrived in her home town, ninety kilometres south of Hamburg. She and a friend went to the station to meet the hordes who were piling out of the trains; it was their job to lead the refugees to the school, where straw pallets had been laid out for them to sleep on. The sight that greeted her when she arrived at the station was pathetic:
They were just standing there with nothing except their bags and the clothes they were in… One female came out of the train on to the platform, and all she had… was a budgerigar in a cage. I don’t know how the budgerigar survived the blast or whatever. But that was all this woman had in the world: a flimsy nightgown, no cardigan, no wrap, nothing except the cage and the budgie. 31
Such images are poignant, but they are nothing compared to the distressing scenes that occurred when some refugees had their luggage searched. One twelve-year-old boy fleeing Hamburg was stopped at the Danish border. He was travelling alone, carrying two sacks. When customs officers made him open them they found that one contained the corpse of his two-year-old brother, killed in the raid, the other the bodies of his pet rabbits. 32
Since this is a third-hand report its veracity is perhaps questionable, but many refugees did bring the bodies of their loved ones when they fled Hamburg. Friedrich Reck described seeing one woman drop her suitcase as she tried to board a train in Bavaria. As its contents spilled across the platform, among the toys, manicure case and singed underwear was ‘the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago’. 33
Ernst-Günter Haberland described a similar event, when he met a man from his neighbourhood shortly after the catastrophe:
He had a small and a large case in his hand, and did not know where he should go. He opened the cases; in the larger one was something which looked like a burned tree stump, in the other, two objects, smaller but otherwise similar. They were his wife and children, their bodies melted by the phosphor; he could not leave them behind. 34
Many others brought the bodies of children who had suffocated as their families were in the very act of escaping. 35In the hurry to flee Hamburg there was no time to bury them, and to abandon them was unthinkable. As a consequence, many ordinary people across Germany did not merely hear about the deaths in Hamburg, they saw the corpses for themselves.