There is an implied guilt in Dr Horsey’s account, especially when he describes the people he came across in the street:
Some of the Germans looked away when we passed them: the children looked at us with great curiosity, but were kept well out of our way by their mothers, as though we might kick them. Most of the women looked at us with hate in their faces, but the men looked more cowed and ashamed. 8
The truth is that men like Dr Horsey had had no idea what to expect when they came to Hamburg. They might have read in the newspapers about how the city had been ‘wiped off the war map’, but they had no concept of what that meant, and the reality was beyond their wildest imaginings. Another British eyewitness, Philip Dark, remembers the Hamburg landscape with horror. Lieutenant Dark was a prisoner-of-war who had been transported through the city in mid-April, just before the surrender. What he saw there would stay with him for the rest of his life.
… we swung in towards the centre and started to enter a city devastated beyond all comprehension. It was more than appalling. As far as the eye could see, square mile after square mile of empty shells of buildings with twisted girders scarecrowed in the air, radiators of a flat jutting out from a shaft of a still-standing wall, like a crucified pterodactyl skeleton. Horrible, hideous shapes of chimneys sprouting from the frame of a wall. The whole pervaded by an atmosphere of ageless quiet, a monument to man’s power of self-destruction… Such impressions are incomprehensible unless seen… Coventry and Bath, any bombing in England, just can’t be compared to this. 9
The last point is perhaps the most important of all. Until they arrived in Hamburg, most British soldiers thought they knew the worst of bombing – they had witnessed it at home in London, Glasgow, Southampton and countless other cities. But the German Blitz on Britain was insignificant compared with what they saw in Hamburg. The rubble, the ruins, the smell – as one British official wrote in 1946, it seemed ‘impossible ever to rebuild this city… Another site must be developed for the traffic of the Elbe, to replace the essential heart of this historic port.’ 10
Of course, not only Hamburg was affected: by the end of the war the devastation had spread to every corner of the Reich – as the refugees of 1943 had predicted – and post-war descriptions of Germany’s other cities are equally devoid of hope. Cologne was a city ‘recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble and loneliness of complete physical defeat’. 11Dresden no longer resembled ‘Florence on the Elbe’ but was more like ‘the face of the moon’, and planning directors believed that it would take ‘at least seventy years’ to rebuild. 12Munich was so badly devastated that ‘It truly did almost make one think that a Last Judgement was imminent.’ 13The damage in Berlin was so great that a former envoy to President Roosevelt described it as ‘a second Carthage’. 14
This, then, was the final result of the bomber dream, the fruit of decades of investment and research. The Allies had perfected the art of devastating cities. As a consequence barely a town in Germany remained untouched by destruction.
* * *
In the aftermath of war, the Allies set about trying to rebuild the shattered country. Under the Marshall Plan the Americans agreed to pour $29 billion into Western Europe, and by far the biggest share was to go to Germany. 15With the British and the French, they steered the western half of the country towards recovery, and eventually to prosperity. However, while the Allies are fond of congratulating themselves on creating the foundations of the German ‘economic miracle’, it is important to remember that things got much, muchworse for Germany before they improved.
When the Allies had taken over they had inherited an extremely efficient economic system. British observers were astonished to find that, despite all the bombing and disruption, Germans were still spending evenings at the theatre and the opera, hair and beauty salons were still open, and food was still relatively plentiful. The welfare system ensured that every German citizen was fairly well looked after, no matter what had happened to their homes. After Dr Horsey visited Hamburg in May 1945 he was able to write that ‘All the Germans I ever saw were well dressed and looked very well fed.’ 16
Under Allied control, however, the situation changed dramatically. By the time Victor Gollancz arrived in Hamburg in the autumn of 1946, the people had been reduced to scavenging for food, malnutrition was rife, and children could only attend school on alternate days because they were obliged to share their shoes with their brothers and sisters. 17Worse still was the threat of disease, which was much more of a danger than it had ever been in the aftermath of the firestorm. Tuberculosis was five times as prevalent as it had been before the war; penicillin was in short supply; there was only enough insulin available to treat a third of the diabetics in the city, and only enough bandages for a fifth of those who needed them. 18One British medical officer, who mistook Gollancz for a visiting politician, came up to harangue him:
What on earth are you politicians in London up to? Do you realize what’s going on here? Ignoramuses see some people in the streets looking fairly well nourished but don’t realize that they are living on carbohydrates and have no resistance, and they forget that the most seriously undernourished people are at home. The present figure of tuberculosis is appalling, and it may be double next year. An epidemic of any kind would sweep everything before it. We are on the edge of a frightful catastrophe… 19
Katherine Morris, who worked for the British administration in the city, backs up Gollancz’s observations. When she arrived in 1946 the faces of many Hamburgers ‘were almost yellow with malnutrition’. 20Crowds of German children routinely gathered outside the British clubs and barracks to beg for food, while other, even more hopeless people, were forced to scavenge in the city’s dustbins: ‘Spectral figures, gaunt and ragged, were moving with the lifeless gait of some macabre nightmare along the pavement… drifting from ash-can to ash-can, poking among the contents for something to eat, their rags flapping in the wind. (It became increasingly obvious why one never saw a cat in this city.)’ 21Germans had never suffered like this while the war was on. Until now, hardship to this degree had been confined to foreigners and forced labourers – but under Allied occupation, everybody suffered.
The fault lay directly with the policies of the British and American occupying forces. One of the first things the Allies did in the direct aftermath of the war was to arrest senior members of the Nazi Party, and to remove all party members from positions of influence. It is understandable why they did this, but the immediate effect was a breakdown of order. Getting rid of all party members meant sacking virtually the entire administrative workforce practically overnight. At a stroke, all the systems that had been keeping the German economy going so miraculously throughout the war were removed. The efficient German welfare network collapsed. The ration cards issued by the Allies were worthless because there was no food in the shops – the food-distribution systems had disintegrated. The torturously slow German bureaucracy was replaced by an even slower and less well-organized Allied one. And in the administrative chaos that ensued, all those people who would once have been looked after by the state – not only the armies of orphans and homeless people, but now also concentration-camp victims and literally millions of refugees from the East – were effectively left to fend for themselves.
The next thing the occupying forces did was far more shameful. Partly to prevent the Germans rearming, but also to eliminate Germany as an economic rival, they began systematically to dismantle the country’s industrial infrastructure. Factories that had survived the war were now closed, or even dynamited. The docks in Hamburg were blown up, the warehouses emptied, the cranes dismantled and used for scrap. Even fishing vessels were scuttled, in case someone might try to convert them into minelayers – and this at a time when food was becoming desperately short. It can only have looked to the people as though the Allies were trying to carry on where the bombs had left off. In the words of Rudolf Petersen, Hamburg’s first Bürgermeisterafter the war, ‘The sea’s full of fish, but they want to starve us.’ 22