Chapter 4

The Logic of Total War: German Society Under the Bombs

After the war in Europe ended in May 1945, many of those who had helped direct the bombing of Germany were curious to see the destruction for themselves. General Spaatz flew to Augsburg in Bavaria on May 10 to meet Hermann Göring, who had just been captured by American troops. The American official historian, Bruce Hopper, was with Spaatz and recorded the two-hour interrogation in a small office in the Augsburg Riding School in which Göring reflected on why his air force had failed to halt the bombing. It was, Hopper wrote, a historic meeting of the “Homeric Chiefs of the Air War.” All around was evidence of the destruction of the national economic and civil life of a great nation, doomed, so he thought, to be set back by a century as a result. “That,” he added, “has never happened before in history.”¹

Other senior American airmen visited the German ruins. General Anderson flew around the captured areas of western Germany, landing where he could and unloading a jeep to get a better look. The diary record of his trip—“Jeeping the Targets in a Country That Was”—recorded a shocking catalog of destruction: “Mainz, a shimmering shell. . . . Darmstadt, a shambles. . . . Frankfurt. Largely roofless. Looks like Pompeii magnified. . . . Ludwigshafen. Frightful, fantastic spectacle.” Anderson flew across the Ruhr-Rhineland industrial basin where the language he used to describe the spectacle was stretched to extremes: “Dusseldorf, not even a ghost . . . all ruins begin to look alike. . . . Cologne, indescribable. One gets a feeling of horror: nothing, nothing is left.” His plane took him back to France five days later. His diarist breathed a sigh of relief: “escape from Götterdamerung [sic] back to civilization.”² Sydney Bufton went to look at Hamburg and was “greatly impressed,” but shocked at the sight of people living in wrecked buildings “into which I would not care to venture.”³ Around the same time Solly Zuckerman, the British government scientist and champion of the Transportation Plan, visited the same Ruhr cities, where he witnessed a similar desolate landscape: “so much destruction one longed for open fields and to get away from the trail of our bombs.” Here and there he saw women sweeping the pavement in front of houses that were no more than neat piles of rubble; in the eradicated city of Essen he observed people who looked neat and tidy and in no obvious sense dejected. He was puzzled by this behavior, so at odds with what he had expected. “How the German civilians stuck the bombardments,” he wrote a few days later, “is a mystery.”⁴

The survival of German society under the bombs has generally attracted less attention than explanations of British survival during the Blitz. Yet the German population of the major cities had to endure more than four years of increasingly heavy bombardment, fighting a war that was evidently lost long before its end. Despite Germany’s growing debilitation, industrial production, food supply, and welfare were all maintained until the very last weeks when Allied armies were on German soil and Allied bombers were pounding ruins into ruins. The capacity of the state and the National Socialist Party to absorb this level of punishment and manage its consequences demonstrated some remarkable strengths in the system, as well as its harsher characteristics. The question asked by the Allies before 1945 was typically, “When will Germany crack?” For the historian the issue needs to be approached the other way round. As for Zuckerman, the real issue is how German civilian life, trapped between remorseless bombardment and a suicidal dictatorship, adapted to the material and psychological pressures of progressive urban obliteration.

Community Self-Protection

In 1935 the German Reichsluftschutzbund (Reich Air Protection League) published a poster featuring a stern-faced Hermann Göring above the slogan, “Air defense fighters have as much responsibility and as much honor as every soldier at the front!” The civil defense structure built up in Germany in the 1930s was from the outset more military in character than its British counterpart. The purpose of preparations for a possible bombing war was not simply to provide adequate protection from gas and bombs but to use air-raid precautions as a form of collective social mobilization. Civil defense was a community obligation that matched the wider claims of the German dictatorship to have created a rearmed and psychologically reinvigorated people after years in the democratic wilderness. By 1939, 15 million Germans had joined the Luftschutzbund; by 1942 there were 22 million, almost one-quarter of the population.⁵

The formal civil defense structure in Germany was intentionally military in nature because it was set up and commanded by the German Air Force when the armed forces were reconstituted in March 1935 in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. From 1933 to 1935 air-raid defense was an office in the German Air Ministry, first set up in September 1933 with Göring as minister. In March 1935 it became part of the new air force structure, and on July 4 the Air Protection Law was published, defining the responsibilities of the new organization. The Air Protection Department was run by Dr. Kurt Knipfer, an air-protection expert previously with the Prussian Ministry of Commerce, who held the office down to 1945, despite numerous changes in the organization of the ministry and the nature of civil defense activity. In 1939 the department was placed under Air Force Inspectorate 13 (Air Protection), but Knipfer was able to avoid too much interference from the military side of the air force, which regarded civil defense as a passive subsidiary to the combat role enjoyed by the rest of the service. With the creation of twelve Regional Air Commands (Luftgaukommandos) in 1938, a territorial structure was established for running air-raid protection at the local level. The regional commands were responsible for all active and passive air defense in their area, including the Air Raid Warning Service (Luftschutzwarndienst), emergency repairs, medical aid, decontamination squads, blackout, camouflage policy, and fire protection.⁶

The question of organization was in practice far from straightforward. The Reich Interior Ministry, which had hitherto been responsible for air-raid protection, objected to the changed ownership of civil defense, and retained some responsibilities in areas of public health, civil administration, and post-raid organization that survived until well into the war, though without very clear definition.⁷ More significant was the claim made by the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, when he was appointed chief of German police in June 1936. At the local level the responsible leader of air-raid protection was usually the city police president, together with a committee composed of the local heads of the various emergency services. In smaller towns or the countryside the control post could be assumed by the local mayor, or rural officials, but in the threatened urban areas, the regular Order Police assumed responsibility. Himmler claimed that the police, rather than the air force, should run the fire service, provide medical help (in collaboration with the German Red Cross), organize gas decontamination, and coordinate the emergency rescue services (Sicherheitsdienst und Hilfsdienst). Confusion was temporarily set aside by an agreement between Göring’s deputy, Erhard Milch, and Himmler in 1938, which confirmed that the Regional Air Commands had overall responsibility for active and passive air defense, but the Order Police would operate the rescue and welfare services once an air raid had taken place. The arguments over responsibility continued into the war as Himmler sought to exploit civil defense as an instrument for internal security as much as civil protection.⁸ The emergency services were in July 1942 turned into the Air Protection Police (Luftschutzpolizei) to make clear that they served the police authorities, not the air force. Such dualism was characteristic of the institutional competition provoked in the Third Reich by the efforts of the party and the SS to penetrate or subvert or substitute conventional forms of authority.⁹

The creation of a national fire service was a typical example. The fire service was decentralized before 1933, the responsibility of local cities or provinces, with no technical compatibility between the different forces in equipment, hydrants, or hose couplings, and was dependent on a large number of volunteer auxiliaries. In 1933 the Air Ministry began a program to encourage manufacturers to standardize fire-service equipment. In Prussia, the largest German province, fire and police services were tied more closely together and instructions on standardized practices and technical standards were introduced; these were confirmed in the 1935 Air Protection Law. In 1936 the Interior Ministry planned to extend the Air Ministry guidelines to other provinces in order to promote national standards. Himmler, however, wanted the fire service under his control as chief of police and prepared legislation to create a National Fire Service, run on standard lines defined by the police authorities and including both professional firemen and volunteers. A National Fire Service Law came into force on December 23, 1938, dissolving all existing fire services and placing the new national organization under the control of the Order Police. Firemen were now to be known as fire defense police (Feuerschutzpolizei), the volunteers as police auxiliaries.¹⁰ By 1940 standard and interchangeable equipment was available, including a single model light-alloy hose coupling that could be used for all types of hoses, and three standard pump appliances.¹¹ In the end, the contest for jurisdictional control did not inhibit the development of a more effective service to meet the needs of a future air war. The German model was the example used when a national fire service was created in England in 1941.

The German public was largely free of these jurisdictional conflicts. Unlike most other European states, the principal aspects of air-raid protection were to be undertaken by the German population on its own behalf. The Luftschutzbund very quickly established itself as the national agent for educating, training, and supervising the community in every aspect of air-raid protection. By 1937 there were 2,300 local branches with over 400,000 officials and 11 million members. By 1942–43 there were 1.5 million officeholders and 22 million members. They paid just one mark a year in subscription. In return, members attended one of 3,400 air-raid schools, or local courses in first aid, self-protection, and firefighting.¹² For potential leaders there were Air Protection Academies to attend. In May 1937 the public’s civil defense role was defined in a law on “Self-Protection.” Three distinct forms of self-help were identified: “self-protection” (Selbstschutz), “extended self-protection” (Erweiterter Selbstschutz), and “work protection” (Werkluftschutz). Individual householders were expected to create their own “air-protection community” in each house or apartment block, responsible for creating an air defense room (a cellar or basement if possible), providing effective escape routes through adjoining walls, and maintaining in good working order a complete set of tools and equipment for post-raid assistance. These generally had to be paid for by the householders but were a statutory requirement; they included rope, a fire hose, ladders, a home first-aid kit, sand buckets, water storage, an axe, a shovel, and armbands for those who were “lay helpers” or wardens.¹³ The intention was to ensure that all citizens assumed responsibility for their own protection, in their own homes; if required, they would have to help protect the immediate neighborhood as well. This was an extreme form of decentralization, but at the same time a commitment by every member of the “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) to a common defense of the nation. Self-protection was voluntary in only a limited sense, since Luftschutzbund officials were supposed to check every household to make sure that blackout materials, anti-incendiary equipment, and a secure air-protection room were available. Failure to comply with civil defense regulations could involve a fine or imprisonment.

The other forms of self-protection involved sites outside the home. “Extended self-protection” was designed for all those buildings that were unoccupied in the evening or at weekends, including commercial offices, warehouses, museums, theaters, and administrative buildings. The system was not needed until war broke out, and it took time to establish, but it ensured that empty buildings did not become easy targets when incendiary bombing began. Work air-raid protection was placed in 1937 under the supervision of Reich Group Industry (Reichsgruppe Industrie). Each factory or plant had its own air defense unit, usually headed by a manager in charge of an emergency organization. Factories had to provide their own shelters and organize lookout schemes, and each one was linked by telephone with the main police control center in the city.¹⁴ Again the object was to ensure that a high degree of community commitment would minimize damage and casualties and remove much of the air-protection burden from the public authorities. In the event that a building or workshop was bombed or set on fire, the local self-protection community had to tackle it first, then notify the local officials if it was too difficult to master, only finally receiving intervention from the police and emergency authorities when the incident was too serious. The onus in defending a locality from the effects of a bombing raid lay in the first instance, despite all the claims of the police and the air force, on those who lived and worked there.

The key figure in self-protection was the air-raid warden (Luftschutzwart). These were generally volunteers, men or women, most commonly members or officials from the Luftschutzbund, responsible for a group of apartment houses or a street. Their function was to ensure that air-raid rooms had been prepared, equipment was up to date and available, the blackout was observed, attics and cellars were cleared of waste and rubbish, air supply and escape routes were adequate, and behavior in the shelters orderly. They lacked the power of arrest, but did enjoy the right to compel local people to help with bombing incidents, even while the bombing was still going on.¹⁵ Before the war many of the wardens combined their role with that of local party “block leader,” responsible for checking on each block of houses or apartments to make sure that party instructions and propaganda were disseminated and no visible signs of dissent expressed. But by the time war broke out the role was generally divided to make sure that both functions could be performed effectively, adequate civil defense and adequate party surveillance. With military mobilization in 1939, male wardens had to be replaced by women. Regular appeals were made in the early years of the war for female volunteers; at least 200,000 Luftschutzbund officials were women. The air-raid warden was to be chosen for evident qualities of leadership, an obsessive requirement in a system dominated by the “leadership principle.” The definition of typical leadership qualities produced early in 1942 presented a formidable range of requirements: “Personal example, involvement of the leader at the site of greatest danger, superlative capability, firm will, calmness, steadfastness and confidence in the most difficult situation, trustworthiness, pleasure in responsibility.”¹⁶ Regular circulars were sent around in the war with stories of heroic individuals displaying, it is to be supposed, some or all of these characteristics.¹⁷ This was the front line on the German home front: ordinary people called upon to perform, if they could, extraordinary acts of heroism.

Nonetheless, the introduction of civil defense measures before the outbreak of war was far less extensive than the large organization and popular propaganda of civic mobilization might have suggested. This was partly a result of geography. Though the object was to involve the whole population, the Reich was divided into three zones to reflect the degree of imminent danger from air warfare. Zone I included all the major industrial cities in Germany, ninety-four in total, with augmented civil defenses; Zone II covered 201 air defense sites (Luftschutzorten) of lesser importance; and Zone III included small towns and rural areas, or regions too far distant for existing enemy aircraft to reach.¹⁸ Only those communities in Zone I were promised state financing to fund civil defense preparations. In late 1938 the association of municipalities complained to Göring that a lack of money for Zones II and III made it difficult either to build public shelters or to provide firefighting equipment, but the Air Ministry remained adamant and local Regional Air Commands were told to reject applications for less urgent air-raid facilities.¹⁹ Not until November 1941 was the order reversed and funds were made available for exceptional expenditures in areas still designated Zone II or III.²⁰ Air-protection facilities and expenditures were targeted at the key areas only; the countryside had almost no organization, though its inhabitants were required to observe the blackout regulations. Only 12 million gas masks were distributed, again on the assumption that most people would not need them. A further explanation for the slow and uneven spread of air-raid protection lay in the air force conviction that antiaircraft fire would be sufficiently concentrated to deter enemy aircraft even if they succeeded in penetrating Reich territory, a judgment largely shared at first by the wider German public. For all the fear earlier in the decade that Germany was exposed to a circle of hostile states capable of bombing the German heartland, preparation on the home front came later and on a more limited scale than in either Britain or France.

The most obvious deficiency came in the provision of public air-raid shelters and the supply of matériel to make the air defense room (Luftschutzraum) a safe and reliable refuge. The quality of the “room” varied a great deal: sometimes it was an extensive cellar under an apartment block, sometimes little more than a small storeroom or a corridor. Most German industrial regions were of recent construction and the communal housing was large in scale and concentrated, though there was usually a basement or cellar. Older housing varied, though the evidence suggests that few people in the threatened cities did not have access to local domestic shelter of some kind. Guidelines were regularly published about the ideal “room,” which had to be gasproof, blastproof, clearly indicated, clear of obstructions, and provided with lighting and seating: “Everything prepared for the emergency!”²¹ In the summer of 1939, the Air Ministry calculated that it would cost 50 reichsmarks (RM) per person to provide adequate shelter for the 60 million people who needed it, a total of 3 billion marks for which the money was simply not available.²² The gap between ideal and reality was difficult to breach, and cellars and basements had to be slowly improved over the war years. The same problems existed with public shelters. In late 1939, for example, it was discovered that the shelter program for schools was well behind schedule, particularly in the areas outside Zone I. Many schools in more remote areas had neither cellar nor basement and had to be provided with trench shelters covered with concrete, or a strengthened ground-floor room, when the materials were available.²³

The provision of shelter varied from area to area, since there was no common policy, but in 1939–40 the number of places available was far below what would eventually be required. In Hamburg in September 1939 there were just 88 public shelters for 7,000 people, by April 1940, 549 shelters for 51,000 out of a population of 1.7 million. Building work was directed at the 80,000 cellars in the city, of which three-quarters were provided with shoring and blast protection.²⁴ In the west German town of Münster, likely to be in the path of incoming bombers, there were by April 1940 public shelter places for just 4,550 people, 3.3 percent of the population. Only by the end of the year was this increased to 20,000, with room for an estimated 40,000 in private air defense rooms.²⁵ Most public shelters were designed for those who were caught in the street during a raid; the preference was to ensure that people returned if they could to their house shelter in order to carry out their “self-protection” duties. The one major difference between German practice and that of other European states was the legal compulsion to seek shelter during a raid, which almost certainly contributed to reducing casualties in the first war years. The wartime version of the Air Protection Law of 1935 carried the legal requirement to seek an air defense room or trench as soon as the alarm sounded, or to ask the nearest warden for help in finding a shelter place. In July 1940, after the first few RAF raids, the Luftschutzbund included in its regular bulletin for members a reminder that failing to take shelter was an offense: “The police have been instructed to take steps against offenders and report them for punishment.”²⁶ Although it is unlikely that this happened in more than a few of the many cases, and merited little more than a nominal fine, shelter discipline was regarded as a serious question. Shelterers had to observe the simple rules of community: not smoke in the shelter, or drink alcohol, or bring in animals except dogs for the blind. To ensure that the local wardens or “self-protection” leaders could monitor the households for which they were responsible, formal notice had to be given of any overnight absence from home and copies of keys for all locked doors deposited with the officials. Once the bombing started in the summer, the rules became a ready instrument, with legal force, to control who would or would not have access to particular shelters.²⁷

Rules for the blackout and evacuation also showed less immediate concern with the threat of bombing than had been apparent in Britain before the declaration of war. Blackout preparations in Germany had been insisted upon from the mid-1930s, when extensive blackout exercises were held in major cities, though with mixed success. The main law covering the blackout was issued on May 23, 1939, with a subsidiary order on domestic lighting issued on September 1, the day Germany attacked Poland.²⁸ All householders had a responsibility to ensure that the blackout was effective; in offices or commercial buildings one designated person was held to be responsible, in multistory apartment blocks one person was required to extinguish the lights in the halls and stairwells. In the first months of the war blackout discipline was variable. Building sites and factories showed more light than permitted; street lighting was 60 percent gas-fired and more difficult to turn off and on than electric lighting, so in many cities dim lighting remained. Helpful propaganda and advice were liberally supplied to help the population cope with the sudden plunge into darkness. In March 1940, Himmler, as chief of police, issued detailed guidelines on blackout behavior that included walking on sidewalks no more than two abreast, and avoiding excessive alcohol: “Drunk pedestrians bring not only themselves, but others into danger.” Blackout infringements brought regular fines of up to 150 RM, but later on householders could also have their electricity supply cut off as a reminder not to leave a light showing.²⁹

State-sponsored evacuation against bombing was, by contrast, almost nonexistent. In October 1939, Göring announced that there would be no assisted evacuation from the threatened urban areas, though plans could be made to transfer schoolchildren if necessary. Voluntary evacuation was neither prevented nor encouraged. Decisions on evacuation were reserved for Göring himself.³⁰ The initial wartime movements of population were away from the frontier (Red Zone) opposite France, only loosely connected with the bombing threat. Not until October 1940, more than a year after the start of the war, and six months after the start of British bombing, did the first trainloads of children leave Berlin at Hitler’s instigation. They went as part of a scheme authorized in late September 1940, under the direction of the head of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, as an extension of the existing program to send city children for invigorating breaks in the countryside (Kinderlandverschickung, or KLV), first begun in the late nineteenth century. In 1938 alone, 875,000 had benefited from the peacetime scheme. Now, to reduce public alarm, the pretense was kept up that what children subjected to regular air-raid alerts needed was an extended rest in rural areas, rather than permanent life in a bomb-free region. The first cities where the program was introduced were Berlin and Hamburg, followed some months later by cities in the Ruhr. The children, all aged between ten and fourteen, flowed out to youth hostels, summer camps, and small guesthouses, a total of 2,500 destinations with 100,000 places, where they stayed for up to six months, unless cold, homesickness, or the severe routine of the Hitler Youth sent them home sooner.³¹

The “Phoney War” period in the air war in Germany lasted a shorter time than in Britain. On May 10, 1940, the first bombs fell on the south German city of Freiburg im Breisgau, killing fifty-seven people, including thirteen children. The German press deplored the evidence of Allied butchery, but the town had been bombed in error by three German aircraft that had lost their way on a flight to attack the French town of Dijon on the first day of the German offensive. Freiburg was later bombed twenty-five times by Allied aircraft.³² It was the following night, on May 11, that the first British bombs fell on the Rhineland; from then on across the summer months bombs fell on a German urban target almost every night. Since the raids were small and the bombing was scattered, the principal effect was to trigger the alarm system over wide parts of western Germany, compelling the population to seek shelter. In Münster in Westphalia there were 157 alarms in 1940, lasting a total of 295 hours, all but 7 of them at night.³³ The onset of bombing did not, however, signal the onset of a frontline mentality. Bombing was geographically restricted and distributed in small packets over villages as well as major cities. German propaganda immediately began to condemn the attacks as simple terror bombing, but this was also the view of the German Air Force, which assumed on the basis of the random pattern of the bombs that the British object must be to terrorize the population rather than attack the war economy. This thinking dominated German perception of the Allied offensive for much of the rest of the war. The propaganda apparatus played down the actual effects of RAF raids, but suspicious foreign journalists soon discovered for themselves almost no evidence of damage in Berlin or the Ruhr cities, and what small damage occurred there was quickly repaired or covered by wooden fencing.³⁴

The absence of a clear urban front line fitted oddly with the large organization dedicated to civil defense and the prevailing image of the Third Reich as an embattled “people’s community.” The Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) reports of the first few raids indicated that the population kept calm, except in places where the air-raid sirens failed to sound.³⁵ Air-raid discipline proved at first to be shallower than anticipated from the endless training courses and the 4- to 5-million-strong army of trained civilian “self-protection” helpers. In May 1940 it was observed that out of simple curiosity people stayed out on the street to watch the bombing, or stood at open windows or on balconies. The Luftschutzbund circulated warnings in May and July that as soon as searchlights and antiaircraft gunfire began it was an obligation to seek shelter, even more to ensure that no light was left visible given the planless character of British aircrew who “threw their bombs wherever they saw a light.”³⁶ But when the bombing spread to Berlin in late August, the same pattern became evident and sterner warnings had to be issued. In September the president of the Luftschutzbund, Lieutenant General Ludwig von Schröder, announced that anyone who sustained injury while deliberately failing to shelter would not be given any state medical assistance. A propaganda campaign was launched to advertise the air-raid room as the safest place to be in a raid and to highlight the numbers still being killed in the open, but the official complaints disappeared in 1941 as the bombing became heavier and more deadly.³⁷ During the summer and autumn of 1940 the population viewed the war differently from the embattled British under the German Blitz; buoyed up by the sense of a historic victory and expecting Britain soon to abandon the war, they did not seem to view the bombing with the same sense of battle.

The regular bombing nevertheless forced the German government to accelerate the program for better protection and to ensure regular welfare. Since the attacks were small and irregular, the costs could be absorbed with relative ease. From the start the government agreed that compensation would be paid for injuries or losses sustained as a result of enemy air action, perhaps unaware of what such a commitment might mean in the long term. After the first raid in mid-May 1940 the Interior Ministry reminded all local authorities that compensation for bomb damage, or loss of livelihood or removal of personal possessions, was a direct charge on the Reich.³⁸ The question of loss of earnings was more difficult, since it would mean paying workers for doing nothing while they sat in the air-raid shelter or took time off while their work premises were repaired. Random though British bombing was, the social geography of the raids showed that the key targets were industrial and port cities, and the majority of victims likely to be workers. The air-raid legislation of September 1, 1939, promised payment of 90 percent of wages lost, but this had not anticipated the long periods of alarm when there were no attacks. One solution was to change the alarm system to ensure that as little time as possible was lost from productive work, and eventually the two-tier system of general alarm, followed by all-clear, was changed in favor of a series of step alarms in which the local civil defense would be notified first, followed by a “raid possible” siren, then a general alarm. Industries were expected to work through the general alarm until a final six-minute warning was sounded to give workers time to get to the shelters.³⁹

In the summer of 1940 it was decided that the 90 percent wage compensation should be changed into an obligation to work extra time to make up for lost production or to help in repair and debris clearance after a raid, to make sure that workers were being paid for actual work. But this decision produced many anomalies and provoked working-class resentment, as had other restrictions on pay introduced with the onset of war.⁴⁰ Salary earners, for example, were paid 100 percent loss of earnings, while in February 1941 the Ministry of Labor agreed that porters and ancillary staff were also entitled to pay during alarms, but could not be expected to make up lost time for nonproductive work. By contrast, it was decided that home workers were entitled to nothing since they could work extra hours when they chose.⁴¹ The consequence was that some workers were paid compensation for doing nothing, whereas others were paid nothing and made to work extra hours. It was evident that the escalating air attacks in 1941 made working-class morale a critical issue. A meeting in October between the Labor Ministry, the giant Labor Front union (representing 26 million workers), the Propaganda Ministry, and the Party Chancellery concluded that morale was more important and insisted that the Labor Ministry find ways of improving compensation and assistance for workers who faced increased travel costs or short-term unemployment as a result of bombing, though not before the Labor Ministry representative had argued that workers saved money sitting in the shelters because there was nothing for them to buy there.⁴² The issue remained unresolved, since firms were free to interpret themselves whether workers ought to be paid at all for interruption of their work or should earn only by working more. Pressure was applied increasingly by the party through the local Gau economic offices to ensure that the law was not applied at the workers’ expense. By late 1943 there had been nineteen different pieces of legislation to try to cope with the consequences of work interrupted by bombing.⁴³

Anxieties about compensation for German workers and German households were not extended to Germany’s Jews. A decree in December 1940 instructed all local labor offices to ensure that no compensation for loss of earnings would be paid to Jewish workers, on the grounds that the war “to a not inconsiderable extent can be traced back to the influence of World Jewry.”⁴⁴ A second order on July 23, 1941, excluded German Jews or Jewish-owned businesses from making any claim for damage compensation under the “War Damage Order.”⁴⁵ Efforts were made from early in the RAF campaign to help the bombed-out (Obdachlose) by housing them in apartments owned by German Jews. In the Rhineland city of Soest the decision was taken in the late autumn of 1940, and although the Interior Ministry highlighted the possible legal problems with doing so, the policy of replacing Jewish householders with “Aryans” became established by the time of the heavy raids in the spring of 1942.⁴⁶ In Cologne the Jewish occupiers were removed to crude barracks while Jewish houses and apartments were redistributed. The Party Chancellery confirmed in April 1942 that if British raids continued, “we will pursue this measure completely and clear out all the Jewish homes.”⁴⁷ By this stage the preparations were well under way for transporting Germany’s Jews to camps in the east and seizing the remaining Jewish housing and assets. Rules published in November 1941 made it possible to sell expropriated Jewish furnishings and possessions to survivors in bomb-damaged cities. Between October 1941 and March 1942, 60,000 German Jews were sent east, most to their deaths, and in the next three months a further 55,000.⁴⁸

The bombing also forced the pace in providing more effective shelter and protection. Because of the poor accuracy of British bombing, many bombs fell in the open countryside or on villages, a result that had not been anticipated when planning air-raid protection. By the summer of 1940 it was evident that the emergency services would have to supply units to help with rescue, bomb disposal, and repairs “even in small, or the smallest localities, and outside them.”⁴⁹ Villages were helped by the local police, but the rural population was expected to form “rural air-protection communities” as well, even in outlying areas with scattered homesteads. The blackout was strictly enforced in rural areas, though villagers could sometimes be the victims of bomb attacks on the many decoy sites set up across western Germany in country districts.⁵⁰ For farmers, the Reich Air Protection Law provided a statutory veterinary first-aid chest, one for the first ten animals, two for more than twenty, and three for farms with over forty horses, cattle, or pigs.⁵¹ The destruction of housing, in town and countryside, was relatively small-scale in 1940 and 1941 because the RAF was not yet using incendiaries systematically on a large scale, but the regime was sensitive to the need to show that rehabilitation was an urgent priority. On September 14, 1940, the general plenipotentiary for construction, Fritz Todt, published a decree on repair to bomb-damaged housing, which gave it top ranking ahead of the list of urgent war-essential construction projects, as long as the repairs could be carried out quickly and the labor and materials found easily from local contractors. Todt’s deputy for construction in Berlin, Albert Speer, promised in December 1940 that all lightly damaged houses (windows, roofs, etc.) would be repaired in thirty-six hours, and all plasterwork repaired in four days. These were promises not difficult to fulfill as long as the damage remained modest.⁵²

The onset of bombing highlighted particularly the inadequate protection offered by the converted air-raid room and the modest amount of public shelter. In Hamburg an emergency program was started that saw the number of places in public shelters expand from 51,000 in April 1940 to 233,207 a year later; by the time of Operation Gomorrah, the bombing of the city in July 1943, around three-quarters of the cellars had been converted to air-raid rooms.⁵³ In other cities, schemes were set up to strengthen the air-raid rooms by providing a reinforced ceiling, props, and escape routes, but shortages of matériel and labor made it difficult to complete the work. In Münster around 5,000 cellars were improved between the autumn of 1940 and the spring of 1941, but a survey in early 1942 showed that still only 4.7 percent of the population had rooms that were considered entirely safe in a raid.⁵⁴ In Berlin in the autumn of 1940 only one-tenth of the capital’s population had air-raid rooms, partly on the assumption that it was relatively safe from long-range bomb attack, which it was not. Following the first raids on the city in August 1940, Hitler ordered a program to build between 1,000 and 2,000 bunkers in Berlin, each capable of holding 100 people. He told the air-protection authorities that “damage to property was bearable, but in no case were human losses.” Every house had to have its own air-protection room, if possible with light, heating, and somewhere to sleep, and the cost would now be borne by the state.⁵⁵ On October 10, Hitler finally published an “Immediate Program” empowering the Air Ministry to undertake an extensive program to ensure that the urban population had access to a proper air-raid room, as well as bunkers and shelters for businesses, schools, museums, galleries, and ministries.⁵⁶ The cost in labor, cement, and iron in an economy already facing rigorous restrictions and priorities proved impossible to meet, and in mid-1941 and again in December that year, work on larger bunkers was curtailed where possible in favor of blastproof trenches and reinforced cellars.⁵⁷

Nevertheless, concrete bunkers were built both above and below ground in the major threatened cities, particularly in the Ruhr-Rhineland. In Cologne a total of at least 58 were built between 1940 and 1942, 15 of them concentrated in the inner city center.⁵⁸ In all, some seventy-six cities undertook to construct a total of 2,055 bunker shelters between November 1941 and 1943, of which 1,215 were finished by early 1942, though not yet fully equipped. Shortages of matériel and the competing claims of armaments production, the Atlantic Wall defenses (which consumed twice as much concrete as the bunker program), and the giant concrete pens for submarines meant that much of the program remained incomplete by the time the heaviest raids began in 1943.⁵⁹ Even this number of new shelters could provide only a fraction of the population with protection. The first wave of building up until the summer of 1941 provided places for 500,000; a second, smaller wave resulted in places for 740,000 by the summer of 1943, or only 3.87 percent of the population in the seventy-six cities involved. There were in addition converted cellars and air-raid rooms for 11.6 million, though many were scarcely bombproof. For millions of Germans there was no immediate prospect of secure shelter, particularly in the cities ranked in Zones II and III, which became the object of heavy attacks in the last year of the war.⁶⁰

A few weeks before the “Immediate Program,” Hitler had also ordered the construction of six vast “Flak-towers” in Berlin. The extraordinary scale of the buildings appealed to his sense of the architecturally gigantic, like the plans for the rebuilding of the capital. Their solid design, modeled on a towered Gothic castle, was deliberately intended to express both grim defiance and grotesque physical power, a blend of function and ideology, “like a fantastic monstrosity,” one eyewitness wrote, “from a lost world, or another planet.”⁶¹ They were planned to provide not only enhanced antiaircraft fire but protection for up to 20,000 people, artworks, museum collections, essential defense services, hospitals, and a Gestapo office. Towering above the surrounding Berlin townscape, coated in green paint to make them less visible from the sky, the colossal towers were prestige buildings. Their cost in labor and resources was prodigious, the “Berlin-Zoo” tower consisting of almost 200,000 tons of concrete, stone, and gravel. The first was completed by April 1941, the second by October, and the third by the spring of 1942. Hitler approved two more tower sets to guard the port in Hamburg; one was finished by October 1942, a second just before Operation Gomorrah, in July 1943. Between them they could hold 30,000 people. Two more tower pairs were built in Vienna in 1943 and 1944, capable of holding not only the cultural treasures of the city, but at least 40,000 of its inhabitants. The Vienna towers were to be literally monumental; the ornamental marble to cover the exterior walls was quarried in France but in the end could not be shipped because of the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944.⁶²

The development of effective protection and compensation was a reaction to the onset of British bombing, rather than a result of advanced planning for the possibility. Until well into 1941, while there was still a prospect that Britain would abandon the war, the plans for civil defense might still be regarded as temporary; the war against the Soviet Union made it clear that Hitler had abandoned the prospect of defeating Britain quickly and that the bombing offensive was likely to increase in intensity before German forces were free once again to concentrate on the British enemy. This strategic reorientation made it more important for the German state and the party to be able to provide sufficient support to prevent bombing from damaging domestic support for the war effort. In 1940 only 950 people had been killed in all the bomb attacks (which suggests that the air-raid cellar offered better protection than the authorities feared). In 1941 the level of civilian casualties and damage to property began steadily to increase. In Münster there were 24 raids between July and December 1940, which killed 8 and wounded 59; just 3 raids in July 1941 killed 43 and injured 196. In Hamburg, 69 attacks in 1940 had resulted in 125 deaths and 567 injured; a further 143 raids up to the time of Gomorrah in July 1943 killed 1,431, injured 4,657, and left 24,000 temporarily homeless.⁶³ In 1941 an estimated 5,029 were killed and perhaps 12,000 injured in a total of 295 raids. Small though these statistics are by comparison with the casualties of the Blitz, it represented the first serious loss of civilian life for a population more accustomed to the roll call of the military dead.⁶⁴

During 1941 the pattern of RAF bombing also changed. From spring onward, bombers carried a higher proportion of incendiaries and began to concentrate them more effectively. Training in fighting incendiaries had been part of routine civil defense education, but now detailed pamphlets were issued on every type of British incendiary device with instructions on how to tackle them, including the recommendation to wear a gas mask. The schedule for self-protection classes was changed so that almost all the practical elements were devoted to fighting fire and extinguishing incendiaries. Training centers had an “air-protection exercise house” where trainees learned to overcome any anxieties about tackling a real fire by exposure to a controlled blaze.⁶⁵ Göring put his name to a list of ten principles to observe when combating incendiaries, under the slogans “Incendiary bombs must be tackled immediately!” and “Everyone fights for his own property and goods!”⁶⁶ A greater effort was made to get householders to remove clutter and stores from all attic spaces to prevent the rapid spread of fires. Hitler Youth groups and other party organizations were detailed to carry out house-to-house clearance of all unnecessary stocks and furnishings, while local civil defense authorities were instructed to remove stored grain and foodstuffs from endangered storerooms. Air-raid wardens were instructed to set up small gangs of two or more residents to go out, even before the all-clear, to check on fires and try to get them under control. Anyone who refused to help was liable in the worst cases, according to the Air Ministry, to a spell in a concentration camp. No house was to be left empty and unwatched.⁶⁷ In March 1941, Hitler’s Supreme Headquarters issued an order to local military commanders to establish an Armed Forces Emergency Service to provide military assistance in cases of major raids where the local civil defense and police units were not sufficient to cope with the scale of the damage or where fires threatened to destroy militarily important stocks or buildings. Armed forces stationed at home were to become an important source of emergency assistance over the following three years.⁶⁸

The impact on popular opinion of the increased bombing is difficult to gauge in a state where the media was centrally controlled and public expressions of anxiety were likely to bring severe reprimand. In the spring of 1941 the authorities began to think about more formal programs of evacuation from the most bomb-threatened regions, though the preference was for movement to safer suburban areas of the same city, or to the immediate rural hinterland. It was only available for women, children, and the elderly, but not for any German Jews, for whom no official provision was allowed.⁶⁹ Evacuation remained voluntary and was presented to the population as a welfare measure, run exclusively by the party through the National Socialist People’s Welfare (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, or NSV), another vast party organization, with 15 million members, mostly volunteers and predominantly female. The first wave of evacuation from Berlin, Hamburg, and the Ruhr cities involved only a small fraction, perhaps 10 percent, of the children and mothers who qualified. Most parents preferred to wait and see what the risks were or were unenthusiastic about handing their children over to party organizations.⁷⁰ The SD reports for 1941 show a declining concern among the wider public over the air raids, but regular interest in the wider news of the war, particularly the successful campaigns against Yugoslavia and Greece and then against the Soviet Union from June 1941, all of which once again raised the possibility of a rapid end to the conflict, which would make all the effort at air-raid protection suddenly redundant. Bombing nevertheless persisted whatever was happening elsewhere in Europe. In July 1941 von Schröder sent a report to all Luftschutzbund officials praising the “decisive bravery” and “will to resist” of the German population subjected to bombing. The aim, he continued, was to overturn the “legend” that the English held the record for steadfastness by demonstrating to the world the inner resolve of the German people.⁷¹

“Great Catastrophes,” 1942–43

The German home front was suddenly rocked in March 1942 by the first concentrated and heavy incendiary raid on the coastal town of Lübeck. Two-thirds of the 400 tons were firebombs, dropped from only 2,000 feet on the old city center, which consisted of half-timbered houses. Rumors immediately circulated in the surrounding area that 3,000 had been killed and 30,000 rendered homeless (just over 300 died in the raid, the worst casualties so far); reports to Berlin observed an immediate improvement in air defense discipline in other cities.⁷² The raid was swiftly followed by a series of devastating incendiary attacks on the port of Rostock, which produced for the first time an outcome classified under the term “great catastrophe.”

The first attack on Rostock, on April 23–24, was relatively limited. The gauleiter reported to the Party Chancellery that the population was calm and the raid well under the control of party and state authorities. But three more raids in quick succession imposed more serious dislocation, damaging or destroying three-quarters of Rostock’s 12,000 buildings. A state of emergency was declared and troops and SA (Sturmabteilung) men were brought in from the surrounding area. By the third day 100,000 of the population had been evacuated or had fled into the surrounding countryside. Rumors began to spread that Sweden had suddenly declared war on Germany and bombed Rostock as the first act.⁷³ When on the fourth day an alarm went off in error in the afternoon, the population began to panic and armed SS men were called in to make sure order could be maintained. Two looters were caught and one condemned to death within a day. Loudspeaker vans toured the area to call for calm while supplies of chocolate and butter (both commodities that had almost disappeared) were handed out from stocks found hoarded in the city. Fifteen military field kitchens were brought in to hand out hot meals, while an emergency supply column with 100 tons of food was sent to the stricken city from the “catastrophe stores” kept for just such an occasion.⁷⁴ By May 2 the population was starting to return to collect goods stacked in the street while groups of hand workers were brought in to begin work on reroofing and reglazing damaged buildings to make them habitable again. It was observed that among the 165 dead so far recorded were 6 Hitler Youth, 8 local National Socialist political leaders, and 3 SA men. The regional authorities found little evidence of “hostile opinion against Party or state.” Their aim was rapidly to re-create “the normal conditions of daily life in every area.”⁷⁵

Although the authorities in Rostock judged that the civil defense services had coped well with the consequences of the raid, the onset of “catastrophic air attacks” prompted a fundamental overhaul of the way civil defense and post-raid welfare was organized. The driving force behind the change was the party hierarchy, which understood that the social and psychological consequences of heavy bombing were likely to have wider ramifications for social cohesion and war willingness. During 1942 the balance in the air-protection structure swung heavily toward the party and away from the Air Ministry and the police. The key figure was the Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. In late April, Hitler agreed to give him special responsibility as commissar for organizing immediate help measures for those areas where the local authorities could not cope. All local party Gaue (and not the Regional Air Commands or the Order Police) were to notify Goebbels’s ministry at once if help was needed. Goebbels told the gauleiters that the watchwords were “unity and planning.”⁷⁶ The choice of the new commissar was not an obvious one, and his actual powers, as so often in the Third Reich, were poorly defined, though he evidently benefited from direct and regular access to Hitler. Goebbels’s principal claim was his concern with monitoring and molding popular opinion, which his local propaganda offices watched closely. Reports on raids were routinely sent to his office as party Reich leader of propaganda, which left him better informed about the national picture than most other political or military leaders. Moreover, Goebbels was a gauleiter himself, representing Berlin; his new office was designed to ensure that the local party leadership should play a fuller part in managing bombed communities. His appointment confirmed the increasing “partification” of the whole civil defense project.

The roots of this new configuration could be found much earlier in the war. The Party Chancellery, directed by Rudolf Hess, had a Mobilization Department (Abteilung-M), which drew up guidelines for the role of party organizations in the event of war. The NSV was detailed to take on responsibility for providing post-raid welfare, including evacuation, and to wear green armbands with “Luftschutz-NSDAP” sewn on them to show that they were independent of the air force or police. In the autumn of 1940, Martin Bormann, Hess’s deputy, drew up a list of nine civil defense activities formally under Göring’s authority, in which the party claimed a role. They included controlling behavior in shelters, checking on the blackout, supplying candidates for air-raid warden who possessed impeccable racial and party credentials, and providing moral support when it was needed.⁷⁷ These claims had at first a nominal value, given the limited raiding activity and the extensive civil defense organization already in place. But party insinuation was insidious and remorseless. By the time Goebbels was granted his new powers, the party had already made itself conspicuous in supplying SA and SS assistance when needed, Hitler Youth as messenger boys, the NSV as the organizers of evacuation, and the necessary pomp and ceremony at the burial of bomb victims. The post of Reich defense commissar (Reichsverteidigungskommissar), established on September 1, 1939, and generally given to the local gauleiter as a largely nominal title, was elevated by the war into an instrument for party leaders to play a fuller part in home-front mobilization. On November 16, 1942, the posts of commissar and regional party leader were formally merged and the Gau became the administrative unit for the home front. The gauleiter of Munich later recalled that from 1942 onward his work came to consist almost entirely of “defence from the enemy air war, activation of civilian air protection.”⁷⁸

The claims of the party had the paradoxical effect of demilitarizing the home front, as the air force role was confined progressively to the more evidently military aspects of air defense. Goebbels was to be the direct beneficiary of this process, though Bormann, now director of the Party Chancellery following Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland in May 1941, resented Hitler’s choice and took every opportunity to increase his influence over post-raid policy. The other competitor was Göring, whose role as general overseer of air defense was challenged by Goebbels’s new powers. In May 1942, Goebbels, Göring, and Wilhelm Frick, the interior minister representing the interest of the police and local authorities, drew up a formal document confirming the new pattern of responsibility between them. “Pure air defense” was left in the hands of the air force and the police; all civil administrative tasks were the province of the Reich defense commissars (usually the local gauleiter); the job of managing the care and morale of the population in the face of bombardment was the sole responsibility of the party. Goebbels was confirmed in his new capacity as emergency commissar, for when the existing system could no longer cope.⁷⁹ The arrangement made explicit the shift of responsibility toward the party and the collapse of the air force monopoly, but the demarcation left a great many gray areas. In December 1942, Göring issued a further directive to try to make the setup clearer: in the event of a catastrophic raid, beyond the scope of the Reich defense commissar or the air protection leader, help should be requested from the Party Chancellery, the Propaganda Ministry, and the Interior Ministry. But this arrangement merely confirmed a state of improvised confusion.⁸⁰ At the beginning of 1943, Hitler finally agreed to set up an Inter-Ministerial Air Protection Committee (ILA), based in the Propaganda Ministry, with Goebbels as nominal head. The object was at last to create a single, national clearinghouse for all emergencies, with no new powers and limited organization, but with a sufficient overview to be able to send resources in a crisis where and when they were needed.⁸¹

The struggle over competency between the power brokers of the dictatorship proved less damaging than it might have been, because intervention from the center was confined principally to the most conspicuous and damaging raids, where the role of the party or the political leadership could be effectively advertised. At the local level the onset of heavy raiding provoked a greater effort to ensure that the local administration and party organs were better prepared to meet the demand to provide effective welfare and emergency rations, rehouse the homeless, and compensate those who had lost everything in the raids. The watchword was Einsatz, a difficult word to render in English, suggesting action that is decisive and purposeful. After the bombings of Lübeck and Rostock, cities were encouraged to develop an “action mentality” by creating an Einsatzstab(action staff) under a designated Einsatzführer (action leader), who was to be chosen from among the local air protection leaders as an individual of outstanding merit. The staff was to consist of representatives of all the local state and party offices for welfare, food, building, repair, transport, and local economy, but the leader was the key figure, given temporary emergency powers to get help from within and outside the raided area and to apply it swiftly and ruthlessly to the catastrophe.⁸² “Self-protection” was to be strengthened by creating local “self-protection squads” (Selbstschutztruppen) run by yet another lower-level Einsatzführer whose job was to tackle raids on streets and small communities in a more coordinated and vigorous way. An “action plan” was made a legal requirement for all Einsatzführer in October 1942. In August 1943, service in a self-protection squad was made a legal obligation for every German citizen, man and woman.⁸³ In practice, not everyone was required to serve, but the proportion could be very substantial. In the small Rhineland town of Bingen, with a population of 16,600 people, 4,783, more than one-quarter, were enrolled as active civil defenders.⁸⁴

According to yet another Hitler decree published in August 1943 after Operation Gomorrah, the aim of all the new emergency arrangements for coping with air raids was “the restoration of normal life as quickly as possible.”⁸⁵ Though this was not easy in the few major cities where repeated heavy bombing began in 1943, the object of the new “action culture” was to make sure that one way or another the problems of welfare, compensation, rehousing, damage repair, and evacuation allowed an adequate community life to continue. A good example of how this worked was the post-raid activity in the Berlin suburb of Schöneberg, bombed heavily on March 1–2, 1943, leaving 11,000 temporarily homeless. They were gathered first in the seventy-one emergency rest centers, with room for between 25,000 and 40,000 people in converted cafés, schools, restaurants, and boardinghouses.⁸⁶ There they were given food, spirits, cigarettes, substitute ration cards, and a provisional sum, in cash or vouchers, for the most urgent replacement clothing and household goods. Those who could not be placed with friends or relatives at once could be found substitute housing, particularly former Jewish homes, with priority for families with children whose houses had been completely destroyed. Evacuation was recommended only in exceptional circumstances, and then to areas if possible within the same urban region, or the same Gau. Over 7,000 were rehoused within two days. The salvaged goods had to be left in the street, clearly marked (to prevent looting), where they were collected in municipal street-cleaning trucks or military vehicles and stored in requisitioned warehouses or shops. Glass from the shattered windows was quickly cleaned up and returned to glassmakers for recycling.⁸⁷

The guidelines for rehousing, house repair, and compensation were laid down in a number of decrees issued by the Interior Ministry and the Organisation Todt in the course of 1941.⁸⁸ In Schöneberg, housing was tackled at once by a special unit (Baugruppe Pfeil) organized by the city mayor. The unit turned up the morning after a raid to classify all housing into four categories of totally destroyed, badly damaged, partially damaged, and lightly damaged. The first had to be made secure, the second repaired if possible, the last two restored to a habitable state. The Interior Ministry instruction was to do no more than ensure that the buildings could be lived in—roofs covered over with boards or broken slates and tiles replaced.⁸⁹ In the aftermath of the Berlin raid there were 300 roofers, 460 glaziers, and 485 bricklayers at work at once, covering over roofs first to protect the rooms exposed to the elements, then covering windows and doors temporarily with card or wood, and covering damaged walls with a coat of paint instead of wallpaper. Though there were complaints about the standard, most of those rehabilitated, according to the official report on reconstruction, showed the necessary resoluteness in returning to homes that were now far less comfortable places to live.⁹⁰ Most of the light damage from Allied bombing consisted of broken windows and damaged roofs. Three raids on Nuremberg in 1942 and 1943 destroyed 1.75 million square meters of glass and 2 million square meters of roofing; but out of 19,184 bomb-damaged buildings, only 662 were totally destroyed and 973 severely damaged, making it possible for those rendered homeless, as in Britain, to return to where they had lived after first-aid repairs were completed.⁹¹ It was calculated that 324,000 homes had been destroyed or badly damaged throughout Germany by November 1943, but by then 3,184,000 people had been successfully rehabilitated or rehoused.⁹²

The most complex procedure was to provide compensating goods for those who had lost some or all of their possessions and to calculate the extent of war-damage compensation to which people were entitled. The evidence from Schöneberg shows that the population took this issue more seriously than any other and that it gave rise to a greater degree of friction.⁹³ The procedures were time-consuming and the regulations irksome to those who saw themselves as victims. At the emergency centers, the bombed-out were given preliminary vouchers for clothes, shoes, soap, and laundry detergent, without having to make a formal written application. Clothes included a suit or a dress, underwear, stockings, handkerchiefs and nightwear, and one pair of sturdy shoes. In March 1943 the welfare offices handed out 10,432 textile vouchers and 10,810 for shoes and 750 furniture certificates. So complex was the rationing system in Germany set up in September 1939 that bomb damage could destroy cards for household articles, furniture, coal, petrol, soap, and tobacco, all of which had to be queued for, often for hours, in order to argue for a replacement. The new card or voucher was an entitlement only, whose redemption depended on the local supply of goods. Schöneberg was fortunate since there were stocks of secondhand goods and Jewish possessions, as well as goods from occupied or Axis Europe, France and Hungary in particular. In the spring of 1943 Hitler had ordered that labor and materials needed to overcome bomb damage and losses should be secured first from the occupied territories.⁹⁴ Berlin still had a large number of small traders and manufacturers who could supply what else was needed, and the stocks used up in March 1943 were soon replenished.⁹⁵

The claims for financial compensation were altogether more fraught. A report from the Schöneberg regional office explained that the officials and the claimants worked in different directions, the first seeking to limit what had to be paid out only to genuinely verifiable losses, the victims with an interest in setting their claim as high as they could. Forms had been distributed to householders so that they could list in detail all their possessions in anticipation of a raid.⁹⁶ Some filled out the claim form in only the most general terms, while others supplied a detailed description of what was lost, including, at times, photographs of the missing objects. Where the owner had been killed, legatees gave their own description of what they had expected to inherit. The officials based their assessments on the credibility of the claimant, including estimates of social class and likely earnings, as a guide to what a claimant might possibly own. One Berlin toolmaker claimed 12,000 RM of furnishings from a one-room apartment, including 143 separate items; the claims office dismissed the claim and paid out 1,500 RM. A building engineer living in a four-room household with his wife and four children claimed a loss of 50,000 RM, including a table valued at 4,800 RM (around three times the annual wage of a semiskilled worker); he was granted just 6,000 RM pending further investigation. The harassed office staff treated few claims as deliberately false, but the bombed-out all over Germany inflated the value of their losses once their possessions could no longer be checked.⁹⁷ The total number of cases involved and the sums claimed represented a major administrative and financial effort for the state to cope with in the middle of a major war. In Nuremberg alone, there were 27,977 claims for compensation by the spring of 1943, amounting to 44.8 million marks; of this sum 8.8 million were paid out in cash, 14 million in kind.⁹⁸ By late 1943 payments at the national level were running at over 700 million RM a month; claims totaling 31.7 billion RM had been filed, of which 11.6 billion had already been paid out.⁹⁹ These were sums that could never have been imagined when the initial commitment was made to pay for the direct costs of the bombing war.

The greatest test of the evolving civil defense and emergency structure came with the bombing of Hamburg in July and August 1943. The 137 small raids (and 782 air-raid alarms) up to July 1943 had given Hamburg more experience than most cities in coping with the consequences of bombing.¹⁰⁰ The idea of an action staff for catastrophic raids had been pioneered there. By July 1943 public shelter was available for 378,000 people; attics had been cleared, fire-risk stocks had been stored safely, and a program of fire-retarding wood treatment—the “Fire Protection Chemical Scheme”—had been ordered in spring 1943 for completion by the summer. There was a large cohort of 9,300 Luftschutzpolizei, and a citywide fire-watching scheme, which involved 15,000 people in the dock area alone. There had been 11,000 demonstrations organized in the city on how to extinguish incendiary bombs. Some 70,000 men and women had been trained for first aid by the German Red Cross. Hamburg’s police president later in the year described the city as “one large Air Protection community.”¹⁰¹ The heavy British raids on other cities earlier in the year gave little indication of what Hamburg could expect in Operation Gomorrah. An attack on Stuttgart on April 14–15 had killed 118; a heavy raid on Dortmund on May 23–24 left 345 dead; another on Krefeld in June resulted in 149 deaths.¹⁰² Hamburg itself had suffered 626 deaths in forty-two raids in 1941, 494 deaths in fifteen raids in 1942, and 142 deaths in ten small raids in 1943. The first reports to reach Berlin of the Hamburg bombing gave little indication of how much more serious the raids in Operation Gomorrah proved to be.¹⁰³

Hamburg was not unprepared for its ordeal, but the scale of the three nights of attack on July 24–25, 27–28, and 29–30 overwhelmed the thousands of trained personnel. After declaring a state of emergency, the Reich defense commissar, gauleiter Karl Kaufmann, called in mutual assistance from outside the city from as far away as Dresden. At the height of the crisis there were 14,000 firefighters, 12,000 soldiers, and 8,000 emergency workers, but although they were able to achieve limited containment of the fire area, the conflagrations soon grew out of control, consuming everything in their path.¹⁰⁴ The firestorm caused by the second raid fed on the oxygen in the thousands of cellars used as “air-protection rooms,” where people sat slowly asphyxiating from carbon monoxide poisoning or were burnt so completely that doctors afterward had to estimate the number of dead by measuring the ash left on the floor. Others died with apparently no external injuries because their body temperature rose above 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 degrees Fahrenheit), causing the body’s natural regulator to collapse from “over-warming.”¹⁰⁵ By the end of the year it was estimated that 85 percent of deaths in German cities were caused by fire rather than high-explosive bombs.¹⁰⁶ The Hamburg police president later wrote that “speech is impotent” to describe the scene that he confronted after the fire had ebbed away, but the description in his official report is vivid enough:

The streets were covered with hundreds of corpses. Mothers with their children, youths, old men, burnt, charred, untouched and unclothed, naked with a waxen pallor like dummies in a shop window, they lay in every posture, quiet and peaceful or cramped, the death-struggle shown in the expression on their faces.¹⁰⁷

By the end of November 1943, records had been compiled to confirm 31,647 dead, of which only 15,802 could be identified; a further 2,322 were known to have died outside the city. The final death toll will never be known with certainty, but it is generally assumed to be between 37,000 (shown by police records) and 40,000 (the figure widely used in Germany before the end of the war). The Hamburg Fire Department calculated that all the wartime bombing in Hamburg, from 1940 to 1945, resulted in the deaths of 48,572 people.¹⁰⁸

The aftermath of the raids saw an awful calm descend on the damaged city. Nine hundred thousand people fled unorganized over the course of the week and had to be absorbed into the surrounding countryside and small towns; 315,000 houses and apartments were destroyed or badly damaged, 61 percent of the city. Over the course of the war 902,000 people in Hamburg lost all their possessions, including the novelist Hans Nossack, who by chance had gone to a summer cottage outside the city just before the raids began. He watched the columns and truckloads of refugees, some still in their nightwear: “They brought with them an uncanny silence . . . crouched and remote. . . . No lamenting anywhere, no tears.” Nossack returned to the city a few days later, losing his way in the ruined landscape and the swarms of rats and flies, “insolent and fat.”¹⁰⁹ The heat that had allowed the firestorm to take hold persisted after the bombing. Another eyewitness, Gretl Büttner, found the contrast uncanny between a deep blue sky dotted with pretty white clouds and the “image of unending misery and terrible devastation,” made starker by the fickle weather. She joined hundreds of others searching through the corpses, laid out in neat rows in squares free of debris, to try to find her companions.¹¹⁰ The police set up a record-card index divided into four categories: identified and registered dead, unknown bodies and their place of discovery and burial, property salvaged and assigned to bodies, and articles found but unclaimed. Any goods that were not claimed were sold secondhand to the homeless. There were hundreds of orphaned children, or children separated from their parents, who had to be identified and housed. In the aftermath of the Hamburg bombings the Inter-Ministerial Committee made it compulsory for all children up to age four to wear a wooden or cardboard tag with their name, date of birth, and address.¹¹¹

The most urgent need in Hamburg in the first days after the firestorm was to supply clean drinking water and to avert a health disaster as refugees began to return to the devastated areas and in some cases to reoccupy the ruined remains of their homes. The drinking-water system was destroyed in the raids and regular water sources contaminated. The emergency services brought in disinfected street-cleaning trucks filled with fresh spring water immediately after the bombing had ended. Water trucks were sent from as far afield as Stettin, Breslau, Berlin, and Leipzig, mostly cleaned and converted gasoline tankers. The level of hygiene was poor and the population was warned to boil water even from the trucks. Two days after the last raid the local Hygiene Institute laboratory was working again, monitoring the quality of water from the main springs and the wells that were opened up for use. Epidemic illness was avoided.¹¹² The medical conditions in the city were nevertheless far from ideal. Instead of the usual 20,000 hospital beds, there were now only 8,000 following the destruction of twenty-four hospitals. Emergency medical stations were set up to give immediate treatment. The many corpses were covered in quicklime and buried in mass graves, or doused with petrol and burned.¹¹³ The most damaged areas of the city were walled up to prevent people from returning to areas where there was a risk to health; buildings that had been checked for bodies and cleared were marked with a blob of green paint.¹¹⁴ Much of the gruesome work was carried out by camp prisoners whose survival worried the authorities less. Looters were few since the penalties were severe. By August 5 the first seven had been sentenced to death; in total, thirty-one cases were tried in the four months following the raids and fifteen looters executed.¹¹⁵

Operation Gomorrah represented a profound challenge to German society and the German war effort, but not one that could not in the end be met. Hermann Göring visited Hamburg on August 6 to an apparently enthusiastic welcome, though informers also heard widespread criticism of his leadership of the air force. The SD report following the raids spoke of the “exceptional shock effect” across the whole country, but also recorded the still widespread belief that Germany had the means to “end the war victoriously.”¹¹⁶ Albert Speer famously recalled in his memoirs his claim at the time that after six more Hamburgs, Germany would be finished. But he also remembered Hitler’s reply: “You’ll straighten it out again.”¹¹⁷ Following the raids, Speer was authorized by Hitler to set up yet another emergency organization based on three Air Raid Damage Staffs stationed in Hamburg, Berlin, and Stuttgart. In the event of a new catastrophe, he would move in mobile columns of workers, relief supplies, and equipment to get workers provided for as soon as possible and damaged industry and utilities working again.¹¹⁸ Over the course of the year following Gomorrah, 50,000 emergency homes were built for Hamburg’s workforce. Small (between 30 and 40 square meters, or 300 to 400 square feet) and crudely built, the new housing clustered near the factories, which supplied the workforce with subsidized electricity at one-fifth of the regular price.¹¹⁹ The number of households in Hamburg fell from 500,000 to 300,000, reducing pressure on local amenities and housing so that within months around 90 percent of the remaining population could be accommodated in regular housing.¹²⁰ The social consequences of the raids, which had killed around 2.4 percent of the city’s population, were gradually absorbed as services were restored, the rationing system reinstituted, and urgent house repair completed.

There were important lessons to be learned from the worst of Germany’s air raids. Although he concluded that the city’s civil defense system was basically sound, the police president added to his report twenty pages of helpful advice on practical and technical improvements to aspects of air-raid protection. His most urgent recommendation was to ensure that there were adequate escape routes, known to all shelter users, to prevent the mass deaths that had occurred in apparently safe air-raid rooms. The problems this presented were advertised in a Luftschutzbund report in July 1943 about a woman who succeeded in the nick of time in saving her fellow shelterers:

There was darkness in the cellar. We were all thrown on top of each other. The light failed. If we had only put ready an axe for opening up the breakthrough at a fixed point on the wall, we would have saved ourselves fearful minutes of alarm. We found the axe only after a good quarter of an hour. As the air in the cellar quickly became worse, I bashed at the breakthrough like someone possessed. Now it got its revenge, because we had never bothered particularly about the added bit of wall. Only after 20 minutes had I cut a hole just large enough to slip through.¹²¹

In the months after the bombing of Hamburg, air-protection instructions sent out monthly by the Air Ministry to local police authorities emphasized repeatedly the need to keep cellar shelters clear of obstacles, with a clearly marked breakthrough point, made of shallow mortar. More difficult was the realization that the constant repetition of the slogan earlier in the war that “the air-protection room is the safest place” was no longer always the case. Air-raid wardens and action leaders were now encouraged to teach their communities the right moment to leave a shelter if a fire threatened to run out of control. When leaving a cellar in a firestorm, people were advised to wear a coat soaked with water and a damp hood. A coat, it was claimed, was more difficult for the fiery wind to tear off the body.¹²²

After the experience of Hamburg, priority was given to finding more effective ways to prevent or to fight a firestorm, challenging though this was. Civil defense and firefighting units were instructed to start attacking fires as soon as they appeared, even during the raid, since casualties were certain to be lower than they would be once a firestorm took hold. “The first half hour is of decisive importance in the development of fires,” ran the Air Ministry instructions. “It is possible to prevent the genesis of a major conflagration, under circumstances where the fires started by the bombs are extinguished along whole streets.”¹²³ If a firestorm took hold, firefighters were told to concentrate on the area around the edges, where buildings were not yet completely on fire, in order to contain it; at the same time they were encouraged to search for pathways through the waves of fire that could be opened up to allow some of the trapped inhabitants to make their escape. In Hamburg, a few of the population engulfed by the hurricane of fire survived relatively unscathed in blastproof surface shelters.¹²⁴ All self-protection leaders were charged with making sure that householders in every building or apartment kept adequate quantities of water available to tackle a small fire before it spread. The more water stored, the better; use was to be made of “all available containers whatever, not only buckets, pails, bathtubs and rain barrels, but even washbasins, washtubs etc.” Water could even be removed from central heating systems.¹²⁵ Each air-protection room now had to contain its own supplies of water and sand. Self-protection units also had to appoint groups to go out during a raid to spot fires and tackle them at once; empty buildings were no longer obliged to observe the blackout, so that fires could more easily be identified through the uncovered windows. “Fires,” ran one piece of Luftschutzbund advice, “always look much worse than they are, and are much easier to extinguish than appears in the first moment.”¹²⁶

How effective civilians were in tackling a fire clearly varied from case to case, and it placed a heavy responsibility on householders, whose first thought was often for their own family and possessions. A Cologne journalist recorded in his diary how well his neighbors coped with the 1,000-bomber raid in May 1942: “The incendiaries which clattered down around our house: one on the balcony of our neighbor Feuser, immediately extinguished by our neighbor Brassart, one in front of the garage of our neighbor Uhlenbruck, which the coal merchant snatched up, one by the garage of neighbor Gessert, which the householder put out.”¹²⁷ For the regular fire service, the onset of heavy firebombing raids placed a strain on units that were already depleted by regular culls of manpower for the armed forces. In September 1943 a second national inspector was appointed for the fire service, Hans Rumpf, who made it his job to visit more than 150 fire-service units over the following year, checking their equipment and practices. The system depended increasingly on volunteer firefighters, around 1.7 million by 1944. After the heavy fire raids in 1943, the local volunteers were organized in “firefighting emergency units” so that they could be summoned at once from the surrounding area to help with fires in the major cities, an estimated 700 units made up of 100,000 firefighters. They were all brought under police jurisdiction, and those who were also members of the SS were permitted to wear the familiar silver runes on their uniform. The numbers of German men in the service fell steadily, so that during 1943 it became necessary to recruit foreign workers—Poles, Czechs, and Ukrainians—into the fire service. In Hamburg by the end of the war around one-quarter of the regular fire service was made up of Ukrainians. A more radical departure was the call in April 1943 for women to volunteer for the fire service, not only in auxiliary roles but as regular firefighters. From October 1943 they could be subject to compulsory mobilization, and by autumn 1944 an estimated 275,000 female firefighters, aged between eighteen and forty, took their part in combating Allied incendiarism.¹²⁸ The popular myth that German women did nothing more than guard hearth and home during the war is demonstrably untrue for this most dangerous of activities.

Hamburg also signaled the onset of widespread urban evacuation following the first two years of war in which it had been discouraged or temporarily indulged. The veiled evacuation of children permitted under the KLV organization tailed off during 1942 and 1943; from a peak of over 160,000 children in organized camps in July 1941, there were only 40,000 by May 1942, and a similar number in the spring of 1944. The peak figure accounted for only 2 percent of all eligible ten- to fourteen-year-olds. Most stayed for no more than a few months in the Hitler Youth camps before returning home because the accommodation was not suitable for winter; mothers and younger children sent away to the country also stayed for short periods or tried to find friends or relatives to stay with as an alternative to close supervision by the National Socialist People’s Welfare. Altogether the party organizations accounted for around 2 million temporary refugees from the cities, but not for a system of permanent evacuation.¹²⁹ In July 1942 local authorities were reminded that “rehousing” (rather than evacuation) would be approved and covered by public funds only if it was necessary to remove the population from areas of severe bomb damage or unexploded ordnance, or in cases where population transfers were socially useful, and only with Göring’s approval.¹³⁰ In February 1943, Hitler finally agreed that whole school classes could be evacuated from danger areas, but insisted that parents should have the choice whether or not to split the family. The number of schoolchildren formally evacuated remained small. In August 1943 in Berlin out of 260,000 eligible schoolchildren, only 32,000 were in organized evacuation, 132,000 placed with relatives or acquaintances.¹³¹

Only in the spring of 1943, with the onset of the heavy bombing of the Ruhr-Rhineland, did evacuation begin on any scale. On April 19 the Interior Ministry published a decree on organized evacuation (Umquartierung), either to accommodation in the same city or in the rural hinterland, or, for the population not essential for the war effort, transfer to a more distant and safer region.¹³² There were no firm plans in place to cope with the growing stream of refugees from the heavily bombed areas who were evacuating themselves. To avoid a growing chaos, the Interior Ministry finally published in July 1943 a list of city populations scheduled for evacuation and quotas for the regions (based on the party Gaue) where the evacuees—mainly the old and the very young—would be sent. It was the crisis in Hamburg that shocked the German population into greater acceptance of evacuation as a clear necessity. Up until June 1943 the German railway authorities estimated that no more than 140,000–150,000 people had been moved under formal schemes to more distant areas; by the end of 1943 more than 2 million people had been transferred under official programs.¹³³The immediate evacuation of 900,000 from Hamburg was a result of the panic that occurred as Operation Gomorrah intensified. By the end of September 1943, 545,000 had been settled in regions across Germany, more than one-quarter in the neighboring rural areas of Schleswig-Holstein, almost one-third in and around the south German town of Bayreuth.¹³⁴ The firestorm in Hamburg provoked widespread fear that Berlin would be next. From a marked reluctance to accept transfer away from the city, Berliners now flooded out, 691,000 by mid-September. Around 1.1 million altogether left the German capital, one-quarter of the prewar population.

The urban exodus provoked widespread problems, not least because it had not been systematically planned for, as it had been in Britain, and finding and allocating spare accommodation—often just a room in a village house—had to be improvised at short notice. There were obvious sources of friction between a small-town and rural population, not yet much exposed to the physical effects of the bombing war, and an urban population used to different standards or from a very different social milieu. A report sent to the Party Chancellery from Upper Silesia in May 1943 highlighted some of these issues:

The attitude of these racial comrades towards the guest region appears incomprehensible, for it must be observed that at the moment the women, scarcely having set foot on the soil of Upper Silesia, exclaim: “If I have to come to a nest like this, then I’d rather go back to a heap of ruins”; another woman declared, “I am surprised that the sluttish wives that crawl around here can still attract men.” . . . The Germans from the west have often criticized the “Heil Hitler” greeting with the remark that people don’t greet each other like that in the old Reich.¹³⁵

In August 1943, Goebbels’s Inter-Ministerial Committee sent recommendations out to all gauleiters to combat the “spiritual depression” evident among the evacuee populations in their new surroundings, including the provision of a well-heated community room, with a radio, games, magazines, and newspapers from the evacuated cities, as well as film shows using equipment salvaged from bombed cinemas.¹³⁶ But the temptation to return home was strong. By the end of November 1943, 217,000 Berliners had returned despite efforts of the authorities to use compulsory ration-card registration in the evacuation areas as a means of ensuring that the rail network would not be overburdened with those who chose to return. In some areas the quota for evacuees from the major cities had to compete with local evacuation from small towns and cities not yet threatened. In Württemberg in southern Germany, out of 169,000 evacuees in February 1944, at least 52,000 (and perhaps as many as half) had abandoned the region’s own towns for safety in the countryside. In other areas, the number of evacuees threatened to overwhelm small communities, which were expected to accommodate evacuee populations that were not far short of the number of permanent residents. In some cases, an apparently safe rural retreat was bombed anyway by aircrews who could not see where they were aiming, making both inhabitants and evacuees into refugees together.¹³⁷

The evacuation crisis following Operation Gomorrah also exposed the serious state of the German medical service as it wrestled to cope with a much-reduced medical profession, the destruction of hospitals and clinics, and a sudden increase in the number of casualties, many of them serious, brought about by the intensified bombing. After the Hamburg firestorm, many doctors and nurses left with the evacuees; clinics and medical practices were destroyed, leaving doctors with few alternatives but to find occupation away from the stricken city. When evacuation set in elsewhere, doctors were among those who accompanied the transferred communities. By late August an estimated 35 to 40 doctors a day were leaving Berlin, some with the evacuees, some with the 11,500 bedridden patients who were transferred to hospitals in safer areas.¹³⁸ The evacuation from the Ruhr-Rhineland had been carried out too quickly to match medical needs to the evacuee community, and since the majority were children, old people, and women, many of them pregnant, the need for doctors, child nurses, and midwives was more rather than less urgent. In the reception areas the problem was made worse by the fact that the armed forces had taken many of the doctors from the zones classified II or III, not having realized the extent of the later bombing threat.¹³⁹ The aim of the Reich health chief, Leonardo Conti (one of those responsible for the T4 “euthanasia” program), was to try to keep an acceptable proportion between the population and the number of doctors, but by October 1943 the profession was down to 35,000 for the whole population, from a prewar level of 80,000. Around 5,500 were too old to practice effectively, and 3,883 died between 1939 and 1942, some in military service. The ideal of one doctor for every 2,000 or 2,500 people could not be met, and of those available, many were themselves the victims of overwork, tiredness, and illness. For evacuees Conti’s aim was only one doctor for every 10,000.¹⁴⁰

The onset of heavy bombing made it necessary to find a solution or risk a breakdown of effective medical services. Military casualty rates rose sharply during 1943 and 1944, making it more necessary to find ways to rationalize the civilian system. Trucks and vans were requisitioned as less than adequate ambulances, while efforts were made to find hotel or guesthouse accommodation to use as hospitals. Doctors were ordered to place their instruments and medicines in bomb-safe basements every evening to avoid damage, while equipment from ruined clinics was given or sold to doctors still practicing.¹⁴¹ The German Red Cross, which controlled most of the ambulance service, instructed local branches to set up an emergency controller in major cities, with responsibility to call in emergency medical columns, prepared in advance with trucks, temporary barracks, beds, stretchers, sanitary materials, and water filters, and a staff of one or two doctors and up to six nurses. Most bomb victims who survived were only lightly injured, a great many with eye injuries from glass, smoke, soot, and dust from debris. It was decided that these walking wounded would have to be treated in first-aid centers rather than hospitals, which would be used for the serious cases. Operations were suspended for hopeless cases so that resources could be devoted to those who might survive.¹⁴² The main shortage was hospital space, since both military and civilian victims competed for this. In August 1941, Hitler authorized construction of emergency hospitals in bomb-threatened areas at the expense of the state.¹⁴³ The scheme made slow progress, and in May 1943, Hitler approved the appointment of one of the doctors on his staff, Karl Brandt, as general commissar for sanitary and health issues, with responsibility for creating additional emergency hospital space and planning its distribution. Conti immediately objected, since Brandt’s appointment trespassed directly on his own role, but the purpose of the new appointment was to focus on hospital beds rather than areas of general medical policy. Brandt immediately bustled about planning nineteen new hospital sites and 54,000 more hospital beds, but the “Brandt Action” cut across existing planning, creating, in Conti’s words, “a permanent state of chaos.” Allocation of hospital space continued on an improvised basis.¹⁴⁴ The one area where extra provision proved unnecessary was psychiatric casualty. As in Britain, the assumption at first was that bombing was bound to increase the degree of serious mental disorder, particularly as many of those subjected to bombing were female. Yet it soon became clear that although fear and nervous anxiety were widespread, this did not lead to evident psychotic states. Psychiatric casualty was generally nursed in the privacy of family and friends. Only after the war were the traumatic consequences of exposure to the bombing threat eventually observable.¹⁴⁵

Along with the evacuees came not only problems of welfare and medical provision but a treasure trove of rumors spread by an urban population that suddenly found itself the center of attention in the reception areas. Rumors performed a number of functions: they gave the evacuees a sense of temporary importance as they regaled their hosts with overblown accounts of the horrors of being bombed; they were a safety valve for people whose opportunity for criticizing the authorities was severely circumscribed; and they acted as an instant form of information and communication for communities that were starved of anything other than the official line peddled by German propaganda. Responsibility for controlling and combating rumors lay with Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. As in Britain during the Blitz, the decision about how much information to release was a difficult one, not only because the effect on the public had to be monitored, but because hard information could be used by the enemy. The heavy raids on the Ruhr-Rhineland in the spring of 1943 immediately opened up, according to the party propaganda office, “the worst outcome, a flood of rumors.”¹⁴⁶ In areas that had not been bombed, rumors often reinforced a self-interested sense of immunity. Common rumors centered on the invulnerability of a region thanks to unspecified British interests in leaving it intact, or the depth of industrial and urban smog covering the area, or the excessive distance from British bases. Others focused on the most likely time to be bombed—on Fridays, on national festivals, on Hitler’s birthday, on days specified in Allied leaflets.¹⁴⁷ One rumor involved lurid tales, which spread across Germany, of people stuck in melted asphalt and burned alive, or ignited by some form of phosphorus rain, half-truths from the sight of those struggling against the firestorm.¹⁴⁸

In other cases rumors took on a more solid shape. In Munich following a heavy raid in September 1942, strong rumors were overheard, first that it was Germany’s fault that civilian bombing had begun in the first place; second, and more significant, the view that bombing was God’s punishment for having “pushed the Jews over the frontier and thrown them into poverty.”¹⁴⁹ In July 1943 the rumor took root that volcanoes were to be bombed to bring about the end of the world. Rumors about the apocalypse were, Goebbels thought, quite understandable when faced with the sight of dead children laid out after a raid, but had to be contested nonetheless.¹⁵⁰ One child, hearing adults talking about “the end” in a shelter, was unsure whether they meant the end of the war or in fact “the end of the world.”¹⁵¹ The summer of 1943 encouraged a sense of extremes. The news from Hamburg, which reached Bavaria in August, was, wrote one diarist, “beyond the grasp of the imagination . . . streets of boiling asphalt into which the victims sank . . . 200,000 dead.” He witnessed a group of Hamburg refugees trying to force their way into a railway car, until one battered suitcase carried along by “a half-crazed woman” dropped open to reveal clothes, a toy, and the shriveled, carbonized body of a child. He reflected that the terrible news from Hamburg meant the end of the old world for good: “This time those riders now saddling their black steeds are none other than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”¹⁵²

The issue of rumors was bound up with the more profound question of how to sustain popular commitment to the war effort and avoid a more serious social or political crisis. These issues came to the forefront only in 1943 when casualty lists grew longer and the means to obstruct Allied bombing became clearly ineffectual. In the Ruhr-Rhineland in the spring of 1943 the first evidence of possible social crisis emerged as the authorities struggled to cope with homelessness and temporary unemployment. Information fed into the Propaganda Ministry highlighted a growing sense of desperation. The raid on Duisburg on March 19–20, 1943, left thousands homeless, destroyed the city’s major department stores, and left just two restaurants still functioning for 200,000 people. The local population complained that the promise of revenge against British cities had not been met, while the Ruhr was reaching the breaking point: “We see no end. We cannot keep this up for long. How will it go?”¹⁵³ Even Goebbels was affected by the evidence of the first really sustained bombing campaign. On March 13 he wrote in his diary that “air warfare is at present our greatest worry. Things simply cannot go on like this.”¹⁵⁴ The difficulty for those charged with the psychological welfare of the population—the party called it Menschenführung—was to separate out the different factors affecting the public mood, of which bombing was just one. In February 1943, Goebbels had delivered in Berlin his famous speech about total war to a selected party audience, an oration designed to reinvigorate the war willingness of the population after the defeat at Stalingrad. But its impact was limited and failed to address the question of how to cope with the consequences of air attack upon morale, though the speech was popular with the armed forces, who wanted the civilian population to grasp the true dimensions of the conflict.¹⁵⁵ The SD reports showed that some of the population blamed the intensified bombing on Goebbels’s speech, which seemed to be an invitation to the enemy to wage unrestricted war against the German people. Resentment against Berlin as the source of the “total war” idea provoked a verse that soon had wide currency in western Germany: “Lieber Tommy fliege weiter / wir sind alle Bergarbeiter. / Fliege weiter nach Berlin / die haben alle ‘ja’ geschrien” [“Dear Tommy fly on farther / we are all miners here. / Fly farther to Berlin / they have all screamed ‘yes’”].¹⁵⁶

From the spring of 1943 onward the regime for molding opinion in Germany struggled to find a method to influence the response to bombing in ways that were more positive for the German war effort. Rumors were tackled by insinuating SA or party officials into crowds and queues with instructions to challenge the substance of rumors; some rumors were deliberately started by propaganda officials to counter a local mood of depression or hopelessness; home intelligence regularly recommended dealing with rumors at the source by publicly announcing their false nature and providing some nuggets of more plausible information.¹⁵⁷ The difficult thing was to gauge how much hard information should be given out. The formal policy, approved by the high command, was to announce no details about the number of casualties and the damage to buildings. In March 1943 a brief but clear communiqué was given about a raid on Berlin, which immediately won wide public approval.¹⁵⁸ But only in the case of the raid on the Rhineland dams were precise casualty figures given, to stop the rumors that 10,000–30,000 people had died.¹⁵⁹ Rather than yield to public pressure to give precise information, public anxiety was to be mediated by propaganda that highlighted the achievements of the German Air Force against the bomber offensive. Propaganda companies from the military propaganda arm began to work in the bombed cities from June 1943 to provide local stories on successful air defense or air-to-air combat. Goebbels had already orchestrated a campaign to convince the public that the German Air Force was taking revenge on the enemy population and would do so with new, powerful but secret weapons in the near future.¹⁶⁰

The idea of vengeance (Vergeltung) was itself problematic, since it depended for its propaganda success on more than just promises. In 1943 the German Air Force’s activity against British targets reached its lowest point. Goebbels hoped that the successful test launch of the V-1 and the V-2 by early 1943 indicated a rapid move to large-scale revenge attacks; the substantial time lag meant that the public became first skeptical, then widely critical of the regime’s promises. In late April 1943 the SD reports noted widespread longing for the “revenge announced ‘already so often,’” and popular calls for revenge punctuated all the weekly reports throughout the year. By September the following joke was in circulation in the Ruhr and Berlin: “The English and the Americans were given an ultimatum: if they do not cease the air war at once, another vengeance speech will follow.”¹⁶¹ By then rumors about a new missile were in circulation and there were popular hopes that a definite deadline would be announced for its use. Goebbels had by then realized that vengeance propaganda was counterproductive, and on July 6, 1943, he ordered the German press to stop using the term, though it retained its public currency. The armed forces’ propaganda branch set up a commission to study the potential of the new weapons and concluded that they were not capable of turning the tide of war and should no longer be used for propaganda purposes.¹⁶² Instead Goebbels used the Jewish question both as a way to explain the bombing war and as an instrument to encourage German resistance. In a speech on June 5, 1943, he denounced British bombing and the “Jewish instigators” behind it. After Operation Gomorrah, party propaganda played on “the Jews’ will to extermination” expressed through the “bombing murder of the Jewish-plutocratic enemy,” and called for a fanatical defense of German race and culture.¹⁶³

On some issues the German public felt strongly, though it is not widely evident that the struggle against “world Jewry” meant very much to the population in the front line against bombing. There were strong demands that the dead in bombing raids should be marked in the newspapers with an iron cross, like the military dead. The Propaganda Ministry approved of the idea in December 1941, but it was overturned by Hitler in January 1942 (who did not want women to be honored that way) and rejected by the armed forces, who thought that it would diminish the value of the symbol for the military dead.¹⁶⁴ Attempts to describe the bomb victims with the military terms “fallen” or “wounded” (Gefallene or Verwundete) were also rejected by the armed forces, since many of those who died did so from willful failure to seek shelter, including a notorious case in Bremen when fourteen partygoers were killed because they wanted to finish their food and drink before going down to the cellar. In the end a compromise was reached, allowing civil defense workers of either sex who died while carrying out dangerous duties to have their death notices marked with an iron cross. They could also be described as “fallen” for the Fatherland, but the rest of the bomb victims could not, a distinction confirmed by Goebbels in May 1943.¹⁶⁵

Opportunity for more serious political or social dissent was limited, given the willingness of the regime to impose severe punishment on any open or dangerous forms of protest; where it existed, political resistance was fueled by ideological difference rather than by bombing. Nevertheless, a growing pessimistic realism about the future jostled in public opinion with evidence of a firmer resolve and persistent confidence in Hitler’s capacity to stabilize the situation. The SD reports speculated, as did British intelligence, that the mass of homeless and disgruntled evacuees might be a possible source of an “inner collapse” if the bombing got worse, but an estimated one-third of the evacuees returned home. Those who remained, mainly women and children, were unlikely instigators of revolt, though there were isolated acts of protest against the treatment of evacuees or the withholding of ration cards. The most famous case was in October 1943 at Witten in the Ruhr, where the police refused to intervene.¹⁶⁶ In some ways bombing actually created a safety valve for popular disaffection. Rumors could represent a surreptitious challenge to prescribed public discourse without amounting to serious dissent. In the shelters it was sometimes possible for the small communities that inhabited them to complain about their hardships or to satirize the regime without fear of punishment. In one Berlin bunker, Hitler was always referred to as “The Hitler,” an intentionally less flattering epithet than “our Führer.” The local warden turned a blind eye both to this and to harsher complaints directed at the dictatorship.¹⁶⁷ For the bombed-out, the opportunity to let off steam could also be tolerated. One generic story, cited by a number of observers, told of a hysterical woman evacuee challenging the police to arrest her for some trivial offense because at least she would have a roof over her head. In each version of the story, the police do nothing.¹⁶⁸ The SD reports noted a widely circulating rumor in August 1943 that the Allies had promised to stop the bombing if the government was changed; this was a brave rumor to pass on, but it was overheard in towns as far apart as Innsbruck and Königsberg.¹⁶⁹ It was also evident that the anxieties and fears generated by bombing in particular affected not only the home front but the fighting front as well. Censors intercepted letters giving painful details of the effects of heavy raids; soldiers on leave could see these effects for themselves. An SD report in early September 1943 described a typical frontline response: “What is the point in defending the homeland at the front if everything at home is smashed to pieces and there is nothing left afterwards when we come back.”¹⁷⁰ Efforts were made to ensure that news reached soldiers quickly to allay their fears. Special “bomb postcards” could be written from raided towns with express delivery to military units.¹⁷¹

The heavy bombing of 1943, and the shock effect of the destruction of Hamburg in particular, did not in reality provoke serious political or social crisis, though it prompted growing public criticism and anxiety and occasional local acts of grumbling protest, which could be tolerated by the authorities. There is no single explanation for this, since the response varied a great deal between different regions and cities, between different social groups and public organizations, but a number of factors played a part. The bombing was still geographically concentrated in 1942 and 1943, principally on the coastal towns and the industrial regions of western Germany, though an estimated half of British bombs fell in open country. Although regular warnings, compulsory sheltering, and waves of morbid rumors affected much of the rest of the population, bombing was not directly experienced. For those who were principally affected, the chief concern was to survive the catastrophe, to find adequate welfare, food, and shelter, and to protect and reestablish the private sphere. Hans Nossack found among his fellow Hamburgers a preoccupation with the mundane: “If by chance a newspaper came into our hands, we didn’t bother to read the war bulletins. . . . We would immediately turn to the page with the announcements that concerned us directly. Whatever happened outside of us simply did not exist.”¹⁷²

Since the regime was exaggeratedly anxious about the state of public opinion, the duplication of effort by the air force, the local authorities, the party, and the police meant that whatever jurisdictional friction might be generated, problems were identified and tackled. The plethora of mobile emergency columns, bringing food or medical care or construction teams, meant that none of the afflicted cities was likely to be short of some form of effective assistance. The range of civil defense activities was extensive, and the mobilization of more women and young people in 1943 spread the mantle of responsibility over a large fraction of the urban population. The combination of state, party, and community initiatives helped German society to cope with the rigors of a long-term bombing campaign and dampened any prospect of social disquiet. “Everything went on very quietly,” wrote Nossack, reflecting on the absence of latent rebellion, “and with a definite concern for order, and the State took its bearings from this order.”¹⁷³ Only in 1944–45, when bombing overwhelmed German society, was the search for order challenged.

Economic Miracles

It has become fashionable in recent accounts of the German economy during the Second World War to dismiss the idea that there was anything very miraculous about its ability to expand war production continuously between 1939 and 1944.¹⁷⁴ All war economies did this, the German more slowly at first than the others, then more rapidly toward the end of the war. The difference is that German industrial cities were subjected to heavy bomb attack from at least the spring of 1943 onward, and in 1944 to a weight of bombs many times greater than the Blitz on Britain. In September 1944, Hitler addressed the leaders of German war production on what had been achieved “despite the growing damage from air attacks.” The new peak in war production achieved in August, he continued, showed that German industry could be trusted, even in the shrunken and battered area still remaining to Germany, to concentrate everything on war production “in order to be able to increase yet further the output of the most important weapons and equipment.”¹⁷⁵

If the “miracle” of expanded German production has very material explanations in the effective exploitation of both capital and labor and efforts to rationalize the distribution of resources, the ability to sustain exceptional levels of war production in the face of the bombing offensive cannot be taken for granted. If bombing eventually placed a ceiling on what could be produced, the performance of the key sectors of German industry over the last two years of war did have something of an “economic miracle” about it. Above all, it was the exact reverse of what the Allies thought would be possible once the offensive got going, as the statistics in table 4.1 make evident. Whatever the other resource and organizational issues confronting the German war economy, which is not the subject here, the extent to which German war economic potential could be safeguarded against the impact of bombing became a central concern of the German war machine and allowed the armed forces to continue fighting forlorn campaigns well into 1945.

Table 4.1: Selected Statistics on German Military Production, 1940–44

Source: IWM, S363, Saur papers, “Auszug aus dem Leistungsbericht von Minister Speer, 27.1.1945.”

The geography of German industry at the outbreak of war had something in common with the British pattern. Older industrial sectors—coal, steel, machinery—were concentrated in the Ruhr-Rhineland and Saar basins, but had been supplemented in the 1930s by expanding domestic production in new greenfield sites, particularly on the Salzgitter orefield in Brunswick, and the seizure of additional iron-ore, steel, coal, and machinery production in Austria, the Sudetenland, and Bohemia/Moravia. Modern industrial sectors, however, including chemicals, electronics, radio, the aeronautical industry, and motor vehicles, were sited away from the old industrial regions, in Bavaria, Württemberg, Berlin, Saxony, and a fringe of smaller industrial cities. After 1933, with the new regime’s emphasis on military and economic rearmament, conscious efforts were made to disperse industry away from the more exposed industrial regions behind the western frontier and to place it in relatively bomb-safe areas in central, southern, and eastern Germany, a process known as Verballung, literally, breaking up the industrial “ball.” German territorial expansion in 1938–40 ensured that the balance of industrial output in the enlarged “Greater Germany” tilted farther east, creating a cushion to absorb any potential damage done to the Ruhr-Rhineland. The Ruhr supplied three-quarters of German iron and steel output in 1939 but less than two-thirds by 1943.¹⁷⁶The vast Reichswerke “Hermann Göring,” a state holding company for iron, steel, coal, and armaments set up in 1937, controlled 71 firms in Germany but 241 in occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Until 1944 a proportion of German war production was protected by its geographical dispersal and the long aerial ranges needed to reach it.

The vulnerability of German industrial and service sectors to bombing was well understood, and “work self-protection” (Werkluftschutz) featured in the 1937 “Self-Protection” law. But like air-raid protection in general, the factory system was introduced piecemeal; those plants farthest from the bombing threat were less inclined to introduce rigorous air-protection procedures for their workforce, provide them with effective shelters, or install blast protection for machinery and equipment. When the Heinkel aircraft plant in Rostock suffered damage in the raids in 1942, it was found that the firm had not followed the Air Ministry’s advice in building protective bomb walls.¹⁷⁷ In the cities in Zone I effective work protection was mandatory. From 1939 onward, vulnerable firms were asked to transfer some of their production to less endangered areas, and an effort was made, as in Britain, to ensure that vital components or even whole products (aircraft, aero-engines, tanks, etc.) were produced in at least three geographically distinct sites. Some of this early dispersal was effective—the Weser aircraft works at Bremen moved one-third of its production of the Ju87 Stuka to Berlin; the Focke-Wulf plant, also in Bremen, was decentralized to three separate sites farther east in 1940 and 1941; the Blohm & Voss flying-boat production was transferred from Hamburg to Bodensee, in south Germany, while new capacity was built in areas far removed from the current bombing threat. In 1938–39, Messerschmitt Me109 production was set up at Wiener-Neustadt outside Vienna (five other assembly plants in Austria and Bohemia were added later); another production center was established at the Erla works in Leipzig. None could easily be bombed until 1944.¹⁷⁸

As in Britain, a program of camouflage and decoy sites was set up to confuse bombers trying to identify industrial targets in difficult nighttime conditions. The largest and most effective site was at Essen, where the vast Krupp works was reproduced in effigy in the countryside outside the city and sustained, according to German Air Force estimates, around three-quarters of the bombing attacks aimed at the real plant. Decoy sites outside Stuttgart and Karlsruhe attracted well over half of all bombs in 1941.¹⁷⁹ In Berlin elaborate efforts were made to disguise the government quarter to avoid the danger of bombing. The Brandenburg Gate was reconstructed along with mock ministries farther from the center while prominent landmarks were concealed. The east-west axis road in the center of Berlin was covered with a canopy of wire netting and green gauze, while lampposts were covered with green material to look like trees. A lake in west Berlin was covered with green netting with a length of gray material laid across it to resemble a road.¹⁸⁰ Outside the city, sixteen major dummy industrial sites were set up, which attracted British bombs throughout the war. When firebombing became the principal RAF method, the German Air Force set up fire sites in small walled enclosures to mimic the appearance of blazing buildings. These too proved highly effective for much of the war. To accentuate the disruptive effect of industrially generated smog, the air force also introduced artificial smoke to screen vulnerable targets. Once daylight raids began in earnest in 1943, the program was expanded so that by the end of the war there were 100 smoke companies composed of 50,000 men and women.¹⁸¹

Of the many problems faced by the German economy between 1940 and 1942, bombing was not one of them. Small-scale, incidental damage could be compensated, while dispersal and decoys reduced what limited prospect there was of accurate raiding against economic targets. The German economy from 1939 onward experienced a rapid and extensive transfer to war production priorities, cutting private consumer spending by one-quarter by 1942 (against a 14 percent reduction in Britain) and increasing the percentage of workers in manufacturing who produced goods for the armed forces, from 28 percent in May 1939 to 70 percent in May 1942.¹⁸² Arms production expanded steadily in the first years of war, though not without considerable difficulties. These were not caused, as has often been argued, by an unwillingness on the part of the regime to commit to large-scale economic mobilization for war—indeed it is possible to describe as early as 1941 a problem of overmobilization—but by poor facilities for national planning of resource use, competition between the three services, and a fraught relationship between the military and industry; the one was concerned with rapid innovation and constant tactical alterations in design, the other with finding profitable ways to convert the large resources of allocated manpower and machinery to an efficient and uninterrupted mass production. Productive performance was held back as much by poor planning as by potential resource bottlenecks, which only really inhibited war production in Germany at the end of 1944 when bombing, the collapse of the economic New Order, and the disruption of trade finally reduced German access to key materials. The effect of production politics in the first years of war was to hold back the full rationalization of war production. The gradual introduction of a system of production rings and committees in 1941–42 to oversee each branch of production, together with the establishment in March 1942 of an organization for coordinated resource allocation, known as Central Planning, saw the creation of a framework within which the substantial earlier investment in war output capacity could be used to expand the supply of armaments exponentially over the last three years of war.¹⁸³

Bombing became one of the factors that German industry had to take more fully into account only during 1943 and early 1944, as a result of the RAF campaigns against the Ruhr, Hamburg, and Berlin, and the American attacks on aircraft production and ball-bearing factories. Although the Ruhr campaign led to a temporary reduction in iron and steel supply, it failed to halt the upward direction of German war production, which reached new peaks during 1943. The main Krupp works in Essen lost only 7.6 percent of its planned output in 1943; the giant August-Thyssen concern produced more iron in 1943 than in either of the previous two years.¹⁸⁴ At the same time sales of iron and steel from the new plants in central Germany and occupied eastern Europe controlled by the Reichswerke “Hermann Göring” expanded by 87 percent between 1941 and 1943 to compensate for declining Ruhr production. The Reichswerke supplied one-fifth of all iron and steel, one-quarter of German coal.¹⁸⁵ Bombing, as already noted in chapter 3, only reduced potential German industrial output by around 9 percent in 1943. That loss has to be set against a threefold expansion of war production between 1941 and 1944 evident for all major classes of weapons. Total munitions output for large-caliber artillery was 100 percent greater in 1943 than 1942, production of tank guns 60 percent higher, aircraft output up by 61 percent; in 1944 these statistics were once again exceeded by a wide margin. Bombing caused local and temporary dislocation, but could not prevent German industry from adapting to the pressures and expanding output.¹⁸⁶ The central problem facing the German war economy in the last years of war was not the bombing but the escalating loss rates at the fighting front. In the first years of the war, losses of both manpower and equipment had been relatively low; from the Stalingrad battles on the Eastern Front to the collapse of Axis forces in North Africa and the rising attrition in the Battle of the Atlantic, the toll on Germany’s armed forces escalated sharply. The demand for higher production reflected higher losses and the subsequent demands from the armed forces for more rapid and extensive replacement of stocks. Army stocks of tanks and self-propelled guns on hand were by 1944 almost four times greater than in 1941; stocks of antitank guns five times greater than in 1942; the supply of aircraft, both new and repaired, expanded from a monthly average of 1,381 in 1940 to an average of 3,609 in 1944.¹⁸⁷ The continuous campaigning in 1943 and 1944 for greater rationalization and concentration of production was driven by the military necessity of supplying the fighting fronts, including the antiaircraft defenses, with larger quantities of weapons in a context of high wastage. Hitler’s response to losses was always to call on the industrial economy to produce more; the priority for German industrialists and planners was to meet those demands, irrespective of the impact of the bombs.

Clearly production would have been easier to organize and have imposed a lesser toll on managers and workers alike in an entirely bomb-free environment. Bombing inhibited the wartime development of new technologies, though it did not prevent it. Indeed in some well-known cases—the Heinkel He177 heavy bomber, for example—the problems were self-inflicted. Improvisation proved successful, but it also came at a cost in organizational effort and problem solving that did not affect managers in the United States or the far Soviet Union. As the bombing grew heavier in 1943 and 1944, the initial attempts to offer protection or immunity to German industry were extended and consolidated. The first possibility was to provide better protection on site. Antiaircraft guns were concentrated in special defensive zones around the most threatened areas of war production. Special “action units” were established for industry, which, like their urban counterparts, were sent to bombed industrial sites to try to restart production as rapidly as possible. In August 1943, following the Hamburg raids, Speer was authorized to declare emergency “damage regions” (Schadensbereiche), which would receive priority in the restoration of productive activity.¹⁸⁸ Individual plants were encouraged to develop comprehensive protective installations for their machinery and to increase the level of training for their workforces in simple air-raid protection procedures. Factories that had been bombed but were still able to function were told not to put on a new roof but to construct a black cover below roof level to simulate an empty building; fire-damaged external walls were kept in place to make it look as though the plant had been abandoned. Other undamaged buildings had camouflage damage painted on the sides.¹⁸⁹ All combustible stores of materials had to be moved to safer storage sites, and by the autumn of 1943 the Economics Ministry was able to report that the policy was working well. Stocks were moved to the edge of the endangered cities and stored by small firms more remote from the threat of attack.¹⁹⁰ The result was that even in cities badly hit, it was still possible to maintain a large proportion of pre-raid production. In Augsburg, for example, where industry was among the most heavily damaged, the average value of monthly production was 964,000 RM in the last five months of 1943; in the five months of heavy raiding in 1944 the average was 814,000 RM. In Hagen, hit by four heavy attacks in 1943, the pre-raid average value was 5.2 million RM, the post-raid value 5.17 million. Much of any loss was absorbed by cutting consumer production and concentrating on war-essential products.¹⁹¹

The second necessity was to ensure that the working population in the bombed cities could be assisted enough to ensure that labor productivity was maintained and absenteeism kept to a minimum. This was a more complex problem by 1943 because of the introduction of an increasing number of foreign compulsory workers and the rising proportion of women in the workforce, though in both cases work discipline could be imposed more ruthlessly by male German supervisors. Foreign workers were treated as effective captives; they had restricted access to air-raid shelters or had to make do with slit trenches, so as to emphasize the difference in status between them and skilled German workers. In a controlled economy, with no right to strike and heavy penalties for dissent, worker unrest could still be displayed through slow working or sabotage. It remained in the interest of employers and the state to ensure that the German labor force was given both stick and carrot to keep it productive. Priority was given to repairing workers’ housing or replacing it with temporary barracks. Workers engaged in repair work following a raid were given a bonus of between 52 and 65 percent an hour depending on their particular skills.¹⁹² Workers who were rendered homeless had to report to their employer within two days to qualify for compensation and to be allowed a brief period of compassionate leave.¹⁹³

Other rewards or bonuses were introduced to sustain worker loyalty despite the long hours and greater danger. Hourly wage rates for all German workers were increased to 25 percent extra for overtime, 50 percent extra for Sunday work, and 100 percent extra on holidays. Firms were encouraged to set up nurseries for working women, hostels for workers, and midday hot meals. The Daimler-Benz company increased its “social spending” on workforce facilities and bonuses from 1.6 million RM in 1939 to 2.1 million in 1944; in the last year of war, 4.6 million RM were spent on air-raid protection.¹⁹⁴ In October 1942 arrangements were made to provide additional food rations for the population in raided cities, predominantly in the western industrial areas: fifty grams of extra meat a week for a minimum of four weeks, and extra fats and bread at the discretion of the local Reich defense commissar. Later in the war, when overtime incentives were declining, special “Speer recognition” awards were made for exceptional efforts, usually paid in kind—alcohol and tobacco for men, health tonics, canned vegetables, and condensed milk for women and youths. But at the same time German workers were subject to closer discipline. In the Ruhr cities “labor control” units were organized by the German Labor Front, checking on attendance and hours worked, granting leave to bombed-out workers, and searching out workers absent without leave to return them to work. Thought was given to militarizing the labor force as “soldiers on the home front,” but although the term was regularly used in propaganda, it was not carried through from fear that it would make labor less rather than more efficient.¹⁹⁵ In the summer of 1944 instructions were given to compel workers aged over eighteen to serve ten times a month (eight for women) in the works’ self-protection squads to make sure there were enough people to fight the fires, though for much of the war the factory was almost certainly a safer place to be than at home.¹⁹⁶ Yet in the end the greatest incentive for workers to remain at work was the need for regular wages to support them and their families, and the fear that defeat would usher in a return to the Depression days of high unemployment and short-time working and the possible dismemberment of Germany. Bombing gave them no incentive to give up.¹⁹⁷

The most common response to the increased bombing was some form of dispersal. For several years production had been dispersed to different units in order to expand capacity. From the summer of 1943 dispersal policy was designed to provide substitute sites, not extra capacity. On June 28, 1943, Hitler issued a decree for securing factory space and accommodation for workers in those areas where production was to be dispersed.¹⁹⁸ Two weeks later Speer’s ministry sent out orders implementing the decree, which included a prohibition on any “wild dispersal” undertaken without approval and an injunction not to move everything to the eastern regions just because they were still beyond range of regular air attacks. Instead firms were encouraged to disperse into local rural areas, which would allow them to keep their workforce intact and maintain links with local service and component contractors.¹⁹⁹ The Air Ministry had already begun a program of dispersal in October 1942, when orders were issued to move all production out of the most endangered areas and to ensure that each product was manufactured in at least two or three different places. Sometimes by chance the same component was bombed simultaneously in two separate places—a Ju87 component, for example, in two raids on Bremen and Osnabrück in 1942—but in general multiple production gave an added cushion of flexibility. By November 1942 most of the 290 businesses producing 100 percent for the air force west of the line Stettin-Berlin-Munich had dispersal plans prepared.²⁰⁰ Over the following months much aircraft production was moved to the Protectorate, Slovakia, Poland, Silesia, and Saxony, but there still remained much to be done by the time Hitler published his decree in June 1943. The next month, Göring, as “Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan,” ordered complete “evacuation of war-essential industry from the core of major cities.”²⁰¹

The success of the dispersal policy, which allowed German production to expand significantly despite the escalating bombardment, can best be illustrated by looking at the two industries chosen by the U.S. Eighth Air Force as potential bottlenecks: ball bearings and aircraft assembly. Both cases demonstrate the substantial cushion available in a heavily industrialized state when manufacture needed to be decentralized. The potentially disruptive effects of this process were mitigated by the simultaneous insistence, laid down in regular orders from Hitler himself, on simplifying and standardizing production and design, concentrating on a narrow range of model types, searching for substitute materials or parts for those in short supply, and eliminating any production, whether civilian or military, that was classified as less essential. Bombing forced the German productive system to become more flexible and improvisatory in ways that the Allied air forces had not anticipated. The attack on the production of ball bearings at Schweinfurt failed in its purpose for just this reason. Four days after the attack, Speer flew to Nuremberg on Hitler’s orders to inspect the damage; the following day, October 19, 1943, Philipp Kessler, a member of Speer’s Armaments Advisory Council, was appointed “General Commissar for Restarting Ball-Bearing Production.” Disliking the rather ponderous title, he established a “Ball-Bearing Rapid Action” (Kugellager-Schnellaktion) organization under his direction. Schweinfurt represented only 45 percent of available ball-bearing production; stocks were immediately taken over from the other producers and from contractors who held substantial reserves, a total equivalent to two months’ production. The careful husbanding of stocks meant that by January 1944 reserves of ball bearings were three times greater than in January 1943. Machine tools for production at Schweinfurt were by January 1944 back to 94 percent of requirements. Production was decentralized so that less than half was left in Schweinfurt itself, the rest spread out among twenty other producers. The whole ball-bearing industry in Germany was served in the end by forty-nine dispersal plants; only 20 percent of national production remained in Schweinfurt a year after the main attack. The output of aircraft and tanks, which relied extensively on ball bearings, was affected hardly at all thanks to design changes. By the time ball-bearing supply was back to its pre-raid level, aircraft production was 58 percent greater, tank production 54 percent.²⁰²

The dispersal of the aircraft industry indicated another cushion of productive capacity, even if in some cases in 1944 assembly or repair had to be improvised in farm barns, wooded shelters, or road tunnels. The second wave of dispersal following the planned decentralization in 1942–43 came after the Allied air attacks in “Big Week” in February 1944. Although the production loss was small and soon made good, the decision was taken by the German Fighter Staff to decentralize all aircraft and aero-engine production even further in case the campaign intensified. The 27 main assembly plants were divided among 729 smaller units, though in the end only around 300 were used; aero-engine output was divided from 51 plants (in many cases already dispersed once) to 249 new sites. Up to the end of 1943 some 3.3 million square meters had been made available as dispersed capacity, but the new programs involved a further 2.4 million.²⁰³ The result was a complex mosaic of productive sites for each of the main producers. The Erla works in Leipzig, making up one-third of Me109 production, was split up among 18 dispersal plants, 13 component plants, and 5 main assembly points, and although output was temporarily safeguarded, the six-month transfer of production lines cost 2,800 lost aircraft. The Me109 production at Wiener-Neustadt also had to be decentralized in the spring of 1944, and once again was undertaken with mixed success because sites were chosen where too much new installation and reconstruction was needed. Efficiency was hit by the requirement to have no unit capable of producing more than 150 aircraft a month. Nevertheless, the company managed to build 50 percent more fighter aircraft in 1944 than in 1943. By contrast, Me110 production at the Gothaer Waggonfabrik in Gotha was more successfully dispersed after the raids in February, so that full production was restored after only a few weeks.²⁰⁴ The whole dispersal policy ensured that aircraft output would reach a peak of almost 40,000 aircraft in a year when 1 million tons of bombs were dropped on German and German-occupied targets. Bombing might have prevented higher output, but the aircraft industry would anyway have faced limitations from raw materials and labor supplies in trying to produce more, with or without bombing.

The decentralization of production did come at a cost, and no doubt overall output would have been higher in 1943 and 1944 without it. The success of the transfer to aboveground sites ensured that overall output could continue its upward trajectory. For those who had to undertake the reorganization, or for the workers forced to transfer to different sites, almost 850,000 by late 1944, the social and psychological costs were considerable. For one thing, managerial and technical personnel had to be distributed among additional small plants, increasing individual responsibility and diluting a firm’s leadership corps; more workers were engaged indirectly on military orders for which they had not been trained, or other workers (usually foreign or camp laborers) had to be transferred from one camp barrack to another; shorter production runs undermined the time and cost savings of large-scale assembly; tools and jigs had to be supplied in multiples, though in this case the large number of general-purpose machine tools available in Germany made the transfer to fragmented production easier to carry out. Above all, dispersal placed strains on the communications system and in particular on the carefully controlled distribution of equipment and parts run by the Armaments Ministry, designed to ensure that components and tools only arrived at the time and in the quantities needed. With an exceptional amount of organizational and laboring effort, German industry succeeded in maximizing production despite the obstacles presented by dispersal. The object, as one manager put it, was for “the impossible to be made possible.”²⁰⁵

Doing the impossible might well have described the coincidence of peak bombing and peak production. The factors that kept war production expanding during 1942 and 1943 played a critical part in sustaining the expansion of output during 1944. The concentration of production on the most essential equipment reached its high point in the spring of 1944 as older models of weapons and equipment were eliminated and standard models introduced. Types of light infantry weapons were to be reduced from fourteen to five, antitank weapons from twelve to just one, antiaircraft guns from ten to two; the number of vehicle models was reduced from fifty-five to fourteen; and so on.²⁰⁶ All inessential or nonmilitary manufacture was combed through one more time to weed out unneeded production: the 117 firms still making carpets were reduced to 5; the 23 firms making 300 types of prismatic glass were reduced to 7, making just 14 types; the 900 machine-tool firms were reduced to 369. Where possible, the floor space and labor were allocated to direct military output. In the machinery industry, 415,700 workers were freed by early 1944 to work directly on war matériel.²⁰⁷ Rationalization, defined by the regime as extracting as much military equipment as possible from existing machinery, materials, and labor, was pushed to its limits during 1944. The major constraint on the German war effort, labor supply, was ameliorated by drawing in resources from occupied Europe, exploiting camp labor more extensively, and finding ways to get women with children to undertake part-time work or work at home. To cope with the large-scale movement of the population as a result of bombing, the plenipotentiary for labor, the gauleiter of Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, issued an order on January 17, 1944, obliging those who had been evacuated and were not yet working to report to local labor offices for work. The first order produced only 65,000 volunteers, but as the number of evacuees increased, the second and third “report orders,” which applied to women with children under seven and women aged forty-five to fifty, reaped a larger harvest. By October 1944, 1.6 million had registered, out of whom 303,000 were given work, three-quarters of them half-day shifts in dispersed factories. Almost all of these were women, joining the 3.5 million female workers already on half shifts. Women constituted more than 50 percent of the total German workforce by the end of the war.²⁰⁸

The changing composition of the industrial workforce brought advantages and disadvantages for German war production. The foreign workforce made up 1.6 million (15 percent) of industrial labor in July 1942, 2.7 million (22 percent) in July 1943, and by the summer of 1944, 3.2 million (29 percent). Their presence could present problems of language, discipline, and training, and there was anxiety that they would not cope as well as German workers under the pressure of bombing. At Daimler-Benz, thirty-one different nationalities were recorded in the workforce, including one lone Afghan and one Peruvian.²⁰⁹ Women came to make up a growing proportion of the labor force, many of them forced laborers from the east. Female employment raised problems about family care, physical exhaustion, and the struggle to secure rationed goods, but the economy would not have functioned without them. Efforts were made to sustain their productivity too with bonuses or extra rations and appropriate training. Of the total of 6.2 million employed in the arms industry, more than half of all industrial employment by October 1944, 35 percent were women, 37 percent foreign workers or prisoners of war.²¹⁰ This heterogeneous labor force was subject to persistent and heavy bombing throughout 1944 and the first months of 1945.

The assumption for Allied planners was that urban destruction would create a growing problem of absenteeism, which would contribute to undermining armaments production. Yet the statistics show that bombing contributed only a small proportion of lost hours in 1944. According to records compiled by the Economics Ministry, in October 1944 only 2.5 percent of hours lost nationally were attributed to air raids. Absenteeism was a result of illness, leave, truancy, or workplace problems—a total of 16 percent lost work hours—but was not directly caused by bomb attack.²¹¹ The aggregate figure nevertheless disguised wide variations from one branch of industry to another, and between different areas of the Reich. The absenteeism rates for the main industrial groups between March and October 1944 are set out in table 4.2.

Table 4.2: Hours Worked and Hours Lost in German Industry, March–October 1944 (%)

Source: BA-B, R 3102/10031, Statistical Office, “Vermerk über die Auswirkung der feindlichen Luftangriffe auf die Arbeiterstundenleistung der Industrie,” January 27, 1945.

Absenteeism rates were higher in the western areas of Germany, in Hamburg and in Munich. Yet over the course of 1944, despite the losses, the total number of hours worked in the 12,000 war production firms surveyed by the ministry actually increased from 976 million in March to 1,063 million in October.²¹² One explanation is that the large proportion of foreign, prisoner of war, and concentration camp workers made it possible to use coercion to keep them working. At the Ford works in Cologne, absenteeism was a problem only among German workers. In 1944 it was estimated that 25 percent of the German workforce was absent on average over the year, whereas the figure for the eastern workers (Russians, Poles, Ukrainians) was only 3 percent. German workers either absented themselves permanently—a total of 1,000 at Ford in 1944, two-thirds of them women—or returned slowly after a raid, one-tenth after one to two days, two-thirds after two weeks.²¹³ For the German war economy one of the major advantages of exploiting captive labor on a large scale in 1944 and 1945 was the possibility of controlling their work effort even in the adverse conditions imposed by heavy bombing.

The large captive workforce also made it possible to contemplate from summer 1943 onward a more radical solution to the policy of dispersal by placing the most important war production under the ground, either in converted mines, caves, and tunnels or in new purpose-built underground facilities, coated with up to seven meters of concrete. Interest in the program was generated from a number of quarters. In July 1943, Hitler asked that production of the new A4 rocket (the later V-2) should be made as safe as possible from bombing, preferably underground; Himmler undertook to carry it out because he had access to a rapidly expanding concentration camp population for the supply of labor. The Air Ministry had already asked the mining section of the Economics Ministry to compile a list of all potential sites in Germany and the nearest occupied territories with underground floor space for the aeronautical industry to escape the raids.²¹⁴ The list of possible sites ran to twenty-two pages, fifteen with German locations, seven more for those identified in Hungary, Slovakia, Bohemia/Moravia, and Poland. Limited progress was made in 1943, but in the spring of 1944, with the onset of more targeted bombing of key industries, comprehensive plans were drawn up for a colossal construction program to embrace eventually 93 million square meters of underground room, to include additional programs for oil and SS projects, among them the A4 rocket. The distribution of underground plants, planned, completed, and in hand, is set out in table 4.3.

Table 4.3: Programs of Underground Construction, November 1944 (m²)

Source: TNA, AIR 10/3873, BBSU, “German Experience in the Underground Transfer of War Industries,” 12.

The plans were by 1944 difficult to implement, though the SS control of slave labor in the camps provided a ready-made supply of workers for the rocket program, set up in the notorious Mittelbau-Dora works at Nordhausen. Only 17 percent of the program was completed by the end of 1944, and not all of that was occupied or functioning by the end of the war. The initial program was designed to get aircraft production into shelters so that increased output of planes could be used to turn back the bombers and perhaps render the rest of the program redundant. By May 1944 some 10 percent of aircraft construction was underground, more by the end of the year. Saur developed a plan to create large underground sites in Hungary, first for fighter aircraft, then one for fuel oil, finally an integrated plant for weapons, munitions, and vehicles, even though the Red Army was now within striking distance. The underground program has always been viewed as a waste of resources: “burrowing away from reality” was the judgment of the British Bombing Survey Unit.²¹⁵ It is true that most of the dispersal underground was wasted effort. The transfer of BMW aero-engine output into salt mines began in May 1944 and was scheduled for occupation by December, but was not in the end utilized. The access shafts were narrow, the subterranean corridors only ten to thirty meters wide, the salt a threat to the workforce and the machinery. Many of the underground installations suffered from poor ventilation, condensation, and the danger of rockfalls; conditions for workers were so poor that preference was given to using the captive workforce, which in the case of BMW made up 13,000 out of 17,000 at the main plant. By the time the vast Volkswagen works at Wolfsburg was ordered to disperse underground in August 1944, only 15 percent of its 17,000 workers were German.²¹⁶ It is nonetheless difficult to see what other long-term solution remained to a regime that refused to surrender and overoptimistically assessed the prospects of survival into 1945 and 1946. When Allied bombing was finally directed at oil production in May 1944, the threat to the vulnerable capital-intensive sectors of German industry could only be solved by either finding effective ways of sheltering it from the bombs or giving up the conflict.

Allied bombing was at its most dangerous in 1944 when it targeted large capital projects in oil and chemicals that could not easily be moved or substituted, unlike ball bearings or aircraft. Following the first bombing, Hitler on May 31, 1944, approved the appointment of Edmund Geilenberg as yet another emergency manager, this time as general plenipotentiary for emergency measures, with the task of putting fuel production underground or moving it into less exposed aboveground installations. The plan was to create ninety-eight dispersed sites, twenty-two of them under the earth, capable of producing up to four-fifths of all aviation fuel and 88 percent of diesel fuel for tanks. By the end of the war around three-fifths of the preparatory work had been done, but only a small amount of equipment had been installed. German fuel supply relied in the end on being able to repair quickly enough the damage to the existing plants.²¹⁷ The problems posed by trying to repair damage and supply replacement components were critical in explaining the final collapse of the German war economy under the remorseless punishment inflicted in the last months of the war. Even before the onset of the transportation bombing in September 1944, random interruption to an overstretched communications system led to regular holdups in getting damaged plants repaired, machines replaced, or vital components and equipment supplied. The weekly reports on economic conditions produced by the Economics Ministry throughout 1944 reiterate the problems presented by interrupted rail lines and damaged rolling stock.²¹⁸ The department heads from Speer’s renamed War Production Ministry all highlighted in their postwar interrogations the damage to production imposed because repairs could not be effected or components and parts supplied.²¹⁹ This situation was exacerbated by the decision to disperse production often long distances from the main plant. At the Henschel aircraft works, 200 couriers were on hand to collect and distribute vital materials and parts to and from subcontractors in order to keep production going at all.²²⁰

Given the artificial concentration on war production at all costs, the chronic stress on the workforce laboring sixty to seventy hours a week, and the rapid contraction of the European supply base, there were limits to how far the German war economy could be pushed, even without the effects of bombing. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, drafted to assess the German economy at the end of the war, judged that in 1944 German production, bombing or not, was approaching “what might be called a general bottleneck.”²²¹ The weight of attack from September 1944 on a taut economic structure confirmed that the German war economy had reached its limit. There was a sudden increase in the number of firms reporting air-raid damage. In July there were 421, of which 150 were totally or severely damaged; in September there were 674, with 253 in the worst categories; in November 1944, 311 out of 664 firms had suffered total or severe loss.²²² The economy kept going during the last eight months of war using accumulated stocks to compensate for the slow decline in the supply of basic materials—steel, iron, aluminum, machine tools—and the cumulative effect of the loss of rail and water transport for the supply of coal. As a result, peak wartime production for artillery, armored fighting vehicles, and fighter aircraft was actually reached in the last three months of 1944.²²³ After that, production collapsed rapidly as the encircling armies and the enveloping air fleets tightened their noose around the German neck.

The German leadership continued, nevertheless, to throw emergency solutions at a collapsing structure. On August 1, 1944, an armaments staff responsible for eight priority production programs was established, bringing together under the direction of Speer and Saur twenty-five department heads with supreme authority to squeeze what weapons they could out of the shrinking economic base. In December 1944, Germany was divided into seven armament zones (Rüstungsbezirke), in each of which an autonomous military economy was supposed to flourish. Production declined by more than half. During the last weeks of the war the system continued to hover between fantasy and reality. The army planned a slimmed-down “storm program” for army weapons, deciding what the forces could do without while still able to keep on fighting successfully.²²⁴ In early March, Speer set up an emergency “transport staff” to coordinate all communications; on March 8 he finally established three armaments plenipotentiaries in areas he thought were suitable for an “autarkic economy.” One was based in Heidelberg, one in Prague, and one in the Rhine-Ruhr, just days before its surrender.²²⁵

Bombing critically affected the German productive economy only during the last months of the war, but even though a ceiling was placed on further expansion, war production continued to increase until the crisis provoked by the loss of territory, the failure of the dispersal schemes, and the collapse of the repair cycle. A combination of effective work protection, control of the workforce, concealment and deception, dispersal of key production, and insistent policies on concentration and rationalization had succeeded in limiting the damage that air attack could inflict on industry, though not on the cityscapes and urban populations that surrounded it. On March 19, 1945, Hitler published his “scorched earth” decree, in which he ordered the destruction of all that remained of Germany’s industry, transport network, and food supplies. It was never implemented, thanks partly to the intervention of Albert Speer, but it would certainly have imposed a higher level of damage on the industrial economy and infrastructure than the bombing. Hans Rumpf, chief inspector of the German fire service, later observed that the dismantling and reparation regime established by the Allies in the occupied zones of Germany after the war’s end took a much higher proportion of German industrial capacity than the fraction destroyed by bombing. Of German engineering capacity, 20 percent was destroyed from the air, 70 percent by Allied requisitioning.²²⁶

“Will Germany Crack?”: 1944–45

In February 1944, Heinrich Himmler, appointed minister of the interior in August 1943, in addition to his other offices, announced that “no German city will be abandoned” as a result of bombing.²²⁷ The situation facing Germany’s urban areas in 1944 was nevertheless a daunting one. In the last seventeen months of the war three-quarters of all bombs were dropped and approximately two-thirds of all bombing deaths were caused. In Munich, 89 percent of bombs on the city fell in 1944 and 1945; in Mainz, 93 percent of the deaths from bombing occurred in the same two years.²²⁸By the spring of 1945, no part of the contracting German empire remained untouched. Bombing by day and by night did not affect every area simultaneously, and many towns were bombed just once. But bombing and its social and cultural consequences came to dominate the daily lives of millions of Germans, a majority of them female. One young schoolgirl in Berlin, Waltraud Süssmilch, subject to compulsory civil defense training and playground demonstrations, surrounded by bombed areas of the city, straining to distinguish the different rush and explosion of each type of bomb, later recalled the bizarre wartime world in her memoir: “Bombs belonged to my life. I was confronted with them daily. I could not do otherwise. . . . I was no longer a child.”²²⁹

The presence of Himmler as minister of the interior as well as chief of German police continued a process begun in the 1930s to extend the responsibility of the SS and police system over all areas of air-raid protection and civil defense policy. During 1944, Himmler continued to undermine the position of the Air Ministry, and in August the Air Force Inspectorate 13, responsible for air-raid protection, was abruptly abolished at Hitler’s insistence. Responsibility for air-raid protection and the air-raid warning service was transferred unconditionally to the SS and police. On February 5, 1945, just weeks before the end of the war, Himmler also succeeded in removing the Regional Air Commands from any responsibility for civil defense, leaving only a handful of mobile “Air Protection Regiments” under air force control.²³⁰ His new role introduced a fresh element of menace into the regular work of civil defense. On April 14 he published a decree threatening tough punishment for civil defenders who failed in their duty. While most citizens were said to display an “exemplary self-sacrifice,” the slackers and feckless were to be dealt with sharply under the terms of the Air Protection Law. Persistent negligence, malice, or deliberate defiance was to result in a court appearance, which by 1944 meant facing a justice system dominated by a narrow ideological outlook and a search for vengeance.²³¹ For many of those engaged in civil defense, whether Ukrainians in the fire service or camp prisoners detailed to clear up urban debris, the SS was effectively their lawless master.

Goebbels found it difficult to maintain his position in the face of Himmler’s ambitions. In December 1943, frustrated that the Inter-Ministerial Committee had too little power, Goebbels persuaded Hitler to make him Reich inspector for civil air protection. With the gauleiter of Westphalia-South, Albert Hoffmann, as his deputy, and a collaborator from the committee, Alfred Berndt, as his office director, Goebbels used his new position to review civil defense all over Germany and to insist on improvements in self-protection organization and communal services.²³² By this stage the local responsibility for coping with the aftermath of raids had passed entirely to the Reich defense commissars, with whom Goebbels kept in close contact. In September 1944 the commissars were formally acknowledged as the key coordinating figures in the defence of the Reich, at which point the party also assumed the public political role of preparing the German people for their final ordeal. By this time Goebbels had abandoned the inspectorate, which had done little more than report the state of affairs rather than initiate action; on July 25, 1944, he was named “Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War,” another emergency appointment that bore little relation to the conditions on the ground for which he was now ostensibly responsible.²³³ It is questionable whether Goebbels’s initiatives did anything more than simply confuse the existing structure for air-raid defense. In February 1944 the gauleiter of the Sudetenland complained that there was “an alarming confusion” of orders issuing from a system that had become “more and more bureaucratic.” The Reich defense commissar in Hannover-East pointed out in August that he was the subject of five separate streams of instructions on air-raid questions, producing simply a “flood of paper” rather than a single, clear administrative path.²³⁴

The evidence on the ground suggests that the real responsibility for coping with air raids and their consequences still lay principally with local authorities and the millions of civilian volunteers who fought as best they could against the rising tide of destruction and demoralization. In August 1943 the police authorities issued an order compelling every resident or visitor in an air-protection zone to take part in self-protection action during a raid. Every street and apartment block had its wardens, self-protection troop, house fire defenders, lay helpers, and messengers, led by the local leader of the self-protection area.²³⁵ In January 1944, Hitler approved further measures to increase the active participation of the population in their own defense, despite the growing risks they faced. He compared their experience with the frontline soldier who had to get over his fear of attacking tanks at close quarters: “The one who has actually seen and practiced extinguishing incendiary bombs loses a large part of his fear of this kind of weapon.”²³⁶ The schoolgirl in Berlin whose life was dominated by bombs was expected to tackle and extinguish one of a number of types of Allied incendiary. (“Would you trust yourself to extinguish such a bomb?” asked the fireman demonstrator. “Yes,” she replied.)²³⁷ In May the Luftschutzbund issued instructions to air-protection officials to undertake home visits to every house and apartment in their sector to provide up-to-date information for each householder, to ensure that every resident was materially prepared to assist, and to try to strengthen the “spiritual resolve” of the community for the difficult task ahead.²³⁸

The priority by 1944, with heavy raids on Berlin and other cities deeper in German territory, was to try to save as much as possible of German urban life and the populations still living there. Even while Allied aircraft remorselessly reduced the habitable areas of major cities, the effort to repair or recondition damaged housing continued so that workers who remained could have some kind of shelter. The repair of bomb-damaged housing was governed by two decrees issued by Speer as general plenipotentiary for construction on September 15 and 16, 1943, which gave priority to getting working-class housing habitable again to reduce lost work time. Only those houses that could be repaired easily and immediately were to be tackled; nothing was permitted that took more than three months.²³⁹ Local repair was allocated to a construction team organized by the Reich defense commissar, with help from mobile columns of skilled workers organized by the Reich Group Handwork. These motorized emergency units—for doors/windows, roof repair, shop windows, and room interiors—were functioning by October 1943 and fully funded by July the following year. They arrived in a bombed town, parked their vehicles in undamaged streets or squares, and began work on reconstruction at once.²⁴⁰ The quantity of residential housing destroyed in 1943 was estimated at 5 percent of the housing stock, but during 1944 the figures mounted sharply, making it difficult to keep pace with the program of repair. In the most heavily bombed cities, houses that were lightly damaged in one raid might be hit again in the next more seriously. In the Ruhr city of Bochum residential damage by the spring of 1944 was 147 percent of all homes, in Düsseldorf 130 percent, in Essen 126 percent, a result of counting some repaired houses two, three, or more times.²⁴¹ Between January and October 1944 the number of destroyed or heavily damaged residential buildings was 311,807 against 119,668 in the first nine months of 1943, leaving 3.5 million people temporarily, or in some cases permanently, homeless.²⁴² From the autumn of 1944 it became difficult any longer to construct an accurate statistical picture of housing losses. The last recorded figures, in November, showed the loss of 57,000 buildings in one month.²⁴³

The urban population also depended on the survival of services—gas, electricity, and clean drinking water. The problem of water supply became acute by the summer of 1944 and emergency measures were prepared for a population that had to share water with the fire service. In all cities under attack the authorities were told to put up notices indicating where people could find a stand-tap with clean water, and warnings where water was not drinkable and would have to be boiled.²⁴⁴ The Interior Ministry drew up a list of all tanker trucks available nationally to help distribute clean water; the Reich inspector for water and energy sent out detailed instructions in August 1944 on how to keep the water supply going by protecting or establishing plants that could filter and purify contaminated water.²⁴⁵ In Berlin the local association of brewers was asked in the autumn of 1943 to supply a complete list of the water sources (springs, streams) used in brewing and mineral water production; by June 1944, 286 usable sources had been identified. The same month the Interior Ministry drew up an inventory of unused bottles that could be requisitioned to supply water, which included 357,000 beer bottles and 312,000 used for Coca-Cola.²⁴⁶

Gas supply, on which a large number of German households depended, faced the same problems of random but cumulative damage to the gas network. It was found in 1943, even in heavy raids, that the loss of supply could be kept within manageable boundaries. Surplus capacity in the network actually exceeded by a significant margin the damage done by bombing. A heavy raid on Berlin on September 3–4, 1943, resulted in the loss of gas in some districts for only a few hours, in others for only a day. It was possible to find supplies from other parts of the network when local gasworks were damaged; after the raid on Leipzig on December 3–4, 1944, the main gasworks, supplying 250,000 cubic meters of gas, was temporarily put out of action, but long-distance supply managed to restore 90 percent of what was needed.²⁴⁷ But the expanded raiding in 1944 resulted in widespread and unpredictable damage to both the gas and water networks. By June 1944 there were ninety-four badly damaged gasworks and waterworks countrywide; by the autumn gasworks were forced to cease operation in many places because of the loss of vital pieces of equipment that could no longer be supplied.²⁴⁸ Millions of householders found that by 1945 gas supply was nonexistent or confined to a slender stream. “The gas is running on a tiny, dying flicker,” wrote one Berlin woman in her diary in April 1945. “The potatoes have been cooking for hours. . . . I swallowed one half-raw.”²⁴⁹

The damage done to German cities in 1944 and 1945 was extensive and indiscriminate. Goebbels ordered lists to be compiled of the destruction of all cultural monuments and cultural treasures. Church authorities sent in regular reports of damage to ecclesiastical property.²⁵⁰ Table 4.4 shows the tonnage of bombs dropped by both Allied air forces on major German cities (by comparison total tonnage on London in the Blitz was 18,800 tons, and on the second most heavily bombed urban area, Liverpool/Birkenhead, only 1,957 tons). The detailed histories of individual cities show the extent of the cumulative losses inflicted in the final raids. Munich, untouched for the first three years of war, suffered thirty major raids from September 1942. This involved the loss of 10,600 residential buildings; only 2.5 percent of all buildings in the city remained completely unscathed by the bombing. Some 45 percent of the physical substance of the city was destroyed, an average figure that disguises wide differences: areas of the central old city were three-quarters destroyed, but in the industrial zone of Munich-Allach only 0.4 percent. Of cultural and religious buildings, ninety-two were totally destroyed, 182 damaged, including the cathedral, the old town hall, the council room, the state library (losses of half a million books), the Residence, the Maxburg, the National Theater, and so on. In total, Munich had 7.2 million cubic meters of rubble that needed clearing away at the end of the war.²⁵¹ These statistics could be repeated for almost all German cities or towns by the war’s end, large or small. The small community of Bingerbrück, on the Rhine, had 470 buildings; 327 were destroyed or heavily damaged, and only two avoided any damage at all.²⁵²

Table 4.4: Bomb Tonnage Dropped on Major Urban Targets in Germany, 1940–45

Source: Olaf Groehler, Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1990), 432.

The heavy destruction of the infrastructure and residential districts of German cities and towns made it increasingly difficult to protect the population from death, injury, and enforced displacement. The evacuation program was expanded rapidly to try to reduce the risk to sections of the population that were not regarded as essential to the war effort. It was now evident that nowhere was safe, so the proportion of the population that might need to move was unmanageably large. In January 1944, Hitler told Goebbels that not everyone eligible to move could go, since this involved an estimated 8 million children, mothers, and the old from the 32 million inhabitants of every city over 50,000 people.²⁵³ The following month Himmler sent out guidelines on evacuation with the object of limiting it as far as possible in order to avoid too much pressure on reception areas that in some cases were already full, and to ensure that work and air defense could be maintained. City dwellers were encouraged to move away from city centers, where the majority of deaths from fire were caused. In an ironic reversal of the RAF zoning system, Himmler ordered local authorities to move people away from the inner zone, with its narrow, tightly packed streets, to the less densely populated outer zones, the commuter suburbs, and the farthest “weekend commuter” belt; the priority was to ensure that most evacuees stayed close to the cities they had left.²⁵⁴

In practice, restrictions were difficult to enforce and the rising tide of urban casualties accelerated the pace of both official and unofficial evacuation. Arrangements had to be made between the party regions to see how many people could be accommodated and what transport was available for them, but by September 1944 there were 5.6 million evacuees, by November 7.8 million, and by the beginning of 1945, 8.9 million. Not all of these were evacuees from bombing. Of the final figure for 1945 an estimated 1.76 million had evacuated themselves, while 2.41 million had been compulsorily evacuated or had fled from the frontier areas imminently threatened with invasion, and 841,000 had been moved with dispersed factories.²⁵⁵ No figures are available for those who remained in the suburbs or commuter belts of damaged cities, but in Hamburg the numbers displaced from the destroyed central areas to other parts of the city numbered half a million, leading to a sudden increase in the level of population density in the unbombed zones.²⁵⁶ During the last half of 1944 and the first months of 1945, Germany was an exceptionally mobile society; Germans moved westward from the threat of Soviet invasion, eastward from the approaching Anglo-American armies, away from the bombed cities and, in an unknown number of cases, back again. Accommodation became rudimentary, food and welfare supplies exiguous, and pilfering and petty crime more widespread. Those who returned to living in familiar cellars and ruins could tell themselves that life was preferable there, for all the risks and violence of the air war. “My cellar home in Hamburg,” wrote a woman evacuated to Linz, “was a thousand times better.”²⁵⁷

For those who remained in the cities, fighting the raids and their consequences was only one of the problems confronted in the last year of the war. The problems of poor health, the difficulty of obtaining rationed goods, long hours of work, and declining transport all owed something to the effects of bombing, but were also derived from the exceptional demands made in the last year of war to sustain war production and military campaigning from an exhausted people. For almost 8 million forced foreign workers and prisoners of war, and the 700,000 concentration camp prisoners, there was no choice about running the risks of being bombed or the dangers of its aftermath. German cities changed their social geography markedly over the last year of war. The population of major cities in the Ruhr-Rhineland shrank to a fraction of their total before the bomber offensive: Essen, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt had less than half their prewar population by May 1945, but Cologne had just 20,000 left out of 770,000. The population of Munich declined by 337,000 (41 percent) between 1939 and 1945, the population of Berlin by 1.7 million (40 percent), that of Hamburg by half a million (35 percent).²⁵⁸ Among those who remained were a rising proportion of non-Germans, or of German workers transferred from other industrial sites, but a shrinking number of young and middle-aged men. This was the population that suffered the high casualty rates of the last eighteen months of the war.

The exact figure of deaths up to the end of the war has never been established with certainty, partly because of the sudden influx of refugees from the eastern regions in the last weeks of the conflict, partly because figures for casualties were collected by a number of different agencies—the Air Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the Economics Ministry, and the Party Chancellery—and partly because in the final weeks of the war accurate recordkeeping was no longer possible. The statistical series collected during the war differed from one another because some distinguished between civilian casualties, uniformed casualties, POWs, and foreign workers, whereas others listed only civilian casualties. In August 1944, for example, Air Ministry records show 11,070 dead, but Economics Ministry records show 8,562; the first includes all categories of bomb victims, the second only civilians.²⁵⁹ Table 4.5 shows the full record for November 1944 provided by the Air Ministry Air Protection Staff.

Table 4.5: The Dead and Seriously Injured from Bombing, November 1944 (Greater German Area)

Source: BA-B, R 3102/10031, Air Ministry, LS-Arbeitsstab, “Übersicht über Luftangriffe und Bombenabwürfe im Heimatkriegsgebiet,” November 1944.

This record was used by the United States Bombing Survey after the war to estimate German casualties. The total number of dead for 1943 and 1944 from Air Protection Staff records was 100,107 in 1943, 146,300 for 1944, and 13,553 for the month of January 1945. The overall figure for those injured is 305,455. No further aggregate statistics are available for the last three months of the war. Using the same proportions as November 1944, it can be estimated that of this 259,960 total, approximately 80 percent were German civilians.²⁶⁰ There are also archive records to show deaths from bombing in the years 1940 to 1942, a total of 11,228, of whom 6,824 died in 1942 and approximately 4,000 in 1941.²⁶¹ Based on these archive sources, the figure for those who died from May 1940 to January 1945 comes to 271,188. No doubt this does not include all those who were killed or died of wounds, but it does include uniformed personnel, POWs, and foreign workers, and it applies to the whole of the Greater German area, including those territories incorporated from March 1938 onward.

It is difficult to reconcile these figures with the much larger totals arrived at in postwar calculations. The difference can largely be explained by the speculative nature of the estimates made for the number who died in the last four months of heavy bombing. In 1956, Hans Sperling published in the German official statistical journal Wirtschaft und Statistik (Economy and Statistics) a detailed account of his reconstruction of the dead from bombing. His total of civilians killed came to 570,000 for the wartime German area. Together with 23,000 uniformed dead and an estimated 32,000 POWs and foreign workers, his sum reached 625,000, the figure commonly quoted today for the total killed in Germany by Allied bombing.²⁶² Sperling’s figures rested on speculations about the number of German civilians and foreign workers who died in the last four months of war, and in particular on the number of refugees fleeing westward into the path of the raids. He guessed that 111,000 of them died between January 1945 and the end of the war, including the greatly inflated figure of 60,000 dead in Dresden. This would mean that around 300,000 people were killed in Germany in the final flourish of bombing, a statistic that has no supporting evidence. In 1990 the East German historian Olaf Groehler published revised figures. Although acknowledging the speculative nature of some of his own calculations, particularly for those who died in 1945, Groehler suggested a much lower figure of 420,000 for all categories of victim and for the enlarged German wartime area.²⁶³

There are ways to arrive at a more plausible total. If it is assumed that the figure of 271,000 dead by January 1945 is a realistic, if not precise, total (and there are archive figures that suggest a lower sum), it is possible to extrapolate from the last five months of heavy raiding for which records exist (September 1944 to January 1945) in order to find a possible order of magnitude for deaths in the last three months of the war. The average death toll for these five months was 18,777, which would give an aggregate figure for the whole war period of 328,000, though it would not allow for the exceptional casualty level at Dresden, confirmed by the latest research at approximately 25,000. Adding this would produce a total figure of approximately 353,000, representing 82,000 deaths in the last months. Detailed reconstruction of deaths caused by Royal Air Force bombing from February to May 1945, though incomplete, suggests a total of at least 57,000.²⁶⁴ If casualties inflicted by the American air forces are assumed to be lower, since their bombing was less clearly aimed at cities, an overall death toll of 82,000 is again statistically realistic. In the absence of unambiguous statistical evidence, the figure of 353,000 gives an approximate scale consistent with the evidence. It is a little over half the figure of 625,000 arrived at in the 1950s.

The lower figure of 353,000 still represents an exceptional level of unnatural deaths compared with the impact of bombing elsewhere, and with the much lower level of casualties in Germany up until the summer of 1943. The obvious explanation is that repeated raids with 600 or 700 heavy bombers will eventually overwhelm the capacity of civil defense to limit casualties. This was certainly true for smaller cities hit just once, such as Pforzheim or Hildesheim, but also large cities such as Hamburg, whose defenses could not cope with the firestorm, though they could cope effectively with raids of lesser intensity. But there are other reasons for an escalating level of casualties. Shelter provision had never been ideal, but in 1943 and 1944 resources were no longer available for a comprehensive shelter program. Towns in Zones II and III became victims of bombing with inadequate public shelters. The air-protection room yielded mixed results, but in areas already heavily bombed, the cellar or basement under a heavily damaged building offered much less protection than a shelter under an intact building. Medical aid, despite the exceptional efforts of the profession, was a declining resource in 1944 and 1945, increasing the risk of death from infection or loss of blood. Finally, the mobile population was more exposed to risk, particularly once Allied aircraft began routine strafing of vehicles and trains, and evacuees found themselves in areas thought to be safe from bombs but now subject to random attack. With at least 9 million people accommodated away from their homes, where they had had air-protection rooms and established self-protection routines, the risks of higher casualty levels increased. People who stayed in Berlin, despite the bombing, had established shelters to which they could go. “Finally we’re in our shelter,” wrote the Berlin diarist, “behind an iron door that weighs a hundred pounds, with rubber seals around the edges and two levers to lock it shut . . . the people here are convinced that their cave is one of the safest. There’s nothing more alien than an unknown shelter.”²⁶⁵

The reaction of the population to this wave of destruction was never uniform. Over the last year of war ordinary people had many different pressures with which to cope, so distinguishing what was particular about the bombing war from wider fears about defeat, dread of the arrival of the Soviet armies, fear of the security apparatus, and anxiety about the mounting military losses is historically complex. Popular opinion was diverse and fluctuating. On bombing, the SD reports in late 1943 and early 1944 show a pendulum swinging between hopes that the air terror would be ended by German retaliation and pessimistic realization that it was likely to get worse. In April 1944, for example, home intelligence found, alongside anxious fears for survival and doubts that the war would end well, the hope expressed that fate would still take a hand in Germany’s favor because “one simply cannot believe that everything had been in vain.”²⁶⁶ For much of the year the principal source of anxiety was the state of the war on the Eastern Front; from June 1944 onward the invasion from the west temporarily eclipsed it. Popular concern with bombing briefly revived with the onset of the V-weapons campaign in the summer, but the unrealistic expectation that it would reverse the tide of the air war was at once disappointed, and by late June the intelligence reports found a widespread skepticism that anything could stop the bombing. By July, when every German front line had collapsed, in Belorussia, Italy, and France, “pessimistic opinion” prevailed everywhere. It was judged that this did not mean that the “will to resist” had evaporated, simply that there was widespread doubt that it would be of any use.²⁶⁷

The German population lived through this period with a sustained sense of drama in which the experience of bombing played only a part. The party played increasingly with the idea that the German people were bound in a “community of fate” (Schicksalsgemeinschaft), in which the final struggles would test their racial qualities to extremes. Some of this propaganda may explain the evidence of a popular mentality of “victory or death” detected by the SD, but most of the home intelligence reports over the last year of the war show that ordinary Germans felt themselves to be trapped between a rock and a hard place—unable to give up because of the consequences expected from a coercive and vindictive dictatorship, but fearful of the consequences of defeat, particularly at the hands of the Red Army. There is little evidence from the intelligence reports that bombing as such strengthened the resolve of the urban population to hold out longer or fight harder. Bombing was a demoralizing and exhausting experience: “nervous anxiety,” “fear,” “worry,” “running around after life” punctuate the reports of popular reaction to the air raids.²⁶⁸ Regular air-raid alarms forced civilians to shelter for hundreds of hours in what were often uncomfortable and airless rooms. The American postwar morale survey found among the cohort of interviewees that 38 percent experienced “intense fear, nervous collapse,” 31 percent “temporary or less severe fright.” One woman gave a vivid account of her ordeal: “I saw people killed by falling bricks and heard the screams of others dying in the fire. I dragged my best friend from a burning building and she died in my arms. I saw others who went stark mad.”²⁶⁹ These experiences were no doubt what the survey was looking for. In answer, however, to the question about why people thought the war was lost, only 15 percent identified air raids as the reason, 48 percent military defeats.²⁷⁰

What bombing did do was to increase the dependence of the population on both the state apparatus and the party organizations responsible for welfare, reducing even further the space for more serious dissent. Survival depended on not challenging the system. Throughout the heaviest period of bombing, both state and party, assisted increasingly by the armed forces stationed in the Reich, were able to sustain the supply of replacement goods, the distribution of food and water, planned evacuation, and rehabilitation, though transport difficulties and the declining access to European food supplies meant that living standards continued to fall throughout 1944.²⁷¹ Indeed, for most of the urban population official sources were the only ones available. The risks from black marketeering and looting grew greater as the war drew to a close, and the terror more arbitrary for the German people; military policemen shot or hanged those they caught on the spot. Even in Berlin in the last days before the Russians arrived, hungry survivors were able to find supplies of food dispensed by whatever authority was still functioning. It proved impossible at this stage to reestablish “normal life” as had been attempted earlier in the war (and had been the aim in Britain, too, during the Blitz), though routines did not break down completely. Rather than greater communal resolve, accounts of the bombed populations show a growing apathy and demoralization: “A weight like lead hangs on all our actions,” wrote one diarist in January 1945.²⁷²

The more surprising result of the bombing was the absence of sustained popular hatred directed toward those who were carrying it out. A long report on popular attitudes to the enemy produced in February 1944 indicated occasional evidence of anger directed at British aircrew, but concluded that “hatred against the English people in general cannot be spoken of.” The Soviet people were feared rather than hated, driven by “an alien and incomprehensible mentality.” Paradoxically, wide popular hostility was reserved almost exclusively for the Italians for betraying Germany in 1943 by surrendering to the Allies.²⁷³ There were, nevertheless, acts of spontaneous violence directed by the bombed population against aircrew who were caught after they had to bail out and land on German soil. The number of airmen who became victims of “lynch murder” has been estimated at between 225 and 350, a small fraction of the total of air force prisoners of war. The first recorded incident was during Operation Gomorrah on July 25, 1943, when two American airmen were killed. The pressure from above for people to take the law into their own hands increased during 1944 after Hitler endorsed popular vengeance against pilots guilty of strafing civilians, trains, or hospitals. The peak of popular lynching occurred in March 1945, with thirty-seven killings.²⁷⁴

The violence is not difficult to explain. Official propaganda had always described Allied bombing as “terror bombing” and the aircrew as gangsters or air pirates. The word “vengeance” had become part of the public vocabulary of the air war. On May 27, 1944, Goebbels published a widely read article in the party newspaper calling for “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” in subjecting Allied fliers to German “self-justice,” echoing views expressed by Hitler as early as the autumn of 1942.²⁷⁵ Many of the cases of lynching were associated with party members or SA men, or policemen, who expected not to be punished. Spontaneous popular violence was rarer, though again explicable because of the level of destruction and casualties imposed in the last years of war. What is surprising is that the violence was not more widespread given the increasingly lawless character of German justice. Reports after Goebbels’s article indicated public concern that killing captured Allied aircrew would result in the killing of captured German airmen too in retaliation. The uniformed services would not endorse the killing, and Allied survivors attested to the intervention of soldiers or policemen in saving them from angry crowds. In the aftermath of heavy bombing, violent reaction against its perpetrators seems often to have taken second place to the relief at having survived and concern for others. Hans Nossack observed in Hamburg in the days after Operation Gomorrah that “no-one comforted himself with thoughts of revenge”; the enemy was at most, Nossack continued, “an instrument of unknowable forces that sought to annihilate us.”²⁷⁶

Somehow the German civilian population survived under the sharply deteriorating conditions of daily life, in a milieu that became progressively more abnormal. The civil defense structure built up and renewed over the course of the war proved in the end sufficiently flexible to continue the task of combating the raids and coping with their consequences. “Self-protection” is evident in the hundreds of photographs that survive of civilians forming human chains to supply water or to remove rubble, of volunteer firemen and salvage workers struggling to contain the flames. After the heavy raid on Stuttgart in July 1944, one girl recalled how her father had saved their home: “Our row of houses only remained standing because my father had dread of being installed just anywhere after the loss of his house. His view was: ‘If I cannot save my home, I have nothing left in life.’ So during the raid he stayed up on top so that he could throw the incendiary bombs straight onto the street.”²⁷⁷ Waltraud Süssmilch found herself with other classmates after each all-clear joining a long human chain passing buckets filled with water or sand by hand to the next person, or in school hours packing parcels for the bombed-out, or visiting the wounded.²⁷⁸ Throughout 1944 advice on firefighting and training for self-protection continued to be published and distributed; blackout regulations were insisted upon and air-raid instructions issued for areas where until late 1944 there had been very little air action and little familiarity with the pattern of air-raid crises.

Right to the very last days of the war, air-raid protection continued to function. The record of two of the air force Air Protection Regiments, mobile units designed to bring immediate assistance to bombed cities, even at considerable distance, illustrates the extent to which positive efforts continued to be made to combat or ameliorate the effects of remorseless daily bombing. Regiment 3, based in Berlin, in action almost every day, traveled 190 kilometers in response to the bombing of Magdeburg on August 5–6, 1944. One company tackled the damaged Krupp-Gruson plant. It succeeded in extinguishing the blazing coal bunkers, rescuing the machinery, putting out the large fires threatening the matériel stores, and saving cellars full of military supplies. A second company worked in the burning city, extinguishing 5 small fires where the bombs fell, 6 roof fires, 11 story fires, 14 “total fires” (preventing them from spreading), 6 burning provision stores, and 5 larger conflagrations. It handled 63 civil defense first-aid cases, 402 civilian injuries, sent 138 off in ambulances, and recovered 38 buried bodies and 33 people still alive.²⁷⁹ Two weeks later Regiment 3 sent three companies to Stettin, where the raid had devastating effects. They rescued 501 people alive, and dug out 53 dead, extinguished 127 smaller house fires and 29 “total fires,” fought 12 industrial and commercial blazes, and prevented 18 fires from spreading any farther. The narrow streets in Stettin made it difficult to get equipment into the heart of the blaze, and only after three hours was it possible to create a corridor covered with water jets to get through to the shelters. There they found 50 dead near the shelter entrance who had tried to escape through the fire by their own efforts, their corpses “completely carbonated.” In the last weeks of bombing in 1945, Regiment 7 reported a grueling schedule of operations starting with a major fire raid on Nuremberg on February 20–21, where the unit extinguished 119 small and 60 major fires, and extracted 36 bodies from the rubble, followed by summons to a further seventeen raids between February 27 and March 21.²⁸⁰ As the military fronts contracted, so it proved possible for technical troops from the armed forces to be deployed more extensively in trying to protect the remaining urban areas, working side by side with the surviving civil defenders.

One of the cities in need of urgent aid in 1945 was the Saxon capital at Dresden, destroyed in a firestorm on the night of February 13–14. Dresden had already experienced two American daylight raids, on October 7, 1944, and January 16, 1945, which had killed 591 people. Little effort had gone into constructing adequate public shelters, and one witness recalled that the sirens failed to sound that night. The day before the February raid was, according to Victor Klemperer, a German-Jewish philologist who had survived in Dresden married to a non-Jew, one of “perfect spring weather.”²⁸¹ By a strange historical quirk, Klemperer was among the small population of surviving Jews in Dresden who that same day had been ordered to turn up seventy-two hours later to be transported away for “outside labour duty.” When the main raid began in the middle of the night he ran at once to the Jewish shelter but scrambled on through the fires and bombs when the shelter became too hot. He managed to get down to the Elbe River, battered by the wind of the firestorm, slipping on the black rain that fell from the condensation caused by the rising column of hot air. He joined the flow of refugees the following morning with his wife, who had been saved only because someone had pulled her from the Jewish into the “Aryan” shelter below their apartments:

Fires were still burning in many of the buildings on the road above. At times, small and no more than a bundle of clothes, the dead were scattered across our path. The skull of one had been torn away, the top of the head was a dark red bowl. Once an arm lay there with a pale, quite fine hand, like a model made of wax such as one sees in barbers’ shop windows. . . . Crowds streamed unceasingly between these islands, past these corpses and the smashed vehicles, up and down the Elbe, a silent, agitated procession.²⁸²

Klemperer was fortunate to survive. He was treated by first-aid workers that morning as American aircraft returned to bomb what was left of the city. By the evening food arrived and then water. The following morning the refugees were moved to the nearby towns of Klotsche and Meissen, where there were plentiful bowls of soup. Klemperer tore off the yellow star all Jews were required to wear and survived the war.

Klemperer’s story is a reminder that the system being bombed still practiced its lethal racism to the very last weeks of the war, though it also demonstrates that even wearing the star he could get medical attention and food and emergency accommodation. Dresden became for the authorities a major emergency. The general of technical troops, Erich Hampe, was sent from Berlin on the morning of February 14 to supervise the reestablishment of rail communications over the surviving railway bridge. He found the burnt-out area of Dresden utterly deserted, except for a llama escaped from the Dresden zoo. Within only two days an emergency rail service had been set up and the wounded could be moved to hospitals in nearby cities.²⁸³ Altogether 2,212 were severely wounded and 13,718 lightly, but the death toll was much higher. By mid-March the police president reported that 18,375 dead had been accounted for, but estimated the final figure as likely to be 25,000, the number recently agreed as the upper limit by a historical commission set up by the mayor of Dresden in 2004. The bodies were collected in large pyres and those not already incinerated were burned quickly to avoid a health crisis.²⁸⁴ Out of 220,000 homes in Dresden, 75,000 were totally destroyed and 18,500 severely damaged; there were 18 million cubic meters of rubble. By the end of February, Dresden, a city formerly of 600,000, housing an unknown number of refugees from the east, had only 369,000 inhabitants left. It was subjected to two further heavy attacks by 406 B-17s on March 2 and 580 B-17s on April 17, leaving a further 453 dead.²⁸⁵

By this stage of the war the bombing had to compete with fear of the oncoming Soviet forces, whose offensive the bombing of Dresden had been supposed to serve. Victor Klemperer noted in his diary, once he was safe in emergency housing, that he shared with those around him fear of bombing but also their profound fear of the Russians, confirmed by the long trails of refugees in carts and buggies making their way westward against the tide of German forces moving the other way. Another survivor wrote two weeks after the firestorm, “Why are we still living? Only to wait until the Russians come.”²⁸⁶ Other diaries show that growing horror at the thought of Soviet occupation, fueled by grim rumors of the primitive behavior of Soviet soldiers, put into perspective the bombing, whose dimensions and effects were more familiar. “Masses and masses of fugitives are crossing the Oder,” wrote one eyewitness in February 1945. “Dead people have been temporarily buried in the snow. The Russians are coming! Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow must have been child’s play by comparison.”²⁸⁷ The Berlin schoolgirl, Waltraud Süssmilch, was fascinated and horrified by the stories brought by the tide of refugees from the east that flowed into Berlin in the last weeks of war. One story of the sadistic murder of a pregnant woman by Red Army soldiers filled her with complete dread, even though almost every day bombs were exacting a brutal physical toll all around her.²⁸⁸ In the last week before the end of the war Berliners stayed in their shelters, which doubled as protection from Soviet shelling, since here, as over most of Germany, the bombing had ceased, in order to prevent the bombers from hitting Allied forces by mistake. The Berlin diarist found the population of her shelter still agitated and nervous, as though they were waiting for a bombing raid. Some of them speculated that the Russians might not be as bad as German propaganda had painted them. A refugee from the east camped out in the shelter began to shout: “Broken sentences—she can’t find the right words. She flails her arms and screams. ‘They’ll find out all right,’ and then goes silent once again.”²⁸⁹

One of the final raids of the war touched a small town that had been spared the bombing, despite its notoriety. Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had his Bavarian headquarters and retreat, was bombed by British aircraft on April 25, 1945, with considerable accuracy, leaving behind “a chaotic brown-and-black mess” in place of the pretty Alpine woods and the smart modern villas of the party elite. The town itself was not hit, an outcome that local people treated as a miracle, apparently evidenced, as one young eyewitness later wrote, by the sign of the cross visible in the sky. She was puzzled by this: “Why of all places should He protect Berchtesgaden, when all of Europe was in ashes?” Her neighbors expected Hitler to arrive at any moment to make his operatic last stand.²⁹⁰ But Hitler was cut off in Berlin, amid the ruins of his new chancellery building. Thousands of Berliners crowded into the vast flak towers for safety from the battle going on all around them, though the bombing of the capital was now over. Waltraud Süssmilch and her family had taken shelter in the tower but had to leave when it began to fill with water. The sight of the ruined city, even after years of bombing, struck her as extraordinary. Like General Anderson, former commander of the Eighth Bomber Command, when he toured the bombed cities later that summer, she thought that the bombed-out houses, burning roofs, and broken windows looked like the picture of Pompeii in her school history book.²⁹¹

The bombing imposed on Germany exceptional demands for organizing the home front, quite different from the experience of the First World War. The dictatorship relied on sustaining a high degree of participation, willing or otherwise, in the organizations and institutions that were supposed to bind together the new “People’s Community.” Any explanation for the capacity of German society to absorb bombing destruction and levels of casualty on this scale must include the willingness of millions of ordinary Germans, in addition to all the other pressures of wartime work and survival, to participate in schemes of self-protection, civil defense work, first-aid organization, and welfare provision, without which the consequences of bombing could not have been sustained, however coercive the regime or however narrow the space within which social protest could operate. The effect of bombing was not, in the end, as the Allies hoped, to drive a wedge between people and regime, but the opposite, to increase dependence on the state and the party and to prompt willing participation by civilians in structures designed for their own defense with a remarkable degree of social discipline. The experience of being bombed did indeed create widespread anxiety, demoralization, social conflict, and limited political criticism, but it was balanced in the end by the capacity of the dictatorship to exploit racial policy unscrupulously to its advantage (redistributing Jewish apartments and furnishings, using camp and foreign labor to clear up debris, etc.), while ensuring that minimum levels of social provision, flexible propaganda, administrative competence, and targeted coercion would prevent anything like collapse.