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As he and the rest of the group escaped through the i
A few streets away, nine-year-old Liselotte Gerke was sheltering in a cellar on the Eimsbüttler Marktplatz. The street was home to a large tram depot, and tonight a line of stationary trams was nose to tail along the centre of the road. As Liselotte came out of her shelter she saw that while her side of the street was relatively untouched by the bombs, the opposite side was burning, and scores of people were trying to cross the road to escape the flames. But the trams were in the way, and there wasn’t time for them all to clamber into the cars and out the other side. The next day, when she and her friends went out to investigate the damage to the trams, she stumbled on a pair of small, charred corpses. ‘This was the moment the war started for me. It was the first time I had ever seen anything like it.’ 33
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Descriptions like these are merely snapshots of what people experienced that night. The bombs spread over the entire west of the city, and in many places to the east and south. Tens of thousands of people were affected, and since the bombs were indiscriminate, women and children found themselves caught up in the fire and explosions just as frequently as the city’s workforce, who were the ostensible target of the attack. Even political prisoners and forced labourers such as Wanda Chantler were affected. Terrifying though their ordeal was, however, the bombing raid was no worse than many others that had taken place in other parts of Germany. Despite the widespread destruction, most people escaped with their lives, and even their belongings, intact. Hamburg had not yet been made special by its ordeal – it was just another name on the long list of towns that had suffered heavy bombing raids.
That said, the death toll was extraordinarily high. Early estimates claimed that about fifteen hundred people died during this raid – far more than in any other previous attack on the city – and tens of thousands more were now homeless. 34For a city that had made such a huge effort to ready itself for an attack like this, the figures represented a crushing defeat.
According to the official police report on the disaster, the performance of the emergency services had been exemplary, but in the heat of battle it was inevitable that many of the drills that had been practised so often did not go according to plan. Hans Brunswig worked in the technical division of the Hamburg fire service, and noted that some of the Nazi Party volunteers did not follow the drills properly, and were content to muddle through. 35Many eyewitnesses on the night say the same thing: Erwin Garvens, for example, noted in his diary that it was almost impossible to put out the fires in his neighbourhood because of a lack of leadership and direction. While the women co-operated admirably, many men, particularly the soldiers on leave, were quick to abandon burning buildings to their fate. 36
To be fair, however, the huge destruction in the city, including the severing of many water mains, made it almost impossible for even the best-trained fire-fighters to do what they were supposed to do. Paul Elingshausen, the deputy air-raid warden of his block, spent almost two hours fighting the fires in his and the neighbouring houses before he finally gave up:
There was no ru
The British tactic of dropping a combination of high-explosive and incendiary bombs had worked: while the incendiaries started the fires, enormous explosions kept the local wardens away from them until it was too late. Further bombs on timer fuses continued to hamper the fire service into the next morning. The gas and water mains had been cut, and so had electricity supplies, making many pumps useless. Just as problematic was the damage to telephone lines. In order to direct the emergency effort, the control room of the Air Protection leader had to be in communication with all the affected areas – but while they were swamped with calls from the south and east of the city, the worst-hit areas in the west were unable to inform them of how bad things had become. As a consequence, early on at least, the fire service was directed to the wrong parts of town. Once the mistake was discovered, the fire chief had no choice but to send out motorcycle dispatch riders, some of whom perished in the chaos. Officers on reco
Early that Sunday morning the city’s gauleiter, Karl Kaufma
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Once the all-clear had sounded, the flak batteries stopped firing. Unable to pinpoint the attacking aeroplanes, the best they had been able to do was put up an unaimed barrage in the hope that they might score a few hits. When they stopped, the barrels of the guns were glowing with the heat of the firing. Rudolf Schurig, the officer in command of the heavy flak battery at Steilshoop, claimed afterwards that his battery alone had shot 547 rounds into the sky on that night. 40In total, about fifty thousand rounds of heavy flak were discharged into the heavens. 41For all that, only a single Wellington had been shot down over Hamburg, and a Halifax of the Pathfinder Force seriously damaged. 42
Now that the firing had stopped, the flak helpers were free to join the emergency effort in the streets. In Altona, the wounded Joha