Inferno

The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg, 1943

Keith Lowe

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781416545965
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the summer of 1943, British and American bombers launched an attack on the German city of Hamburg that was unlike anything the world had ever seen. For ten days they pounded the city with over 9, 000 tons of bombs, with the intention of erasing it entirely from the map. The fires they created were so huge they burned for a month and were visible for 200 miles. The people of Hamburg had no time to understand what had hit them. As they emerged from their ruined cellars and air raid shelters, they were confronted with a unique vision of hell: a sea of flame that stretched to the horizon, the burned-out husks of fire engines that had tried to rescue them, roads that had become flaming rivers of melted tarmac. Even the canals were on fire. Worse still, they had to battle hurricane-force winds to escape the blaze. The only safe places were the city's parks, but to reach them survivors had to stumble through temperatures of up to 800°C and a blizzard of sparks strong enough to lift grown men off their feet. Inferno is the culmination of several years of research and the first comprehensive account of the Hamburg firestorm to be published in almost thirty years. Keith Lowe has interviewed eyewitnesses in Britain, Germany, and America, and gathered together hundreds of letters, diaries, firsthand accounts, and documents. His book gives the human side of an inhuman story: the long, tense buildup to the Allied attack; the unparalleled horror of the firestorm itself; and the terrible aftermath. The result is an epic story of devastation and survival, and a much-needed reminder of the human face of war. Includes nineteen maps and thirty-one photographs, many never seen before

PART I

HAMBURG

Chapter 1

CITY ON THE RIVER

Wherever there’s trade, there tread Hamburgers.

—HAMBURG SAYING, MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY¹

The city of Hamburg lies on the banks of the river Elbe in northern Germany, about sixty miles from the coast of the North Sea. In truth, it is not a very hospitable place to found a city. Situated on a fluvial plain, most of the ground is little better than a marsh, and it is prone to flooding. Ever since the area was first settled the city fathers have fought a constant battle against the storms and tides that regularly cause the waters of the river to rise and break their banks. The threat extends far beyond the city boundaries. For mile after mile the earth lies flat, perhaps rises a little, and then is flat again, providing scant protection from the whims of the river. In times of flood the entire area becomes submerged: farmland, docklands, parks, city streets, and houses—all are ruined. When eventually the water subsides it leaves behind it a blanket of silt covering the city and countryside alike, reducing everything to a dull, muddy uniformity.

There is nothing to protect the city from the weather either. No mountains infringe on the curve of the horizon, or provide a break to the prevailing winds rolling in from the North Sea. The moist sea air produces huge banks of cloud, which smother the region for most of the year, bringing frequent rain and occasionally sleet and snow. In winter, if the wind changes direction and blows in from the Baltic, temperatures plummet, and drift ice begins to appear on the river. Even in summer the nights can be cold and wet, and the temperature rarely reaches the highs that other parts of Europe experience.

The element that most dominates the city is water. The river Elbe is its life blood, linking it to the North Sea and trade routes across the globe. At the city’s core is a second river, the Alster, which, since it was dammed in 1235, has formed two large lakes right in the city center. To the east, elaborate networks of canals creep like tentacles into the city’s warehouse and workers’ districts. To the south, in the midst of the Elbe itself, lie a series of islands that have been linked together over the centuries into a vast complex of docks and waterways: this is Hamburg’s harbor, one of the largest ports in the world, and the watery foundation of all the city’s considerable prosperity.

* * *

Apart from its harbor, Hamburg is an unremarkable place. Unlike Dresden, which lies a couple of hundred miles upstream, it has never been considered a jewel, and its architecture is generally functional rather than ornate. Its handful of city churches have none of the scale and grandeur of other German cathedrals, like that at Cologne. There are no palaces or castles here like those in Berlin, or Potsdam, or Munich; in fact, the grandest houses the city has to offer are the upper-middle-class villas along the Elbe Chaussee. The city boasts more bridges than Venice, but that is where the comparison ends, and not even its most enthusiastic citizens would pretend otherwise. Few pleasure boats travel the city’s many canals, hardly any of the buildings are more than sixty years old, and the sound of voices and footfalls is drowned by the noise of traffic flowing down the six-lane highways that scar the city in all directions.

Even before the Second World War, Hamburg was never really considered a destination for sightseers. Even then, the historic center of the city was not particularly historic, since most of it had been destroyed by fire less than a century before, and the few tourists who came to this part of Germany generally preferred the picturesque town center of nearby Lübeck. Neither is it particularly considered a city of culture. Hamburg did not have a university until after the First World War, and while the Musikhalle and the Hamburg Opera are much admired by the middle classes, the city has always been better-known for the more low-brow pleasures to be found on the Reeperbahn in the St. Pauli district.

To their credit, the people of Hamburg have never much cared about the lack of superlatives connected to their city: They are proud of what they do have, and unconcerned about what they do not. They are a tough, practical people, accustomed to dealing with challenges and to making the best of any situation that fate might throw at them. Over the past two centuries they have seen their city ravaged in turn by epidemics of cholera, by famine, by economic recession and unemployment, and of course by flooding. The town center has been destroyed by fire not once but four times—despite the huge quantities of water that seem to dominate the city’s open spaces.² In the face of such a history it is little wonder that there are so few ancient architectural gems here.

However, the lack of grand monuments in the city cannot be blamed entirely on natural disasters: It is also the result of an inherent reserve that has deep roots in the city’s mentality. For more than eight hundred years Hamburg has been a place of merchants, and the centuries have carved it into a middle-class rather than an aristocratic city. The town center is dominated by the towers of that most bourgeois of German buildings, the Rathaus (or town hall). It sits before a large piazza, where Adolf Hitler once addressed a crowd of over 20,000 people, overlooking the great Alster lakes. The streets around the Rathaus are filled with exactly the kind of buildings one would expect in a city of merchants: shops, office buildings, and, a little farther south, the warehouse district of the Speicherstadt. The only towers to break the skyline, apart from those of the Rathaus, are the spires of the city’s five main churches.

As for the rest of Hamburg, it is generally a green, pleasant place to live. To the west of the city are the tree-lined boulevards of Eimsbüttel, Eppendorf, and Harvestehude, with their tall, elegant apartment buildings and rows of flower-filled balconies. To the north, the leafy suburbs of Winterhude, Barmbek, and Alsterdorf cluster round the huge Stadtpark. Farther north still, in Ohlsdorf, the greenery conceals the largest cemetery in Europe: four square miles of gravestones among well-tended gardens.

The working-class districts have traditionally been confined to the east of the city, in suburbs like Hammerbrook, Hamm, Rothenburgsort, and Billbrook. Here low-rise apartment blocks have always crammed high concentrations of people within easy commuting distance of the docks and warehouses. There is nothing here—not a building, not a tree, not a lamppost, not even a street sign—that is more than sixty years old. In some areas even the people have moved away. In Hammerbrook, for example, there are few apartments, only offices and warehouses, garages and depots. After office hours, the only human beings that walk along Süderstrasse are the prostitutes trying to attract the attention of one of the occasional passing cars. In the smaller streets even these signs of life are missing, and the whole area lies silent.

* * *

While the historic center of the city might lie on the north shore of the Elbe, it is the harbor that is its true heart. The industrial landscape here is vast and impressive, and has a savage beauty unparalleled by any other place in Germany. Formations of cranes stretch as far as the eye can see, towering above the warehouses and the dry docks of Hamburg’s shipbuilding companies like the silent regiments of some huge mechanical army. The many-colored blocks of transport containers rise in mountains from the quayside, dwarfing the trucks and railway trains that come from all over Europe to collect them. Their reflection stains the gray waters of the Elbe with every color of the rainbow.

When the population of Hamburg gathers each May at the Landungs-brücken to celebrate the official birthday of the harbor, they are not merely giving thanks for the wealth that floods in through its gates. The harbor is more than just a source of jobs and economic prosperity: It has provided Hamburg with its very identity as a city of trade. Because of it, Hamburg has been known for centuries as Germany’s gateway to the world.

According to tradition, the harbor was founded over 800 years ago, in 1189, when the emperor Frederick Barbarossa granted Hamburgers the right to duty-free trade all along the Lower Elbe as far as the sea. With such an advantage over their neighbors, the city’s merchants soon managed to build Hamburg into a major trading center. By 1242 the city was powerful enough to draw up an agreement with nearby Lübeck, thus forming the template for the Hanseatic League. This alliance brought them major trading partners right across the region—not only in Germany, but also in Bruges, Amsterdam, London, and even as far away as Novgorod—making this marshy, watery city one of the wealthiest in Europe.³

By the sixteenth century Hamburg was nothing short of a huge, citywide storehouse, holding vast quantities of goods for resale throughout Europe. Tall warehouses stacked with grain, oil, salt, and beer rose out of the narrow canals and waterways that carried the tide of commodities right into the heart of the city. The more expensive goods, such as honey, fine wines, and amber, were stored on the higher floors to keep them safe from the floodwaters of the Elbe, while the lower floors were reserved for cheaper goods such as fish or lumber. With the discovery of the New World, local merchants who had made themselves rich by trading in cloth or foodstuffs soon began to trade in precious gems and metals, saltpeter, coffee, tea, tobacco, and exotic spices. One of the most lucrative cargoes was peppercorns, which Hamburg’s spice traders brought back in sackloads from the Orient. Even today, the wealthier citizens of Hamburg are still occasionally called Pfeffersäcke (“peppersacks”)—a derogatory nickname for fat-cat businessmen.

The city’s residents lived in similarly tall houses, rising above the squalid streets like warehouses of humanity, storing workers for use in the busy port. In such cramped conditions hygiene was impossible, disease was rife, and life expectancy short. Despite the ubiquitous waterways, fire was a very real danger. In 1284 the entire city had been completely destroyed by a huge fire that, according to tradition, left only a single building standing. In 1684, after a series of smaller fires, a second conflagration destroyed 214 houses. Nearby Altona also suffered a major fire in 1711, followed by the deliberate burning of two-thirds of the city by Swedish troops two years later.⁴ After each catastrophe, the city was rebuilt with houses even taller and more densely occupied than before.

In among this jumble of homes and warehouses were also small islands of industry—tanneries, weaving houses, potteries, breweries, and shipbuilders. Some of the most important industries for the city were brought here by outsiders. Hamburgers first learned the art of sugar refining from the Dutch, and by the early 1600s Hamburg was one of the biggest exporters of refined sugar in the world. Dutch immigrants also brought the velvet and silk trades to the city. The French brought new baking techniques, and Franzbrötchen are still something of a city specialty. Greenlanders brought their skill in extracting oil from whale blubber and set up a whole district of workshops in Hamburger Berg (now St. Pauli): The glut of train oil they produced meant that the citizens of Hamburg could afford to put lanterns along the major streets, making this one of the first cities ever to have street lighting.⁵

As a maritime power, Hamburg has always teemed with such foreigners, and the face of the city seems to have changed with every new influx of immigrants. It was not only the sailors and adventurers who settled here, drawn to Hamburg along the world’s trade routes in search of a better life; refugees also came. While the rest of Europe was persecuting its religious minorities, Protestant Hamburg tended to extend a cautious welcome to anyone who brought in new money or new trades. In the sixteenth century Jews from Spain and Portugal settled here after being expelled from their own countries and built one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. Dutch Calvinists found safety here from the Catholic armies of Philip II, and came to dominate the city’s foreign trade. Later, Huguenots would flee here after the purges in France, as would aristocrats after the French Revolution. Hamburg fast became one of the most cosmopolitan places in Europe, a Renaissance Babel where English gentlemen and French princes knocked shoulders with Finnish sailors, Brazilian rubber merchants, and the countless migrants from Mecklenburg and Schleswig-Holstein who flocked here to try to take a tiny share of the city’s considerable fortune.

* * *

Hamburg has always been like this: hardworking, multifarious, and quick to embrace new ideas. Throughout its history, the only constant has been change. Buildings rise, are demolished by fire or flood, and are rebuilt: Whole suburbs are regularly created and destroyed. The population comes and goes from all over the world, creating distinct communities that flourish for a few generations before dispersing once more as they are integrated into the whole. This is natural to Hamburgers, and continues to this day.

Even the river is not constant. Before the Second World War, parts of it often became so silted up that it caused problems for the ever-larger ships that traveled in and out of the harbor with the tides, and specialist pilots had to be used to guide foreign ships to the safety of their berths. Sometimes whole islands of silt would form in the center of the river; for months, or even years, they would give the illusion of solidity, before the waters rose once more and they were swept away toward the sea.

Chapter 2

THE ANGLOPHILE CITY

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

—WILFRED OWEN¹

Through its trade links, Hamburg has developed associations with many countries over the centuries, but there are two relationships that are particularly interesting, especially when considering the events of the Second World War. Hamburg’s connections with Britain and America go beyond that of mere trading partners: Somehow these two English-speaking nations seem to have found their way beneath Hamburg’s skin. This is particularly the case with the British—or, more specifically, the English. Even during the height of the war Hamburg still thought of itself as an anglophile city, and it was not until the dreadful events of July 1943 that Hitler’s propaganda minister was able to note with wry satisfaction that the city was at last learning to hate its English cousins.²

Hamburg’s ties to England were extremely deep-rooted and remain close to this day. As part of the Hanseatic League, the city has been trading with London ever since the thirteenth century. The first English company to set up a permanent office in the city was the Merchant Adventurers Company in the sixteenth century. It was followed by other English merchants, trading wool and fine English cloth for Continental wine, linen, and timber, and by 1600 Britain had established itself as a significant trading partner.

As Britain’s power grew, it became increasingly important for the city to maintain a good relationship with its neighbors across the North Sea. This was not always easy. For example, when Dutch men-of-war attacked British merchant ships in the Elbe in 1666 the British blamed Hamburg for allowing the warships passage, and insisted on compensat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• Author’s Note
• Part I: Hamburg
• Part II: Darkness Falls From the Air
• Part III: The Aftermath
• Acknowledgments
• Appendixes
• Photographs
• About the Author
• Notes
• Archives Consulted
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright