41 Ben Witter interview, The World at War, Thames TV, translated by Ben Shephard, IWM Sound Archives 2916/01.

42 Hamburg Police Report, p. 22; Klöss (ed.), Der Luftkrieg, p. 55.

43 Heinz Masuch’s letter to his parents, 28 August 1943, in Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, pp. 98–9.

44 Wolf Biermann interview, Der Spiegel, 25 July 2003.

45 Brunswig, Feuersturm, pp. 214 and 216.

46 Ibid., p. 266.

47 See the Hamburg Police Report, p. 16; see also the Fire Department’s chronology of events, reproduced in Brunswig, Feuersturm, pp. 214–17.

48 Ibid., map on pp. 218–19.

49 See the ‘Town Plan of Hamburg’, drawn up by the War Office in 1943, sheet 2.

50 Max Kipke, quoted in Kerstin Rasmuβen and Gunnar Wulf (eds), Es war ein unterirdischer Bunker(Hamburg, 1996), p. 22.

51 Ruth Schramm, in ibid., p. 32.

52 Else Lohse’s letter to Frau Schilske in Kerstin Rasmuβen and Gunnar Wulf (eds.), Juli 1943: Hamburg erinnern sich(Hamburg, 2001), p. 36.

53 Traute Koch, quoted in Middlebrook, Battle of Hamburg(London, 1980), p. 274. The description of the bodies being like tailor’s dummies is fairly common: see also, for example, Waltraut Ahrens, in Hof (ed.), Rothenburgsort 27/28 Juli 1943, p. 43.

54 Erich Titschak, in Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, p. 79.

55 Manuscript account by ‘Maria K.’, quoted in ‘Als die Bomben fielen: Hamburg vor 40 Jahren’, p. 163.

56 Hans Jedlicka, typescript account, FZH 292–8, G–Kra.

57 Herbert Wulff, typescript account, FZH 292–8, T–Z.

58 USSBS Economic Effects of the Air Offensive Against German Cities: A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Hamburg, Germany, tables on pp. 7a and 7e, UK National Archives, AIR 48/19.

59 Hamburg Police Report, p. 18.

60 Early estimates put the death toll in Hammerbrook at about 36 per cent of the total population. See Hans Rumpf, The Bombing of Germany, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London, 1963), pp. 83–4.

61 The exact figure quoted in the USSBS, Economic Effects, p. 7a, was 37,439. UK National Archives, AIR 48/19.

62 Hamburg Police Report, p. 22; Klöss (ed.) Der Luftkrieg, p. 56.

63 ‘Maria K.’, quoted in ‘Als die Bomben fielen: Hamburg vor 40 Jahren’, p. 163.

64 See Horatio Bond, ‘Fire Casualties of the German Attacks’, in Bond, Fire and the Air War, pp. 112–121. See also Professor Siegfried Gräff, Tod im Luftangriff(Hamburg, 1955), quoted at length in Klöss (ed.), Der Luftkrieg, particularly the report on the state of the corpses by ‘W.W.’, a fifty-one-year-old air-raid warden, p. 110.

65 ‘N.N.’, quoted in Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, p. 92.

66 This was typical of a heavy incendiary attack. See Rumpf, The Bombing of Germany, p. 157.

67 These bodies became the subject of intense scrutiny by pathologists during and after the war. The Hamburg Police Report Appendixes contain pathologists’ reports into the various causes of death in the firestorm (see Appendix 15, pp. 213–39). See also the exhaustive study made by Professor Siegfried Gräff, quoted in Klöss (ed.) Der Luftkrieg, pp. 122–63, particularly pp. 128–40, on corpses found in basements.

68 Herbert Wulff, typescript account, FZH 292–8, T–Z.

69 Erich Titschak, in Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, p. 79; Hans Jedlicka, FZH 292–8 G–Ha; Else Lohse in Rasmuβen and Wulf (eds.), Juli 1943, p. 37.

70 Erika Wilken, quoted in the Hamburg Police Report, Appendix 10. A transcript of her report is available in Klöss (ed.), Der Luftkrieg, p. 83.

71 Henni Klank, Internet account.

17    The ‘Terror of Hamburg’

1 Adolf Galland, The First and the Last(London, 1955), p. 239.

2 Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, vol. II, ed. Elke Fröhlich (München, 1993), 6 August 1943.

3 Ibid., 29 July 1943.

4 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard and Clare Winston (London, 1970), p. 389.

5 Milch, quoted in David Irving, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe(Boston, 1973), p. 232.

6 Ibid.

7 Speer, Inside the Third Reich, pp. 388–9. From the flurry of meetings that took place around this time, it seems that Hitler was far more concerned about the situation in Italy in the wake of Mussolini’s resignation. See Goebbels, Tagebücher, 24–29 July 1943.

8 The Times, 29 July 1943, pp. 4 and 6.

9 Daily Express, 31 July 1943, p. 1.

10 New York Times, 31 July 1943, p. 6; New York Herald Tribune, 1 August 1943, p. 10; Washington Post, 26 July 1943, p. 2.

11 Propaganda leaflet G61, Royal Air Force Museum.

12 Herr K. St., quoted in Volker Böge and Jutta Deide-Lüchow, Eimsbüttler Jugend im Krieg(Hamburg, 1992), p. 28.

13 See, for example, unpublished transcript of local-history group conversation, Galerie Morgenland/Geschichtswerkstatt, ‘Klöntreff “Eimsbüttel im Feuersturm”’, Sprecher 6, p. 13: ‘Das habe ich von Frontsoldaten gehört, die haben mehrmals gesagt, an der Front sei es nicht so schlimm.’ Contemporary reports agree. Directly after the attacks, for example, a reporter for the Stockholm Aftonbladetclaimed that ‘what the German people have been experiencing… is an ordeal by fire without example in history, which, in certain respects, is more horrible than the gigantic fight on the Eastern Front’, quoted in Daily Express, 2 August 1943, p. 1.

14 Martha Bührich, in Renate Hauschild-Thiessen, Unternehmen Gomorrha(Hamburg, 1993), p. 25. Significantly, the soldier was talking about the first British night raid, which was not nearly so devastating as the second. Others also compare Hamburg to Stalingrad: see ‘N.N.’ and Adolf Freydag’s accounts in Renate Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe vom Sommer 1943 in Augenzeugenberichten, pp. 189 and 215.

15 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (London, 1943), p. 159.

16 For the official description of the evacuation that follows see the Hamburg Police Report, pp. 62 and 70–72, and appendices 7 and 14. See also Martin Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg(London, 1980), p. 278.

17 These figures are Middlebrook’s, but unfortunately he does not give his source. Goebbels says in his diary that 300,000 loaves of bread were sent from Berlin (29 July 1943), and Georg Ahrens claimed that as many as 1,600,000 loaves were handed out; see Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, p. 226.

18 See, for example, Ilse Grassmann’s description of trying to leave Hamburg, in Ausgebombt: Ein Hausfrauen-Kriegstagebuch von Ilse Grassmann(Hamburg, 2003), pp. 43–6; and the story told by a woman who found it almost impossible to hitch a lift out of the city even though she was heavily pregnant, in Uwe Bahnsen and Kerstin von Stürmer, Die Stadt, die sterben sollte: Hamburg in Bombenkrieg, Juli1943 (Hamburg 2003), p.35.

19 Heino Merck, in Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe, pp. 114–16.

20 Grassmann, Ausgebombt, p. 48.

21 Letter to Pastor Jürgen Wehrmann, in Günther Severin (ed.), Briefe an einen Pastor(unpublished).

22 Helmuth Saβ, FZH 292–8, Ri–S.

23 Hans J. Massaquoi, ‘Operation Gomorrha’, in Volker Hage (ed.), Hamburg 1943: Literarische Zeugnisse zum Feuersturm(Frankfurt am Main, 2003), p. 265.

24 Ibid., p. 262.

25 Lore Bünger, ‘Operation Gomorrha’, in Claus Günther (ed.), erlebt – erkannt – erinnert: Zeitzeugen schreiben Geschichte(n) 1932–1952(Hamburg, 2003), p. 134.

26 Hans Erich Nossack, Der Untergang(Hamburg, 1981), pp. 63–4.