7 Dr P. J. Horsey, typescript diary, IWM Department of Documents, Con Shelf.

8 Ibid.

9 Philip J. C. Dark, ‘Look Back This Once: Prisoner of War in Germany in WWII’, typescript account, IWM Department of Documents, 94/7/1. Professor Dark returned to his memories of Hamburg in an exhibition of his paintings at the Honolulu Academy of Arts in 1994.

10 Katherine Morris, ‘Destination Hamburg’, typescript account, IWM Department of Documents, 91/27/1, p. 3. Ruth Evans, a native of Hamburg, expressed much the same sentiments when she returned there after the war: ‘would this town ever be rebuilt? I doubted that’. See Wolff-Mönckeberg, On the Other Side, translator’s epilogue, p. 163.

11 Janet Flaner’s description for the New Yorker, in W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction(London, 2004), p. 31.

12 Herbert Conert, in Frederick Taylor, Dresden(New York, 2004), p. 396. The description of Dresden as moonscape comes from Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5(London, 1991), pp. 130–31.

13 Victor Klemperer, To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942–45, trans. Martin Chalmers (London, 1999), 22 May 1945, p. 596.

14 Harry Hopkins diary entry, in Hans Rumpf, The Bombing of Germany, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London, 1963), p. 126.

15 This was the figure taken before Congress in 1947. The actual investment was somewhat less. See Gregory A. Fossedal, Our Finest Hour: Will Clayton, the Marshall Plan and the Triumph of Democracy(Stanford, 1993), p. 252.

16 Dr P. J. Horsey, typescript diary.

17 Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany(London, 1947), pp. 28–9, 53–5, and plate 143.

18 Ibid., pp. 55–6.

19 Ibid., p. 52.

20 Morris, ‘Destination Hamburg’, p. 15.

21 Ibid., p. 31.

22 Quoted in Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, p. 93.

23 Morris, ‘Destination Hamburg’, p. 15.

24 According to the Food Committee of UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), a normal population required 2,650 calories per day to maintain health. Official rations provided only 1,550 calories, but were rarely delivered. In Belsen the rations provided 800 calories per day. See Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, pp. 28–9 and 35.

25 Undated newspaper clipping from 1946/7 kept by Katherine Morris: ‘Death warning to food rioters: U.S. may invoke military law’, IWM Department of Documents, 91/27/1.

26 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, p. 29.

27 E. G. W. Ridgers, ‘The Life of a Sapper in World War Two’, typescript memoir, IWM Documents, 99/16/1, p. 32. For winter temperatures in 1946/7 and their effects see Eckart Klessmann, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg, p. 595; and Nora Heather, ‘Experiences with Control Commission in Germany immediately after World War Two’, typescript account, IWM Documents 03/1/1 (Mrs Heather kept a diary of temperatures, and even includes an official contemporary temperature chart).

28 For power cuts, see Heather, ibid.; and Klessmann, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg, pp. 594–5. For several stories of children raiding coal trains, see Monika Sigmund et al. (eds), ‘ Man versuchte längs zu kommen, und man lebt ja noch…’: Frauenalltag in St Pauli in Kriegsund Nachkriegszeit(Hamburg, 1996), p. 21.

29 Only eighty-five deaths from ‘exposure’ were entered on official registers, but this is a hopelessly low figure and does not include those who died from other conditions related to the severe cold: see Klessmann, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg, p. 595.

30 In February 1962 the city suffered a catastrophic flood which ruined the underground train network, caused hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks’ worth of damage, and claimed 315 lives. Smaller floods occurred in 1976 and 1983.

31 In 2001 more than six thousand companies were involved in media based in Hamburg, including 3,200 advertising firms, 1,600 publishers and printers, and 700 film companies. See Anna Brenken, Hamburg: Metropole an Alster und Elbe(Hamburg, 2001), p. 45.

32 Hildegard Huza’s memorial to the 370 people who died in the shelter at Karstadt shopping centre, at the junction of Hamburger Strasse and Oberaltenallee in Barmbek.

33 Alfred Hrdlicka’s anti-war memorial at Dammtor comprises one sculpture of the Hamburg firestorm, and one of the concentration-camp prisoners who died when Allied bombs sank the ship Cap Arconathat was transporting them in the last days of the war.

34 Gerhard Marcks’s sculpture, Fahrt über den Styx, is a memorial to the 36,918 bodies that lie in the mass graves.

35 ‘Klöntreff “Eimsbüttel im Feuersturm”’, unpublished transcript of local-history group conversation, Galerie Morgenland/Geschichtswerkstatt, p. 13.

36 Hans Jedlicka, FZH 292–8, G–Kra.

37 Wanda Chantler, interview with the author, 5 July 2004; and Jan Melsen, quoted by Karin Orth, ‘Jan Melsen: “Hamburg beschäftigt mich emotional am meisten.”: Erinnerungen eines KZ-Ü berlebenden an den Hamburger Feuersturm’ in Ulrike Jureit and Beate Meyer (eds), Verletzungen: Lebensgeschichtliche Verarbeitung von Kriegserfahrungen(Hamburg, 1994), p. 153. Wanda Chantler suffered an immediate breakdown as a result of the horrible scenes she witnessed during the first night of bombing (see chapter 10), and years later she was to suffer psychotic episodes that saw her hospitalized. Jan Melsen, one of the concentration-camp inmates forced to clear dead bodies from cellars, also had a breakdown in 1971. This was not the result of the firestorm alone, but of years of abuse in Neuengamme; even so, the events that affected him most deeply were those he experienced in the aftermath of the firestorm: ‘Hamburg damaged me the most emotionally. The work there saved my life, when I was practically dead before I went there – but on the other hand, after the war it was this that most weighed on my mind, especially the corpses of all the old and young people. The worst came back to me as a syndrome – then you have dreams as if it’s happening all over again…’

23    The Reckoning

1 Though this quote refers to nuclear warfare, what happened at Hamburg fits better into a nuclear context than it does into the context of conventional bombing, as I will argue in this chapter. In 2003 Eisenhower’s words were quoted during a debate on nuclear weapons in the US House of Representatives; see ‘Notable Words: S&T Policy Quotations from 2003’, in FYI: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News, no. 2, 8 January 2004.

2 All statistics here and in the following paragraphs are taken from the USSBS, Economic Effects of the Air Offensive against German Cities: A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Hamburg, Germany(November 1945), pp. 7–10. The Hamburg Police Report also contains most of these figures (pp. 17–18), and by and large they agree. Where they do not, I have assumed that the compilers of the former document, who based many of their findings on data from the Hamburg Police Report, also had access to later, more accurate sources of information. The report of the BBSU is slightly less reliable, since the unit was run on a shoestring budget.

3 Ibid., pp. 9–11. The Hamburg Police Report claims that 2,632 ‘commercial establishments’ and 580 ‘industrial establishments’ were destroyed, but this does not seem to square with the huge amount of damage done to residential property, or the figure given by the USSBS of around forty thousand industrial buildings lost.

4 Hamburg Police Report, pp. 17–18.

5 The figures for the number of dead, which had not yet been completed by the time the Hamburg Police Report was finished, are taken from the USSBS, Hamburg Report, pp. 1 and 7A. I have assumed that the majority of the two thousand reported ‘missing’ were also dead, since many bodies were completely incinerated, and corpses were still being discovered in rebuilding works as late as 1951. The Hamburg Police Report has the number of injured slightly lower at 37,214 (p. 17), but it is likely that the real figure was much higher than either estimate.