Given its shipping links and huge manufacturing capacity, it is unsurprising that Hamburg now became important to the Nazi regime’s plans. In 1936, military contracts suddenly poured into the city’s shipbuilding companies – so much so that HAPAG lodged a complaint that its military commitments were making it fall behind on orders for merchant and passenger ships. Other shipping companies also worried that they were becoming far too dependent on the German Navy for business. 20
The up-side to the story was that rearmament provided Hamburg’s ailing industries with a much-needed tonic. Until now the city had gained little from the change of regime. While the rest of Germany had started to recover as early as 1934, unemployment in Hamburg was still high. The entire Lower Elbe area had always depended on international trade, and Hitler’s policy of restricting imports in favour of German-made goods had had a disastrous effect on the city’s trade and shipping industries. Rearmament, however, brought jobs and money to Hamburg. New businesses were set up, all devoted to preparation for war: oil refineries, engine factories and aviation engineering works. The need for huge amounts of raw materials also increased trade, particularly with Scandinavia.
Hitler had big plans for Hamburg. For centuries it had been surrounded by satellite towns, many of which had worked in direct competition with the city, but on 1 April 1937 this was to change: Altona, Wandsbek, Harburg and twenty-eight smaller municipalities were consolidated into a single industrial and administrative giant that would become known as Greater Hamburg. 21With this single action the city became hugely more efficient. It also doubled in size overnight, and its population increased by 41 per cent to 1.68 million.
In keeping with the city’s new status, Hitler drew up grand plans for a new Kongresshalle, a 250-metre high Gauhaus, and a road bridge to span the Elbe. 22The Hamburg–Lübeck Autobahnwas completed in 1937, and the clearance of the slums in the Neustadt was also carried out as a priority – ostensibly under a programme of housing reform, but actually because the area was a hotbed of Communist resistance to the Nazi regime. The importance of Hamburg’s position to the new Reich was underscored by the fact that Hitler visited this city more than any other during his time as leader of the Nazi Party. 23
As Hamburg churned out warships and U-boats, the Reich Chancellor was busy provoking the world towards conflict. In March 1938 he marched his troops into Austria to ‘encourage’ her people to vote for an Anschluss(or ‘union’) with Germany. (At the same time he transported more than ten thousand Austrian guests to Hamburg to attend the launch of the troopship Robert Ley– a rare example of his use of the carrot as well as the stick.) 24A year later, in defiance of an agreement made with Britain, Hitler’s tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. A pattern was emerging: Germany was turning on her neighbours one by one.
During his last major visit to Hamburg in February 1939, Hitler hinted that such actions were only the beginning. At the launch of the battleship Bismarckhe explained that his ultimate aim was ‘the future eradication of the enemies of the Reich, now and for all time’. 25The festive atmosphere of a launch was a long way from the beer-hall brawls that had characterized the early years of the Nazi Party, but the themes in Hitler’s speech were the same. Several years on, the Nazis were obsessed with enemies of the Reich, which still appeared to outnumber Aryan Germans on every side.
When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the ‘enemies of the Reich’ stepped forward. Two days after Hitler’s accumulated weaponry began to pour towards Warsaw, France and Britain picked up the gauntlet and declared war on Germany.
The violence of the beer hall had at last expanded to its logical extreme: the treaty of Versailles was dead, extremism was taking over Europe, and the entire continent was spiralling inexorably downwards into a vast, all-encompassing war. At the centre of it all the Nazis, surrounded by enemies, were outnumbered, but fanatically certain that the strength of their ideology would see them through to ultimate victory, whatever the odds against them. Like the staunch defenders of the Nazi election meeting in Winterhude in 1930, the forces of the Fatherland would carry on fighting until there was no one left to fight. For Germany this would result in six years of increasing hardship, followed by the agony of defeat and disgrace. For the city of Hamburg, whose ‘Red Marines’ had long since been battered into silence, it would result in almost total annihilation.
5. Hamburg Prepares for War
Truly, I live in dark times!
Bertolt Brecht 1
Despite the eagerness with which the Nazis seemed to embrace conflict, there was little enthusiasm for war among the rest of the German population, especially in Hamburg. 2The city had never done well out of war, and the memories of the hardships created in 1914–18 were still relatively fresh in people’s minds. Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg summed up the feelings of many when she wrote in her diary that she and everyone she knew was in ‘absolute despair’ at the outbreak of war. ‘We were convinced that immediate and total annihilation would follow.’ 3
Many in the city’s Nazi administration seem to have shared her fears. Throughout its history Hamburg had been vulnerable to attack from the sea and the surrounding land. Now it faced a brand new danger: a threat from the air. Unlike many other towns closer to the French border, Hamburg had never suffered from bombing between 1914 and 1918. This did not mean that its citizens were unacquainted with the overall concept: in fact, the opposite was true – the city had been a centre for German aviation even before the First World War, and many of the zeppelins that bombed British cities had been based in airfields around Hamburg.
Now, to combat this new danger from the air, city officials immediately set about creating a system of civil protection unlike anything Hamburg had seen before. The first thing they did was to launch a programme of strengthening the cellars of houses and apartment blocks throughout the city, to protect them from the possibility of blast bombs. However, it was soon realized that there were not enough to go round. The soggy, waterlogged soil upon which Hamburg was built meant that whole districts were devoid of cellars – the high water table of the Elbe floodplain would have swamped them – so in these areas extra air-raid shelters were built. Even before the war there were some eighty-eight public air-raid shelters in Hamburg, but by April 1940 this had risen to 549. A year later there were 1,700 shelters, splinter-proof buildings and bunkers across the city, with room for at least 230,000 people. 4
The city authorities quickly recognized that the main threat from bombing was fire. While high-explosive bombs caused terrible damage to buildings, it was localized. Fire from incendiary bombs, however, could destroy whole areas of the city. They set about training an army of firemen and air-raid wardens in every suburb. In theory, each block had its own fire officer. The railway authority alone had almost 1,500 firemen, and 15,000 fire-watchers kept a look-out over the port area. More than seven hundred sand boxes were placed in streets and squares, and measures were taken to ensure that a water supply would be available if the mains should fail. New wells were dug, water carts requisitioned, and containers built. In Blankenese the cellars of two derelict buildings were converted into huge water tanks, which could be called upon in times of emergency. 5