Everyone in Hamburg knew how quickly a conflagration could spread if it was allowed to get out of control: they had learned about the Great Fire of 1842 at school. In the early part of the war, the entire population set about removing anything flammable from the place in their buildings that was most vulnerable to falling bombs – the roof. They cleared their attics of personal belongings and all superfluous woodwork, such as partitions, was removed. Businesses fitted their buildings with incendiary-proof ceilings, and firewalls were set up, especially in the harbour area, to stop fire spreading.

Finally, in an attempt to throw enemy bombers off target, a city-wide programme of camouflage was put in place. Stations were masked so that they would look like ordinary buildings from above; oil depots were hidden; wharves were disguised to look like insignificant parts of the riverbank. The whole of the inner part of the Alster Lake was hidden beneath a fake reconstruction

of the city centre, complete with imitation streets and false buildings. The idea was that British bombers aiming for the Rathausmight mistake the reconstruction for the real thing, and drop their bombs harmlessly into the lake.

As a consequence of all this activity, Hamburg was probably better prepared for catastrophe than any other city in the world. There was shelter of some description for just about everyone, and by 1942 the entire population had been trained in methods of fire control. In the words of the then chief of police, ‘As far as Air Protection was concerned, everything that it was humanly possible to do was done.’ ⁶

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Yet whenever the sirens rang out above the city streets it was impossible to feel completely safe. Everyone knew the drill. First the Kleinalarmwould sound, warning that hostile aircraft were in the area, and that everyone should get ready to take cover. Then a second alarm would be sounded: fifteen rapid four-second wails from the sirens. As soon as this Fliegeralarmwas heard, everyone should take shelter immediately: they had just twenty minutes before the first bombs fell. On arrival at the bomb shelter they would have to show their Platzkartto the shelter supervisor, and make their way to their own allocated seat. Here they would wait – sometimes for several hours – until it was safe to leave.

Although Hamburg was not attacked until May 1940, and the raids even then were fairly ineffective, the sound of the siren was enough to strike fear into the hearts of all who heard it. Eva Coombes lived in Hamburg during the early years of the war, and remembers being in a state of almost permanent anxiety:

You always had the siren. There were two kinds of siren – the warning siren and then the proper one. When the warning siren was heard I was the first one racing at high speed down the staircase into the cellar. And I was shaking with fright… I always used to say I had a nervous breakdown – I couldn’t have done, because I was much too young for it – but I was absolutely terrified of the bombing. ⁷

In the early days, the damage caused by bombing was minimal compared to the disruption the air-raid alarms inflicted. Night after night, particularly in the summer months, people had to drag themselves from their beds to take shelter, then return to their rooms to snatch a few more hours’ sleep before daybreak. Frustratingly, most of the alarms were false: the bombers changed course, or flew past Hamburg to bomb Kiel, Lübeck or some other city nearby. The British got into the habit of flying ‘nuisance raids’ over Germany for the sole purpose of keeping people awake at night, which often caused more disruption than the bombs did. In his diary, Hitler’s propaganda minister recorded his regular irritation at ‘the absurd fact that ten nuisance planes drove fifteen to eighteen million people out of bed’. ⁸

By the end of 1940, Hamburg had already had more than two hundred air-raid warnings, ⁹most of them in the middle of the night, and the authorities were having to adopt strategies to cope with people’s chronic lack of sleep. Children were allowed to come to school late on mornings after an air-raid warning, or perhaps even miss school altogether. In the end, a scheme known as the Kinderlandverschickungwas set up to evacuate them to safer areas in the interior of the Reich, and tens of thousands of children were sent to schools in places as far away as Bavaria. They stayed away until the following year, when a decrease in the regularity of raids allowed them to filter back to the city.

Adults were not accorded nearly such considerate treatment. They were required to turn up at work no matter how little sleep they had had the night before, and there were severe punishments for absenteeism. With so many men away at the war there were serious labour shortages, and lack of sleep was no excuse for shirking. In fact, as the war progressed, many were required to work even longer hours: in January 1942, for example, the standard working week for public officials was increased from forty-six to fifty-eight hours, and vacation periods all but disappeared. Early in 1943, after much resistance, women were also conscripted for war work. ¹⁰

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With no holidays, longer working hours and sleep deprivation at epidemic levels, grumbling became a part of life: ‘the soul moving its bowels’, as Goebbels called it. ¹¹A tired, grumpy population was much more likely to complain about all the other hardships it had to endure: rationing of food, fuel and tobacco, clothing shortages, travel restrictions, and the ubiquitous queues that meant shopping trips always lasted for hours.

Soon the luxuries of 1939 were only a distant memory. Before the war, Wiebke Stammers would always cut away the fat from her meat: ‘I remember my mother’s favourite saying, “May God forbid it, but if war ever broke out again you would be going down on your hands and knees to eat it. And you would eat anything.” And I said, “I would rather starve than eat fat.”… It never occurred to me that it would ever come true – but she was right.’ ¹²

In fact, the conditions suffered by the people of Hamburg were not nearly as bad as those endured by the British during the first half of the war. But many people remembered the disastrous food shortages of the First World War, and were constantly worried by the spectre of famine. In desperation, large numbers turned to ‘hamstering’ – making trips to the countryside to buy extra rations on the black-market. In the words of Wiebke Stammers, ‘Many a diamond ring went to the country to buy food.’ ¹³

While most people simply got on with life and tried to make the best of things, for some the constant restrictions were too much to bear, and their grumbling became increasingly subversive. Else Baker clearly remembers her father, who was a Hamburg docker, openly criticizing Hitler: her mother was constantly asking him to lower his voice, for fear that he would be overheard. ¹⁴Likewise, whenever twelve-year-old Hannah Kelson complained, her parents would silence her, saying, ‘For God’s sake, don’t let anybody hear that!’ ¹⁵

They had good cause to be concerned. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the SS, had informers in all walks of life, and reports on individuals who criticized the regime went all the way to the top. ¹⁶The authorities were troubled by the small pockets of resistance that were appearing across the country, such as the White Rose movement in Bavaria (which also had members in Hamburg), and various Communist groups in Berlin. In Hamburg the swing movement was gaining in popularity, and there had been incidences of ‘swing youth’ waylaying members of the Hitler Youth and beating them up. ¹⁷Unsurprisingly, the Nazi regime could not tolerate this, and the movements were violently suppressed.