Hiltgunt Zassenhaus had been studying for her university exams at home when the alarms went off. She lived in the north-west of the city so the bunker where she and her family took shelter was beneath the flight path of the bombers as they approached. At the beginning of the attack the shelter was virtually empty, and there was space to relax and reread a letter from her brother Björn. ‘Then came a sudden flicker of the lamps, a roar, an explosion. Was it inside or outside? The light went out. My pocket torch fell to the ground. The pram rolled towards me, set in movement by the shaking of the bunker. I jumped up. The light flickered a couple of times – then another explosion – and all was dark. I fell on my knees, my head in my hands.’ ²⁶

The sound of the bombs was terrifying, but it was perhaps even more frightening when the bomb was so close that it was no longer audible. As another woman who lived through this series of raids explains, the bombs became truly terrifying when one stopped hearing and started to feelthem. ‘Whenever a person hears a “singing” or “whistling”, it doesn’t matter if he is in a cellar or in a living-room, the impact of the bomb is some distance away. But woe betide you if you can feel the air pressure blast on your ears (very unpleasant); then the bombs are falling directly in the vicinity. One hears no booming, nothing, only this terrible blast of air pressure. ²⁷

In Hiltgunt Zassenhaus’s bunker one such wave of pressure blew the internal cover off the ventilation shaft, and the iron doors of the bunker groaned under the strain. The girl cowering inside was paralysed with fear. Once it became obvious that this was a full-scale attack, scores of other people arrived, desperate to escape the nightmare in the streets. Within a short time Hiltgunt’s bunker was overflowing with shocked and frightened people: ‘One explosion followed another. Suddenly from outside a despairing hammering on the bunker door – wild screams tore the night. Someone opened the door, and the crowd fell in like the possessed; they screamed to one another and struggled for breath, and the block walls echoed with the howling of children and the wailing of women. Over all droned the voice of Herr Braun [the bunker warden]: “Calm down! We have space for everyone!”’ ²⁸Beneath the seemingly endless explosions Hiltgunt lost all sense of time and, in the pitch darkness, all sense of space. She was aware only of the heaving mass of humanity around her. ‘Crammed together in the darkness, we became just a single mass of bodies, and at each explosion we swayed with the shaking bunker walls.’ ²⁹

On the first night of bombing the conditions inside some bunkers were appalling. Many of the structures were little more than a series of narrow tunnels in the ground, with wooden benches along their concrete walls. Even the larger, overground bunkers were often extremely cramped. They became so overcrowded that sometimes they were reserved exclusively for women and children, while some over-zealous bunker wardens also excluded foreign workers. There were simply not enough places to go round.

Paul Elingshausen, who witnessed the bombing that night, was shocked by the air-raid shelters. After trying, and failing, to save his house from the hail of incendiary bombs, he eventually joined his wife and two young children in the nearby bunker.

Imagine around a thousand people crammed into the small rooms, a real heat inside, sweat running down our bodies, the bunker full of smoke from outside, not a drop of water to drink, no food and no light. The electricity went straight away. Torches were all flat; the few tallow candles were soon finished. And the whole time there was such an atmosphere; outside the bombs roared, often so close that the bunker shook. Can you imagine this with women and babies? ³⁰

Despite the conditions, few complained. They were aware that the alternative – to weather the storm outside – was infinitely worse. Occasionally those near the doors would hear reports on what was happening outside as those on fire duty returned with messages for the bunker warden. In general, no news was good news. Fire wardens rarely beat on a shelter door unless it was time for everyone to evacuate the shelter.

* * *

Descriptions of what it was like to be in the streets at the time of the bombardment are rare, for the simple reason that few were foolish enough to risk it. With more than thirteen hundred tons of high-explosive bombs falling on the city, there was the strong likelihood of being caught in the blasts. Also, incendiary bombs struck the ground at high speed, and the most fearsome spilled liquid phosphorus as they landed. There was also the threat of being hit by falling masonry.

Wanda Chantler was one of the first to discover why it was so important to seek shelter during an air raid. She was sitting in the makeshift earth bomb shelter with the handful of women she had managed to rouse from their beds earlier when ‘Suddenly a gust of wind blew the door in. There was a terrific noise. It was like a winter’s night when the wind comes howling through the door and through the window, and you sit in the kitchen hoping it will go away – that sort of noise. And this wind blew our wooden door right open and we were exposed to a terrific blast of hot air. Until then we didn’t hear the bombs falling. We didn’t even knowthey were falling.’ ³¹

The blast knocked Wanda off her feet, and the other girls had to help her up. Shaken by the explosion, they huddled in the open doorway wondering what to do. Since their shelter no longer seemed to provide much protection they decided to venture back across the compound to see if the other women were all right. But as soon as they stepped through the door they saw that ‘The barracks was not there. It just was not there. I looked, and then I looked down, and it was all in a heap. That was all that was left of the barracks … We stood, the six of us, and we didn’t know what to do.’

Numbed by shock, they did not move for a while, but eventually they were drawn to the rubble that had once been their sleeping quarters by cries: ‘It was light, you could see everything, because it was burning, because the firebombs were falling down as well, and the phosphor bombs. We saved lots of girls, but some of them died. We just kept pulling them out of the rubble. There were bits of flesh everywhere. Bits of flesh. And there was one arm, just an arm, sticking out of the debris. One hundred and twenty-three girls died that night.’

Throughout Hamburg, similar destruction was being wreaked on countless other streets and houses. While those who had sought shelter in the larger public bunkers were generally safe, many more people had hidden in the cellars of the larger houses. When one of these received a direct hit, or caught fire, those in the cellar often found their exit blocked by rubble or flames. In such cases they could only escape by breaking through to a neighbouring cellar in the hope that there might still be a way out.

Sometimes the only option was to run through the fires, the most terrifying choice of all. Although he was only a small child at the time, Klaus Müller remembers doing exactly that. He lived with his parents and grandparents, who owned a milk shop on Marthastrasse, right in the centre of one of the worst-hit areas, and was sheltering with his family in a cellar beneath his grandfather’s apartment. As the bombing subsided, it became apparent that the whole house was on fire, and that the only way out was through a burning passageway into the inner courtyard. Fortunately, Klaus’s grandfather had kept several milk churns filled with water in their cellar for just such an emergency. ‘As a small child one remembers everything as being far larger – it was probably only a few metres – but it was an inferno. The entire entrance was filled with flames … My grandfather and the other men poured ten milk churns of water into the passageway, and this created a small path through which we could pass.’ ³²