As he and the rest of the group escaped through the inner courtyard to the street outside, they found the whole of Marthastrasse on fire – not only the houses but the asphalt on the road. Beyond, they could see Bellealliancestrasse and the Eimsbüttler Chaussee where there was a small park, which would be safe, but to get to it they had to run along the pavement beside the burning road. It was only twenty metres, but by the time they got there Klaus’s clothes were alight – his parents had to beat out the flames, then carry him to safety in the park.

A few streets away, nine-year-old Liselotte Gerke was sheltering in a cellar on the Eimsbüttler Marktplatz. The street was home to a large tram depot, and tonight a line of stationary trams was nose to tail along the centre of the road. As Liselotte came out of her shelter she saw that while her side of the street was relatively untouched by the bombs, the opposite side was burning, and scores of people were trying to cross the road to escape the flames. But the trams were in the way, and there wasn’t time for them all to clamber into the cars and out the other side. The next day, when she and her friends went out to investigate the damage to the trams, she stumbled on a pair of small, charred corpses. ‘This was the moment the war started for me. It was the first time I had ever seen anything like it.’ ³³

* * *

Descriptions like these are merely snapshots of what people experienced that night. The bombs spread over the entire west of the city, and in many places to the east and south. Tens of thousands of people were affected, and since the bombs were indiscriminate, women and children found themselves caught up in the fire and explosions just as frequently as the city’s workforce, who were the ostensible target of the attack. Even political prisoners and forced labourers such as Wanda Chantler were affected. Terrifying though their ordeal was, however, the bombing raid was no worse than many others that had taken place in other parts of Germany. Despite the widespread destruction, most people escaped with their lives, and even their belongings, intact. Hamburg had not yet been made special by its ordeal – it was just another name on the long list of towns that had suffered heavy bombing raids.

That said, the death toll was extraordinarily high. Early estimates claimed that about fifteen hundred people died during this raid – far more than in any other previous attack on the city – and tens of thousands more were now homeless. ³⁴For a city that had made such a huge effort to ready itself for an attack like this, the figures represented a crushing defeat.

According to the official police report on the disaster, the performance of the emergency services had been exemplary, but in the heat of battle it was inevitable that many of the drills that had been practised so often did not go according to plan. Hans Brunswig worked in the technical division of the Hamburg fire service, and noted that some of the Nazi Party volunteers did not follow the drills properly, and were content to muddle through. ³⁵Many eyewitnesses on the night say the same thing: Erwin Garvens, for example, noted in his diary that it was almost impossible to put out the fires in his neighbourhood because of a lack of leadership and direction. While the women co-operated admirably, many men, particularly the soldiers on leave, were quick to abandon burning buildings to their fate. ³⁶

To be fair, however, the huge destruction in the city, including the severing of many water mains, made it almost impossible for even the best-trained fire-fighters to do what they were supposed to do. Paul Elingshausen, the deputy air-raid warden of his block, spent almost two hours fighting the fires in his and the neighbouring houses before he finally gave up:

There was no running water, the Tommies had smashed the waterworks first. The small amount of water we had on the ground was quickly used up, and we had to abandon house after house. Finally Dr Wilms’s house caught fire, and I, as deputy air-raid warden, stopped fighting the fire, since there was neither sand nor water, and the flames were already licking the side of our roof. We started to save what could be saved … I had all of fourteen minutes to rescue the most important things, some clothes and other stuff … One cannot imagine how fast fire is, and how easily it can cut off your escape route; this is why I also gave up, no matter how much I would have liked to have this or that. And so I stood below with what little stuff I had, and was forced to watch, full of impotent anger, as our beloved building burned. ³⁷

The British tactic of dropping a combination of high-explosive and incendiary bombs had worked: while the incendiaries started the fires, enormous explosions kept the local wardens away from them until it was too late. Further bombs on timer fuses continued to hamper the fire service into the next morning. The gas and water mains had been cut, and so had electricity supplies, making many pumps useless. Just as problematic was the damage to telephone lines. In order to direct the emergency effort, the control room of the Air Protection leader had to be in communication with all the affected areas – but while they were swamped with calls from the south and east of the city, the worst-hit areas in the west were unable to inform them of how bad things had become. As a consequence, early on at least, the fire service was directed to the wrong parts of town. Once the mistake was discovered, the fire chief had no choice but to send out motorcycle dispatch riders, some of whom perished in the chaos. Officers on reconnaissance were often forced to take long detours and were unable to report back for several hours. Things became even more difficult when the control room was engulfed in flames, and its staff were compelled to evacuate to another building. ³⁸

Early that Sunday morning the city’s gauleiter, Karl Kaufmann, was compelled to declare a state of emergency. Immediately the running of the city came under stronger Nazi Party control, and the SS were sent out to make sure that fire-fighters continued the effort to extinguish fires throughout the day. Kaufmann’s worst fear was that the RAF would return the next night to stoke the fires, in which case it was essential that Saturday night’s conflagrations were put out by dusk on Sunday. In the event it proved impossible. Even after fire services from all of the nearby towns had been drafted in to help, many fires raged for days. In some areas the fires were so huge that they were not extinguished for several weeks – many households had already bought their winter supplies of coal and coke, and when they caught fire it was next to impossible to put them out. ³⁹

* * *

Once the all-clear had sounded, the flak batteries stopped firing. Unable to pinpoint the attacking aeroplanes, the best they had been able to do was put up an unaimed barrage in the hope that they might score a few hits. When they stopped, the barrels of the guns were glowing with the heat of the firing. Rudolf Schurig, the officer in command of the heavy flak battery at Steilshoop, claimed afterwards that his battery alone had shot 547 rounds into the sky on that night. ⁴⁰In total, about fifty thousand rounds of heavy flak were discharged into the heavens. ⁴¹For all that, only a single Wellington had been shot down over Hamburg, and a Halifax of the Pathfinder Force seriously damaged. ⁴²

Now that the firing had stopped, the flak helpers were free to join the emergency effort in the streets. In Altona, the wounded Johann Johannsen was finally given permission to stand down by his battery commander. He went immediately to look for his family. As he hurried through the burning streets he narrowly missed being blown to smithereens by a high-explosive bomb: even though the RAF planes had returned home, explosions were still going off throughout the city, partly because numerous bombs had timer fuses, and partly because chemicals caught fire in factories. By the time Johannsen reached his house, he was a bag of nerves: