Everything was in flames: houses, vehicles, trees. Burning phosphorus dripped from the roofs. Around my house it was empty of people – apparently they were sitting in the cellar even though the house was ablaze. I hurried into the stairwell, where glowing sparks were already coming down, and then in two, three leaps was down in the air-raid cellar. On my question, ‘All Ok?’, I discovered that my son and another person who’d been sheltering in the cellar had broken through a wall cavity into a neighbouring cellar. ⁴³

As he gathered up his family and took them through the streets to safety, the suitcase he had rescued from the cellar caught fire, set alight by a ‘huge rain of sparks… pouring down over everything’. ⁴⁴

Across Hamburg people were emerging from their shelters to be greeted by chaos. After several terrifying hours below ground, Rolf Arnold clearly remembers his first sight of the devastation that was unfolding outside his Harvestehude home:

As we left the cellar after the regular tone of the all-clear siren, the first window in the stairwell presented us with a view over the courtyard towards Harvestehude: a terrible picture – everything we could see was on fire. Grindelberg was burning on both sides, and the facing parts of Oberstrasse, Werderstrasse, Brahmsallee, Hansastrasse and Hallerstrasse – they were all burning. It was a complete sea of flame. ⁴⁵

Just across the Alster in Winterhude, the picture of destruction was similar, as Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg recorded in her diary shortly afterwards:

Back in our flat we stand on the balcony and see nothing but a circle of flames around the Alster, fire everywhere in our neighbourhood. Thick clouds of smoke are hanging over the city, and smoke comes in through all the windows carrying large flakes of fluttering ash. And it is raining in torrents! We go into the road just for a moment at three thirty a.m. In the Sierichstrasse several houses have collapsed and fire is still raging. The sight of the Bellevue is dreadful, and the Mühlenkamp is nothing but glass and rubble. We go to bed completely shattered. ⁴⁶

The huge fires across the city were so numerous that they sparked off a number of unusual meteorological events. To begin with, the massive heat had created strong winds. Johann Johannsen claims he had to struggle against ‘a frightful storm, caused by the heat’. ⁴⁷Liselotte Gerke remembers her aunt telling her the next day that she was unable to fight her way through the wind to the shelter at Osterstrasse station, and had to go to the one at Emilienstrasse instead. ⁴⁸And then, amid all the wind and fire, another phenomenon occurred: it started to rain.

The full effect of these events could only be seen clearly from a distance. Professor Dr Franz Termer, director of the museum of ethnology, was watching the city burn from his home in Hochkamp in the far western suburbs:

I will never forget the view over burning Hamburg. On a wide horizon, from north to south, a single fiery glow; above this, while we had a clear starry sky over us, an enormous cloud whirled and billowed upon itself over the city, reaching to the sky with sharp, threatening edges. I was reminded of a volcano eruption, and, to strengthen this, the phenomena it caused were similar to an eruption. Because of the hot air, which rose and then cooled and condensed in the upper atmosphere, a downpour fell over Hamburg from the 2,000–3,000-metre high cloud of smoke… In Hamburg the rain mixed with the ash and created a thick black mud, as we know of volcanic eruptions – a mixture that covered everything, distorted people’s faces and matted their hair. I personally saw such creatures on the following day. ⁴⁹

* * *

As Sunday dawned Hamburg was wreathed in thick black smoke. Perversely, the morning seemed darker than the night before: at least then the people had had the fires to see by, but under the smoke there was nothing to light the streets. Night had become day, and day night, as Pastor Schoene of the Christuskirche in Eimsbüttel noted: ‘By the morning everything was wrapped in black smoke, which was so thick that at nine o’clock in the morning it was still too dark to see anything indoors. Not until eleven o’clock did it become lighter, so that one was able to see what time it was. At three in the afternoon the sun appeared like a small ball shining through the smoke cloud.’ ⁵⁰

The houses and their coal stores were burning and so were numerous warehouses, storing everything from timber and grain to margarine. ⁵¹The municipal gasworks was ablaze, and in Barmbek three thousand litres of ethanol exploded in a liqueur factory. ⁵²

The billowing smoke was blown by the prevailing winds eastwards across the city. When Ilse Grassmann woke up in her Uhlen-horst apartment, she recorded in her diary the eerie effects of this huge cloud: ‘The sun has no power today. It is already midday and it still hasn’t managed to pierce through the layer of smoke and ash. An indescribable radiance: a wan, yellow light gives everything a feeling of unreality that is beginning to seem oppressive.’ ⁵³

Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, who lived a little further north, noted: ‘There is no proper daylight the following morning, the town is so shrouded in smoke. The sun cannot fight its way through, but looks like a bloodshot eye on to the devastation. It remains like that all through the day; the smell of burning is all pervading, so are the dust and the ash. And the siren never stops.’ ⁵⁴

Her husband, Emil, walked into the city to see what had happened, and when he returned, ‘He was full of sad tales. His beloved cigar shop no longer existed, his favourite luncheon place, Michelsen, destroyed, huge devastation at the Gänsemarkt, a direct hit on the Opera, Eimsbüttel and Grindel wiped off the face of the earth.’ ⁵⁵

In fact, the scale of the damage was beyond anything that anyone on the ground could yet imagine. In Eimsbüttel whole streets had been destroyed, with post offices, schools, churches, the tram depot, the police station and Schlump railway station. In Altona the damage included numerous factories and council offices, the military hospital, an electricity sub-station, the county courts, the police headquarters and barracks, and the old town hall. ⁵⁶Although no area was quite ‘wiped off the face of the earth’, the damage in the west of the city was extensive, and the dispersed nature of the bombing meant that not a single area of central Hamburg was unaffected. The effect on morale was devastating.

Wanda Chantler had spent most of the night doing what she could to help the wounded and dying in her forced-labour camp, even stepping through the barbed wire to help rescue a German family whose house on the other side of the street had been hit. After a long night she returned to the rubble. Exhausted and confused, she wanted to see if any of her few belongings had survived the destruction, and was particularly concerned about her Latin grammar book, which she had been studying in the evenings:

I should have taken it with me in my pocket when the warning sounded, but it was so hot that night that I didn’t put my coat on. So I’d lost my grammar, and I was looking for it in this terrific light from the fires. And there, in the debris, were five eyes on a plank, looking at me. Just five people’s eyes. And I said ‘Go to sleep,’ and started crying. Five eyes on a plank. I said, ‘Go to sleep, I’ll come back.’ But when I came back they were not there. ⁵⁷

Over the coming week, the forced labourers of the Lokstedt fish-canning factory were abandoned by the authorities, forgotten among the mounting devastation. Wanda and many of the other surviving prisoners considered escaping – the barbed-wire perimeter fence of their camp had been blown down, and the guards were caught up in the wave of chaos that had swept the city. But since they had nowhere to go most stayed where they were, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.