It was the incessant nature of the attacks that made them so difficult to bear. By attacking so soon after the British raid, the Americans had seriously hampered the rescue effort – and since the entire city was engaged in putting out the old fires there was nobody to deal with the new ones caused by the B-17s. To make things worse, the RAF had sent six Mosquito bombers to Hamburg on Sunday night, and again on Monday, with the sole purpose of causing as much nuisance as possible. After what had happened on Saturday night, nobody was taking any risks, and the entire city had huddled inside its air-raid shelters for several hours on both nights. Among their obvious material woes, the whole population was now suffering from severe sleep deprivation.

It was not until Tuesday that the people of Hamburg got any peace. In the lull that day, the city authorities were finally able to get a clear picture of the damage that had been done. It was not a pretty one. Worst hit were the areas around Altona and Eimsbüttel in the west of the city where whole districts had been burned to the ground. Barmbek was also fairly heavily damaged, and the port area on the south shore of the Elbe had been hit by all three raids in succession. With the damage to power lines, and the destruction of Neuhof power station, electricity was now limited. The gas and water mains had been breached in countless places, which hindered the fire services’ efforts to extinguish the fires. The transport systems in the worst hit areas were now non-existent, although the main train lines in and out of the city were still functioning. There was major disruption to the telephone network within Hamburg, and after the destruction of the long-distance exchange in Rotherbaum all lines to the rest of Germany were defunct. ⁵

Almost all of the fires had been brought under control, which had required a Herculean effort. However, according to Hamburg’s chief of police, by the evening of Tuesday, 27 July, there were still fifty large fires burning across the west of Hamburg, and a further 1,130 smaller ones that the fire-fighters had been unable to put out. Despite heavy reinforcement from other northern German fire units, the sheer number of fires had been overwhelming. At the height of the crisis eighty-seven kilometres of street frontage had been ablaze in the west of the city alone. There were several singlefires that covered an area of four square kilometres or more: such conflagrations were simply too big to deal with. The best the firemen could do was put out smaller outbreaks at the edges, and stop the blaze spreading. By nightfall on 27 July, almost every fire-fighter in Hamburg was still working in the west of the city. Most had had no rest and little food for three days. But the situation, broadly speaking, was stable. ⁶

* * *

With the fires under control, the heavy pall of smoke that had smothered the city all day on Sunday began to disperse. Hiltgunt Zassenhaus described the scenes of utter devastation she encountered as she walked into the university on Monday morning to attend her physics exam:

Along the way furniture was piled up outside the burning houses. Cushions and mattresses were singed, mahogany scratched and scorched. Their owners sat beside them, as if they were waiting for removal vans. But no vehicle could have come along the torn-up streets; and where the streets were clear cars and lorries drove through at top speed. Their vibrations sent a trembling through the broken walls; façades crumbled together and blocked off one street after another. ⁷

The threat of falling façades was not the only danger she encountered as she tried to pick her way through the city:

Rubble blocked the streets, so we had to go round it; we climbed over broken walls and charred wood, one after another, like a line of ants… ‘Watch out!’ shouted a voice from the side of a mountain of rubble. ‘There are unexploded bombs all over here!’ But in blind indifference the crowd continued. What was the point of closing off the way? There were unexploded bombs everywhere. Each step back was just as dangerous as each step forward. ⁸

Because of the widespread destruction to electricity cables and gas and water mains, even those living outside the worst-affected areas found their lives beset with difficulties, as Dr Franz Termer described in a letter to a friend at the time:

Organization has quickly fallen apart. A shortage of bread is now beginning to take hold. One cannot cook, there is no gas as yet; one can only wash sparingly as there is no water in our homes. We cook at a neighbour’s house – she has an electric oven. We have the advantage that on one of the plots in our road there is a pump in the garden, to which the entire neighbourhood traipses. My wife pushes the pram with water containers, I carry buckets. ⁹

In devastated districts the daily journey to the water hydrant was not only depressing, it was downright dangerous. Just south of the Hagenbeck zoo a coal depot on Steenwisch was still ablaze, as was a floor-polish factory that had suffered a direct hit. The

polish was flowing down the road: residents had to step barefoot through the hot liquid to get water from the hydrant on the other side of the road. ¹⁰

There were other blows to morale. Thousands of people’s homes had been destroyed, but so had the places where they worked, shopped, or spent their leisure time. In all the cutbacks ordered by Joseph Goebbels after his proclamation of ‘Total War’, Germany’s cinemas and theatres had remained unrestricted, because the Nazis recognized how important they were for keeping up people’s spirits. ¹¹Now many of Hamburg’s best-loved theatres lay in ruins. The Opera House in St Pauli was completely burned out, as were parts of the Staatstheater, and the front of the Thalia-Theater in the town centre had been seriously damaged by a bomb that had exploded opposite. Many cafés and dance-halls, such as the Trichter dance-hall in St Pauli, were now little more than rubble. Even the theatre museum in Altona had been destroyed. ¹²

One of the most poignant episodes in this tragic period involved the famous Hagenbeck zoo, which was hit in the British attack on Saturday night. Four keepers died during the struggle to put out the fires, and five more were killed when the zebra house received a direct hit. But it was the animals that suffered most. A hundred and twenty large animals were lost during the night, along with countless smaller ones. When an 8,000-pound blast bomb landed near the big-cat house several of the occupants escaped: two jaguars and a Siberian tiger had to be shot the next morning. All the big cats that stayed inside burned to death in the fire.

In the zoo’s official report the writer’s weariness is plain:

Everything that was not burned down was destroyed by explosive bombs: the main buildings, both restaurants, the cattle sheds, the deer and goat house, the aviary, the walkways and superintendent’s house, the zebra stalls, the ticket office, the country house opposite the main entrance, the business yards, the baboon enclosure, the monkey bath, the Rhesus monkey enclosure, the aquarium. The remaining buildings were partially destroyed by fire and explosion, and have been provisionally repaired by hand. ¹³

Curiously, none of the animals was driven wild by its experiences, and few tried to escape from their broken cages and enclosures – it is probable that they were every bit as shocked as their human counterparts. There were a few exceptions: some of the monkeys escaped into the surrounding area, and a stallion used his new-found freedom to play with a circus mare, even though he had lost an eye.