Our fire engine was burning. My comrades had disappeared in the storm and heat. In order to stop myself being pulled into the fire I struggled against the storm and landed up in a huge bomb crater, full of water from a broken pipe. Trapped, I ripped the gas mask from my face and clung to the edge of the crater for fear of drowning. The rim broke off, my helmet was gone, dread began to take hold of me. I ducked under the water in order to escape the glowing heat. There was an insane noise in the air. ³²

In this atmosphere, surrounded by incessant noise and unbearable heat, the terrifying scenes took on a surreal quality.

With a glance over the edge of the crater I saw a man kneeling right in front of me. With big, frightened eyes he fell forwards. I pulled the dead man into the crater. Only those who had left the cellars by this time would now survive. They rushed over glowing mountains of rubble. Many were killed by the ruins collapsing, or torn to pieces by bombs, suffocated or burned. I could not believe what I was seeing. In the thunderous din none of them could hear the screams of the others. Each struggled for survival. Parts of a collapsing house façade poured down on the other side of the crater and into the water. The brown sludge splashed around the edge and meant the end for some of those seeking shelter. ³³

As he clung to the edge of the crater, Faupel lost all sense of time. He had no idea how long he stayed there, whether it was hours or merely minutes. Eventually, however, instinct told him to move on:

At some point in the night I ran on once more with the dripping wet jacket of the dead man over my head. In this whirling fire I had lost all sense of direction. On my way out of the chaos I came across a burnt-out tram. The windows had melted in the heat. Dead bodies lay naked on top of one another in the carriage. Their clothes had disintegrated into embers. The people had tried to shelter there from the firestorm. In Eiffestrasse they struggled for survival. Sinking into the hot Tarmac, they had tried to support themselves with their hands, and lay now on their knees. They ended their lives screaming with fear and pain. I could not help them. ³⁴

Although he was only a child, Wolf Biermann remembers equally chilling scenes:

The firestorm was so strong that it converted streets into jets. Schwabenstrasse, where we lived, was in a good position, aslant to the suction of the fire. But once you got into a street which was part of the suction, people started to burn like tinder and they had no chance. So we ran close to the walls to escape the storm. I saw how roofs were flying through the air; it was like in the movies, like science fiction, but real. The asphalt was burning and boiling. I saw two women running, a young one and an older one, whose shoes got stuck in the boiling asphalt. They pulled their feet out of the shoes but that wasn’t a good idea because they had to step into the boiling asphalt. They fell and didn’t get up again. Like flies in the hot wax of a candle. ³⁵

Ernst-Günther Haberland was another schoolchild who witnessed this uniquely awful vision, after leaving the safety of the main bunker at about five o’clock the next morning:

We looked around us at the area where we had once lived. All the buildings burned brightly, it was a single wall of fire. One could hear the terrible cries of people seeking help for their wounds. One saw people on Heidenkampsweg trying to cross from one side of the street to the other, where there was a canal. The asphalt of the road had become almost liquid with the immense heat. They reached the middle, where their feet got stuck in the asphalt. Their legs began to burn because of the heat, the flames ate their way up and met again above their heads. At first they screamed, then became quieter, and finally, they gave a last rattling breath and were dead. ³⁶

* * *

Survival in the open streets of Hamburg was now virtually impossible. The hurricane was full of burning debris – roofs, branches, pieces of masonry and timber – and there are many accounts of people being bowled over by items that hit them. ³⁷The air was so hot and so choked with smoke and poisonous gases as to be all but unbreathable. Sparks and embers caught on people’s hair, setting it on fire. To make things worse, the fugitives could not allow themselves to be carried along by the wind: since the hurricane was caused by the fire sucking air inwards to feed itself, that would have been suicide. Instead they had to battle againstit, and all the flaming debris it carried, to reach anything resembling safety. Neither were they able to seek shelter in doorways – often the heat from burning houses was so intense that they were obliged to stick to the middle of the road, where the force of the wind was strongest.

When the safety of an open space was too far for the fugitives immediately to reach, they had to try to get there in stages, taking what shelter they could along the way. One woman tells how she, her husband and daughter travelled from one burning cellar to the next, sheltering for as long as the flames were not immediately threatening, before moving on again. They did this no fewer than seven times, before finally succumbing to despair:

So we had finished with our lives. There was too little hope of escaping this hellish cauldron. No way to break through this ring. We no longer said a word to one another, we did not cry either, nor did we whine or complain, we only stared silently in front of ourselves. Suddenly we were told there was an escape route by the railroad embankment, that we should get onto the rails, since no trains could come because the station had been destroyed. We then slid down a long rope on to the platform. Today I can’t imagine how we managed to get down there – but anyway, we got down. Exhausted, we threw ourselves on to the embankment. However, the grassy knolls were so hot that one could not stay on them. The opposite embankment had already caught fire. Hannelore climbed to the top of the embankment with the last of her energy in order to see how thick the smoke above was… She called to us, and we climbed with what little strength we still had to the top, our cramped hands in the hot grass. When we arrived at the top, we fled into a small corrugated metal toilet. Here people sat on top of each other in the disgusting air, safe only from the sparks, and in no way from the smoke. ³⁸

On such a hellish night, a public toilet was a welcome haven, particularly if the cisterns still had water in them. Erika Wilken and her husband Willi found shelter in a toilet under the street on Grevenweg, at the centre of the firestorm area in Hammerbrook. For a while they huddled with at least eighty others, wetting a blanket in the water from the cisterns to drape over their heads. When it ran out they used the water from the toilet bowls. There was little they could do beyond staying put, and hoping not to suffocate as all the oxygen was sucked out of the air by the fires. But worse was to come:

To our misfortune, a large phosphorus bomb fell directly outside the entrance (whose door had been blown off on Saturday evening). The people nearest the door now gave way to an indescribable panic. The inner lavatory doors were torn off and used as shields in front of the bomb. After a few minutes, they too were burning brightly.

Terrible scenes took place, since all of us saw certain death in front of us, with the only way out a sea of flames. We were caught like rats in a trap. The doors were thrown on to the canister by screaming people and more smoke and heat poured in. In the meantime, the water in the tank had been used up… My husband was completely worn out and we crouched next to the bowl. The other people here sat down too; some collapsed and never woke up again. Three soldiers committed suicide. I begged my husband to beat back the flames with our blanket – the one object we had brought with us apart from our papers – but he was no longer able to do so. So with my last strength I did it. My hair began to singe and my husband extinguished it…