What now? Our hearts were racing, our faces began to puff up and we were close to fainting. Perhaps another five or eight minutes and we would be finished too. On my question ‘Willi, is this the end?’, my husband decided to risk everything and try to reach the outside… I took the blanket and he the little suitcase. Quickly but carefully, so that we would not slip on the corpses, we reached the outside, me first and my husband behind me. One! Two! Three! We were through the wall of fire. We made it. Both without burns; only our shoes were singed. But our last strength and courage had gone. We lay down on the ground at the side of the canal… People swimming in it kept wetting our blanket for us. 39
Erika and Willy Wilken had stumbled by accident upon probably the last safe haven in Hammerbrook. Away from the relative security of the parks and open spaces, the canals that criss-crossed the area proved the only salvation for thousands of people. Beside the water they were a fraction cooler, and the air near the water’s surface was breathable. Most of the fugitives did not stop on the canals’ banks but hurried to submerge themselves, cooling their burns in the life-saving water.
Yet even here it was not completely safe. There are many tales of people becoming drenched in liquid phosphorus and being unable to extinguish the flames, even by throwing themselves into the canals because phosphorus burns as soon as it comes back into contact with oxygen. Most of these stories can be dismissed as repetition of a particularly gruesome urban myth, 40but the British used liquid phosphorus in some of their incendiaries, and there are enough first-hand eyewitnesses to make one or two instances of this terrible story possible.
Just as dangerous, however, was the thin layer of oil on the water’s surface. Ben Witter, who witnessed the firestorm as a local journalist, describes the circumstances in which some people found themselves as they sought shelter in the canals:
It is difficult to explain how water can burn. It was burning because very many ships, small ships, had exploded and oil had been released into the water and the people who were themselves on fire jumped into it and… I don’t know, some kind of chemical must have been in it… and they burned, swam, burned, and went under. 41
The official report of the Hamburg police chief confirms that while the canals were often the only safe place to go they were still by no means comfortable. Even those who stayed in the water throughout the firestorm suffered burns on their heads; they were obliged to keep wetting their faces to avoid perishing in the heat. ‘The firestorm swept over the water with its heat and its showers of sparks so that even thick wooden posts and bollards burned down to the level of the water.’ 42Many people were obliged to stand in the water or swim for hours; some became exhausted and drowned. Others died from injuries caused by falling masonry and other debris that fell on to the water’s surface.
Twenty-one-year-old Heinz Masuch was driven to the Süd Kanal after being forced to abandon every other place of refuge he’d come across. Having left his shelter in Robinsonstrasse (a street so badly burned that it has since been erased from the map), he tried the docks, the Sorbenpark and a space behind the pillars of a bridge – but in each case the temperature became so unbearable that he and his companions feared that their clothes would ignite.
So we sat in the canal up to our necks in water and our wet jackets and coats over our heads. If we thought we had escaped the flames there, we were gravely mistaken, as there were glowing coal barges floating along, from which we had to protect ourselves. We must have spent two hours, maybe more, in the water, until the fires had died down. 43
Wolf Biermann’s mother was likewise trying desperately to find a safe place for them to weather the storm. Having taken shelter in a factory for a short time, she was now steering her son towards one of Hammerbrook’s canals, rightly assuming that it was the only place left that might offer them safety. As he recalls, he was still clutching a little bucket of jam she had entrusted to him in the cellar:
Back into the streets? To try that was to put yourself straight back into the blaze. That was suicide. Impossible. But we had to go. We turned left round the corner, there was a canal, a bridge. My mother tried to reach the water with me near the bridge. We crawled through the handrail, down the canal’s bank… We reached the water, found a spot in the group of people and stood in the water. I was standing next to an old lady who on every finger was holding a little suitcase or handbag, everything she could grab. And now that was all floating on the water. I saw, from my low point of view, that my head was at the same level as her hand. And suddenly I could see right in front of me how the woman’s fingers were losing their grip, how the suitcases were floating away, how the woman was sinking. Then she was gone.
More and more pieces of debris were falling around us from above, and it became obvious we couldn’t stay there. Some stayed because they could think of nothing better to do, but my mother had a feeling we should leave. So she grabbed me by my shoulders and swam with me across the canal. And on the other side it was idyllic! There was grass, there were shallow banks and there were a dozen other people who had escaped there. They were sitting there like in a theatre box: nothing could fall down from above, and around them there was the panorama of a burning city which they could watch from a safe position. How wonderful! Believe it or not, it’s true, I still had my little bucket in my hand. And as there was a good lid on it nothing bad had happened to it even when I fell into the water… We opened the lid and it was the most wonderful mirabelle jam of my life – little wonder when your throat is sore, from the smoke, from the fire, from all the dirt, from all the anxiety! We passed the bucket around, so that everybody could take a taste of its syrupy sweetness. It was paradise on earth, in the middle of hell! 44
From their position on the bank they had a grandstand view of the blazing buildings that stretched on all sides as far as the eye could see. Directly before them lay Hammerbrook, the centre of the firestorm, and the glow of Hamm beyond. To their right the docks were in flames, all the way down to the riverside suburb of Rothenburgsort. To their left, Borgfelde, Hohenfelde, Eilbek and Wandsbek were all burning.
* * *
It is impossible to tell precisely when the firestorm started, but certainly it was before the bombing finished. The word ‘firestorm’ was not written in the chronological record at Fire Service Headquarters until 2.40 a.m., but Hans Brunswig, the chief engineer on duty that night, remembers that by two o’clock the winds were so strong that it was impossible to walk through the fire-station courtyard: the men had to crawl on their hands and knees. 45From the study he made both at the time and after the war, Brunswig estimates that the firestorm probably began as early as twenty or thirty minutes after the first bombs fell. 46His suggestion is backed up by the accounts of eyewitnesses.
By 1.30 a.m., the fires already extended from the Berliner Tor on the edge of the city centre to the Hammer Park in the east, and from the banks of the river as far north as the Wandsbeker Chaussee. In half an hour the RAF had created a single fire that had engulfed several square miles of the city. Had it been left to itself it would
probably not have spread further. A feature of firestorms is that, because all the winds blow inwardsto feed the flames, there is little spread from the main centre. But the fire was not left to itself. The RAF continued bombing for almost half an hour after the firestorm had taken hold, dropping incendiaries across the entire eastern quarter of the city. Large parts of Eilbek, Barmbek and Wandsbek were badly hit, and soon the fire service was receiving reports that the flames had spread as far as the main railway station to the west, and the suburb of Horn to the east. 47