The centre of this burning hell was in Borgfelde, around the point where Ausschläger Weg crosses the Mittel Kanal. ⁴⁸This was where the Lotze Engineering Works was situated, which the British War Office suspected of producing underwater mines for the Wehrmacht. However, the Nienstadt timber yard lay on the other side of the canal, and it is possible that the intense heat given off by huge stacks of burning wood acted as the first catalyst to the firestorm. ⁴⁹

For four and a half hours this unassuming corner of the city was the eye of the hurricane – the centre of a city-wide furnace that was burning at temperatures of over 1000°C. By dawn there was little left to burn. In many areas the house façades were all that was left standing, like blackened empty shells above the glowing rubble. Everything else – floors, ceilings, furniture, the stuff of people’s everyday lives – had been consumed. In some buildings the fires would continue to burn for a long time, particularly those in which the occupants had stocked up early on coke and coal for the winter, but in most cases it was gradually burning itself out. As it ran out of fuel, the raging heat diminished, and the wind died down.

Morning broke darkly over the city, just as Sunday had, the sun blotted out by smoke, and no light beyond that which came from the fires. In the gloom it was impossible for the survivors to see the extent of the city’s devastation. The damage immediately around them, though, was plain: buildings reduced to shells, cratered roads, burned-out cars and trams. And, most distressingly, there were corpses everywhere. Almost all eyewitness accounts of this terrible morning have in common a deep sense of shock at the gruesome and ubiquitous presence of death.

Max Kipke remembers the sight that greeted him when he came to one of the underground shelters in Hammerbrook:

I went to the shelter and wanted to see if people had already come back out. But I saw only corpses, corpses, corpses. They must have wanted to reach the shelter, but did not make it. Even today, I do not understand why they were already dead. I was still in pretty good shape. The staircase that led down to the entrance of the shelter had a bend in it, and shortly after, another: the shelter was built practically two storeys underground. The staircase was covered with bodies. The door to the shelter opened outwards, and because it was blocked by the corpses, the people could not open it. After a while the next living being arrived, a marine. I asked him if he could help me. The shelter was full of people and they probably could not open the door. A third man joined us, and together we managed to clear the entrance enough, so that we were able to open the door a short way. The first people came out; they felt their way up, because there was no light – all the power lines were destroyed. Maybe it was better that they did not see anything. ⁵⁰

The sensitivities of those leaving the bunkers would not be spared for long. Once they found themselves at street level they were greeted with the most gruesome sights, as Ruth Schramm remembers:

When we had clambered up the stairs, our first glance fell on the stacked corpses to the left of the shelter entrance. It was a double row, around ten metres long. I can still clearly see these completely blackened bodies before me. There was no time to waste thoughts on them; we were forced to protect our hair… ⁵¹

Parents did what they could to shield their children from the horror. Else Lohse was a young mother who had literally thrown her children out of a ground-floor window on to the Hammer Landstrasse to save them from the flames. Now she was doing all she could to keep them safe, both physically and emotionally:

The little ones kept asking, as we stepped over the dead: ‘What is that, mama?’ I said to them, ‘Don’t step on that or you will fall. It is a branch, fallen from a tree.’ ‘Mama, here is another one,’ and so it went on from Meuthien to Biederbeck, one after another. Some hugged themselves, others folded together or their limbs spread… You cannot imagine the scene, how the Hammer Landstrasse looked. Burned-out cars stood at angles in the road, dead upon dead. ⁵²

Traute Koch also remembers the corpses on Hammer Landstrasse. She had spent the night in a house that was relatively safe because it had been burned out in a previous raid. Now her mother was trying to lead her away from the fires to safety:

We came to the junction of the Hammer Landstrasse and Louisenweg. I carried my little sister and also helped my mother climb over the ruins. Suddenly, I saw tailors’ dummies lying around. I said, ‘Mummy, no tailors lived here and, yet, so many dummies lying around.’ My mother grabbed me by my arm and said, ‘Go on. Don’t look too closely. On. On.’ ⁵³

It is impossible to imagine the trauma that such sights inflicted on the exhausted people, who were already in shock from their experiences of the night. Many were driven to the brink of madness. Erich Titschak, who had spent the night out in the streets remembers seeing a woman screaming, ‘They’re coming to kill us!’ repeatedly, although the bombers and the firestorm had long gone. ⁵⁴

With so many people struggling to reach the open spaces, the parks were soon filled with the screams of the injured and the weeping of those who had been forced to leave behind loved ones. One woman describes sitting in what was left of the rose garden in the Stoltenpark, listening to all the terrifying sounds around her:

In front of me was the front of Heidenkampsweg, and I saw building after building collapse. Behind me was the animal sanctuary where the animals slowly burned. On top of the cries from the surrounding burned and wounded, the last calls of the dying, and the cries for help from the collapsing buildings, came the barking and screeching of the cats and dogs. It was enough to drive you to despair. ⁵⁵

Hans Jedlicka, who was also sheltering in this park, witnessed similar things:

How long we stayed in the Stoltenpark I no longer know. We watched the flaming hell of Hammerbrook. It still surprises me that anyone at all was able to make it through there alive. Again and again people came running over the bridge into the park. Screaming people with dreadful burns. One young woman especially stays in my memory. I still have the picture before my eyes. She came screaming out of the smoke over the bridge. She was completely naked and barefoot. As she came closer I saw that her feet were nothing but charred stumps. As soon as she found safety she fell down and died. ⁵⁶

Herbert Wulff, who had spent the night huddling between an advertising pillar and the wall of a bridge, remembers the scene the next morning, after the fires had died down. Buildings were still burning, his city was utterly ruined and horribly disfigured corpses were scattered across the Heidenkampsweg:

The most gruesome sight we must have seen was the people, lying on the ground completely naked, no longer recognizable as man or woman, with a centimetre-thick burned crust covering them, seemingly dead, but still giving their last signs of life through guttural sounds and small movements of their arms. This appalling sight will stay with me all my life. ⁵⁷

* * *

It is impossible to say with any accuracy how many people died that night. At the time rumours put the death-toll at a hundred thousand, and for once the figure was not entirely far-fetched. Because of the chaos that reigned in the aftermath of the catastrophe, German officials were never able to say for certain which deaths had occurred during which air raid, but the official number for the series of attacks that week was eventually calculated at 42,600, ⁵⁸of whom the vast majority died during the firestorm of 27/28 July.