Most of the injuries that occurred were caused by the great heat – inflamed lungs, scorched eyes, severe burns – but many people had broken bones from the blasts of high-explosive bombs and falling masonry. When the authorities arrived en masseto oversee the evacuation, these people were taken away first, carried off in whatever vehicles could be commandeered: boats, lorries and even horse-drawn carriages. Most people, however, had to walk to the edge of the city to find transport. All the normal methods of escape – trams, subways and the railway – had been destroyed. Most roads were impassable. The only transport conduit relatively unaffected was the river, and even that was strewn with debris.

As tens of thousands of people streamed out of Hamburg, they left behind a broken city, shrouded in smoke, in many places still burning. Despite the terror they had all experienced, it was impossible to leave without a last glance at the place that had been their home. For many it seemed like their final farewell and, in a sense, it was: although most would return to Hamburg in future months and years, it would never be the same city again. In the course of a single night almost a quarter of it had been erased from the map.

Henni Klank, who had escaped to the river with her newborn baby, left the city by boat. She remembers her departure as a final moment of supreme sadness:

The boat was supposed to go to Lauenburg, and what took place aboard it on the journey is almost beyond description. There was no wound-dressing material, only paper bandages. I helped a young mother dress her half-burned baby with my makeshift gauze-nappy. We couldn’t do more… The woman and the others were all in a state of shock. We glanced back once more at our broken and beloved Hamburg, across which a giant mushroom-cloud was spreading. It was as if it wanted to say: I’ll cover up all of this horror that descended on Hamburg tonight, for ever! ⁷¹

17. The ‘Terror of Hamburg’

A stream of haggard, terrified refugees flowed into the neighbouring provinces.

In every large town people said: ‘What happened to Hamburg yesterday

can happen to us tomorrow.’

Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland ¹

The events of 27/28 July 1943 shook the Nazi hierarchy to its core. Writing in his diary a few days later, Josef Goebbels called the disaster ‘the greatest crisis of the war’. ²For once, the normally resourceful propaganda minister seemed at a loss for what to do.

A city of a million inhabitants has been destroyed in a manner unparalleled in history. We are faced with problems that are almost impossible of solution. Food must be found for this population of a million. Shelter must be secured. The people must be evacuated as fast as possible. They must be given clothing. In short, we are facing problems there of which we had no conception even a few weeks ago. ³

Many other key figures in the Nazi establishment were just as shaken. Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and War Production, told Hitler that if the British managed to attack another six German towns on the same scale then armaments production would be brought to a halt. ⁴Erhard Milch, the State Secretary for Air, went further: ‘It’s much blacker than Speer paints it,’ he told the members of his ministry. ‘If we get just five or six more attacks like these on Hamburg, the German people will just lay down their tools, however great their willpower.’ ⁵

The crisis of confidence became so bad that Hitler was forced to take action to avert a collapse of morale in the Party. A few days after the catastrophe, he instructed Goebbels to speak to an assembly of ministers and gauleiters to ‘inject some concrete into them’. Ever faithful to his master, Goebbels did as he was told. It was a tense meeting. During the discussion, Milch repeatedly interrupted Goebbels with the almost treasonable outcry, ‘We have lost the war! Finally lost the war!’ The propaganda minister had to appeal to his honour as an officer to quieten him. ⁶

While those around him were in deep shock at the scale of the disaster, Hitler appeared to react in much the same way as he did to all such catastrophes: by remaining in denial. To Speer’s announcement that further British attacks might halt German arms production, he simply said, ‘You’ll straighten all that out again.’ Neither was he sympathetic to the victims of the firestorm. When Hamburg’s gauleiter, Karl Kaufmann, repeatedly telegraphed him, begging him to visit the stricken city, Hitler steadfastly refused. When Kaufmann asked him at least to receive a delegation of the heroic rescue crews, Hitler refused that too. He was simply not interested in Hamburg, or the fate of its people. ⁷

* * *

On the other side of the North Sea, the mood was precisely the opposite of that in Germany. While the Nazis imposed a virtual news freeze on all but the most general reports of the firestorm, the British and American authorities were quick to announce their success to the international press. In London, The Timesprinted a large photograph of American bombs falling on the Howaldtswerke shipyards under the headline ‘Hamburg Battered’: ‘Air bombing reached a new intensity on Tuesday night,’ it said, causing damage that would ‘far exceed that caused in any previous attack’. ⁸The Daily Expresswas more graphic. ‘RAF blitz to wipe Hamburg off the war map’ was the front-page headline on 31 July:

It now seems plain that Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, our bomber chief, has set himself the task of wiping out completely the town of Hamburg from the enemy’s war effort… Bombs went down at the rate of about 50 tons a minute for 45 minutes, and nothing the guns and night fighters could do could stop them. ⁹

In America, the headlines were equally triumphant: ‘Hamburg Pictured in Ruin and Death,’ wrote the New York Times; ‘Swedes Report Hamburg Has “Ceased to Exist” ’ claimed the New York Herald Tribune; while the Washington Postwent with ‘Heaviest Raid Dumps Death on Hamburg’. ¹⁰To add weight to their reports, they quoted statistics and eyewitness statements from the neutral press in Sweden and Switzerland. Lest the German people missed out on the news, propaganda leaflets were printed, showing photographs of the devastation, to be dropped across Germany over the next few weeks. The photographs’ caption read, ‘Das war Hamburg’ (‘This was Hamburg’), the verb deliberately in the past tense. ¹¹

The Soviets also appreciated the propaganda value of the catastrophe. In the days after the firestorm Russian soldiers erected loudspeakers along the front to broadcast the news across no man’s land to the German troops. The announcements came with the suggestion that, since the Germans were suffering as badly at home as they were at the front, they should surrender. Most German troops did not believe what they heard, of course; they were used to enemy propaganda. It was not until they were able to return to Hamburg on leave that they discovered the truth for themselves. As one veteran from the Russian Front remembers, their first view of the city left them in a state of shock, despite the warnings. ‘When we saw it [Hamburg] we just stood there in the train and thought, This cannot be. It was not only me, but all of us were completely shattered by it. We thought, that’s it, the war’s over.’ ¹²

Soldiers caught up in the bombing said that it was far worse than being at the front. ¹³Some claimed that it was worse even than the military disaster at Stalingrad. Martha Bührich remembers meeting a soldier in the street who said that ‘he had witnessed the hell of Stalingrad, but that it was nothing compared to this terrible night’. After the war, many others said exactly the same thing. ¹⁴