Looking back, the implication of such statements is clear. If Stalingrad was the great turning point of the war for the German Army, then Hamburg was the equivalent for German civilians. Before the firestorm most people believed that their towns were largely safe from Allied bombers; afterwards they realized that they would be lucky to escape erasure from the map. Hamburg made it clear that the Allies, and the British in particular, were intent on annihilating one city after another until Germany capitulated. It was beginning to look as though the terrible predictions that Douhet had made in the 1920s were at last coming true: the home cities had become more dangerous than the battlefields. ¹⁵

* * *

While government ministers were panicking over how to handle the disaster, the city authorities in Hamburg could not allow themselves such a luxury. With vast swathes of the city still on fire, and tens of thousands abandoning it in panic, something had to be done immediately. Early on the morning of Wednesday, 28 July, Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann officially announced the evacuation of Hamburg. Women and children were told, not asked, to leave the city within the next few hours.

As Goebbels had suspected, the evacuation of Hamburg was a logistical nightmare. According to the city’s disaster plan, displaced people were supposed to be evacuated by rail – but since all the train lines in the centre of Hamburg and most of the city’s stations had been destroyed, this was impossible. The roads were not much better. Throughout the main disaster area the streets were full of craters, and rubble from collapsing buildings had made many impassable. To make things worse, whole districts were still on fire. In such circumstances the only course of action was for refugees to make their way to the edge of the firestorm area on foot. They would be guided by the emergency services, and evacuation would take place from there. ¹⁶

In an attempt to bring order to the chaos, the city authorities were forced to improvise wildly. Almost all of the collection centres for the homeless had been destroyed or damaged, so the authorities designated four huge refugee camps: at the Moorweide Park, at the horse-racing courses in Horn and Farmsen, and at a large open space in Billstedt. Since nobody knew about them, loudspeaker vans were sent to roam the outer edges of the firestorm area telling people where to go. At the same time dressing stations were set up on all the major exit roads to cope with the huge numbers of injured staggering out of the destroyed city. Enormous amounts of food and drink were brought in to feed everyone. On the first day alone half a million loaves were given out, along with sixteen thousand litres of milk, beer, tea and coffee. ¹⁷

Meanwhile, the authorities commandeered lorries, buses and horse-drawn carriages from every possible source to get people out of the city. Ten thousand men from the armed forces were brought in to help with the operation, along with all the police and SS forces that neighbouring areas could spare. They shuttled people from the refugee camps to the nearest major stations – more than three-quarters of a million people in total – then sent them to cities throughout the Reich. A further fifty thousand were evacuated on the river, and thousands more were flown out from Fuhlsbüttel airfield. Within a few days more than a million people had been evacuated from the city, the largest such transfer ever carried out in Germany at such short notice.

* * *

The figures are undeniably impressive. On a grand scale it seems that the evacuation worked smoothly and efficiently – incredibly so, given the extent to which the authorities had to improvise. But this was not how most people experienced it. As they stumbled out of the burning suburbs, the streets strewn with corpses and rubble, many refugees were too exhausted to walk as far as the collection centres. Occasionally lorries arrived at seemingly random locations to help them on their way, but there were too few to make much difference. Many mothers were forced to stand with their children on street corners hoping to catch a ride on an army truck or in a private car. ¹⁸

Huge numbers of people did not wait to be processed through the official collection centres, but made their way to nearby towns and villages in the hope of finding shelter there. It is important to remember that not everyone was supposed to go: officially, it was only the city’s women and children who were evacuated, while the men were meant to stay behind to continue working. In reality, many men left to take their families to safety. Nobody considered stopping them.

Within hours, all the satellite towns of Hamburg were swamped with refugees. Even those further away were unable to cope with the numbers: it was one thing to take people away from Hamburg, but another to find them places to stay. For example, when Heino Merck fled to his sister’s house in Kellinghusen he found it already full of refugees. ¹⁹Ilse Grassmann and her children were unable to stay with her sister-in-law in Wittenburg because the house was jam-packed with other relatives in the same plight. ²⁰Erwin Krohn described the scene when he arrived in Neumünster as ‘unparalleled chaos. Forty thousand inhabitants and 160,000 Hamburgers. Nobody knew where to go.’ ²¹

With so many people on the move, the city authorities were terrified of a breakdown in law and order. To prevent possible riots they stationed extra police and even SS units in the refugee-collection points. Helmuth Saß describes the scene he witnessed when he arrived in the Stadtpark on Friday morning:

On one side of the grass, I saw a detachment of the SS marching. They set up heavy machine-guns every two metres. As I approached this row, I was curtly sent away. I asked Mr Lukas what the SS were doing here. He answered: ‘They are supposed to guard us.’ And so it was that we, the Ausgebombten, were not to make a stand against the Nazi Party, otherwise we would be shot. ²²

However, the police could not be everywhere at once, and there are countless examples of ordinary people expressing hostility openly towards the Nazi authorities away from the main collection points. Hans J. Massaquoi describes an incident at a station where ‘a man in a brown Nazi uniform came into sight, and a woman screamed at him from the train, “You pigs, it’s all your fault!” ’ She continued shouting similar accusations until someone from her company ‘literally gagged her by holding a towel over her mouth’. ²³He also tells of a soldier friend who was determined to desert the army, on the grounds that in the wake of this catastrophe ‘the war can’t last longer than a couple of weeks, perhaps only a couple of days’. ²⁴Another refugee, Lore Bünger, remembers hearing a man proclaiming loudly, ‘That Hitler! The pig should be hung!’ before his wife warned him to be quiet. ²⁵

There was little the authorities could do about such outbursts. They certainly could not have arrested everyone who voiced their anger – in the desperate atmosphere that prevailed in the wake of the firestorm, to do so would have risked causing riots. People no longer felt they had anything more to lose; consequently, for the first time in ten years, they were defying the Nazis without fear of reprisal. Hans Erich Nossack recounts a scene that speaks volumes: ‘In the Harburg railway station I heard a woman who had broken some rule or other screaming, “Go ahead, put me in prison, then at least I’ll have a roof over my head!” and three railway policemen didn’t know what else to do but turn away, embarrassed, leaving the crowd to calm the woman.’ ²⁶

Had they known how common such outbursts were, the Allies would have been delighted. This was exactly what was supposed to happen in the wake of a huge bombing raid: anger at the authorities leading to open defiance and, finally, revolution. But the final link in the chain never materialized. The speed and relative efficiency of the evacuation was certainly a factor in avoiding serious civil unrest: by carrying people away from the city the authorities dispersed potential trouble. Besides, the disaster had left most people too exhausted and apathetic to cause much more than a token fuss. It was simply too big an event to blame wholly on the Nazis. It seems that most people regarded the firestorm almost as an act of God: in such circumstances the state was ‘something completely irrelevant that could neither be blamed for a fate such as Hamburg had suffered nor be expected to do anything about it’. ²⁷