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The evacuation of Hamburg was a huge event for Germany, arguably more important to the course of the war than even the firestorm. Terrifying as it had been, the firestorm had affected only a single city. The evacuation, on the other hand, affected the entire Reich – indeed, until the Allied invasion in 1945, the mass migration of refugees from Hamburg was probably the biggest single event on the home front of the war. Until now, many ordinary Germans in the smaller towns and cities knew of the scale of Allied bombing only through what they read in the newspapers or heard on radio broadcasts. But as a deluge of refugees poured over the country, even those in rural areas came face to face with people who had suffered the most unimaginable horror. The stories they brought with them could not be dismissed as rumour, and the message was clear: nobody was safe. What had happened in Hamburg would soon happen, in some degree, to every city in Germany.
The psychological effect this had on the country is incalculable. Years later, many would remember it as a defining moment of the war. For example, Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe’s most senior fighter general, claimed in his memoirs that the constant stream of shattered, frightened refugees spread what he called the ‘Terror of Hamburg’ to even the remotest villages of the Reich: ‘A wave of terror radiated from the suffering city and spread throughout Germany… Psychologically the war at that moment had perhaps reached its most critical point.’ 28
Accounts from ordinary civilians back up his claim. ‘I’ll never forget the scene,’ says Margret Klauß, who was sixteen at the time. She had turned out at Lübeck station with the League of German Girls to hand out food and drinks to the refugees. ‘Most of them just sat there full of apathy, the horror still in their faces. Others hurried from wagon to wagon, calling the names of missing relatives in the desperate hope of finding their spouses, parents or siblings again. It was heart-breaking.’ 29
Hiltgunt Zassenhaus saw the beginning of the exodus after the first night of attacks, as lines of bizarrely dressed people traipsed past her window:
There were women who dragged along in their winter clothes, who had draped themselves in fur coats. They panted in the heat. There were women in flimsy summer dresses with stockings of differing colours. The bombs had torn them out of their sleep. In their mad haste they had pulled on whatever they found as they fell out of their burning houses. They pulled their children along with them; little feet that couldn’t keep in step with their big ones. The men dragged suitcases and boxes tied up with string. They lay down on the paving stones. They pulled their shoes off. Or they lay down on the surface of the road and stared up into the darkened sky. Hardly anyone cried or complained. In their faces all life had been extinguished. 30
Hannah Voss saw a later stage of the evacuation, on Wednesday afternoon, as trains full of refugees arrived in her home town, ninety kilometres south of Hamburg. She and a friend went to the station to meet the hordes who were piling out of the trains; it was their job to lead the refugees to the school, where straw pallets had been laid out for them to sleep on. The sight that greeted her when she arrived at the station was pathetic:
They were just standing there with nothing except their bags and the clothes they were in… One female came out of the train on to the platform, and all she had… was a budgerigar in a cage. I don’t know how the budgerigar survived the blast or whatever. But that was all this woman had in the world: a flimsy nightgown, no cardigan, no wrap, nothing except the cage and the budgie. 31
Such images are poignant, but they are nothing compared to the distressing scenes that occurred when some refugees had their luggage searched. One twelve-year-old boy fleeing Hamburg was stopped at the Danish border. He was travelling alone, carrying two sacks. When customs officers made him open them they found that one contained the corpse of his two-year-old brother, killed in the raid, the other the bodies of his pet rabbits. 32
Since this is a third-hand report its veracity is perhaps questionable, but many refugees did bring the bodies of their loved ones when they fled Hamburg. Friedrich Reck described seeing one woman drop her suitcase as she tried to board a train in Bavaria. As its contents spilled across the platform, among the toys, manicure case and singed underwear was ‘the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago’. 33
Ernst-Günter Haberland described a similar event, when he met a man from his neighbourhood shortly after the catastrophe:
He had a small and a large case in his hand, and did not know where he should go. He opened the cases; in the larger one was something which looked like a burned tree stump, in the other, two objects, smaller but otherwise similar. They were his wife and children, their bodies melted by the phosphor; he could not leave them behind. 34
Many others brought the bodies of children who had suffocated as their families were in the very act of escaping. 35In the hurry to flee Hamburg there was no time to bury them, and to abandon them was unthinkable. As a consequence, many ordinary people across Germany did not merely hear about the deaths in Hamburg, they saw the corpses for themselves.
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Despite the official suppression of detailed news about the disaster, those who witnessed scenes like this could only conclude that what had happened in Hamburg must have been truly extraordinary in its horror. To their infinite credit, most people extended whatever help they could offer to the refugees. Families all over Germany opened their doors, and shared what they had with those who had lost everything. The state provided free food in all the major towns, but it could not have been distributed properly without the help of thousands of volunteers from the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls and many other community groups.
The outpouring of goodwill towards the Hamburg refugees was as spontaneous as it was phenomenal. Hans Erich Nossack wrote shortly afterwards about the ‘heartening experience of seeing those who had been most distant, sometimes the most fleeting acquaintances or business associates, voluntarily step into the breach with such kindness that one is shamed into asking oneself whether one would have done the same if the situation were reversed’. 36Inevitably there were some exceptions, but in general refugees were accepted with open arms, and the welcome did not wear thin for several weeks. 37
Those who came into contact with the refugees could not help but be affected by them. Their stories were horrific. One woman told how a succession of badly injured people had clutched at her feet and clothes as she scrambled through the fiery ruins, begging her to take them with her. She had been forced to kick them off, because only by doing so could she escape death herself. 38Another told of how she had wrapped her children in pillows and thrown them out of the window to save them from the fire. Her baby slipped out of the padding and died when it hit the pavement. The mother who told this story ‘did not cry or complain; with the general fear, the thousands in agony, her pain was nothing special’. 39Tales like these were repeated ad infinitumall over Germany in the weeks to come.
Inevitably, gloom descended wherever the refugees gathered. Writing in the months shortly after the firestorm, Hans Erich Nossack claimed that the sense of total defeat was universal among the people of his city.