The links between Hamburg and America were based on the huge volumes of trade that passed between them, but over time a more personal side to the relationship evolved. In the second half of the nineteenth century one of the city’s biggest exports to the USA was not ceramics, textiles or glassware but people. America was opening up as a land of opportunity, and thousands of Germans were emigrating there each year in search of a better life – many of them Hamburgers.

Despite the great wealth of certain sections of the community on the Elbe, poverty was rife among the lower classes, ⁷and for many in Hamburg’s slum districts the temptation to start afresh on the other side of the Atlantic proved irresistible. It was not a decision that was made lightly. Travelling to America was a desperate business, and conditions during the long sea voyage were comparable to those in eighteenth-century slave ships. Travellers would be crammed into a dark hold with barely anything to eat and only half a pint of water to drink each day. There was little sanitation, no doctors, and after seventy days at sea it was not uncommon for diseases like typhoid or cholera to have claimed up to a fifth of the passengers. For those who survived, conditions on the other side of the Atlantic were often only marginally better than those they had left at home, but a large proportion did find a better life, and the letters they sent back were enough to inspire yet more people to make the journey.

By 1866 more than fourteen thousand people were travelling each year from Hamburg to America. They came from all over northern Europe – even from as far away as Russia – and many from Hamburg itself. A faster, more reliable steam service now navigated the route, and companies like HAPAG were growing rich on the hopes and dreams of this constant stream of emigrants to the USA. ⁸Later on, even members of the middle and upper classes made the voyage across the Atlantic, but on luxury cruise liners. By the turn of the twentieth century, the biggest passenger ships could make the crossing in under six days. There was even talk of flying Zeppelins across the ocean, and Hamburg was a major centre of Germany’s growing aircraft industry. ⁹

By the early 1900s not a single community in northern Germany was untouched by emigration to the United States. At the outbreak of war in 1914, the German population of the United States was so large that the Canadians were induced to take precautions against the possibility of cross-border attacks. ¹⁰In Hamburg almost everyone had friends or relations in America – after all, the majority of northern European emigrants to the United States had embarked on their journeys from that very port.

It was this personal relationship, more than any volume of trade, that bound the two peoples together: Hamburg and America had, quite literally, become family. When the USAAF flew over the city in July 1943, more than a few American airmen could trace their ancestry back to Hamburg. Their grandparents or great-grandparents had passed through the port on their way to America, and now, as descendants of those emigrants, the young men were returning to destroy the city that had been their gateway to a new life.

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But we are running ahead of ourselves. Before we become embroiled in the catastrophic events of 1943, it is necessary to explain a little about how those events came about in the first place – not least because Hamburg remains firmly in the centre of the story. For that we must turn our focus not merely to the beginning of the Second World War, but to the end of the First, for it was in 1918, in the dockyards of Hamburg and Kiel, that some of the most potent seeds of the Second World War were sown.

3. City of Rebellion

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Karl Marx ¹

At the outbreak of the First World War Hamburg was no longer recognizable as the small city that had been invaded by Napoleon just a hundred years before. The industrial revolution had transformed it into a metropolis for the region: it was now the second biggest manufacturing centre in Germany after Berlin, and the third largest port in the world after London and New York. The constant influx of immigrants had brought the population to more than a million, and forced the city to expand well beyond its medieval city walls. Whole new suburbs had been built to house its workers, while others had been demolished to make way for a brand new warehouse district, the Speicherstadt. It was home to a wide variety of heavy industries – not just shipbuilding, but engineering and electrical companies, oil refineries, asbestos factories, as well as coffee-roasting plants and rice mills – and one of the most prosperous places in the whole German Reich.

After four years of fighting, however, virtually all of this had been ruined. Not only had the city sacrificed forty thousand of its young men to the trenches, but the rest of the population was starving. The British blockade of the German coastline had caused shortages across the country, but in Hamburg this was compounded by the effect it had on the city’s economy. Trade kept Hamburg working, and once starved of it the city fell apart: industries failed, food and fuel became desperately scarce, and the people increasingly angry with the military regime responsible for their hardship. The atmosphere of Hanseatic conservatism that had characterized the city for hundreds of years was rapidly replaced by radicalism, and strikes and protests erupted all along the lower reaches of the Elbe.

Things came to a head in November 1918, shortly before the Armistice was signed, when Admiral Hipper ordered his ships out on one final desperate attack on the British Grand Fleet. The sailors at the naval bases of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven saw this as a pointless suicide mission, and promptly mutinied. The uprising spread quickly across northern Germany, and on 5 November workers at several of Hamburg’s shipyards voted to strike in sympathy with the sailors. At first the city council managed to pacify them, but that evening ten thousand workers attended a meeting of the radical Independent Social Democratic Party (USDP) and agreed to hold a general strike throughout the city. During the night groups of sailors occupied key strategic positions in the city – the Elbetunnel, the main station, the union buildings and the city barracks – and even boarded torpedo boats in the harbour to disarm them. The following morning a crowd of some forty thousand workers and soldiers marched on the General Command in Altona, and effectively seized power over the whole of the Hamburg area. ²

By the time Germany accepted the Allies’ armistice terms on 11 November, Hamburg, with many other cities, was already in the hands of revolutionaries. The consequences were enormous. In later years, when order had been restored, many Germans would come to remember the end of the war not as a time of defeat at the hands of the Allies – after all, the Allied armies had never reached German soil – but as a period when their country had collapsed from within. With the passing of time, they began to believe that they had not lost the war at all, but had merely been betrayed by their own people: as the German general Paul von Hindenburg said, his army had not been defeated, but ‘stabbed in the back’. ³

In reality, the November revolution had little or no effect on the outcome of the war, which had already been lost. Nor was it a particularly violent revolution. The transfer of power from the old élite to the new republic was relatively peaceful – it was not until well after the war was over that the real problems began. During the winter of 1918–19 the well-ordered society that Germans thought they knew seemed to vanish. In the face of drastic food and fuel shortages, crime levels soared. Violence became increasingly common, inflation spiralled out of control, and transport difficulties made German lives thoroughly miserable.