Gretl Büttner also describes making a journey into the ‘dead city’. She and her companion, Dr Maack, were investigating what had happened in these areas, and looking for the remains of some colleagues in the Air-raid Protection Service. After clambering over the rubble for a short way, they found themselves overlooking a sea of corpses:

On a little open square near Boonsweg – I shall never forget the sight – there lay hundreds of men and women, soldiers in uniform, children, old people. Many had torn the clothes from their bodies shortly before their death. They were naked, their bodies seemed unmarked, the faces showed peaceful expressions, like in deep sleep. Other bodies could hardly be recognized; they were charred, torn to pieces, and had shattered skulls… There an old woman lay. Her face was peaceful, soft, and tired… And there, a mother with a child on each hand. They were all three lying on their faces in an almost gracefully relaxed position… And there a soldier, with charred stumps for legs. There a woman with a torn body, on whose bulging-out intestines the flies were feeding. And there a child, clutching a birdcage in his hand. And there, detached from the body, a boy’s foot with a black boot; a small, brown girl’s hand with a blue ring… The heart almost stops beating at such sights. ⁵

Scenes like that were only the tip of the iceberg. There were literally hundreds of streets and squares in the affected areas, and many were strewn with corpses. Most of the bodies, however, were out of sight, hidden in the cellars where they had succumbed to the combined effects of heat, smoke and carbon-monoxide poisoning.

Hamburg had an efficient system for collecting, identifying and burying those who died in air raids, but in the summer of 1943 it was overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies it had to collect, and by the inaccessibility of the areas in which people had died. With rubble strewing the streets, often the only way to get to them was on foot. Corpses in the worst-affected areas had to be left for days or even weeks until the roads were clear enough for lorries to get in to take them away. Many were buried beneath piles of stone, requiring heavy lifting equipment before they could be recovered. Those bodies that were still underground were especially difficult to recover. Sometimes the inrush of air as cellars were opened caused fires to break out afresh, and many cellar shelters had to be left for up to ten days before they were cool enough for the disposal squads to enter. ⁶

In the first few days after the firestorm ten thousand corpses were collected from the streets for burial. This was the sort of work normally carried out by the Air-raid Protection Service, but the sheer scale of the clean-up operation meant that hundreds of auxiliary workers had to be drafted in to help. Most came from the armed forces, but the SS were also called in, as were prisoners from the concentration camp at Neuengamme. The bodies were gathered without ceremony: there was barely time to identify them before they were taken away. After their details had been logged, with a description of where they had been found and any possessions they had had, they were piled on to the back of a lorry and transported to Ohlsdorf cemetery. ⁷

Ludwig Faupel was one of those who dealt with the bodies. The company at which he was apprenticed had been destroyed, so he and his surviving colleagues were immediately drafted by the Rescue and Repair Service to help clear up the city.

The clean-up work went on. The streets had to be rubble-free, burned out façades had to be levelled… With the rest of our group we were obliged to join in with the clean-up work, in which the mountains of corpses were regarded as the worst part. It was not the sight of it, but the smell that made this activity so hard. As you walked through the ruins every now and then the smell of burned flesh, or the sickly sweet stink of decomposing tissue, would bring on a strong and immediate nausea. ⁸

Corpses everywhere were sprinkled with chlorinated lime, partly as a hygiene measure, but mostly in an attempt to counteract the terrible stench of advanced decomposition. Soon whole areas of the city smelt of the powder – it was the only way to keep nausea at bay. Clean-up crews entering the cellars had a particularly hard job. Here the stench was so bad that some military detachments insisted on blasting the cellars with flame-throwers before entering. ⁹Recovery squads were issued with gas masks, in which the filter had been replaced by a pad soaked in rum or Cognac. The mental and physical strain on those men was so great that many took to drinking the rum instead, and extra rations of alcohol and cigarettes were freely distributed throughout the Decontamination Service to keep the men working. ¹⁰

The most unpleasant jobs were often reserved for the concentration-camp inmates. Jan Melsen had been in Neuengamme since 1942, when he had been arrested as a member of the Dutch resistance. By the summer of 1943 he was a virtual wraith. Perversely, his work clearing up corpses probably saved his life since it allowed him access to extra food – often stolen from kitchens and factories among the ruins. However, as he explained after the war, the extra food came at a high price:

Later a lorry came. Then we formed a chain and passed the corpses along until they were laid on the back of the truck… After we had carried the corpses out of the cellars we had to start afresh with searching through the rubble for body parts, because they wanted to know approximately how many dead there were. We fetched ourselves bowls and buckets – there were enough lying around – then dug through the rubble and put whatever body parts we found in the buckets. In the evenings an SS doctor came with his assistants, and then we had to spread the body parts across the ground. From this he would estimate the number of men and women. ¹¹

As Melsen goes on to explain, it was not always easy to guess at the number of people who had died, simply because of the extreme circumstances of their deaths:

I had just cleaned up a cellar when a civilian came up with the unit leader and said, ‘My wife and daughter were here – they must be in this cellar.’ But we had found nothing. The man cried out, ‘They must be here inside.’ It was nothing to do with me, but I had a pickaxe beside me, so we went back and forth, scraping around the entrance with the pickaxe. As I dug at the ground a bracelet sprang up. The people had been burnt right down to their hair and skin – there was nothing left but this piece of gold. ¹²

With some shelters they could make only vague estimates of between 250 and 300 dead; greater accuracy was impossible. ¹³

In such circumstances, identification was a real problem. In a rather harrowing account, Ben Witter describes pulling body parts from the rubble, with wallets, ID cards, wedding rings and other material that might be used to identify the bodies. (In the end he was taken off this duty, because his hands were covered in staphylococcic blisters, brought on by continual contact with the cadavers he was handling.) ¹⁴Gruesome though the work was, it took on a much more personal dimension when he discovered his own grandparents among the dead:

My grandmother was a really stately lady, rather fat. A fat dead lady without a head was lying there: I wondered if it could be her and came to the conclusion it was. My grandfather I found later in the harbour hospital. A lot of unknown bodies had been brought there – parts of bodies too… I examined all of them, and in a basin there was a belly with a watch sticking out from it. That was my grandfather’s watch. There was only so much left of him… The rest was God’s. ¹⁵