Originally the plan was to burn all of the corpses and body parts in the open. But when it was discovered that they did not pose much of a health risk after all, the authorities decided to bury them, and four mass graves were prepared in a corner of Ohlsdorf cemetery in the north of the city. Jan Melsen was one of the concentration-camp inmates who was sent to dig them.

I thought that all the corpses had been put in graves already, but that was not so – they had simply been laid out in a huge heap and doused with lime and chlorine, nothing more. The same people who had fetched the corpses out of the cellars now had to dig mass graves for them. So we dug mass graves in the form of a cross. They are still there, in exactly that form, just as we laid them. ¹⁶

Ben Witter witnessed how the graves were filled. From the back of one of the lorries he saw concentration-camp inmates standing inside the graves among the dead, stacking literally thousands of bodies on top of each other. Round the top of the grave a circle of SS men was standing, for obvious reasons, with their backs to the corpses. They were all drinking, and two became overpowered by the combined effects of alcohol, heat and the stench. While they were thus distracted, a few of their prisoners took some clothes from the corpses, climbed over the edge of the grave and disappeared into the trees. ‘I don’t know how many escaped but I believe half a dozen managed it.’ ¹⁷

* * *

During the first two weeks of August, the authorities became increasingly anxious about the possibility of epidemics breaking out. It was not only the vast number of corpses in the city that fuelled their fears, but several other factors. With the city in ruins, those who remained found themselves living in extremely close quarters, and eating from communal kitchens. The conditions were ideal for the spread of disease, and in an attempt to stop typhus breaking out free vaccinations were offered to anyone who wanted them.

The most worrying thing was the lack of drinking water. Instructions were issued repeatedly through the press telling everyone to boil all water before drinking it, but without any gas or electricity available this was often impossible. The city’s toilets were another problem. The main sewers, remarkably, had remained intact, but without water for flushing, toilets everywhere were hopelessly blocked. The authorities suggested that each surviving community should dig latrines, with strict instructions that they should be sited at least fifty metres from any of the city’s seven thousand artesian wells, which had become important in recent days for supplying water. But outdoor latrines were unpopular, especially during spells of rain, and many people poured their waste into the canals, although this was strictly prohibited. The resulting stench merely added to the catalogue of repugnant odours that now filled the city. ¹⁸

Since most of the city’s dustcarts had been destroyed in the raids, and the streets were impassable, the garbage-collection service was virtually non-existent. Soon, huge piles of rubbish developed everywhere. ¹⁹At the end of August, Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg described the streets as ‘full of dirt and rubbish’. She was still complaining at the beginning of the following year:

In the streets mountains of rubbish are piling up. The big metal dustbins are never emptied and garbage is bursting out all over the place. Paper, potato peel, cabbage leaves – the muck-containers open their lids like gaping throats, vomiting out their evil contents. Then the wind takes it all and scatters it over the wet roads, leaving a stale, foul stench. We are told that every street must dig its own rubbish pit to avoid further contamination. ²⁰

A plague of flies and rats was soon swarming throughout Hamburg. They fed on the corpses, the rubbish and the huge amounts of rotting food that had been abandoned in the ruins. Hans Erich Nossack describes the revulsion he felt whenever he saw these pests:

Rats and flies were the lords of the city. Bold and fat, the rats frolicked in the streets. But even more disgusting were the flies, huge and iridescent green – no one had ever seen flies like this before. They swarmed in great clumps on the roads, settled, copulating, on top of the ruined walls, and basked, weary and satiated, on the splinters of windowpanes. When they could no longer fly they would crawl after us through the tiniest of cracks, soiling everything, and their buzzing and whirring was the first thing we heard in the mornings. This didn’t stop until October. ²¹

The increasing plague of flies began to pose a serious health risk, particularly when latrines and rubbish tips were located close to communal kitchens. People were exhorted to bury their rubbish, but this was very difficult: picks and shovels were in short supply, and the earth had been baked hard by weeks of hot sunshine. ²²So the plague worsened. Supplies of chemicals for killing flies did not appear until the end of September, but it was the onset of colder autumn weather that brought an end to them. The rats, however, remained. With piles of rubbish lining the streets there was little anyone could do to get rid of them.

* * *

Once again, the centre of all this devastation and squalor was the ‘dead city’, where the highest proportion of buildings had been destroyed and the remaining buildings were most unstable. People were warned to walk in the middle of streets throughout the city, in case of collapsing house façades, but they were told not to come into this area at all.

The sheer scale of the damage there was so great that even those eyewitnesses who did venture inside the ‘dead city’ often found it impossible to describe what they saw. Most contemporary descriptions do not even attempt to give an impression of the vast field of ruins. Instead they invariably focus on smaller details in a series of broken images. For example, Gretl Büttner is able to describe what she saw only in a list of images:

Ruins everywhere, as far as the eye could see. Debris on the streets, collapsed house fronts, far-flung stones on kerbs, charred trees and devastated gardens. Over it all a bright blue sky, little white clouds, and a bright sun. This made the picture of endless grief and terrible devastation even more noticeable. And always the sound of new buildings collapsing and the crackling of the ravenous fire still feeding could be heard. Poor, beautiful, beloved, raped city! One was without words. ²³

It is revealing that eyewitnesses like her, who were otherwise eloquent, found themselves so tongue-tied by what they saw. It is as if the scale of the destruction was so great that the only way to make sense of it was by seizing on a handful of tangible details.

According to Hans Erich Nossack, people did this because the bigger picture was unrecognizable. When he tried to take it in he was struck by a sense of unreality: it was as if the city he knew had not merely been destroyed but taken away and replaced with something completely alien. ‘What surrounded us did not remind us in any way of what was lost,’ he says. ‘It had nothing to do with it. It was something else, it was strangeness itself, it was the essentially not possible.’ ²⁴So complete was the transformation that he was unable to navigate his way through the ‘dead city’, even in areas he knew well:

I have gone through all these districts, by foot or by car. Only a few main streets were cleared, but mile after mile there was not a single living house. And if you tried to work your way through the ruins on either side, you immediately lost all sense of time and direction. In areas I thought I knew well, I lost my way completely. I searched for a street that I should have been able to find in my sleep. I stood where I thought it must be and didn’t know which way to turn. ²⁵