That was why people focused on little things. It was impossible to mourn a city that had become so alien: much better to concentrate on something specific – a particular street corner or a ruined shop – as a tangible fragment of a lost past.

* * *

If mourning the city was difficult, then mourning the people who had died was often impossible. The bodies had been removed so hastily that there was often nothing left to mourn – no proof that they had died. Indeed, with almost a million refugees spread out across Germany, most Hamburgers had no way of knowing whether their friends and relatives were not in fact alive. There are countless stories of people fearing the worst, only to discover that their wife, father or daughter was living somewhere in Bavaria. Equally there are stories of those who refused to believe that their loved ones were dead, even to the point of madness.

In the days after the catastrophe, signs appeared all over the city, chalked on the walls of ruined apartment buildings: ‘Where are you, Hilde?’ ‘We are alive’, ‘Aunt Anna is living in Blankenese’. Soldiers on leave travelled from town to town, searching desperately for families who had disappeared.

In an attempt to bring order to the chaos, the police authority began to catalogue the names of the missing and dead. It was hoped that the central register they created would become the first port of call for those looking for loved ones; it was also a way of re-establishing the Nazi Party’s grip on the exact whereabouts of the roving population.

There were two main catalogues. The first was a card index of all the refugees who had fled Hamburg in the days after the firestorm. They were required to register themselves with the local police when they arrived at their destination, so that details of where they had moved to could be sent back to Hamburg. In the first week alone the Hamburg police received more than a million such communications; even in November they were still receiving two to three thousand each day. They used this information to produce a fairly accurate record of where everyone had gone. ²⁶

People returning to Hamburg could consult this index in the hope of locating their lost relatives. If a particular person was not listed on the refugees register, then the second card index listed the details of the dead, starting with where the body had been found and any belongings that might help with identification. Each time some unfortunate relative or friend recognized the details on one of the cards, a name could be matched to one of the bodies that had been buried, without ceremony, in the mass grave at Ohlsdorf. It was a painstaking process. By the end of the year the police had still not discovered the names of even half of the 31,647 corpses they had buried. ²⁷Indeed, many remain nameless to this day.

Some of the missing proved as difficult to track down. By the end of the war two thousand people were still unaccounted for. ²⁸Some, presumably, were happy to slip off the Nazi registers, perhaps disappearing under pseudonyms in other areas of the Reich.

But it is likely that the vast majority were – and perhaps some still are – buried, undiscovered, beneath the ashes of Hamburg.

* * *

At the beginning of August the ‘dead city’ was cordoned off with barbed wire, and walls built with blocks of rubble from the collapsed buildings. Signs appeared round the perimeter: ‘Forbidden zone. Entry allowed only with written police permission.’ ²⁹The few roads into it that remained open were guarded day and night to prevent people coming in. The initial reason for the perimeter fence was to prevent the possible spread of disease from corpses, and to stop looters disturbing the few remaining belongings of the dead. But it was also done for moral reasons: it was considered indecent that the recovery of cadavers should be carried out in public.

Needless to say, the forbidden area soon gained almost mythical status among the surviving population, and terrifying rumours circulated. Some said the voices of the dead could still be heard, screaming as they had when they perished in the flames. There were stories of children who had sneaked into the ruins coming home with sores all over their arms and legs. Although this was probably brought on by chemical residues in the rubble left by the incendiaries, some children believed it was a kind of curse put on them by the malevolent spirit of this ‘forbidden city’. ³⁰Worse, it was said that decontamination squads had to use flame-throwers not only to cremate the decomposing bodies where they were but because ‘The flies were so thick that the men couldn’t get into the cellars: they kept slipping on maggots the size of fingers, and the flames had to clear the way for them to reach those who had perished in flames.’ ³¹

For the rest of the war, the forbidden zone sat in the centre of the eastern quarter like a dark reminder of the catastrophe, emanating a sense of horror and a stench of death to the rest of Hamburg. For years afterwards, the reality of what had happened there, hideous enough in itself, was routinely exaggerated into the grotesque. Myths grew up about the whole area having been doused in a ‘rain of phosphor’ during the attacks – myths that were repeated well into the 1960s. ³²Official death tolls were ignored in favour of higher figures – 60,000, 80,000, 100,000 – as if the city was afraid to admit the truth: that nobody knew how many had died because the number was simply unquantifiable. Even sixty years after the event the final count is uncertain, though the most reliable sources put it somewhere around 45,000. ³³However many had died, the one thing everyone knew for certain was that the vast majority of deaths had taken place in the shattered streets of Hammerbrook, Rothenburgsort and Hamm. It was a ‘dead city’ in every sense of the phrase.

21. Survival

Look not behind thee… lest thou be consumed

Genesis 19:17 ¹

Gradually, people started to return to Hamburg. Foreign workers and slave labourers had no choice: they were herded back and allocated new barracks to live in among the ruins. Workers in essential industries were also required to return and help get the city back on its feet: if they did not, they would be denied ration cards. But the majority drifted back because they felt they had nowhere else to go. They were tired of being tolerated as refugees in other parts of the country – they just wanted to come home. Hans Erich Nossack described it as a law of inertia: ‘The drops that were hurled in all directions by the city’s collapse now flooded back to fill the crater.’ ²

The return to the shattered city was a miserable experience. Even those who found their apartments intact were heartbroken by the destruction in their neighbourhoods. All the places where they had done their shopping, worshipped, socialized and relaxed had gone. The transformation struck even the forced labourers as tragic, as a Frenchman later described:

The damage from July’s bombings was, of course, not confined to the restaurants. There were no more music-halls or cafés with orchestras. The clowns were gone, the pom-pom of the Teutons’ music had been silenced and the horses that circled around a ridiculous rink were nowhere to be found. The brothels had disappeared; there was no more wrangling on the street outside forbidding entry; the whorehouses were diminished to piles of bricks and the women who had not managed to escape in time had perished. Only two cinemas were still working, as a last testimony of former happy times for Hamburg society. The public baths had also vanished. ³