Most of those who returned found they had nowhere to live: they were forced to sleep in the bunkers every night until they found friends or relatives with space to put them up. Those whose houses were still standing often found that other families had moved in while they were away. Rather than turn them out they were often obliged to let them stay, at least until they had found somewhere else to go – but with the sheer lack of living accommodation in the city, this sometimes took months. It was common to find two or three families sharing even the smallest of apartments. ⁴For those who could not find such shelter there was little choice but to return to the ruins. Gradually a shanty-town grew up, as people found cellars to live in, or stacked up debris around ruined walls to create makeshift dwellings.

Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg described the spirit of this grim time with a mixture of incredulity and admiration for the ordinary people of Hamburg:

It is amazing how these poor human beings manage to create something, some kind of homestead, out of the rawest of materials, charred wooden boards and broken bricks. Everybody lends a hand: the husband if he is at home, the wife and all the children. And they are so proud of their achievement, preferring to live like Robinson Crusoe in one single room on the lonely heath, rather than be billeted out amongst strangers. ⁵

They lived without electricity or gas, cooked on open fires, as if they were camping, and washed in the open at water pumps or from buckets. In the absence of any kind of transport, people walked everywhere, often clambering through rubble-lined streets for three or four hours each day just to get to work and back. ⁶And while the adults were at work, the children ran wild, as Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg continues: ‘There are children everywhere, hordes of them. There is no school and they roam the streets all day long… they forage in the garbage, dig tunnels in the rubble and imitate the siren to perfection.’ ⁷Johannes Schoene, the pastor of Christuskirche in Eimsbüttel, also wrote of ‘countless children’ running around the ruins and ‘getting into mischief’. ⁸

Generally speaking, it was the children who adapted first to the new realities of the war. In her diary of the time, Ilse Grassmann tells a story about her son and daughter playing ‘air raids’ under the kitchen table. The table was their shelter, and while one hid beneath it, the other dropped building blocks round it, claiming they were bombs. The sight of her children playing like this filled her with a unique dismay. ‘Is there no escape from this dreadful time?’ she wrote. ‘Not even for the children?’ ⁹But no matter how disturbing such games were, they demonstrated a fundamental truth: huge bombardments were part of everyday life. What had once been considered ‘normal’ no longer existed. There was a different ‘normality’ now: one of bombs, sirens, and ruins surrounded by barbed wire.

The younger children could not remember a time before the war – they had never known a time when the threat of British or Allied bombs had not hung over their city. Even the older ones found it difficult to imagine how things could be different. Since they were powerless to change the way things were, they had to get used to the devastation that now surrounded them.

Eventually the adults were forced to follow their children’s lead: it was surprising what one could get used to, given time. The shock of the first few weeks wore off, to be replaced instead with a numb insensibility to all but the most traumatic sights. In varying degrees, everyone was slowly becoming accustomed to the terrible conditions in Hamburg: ‘You get used to the sight,’ wrote Maria Bartels, to her husband at the front. ‘It’s only when you go through Hamm that you realize once again what we’ve lost.’ ¹⁰Soon, people no longer noticed the rubble. They walked past ruins without seeing them. They no longer even noticed the smell, which hung over the city in a permanent fug. They learned how to cope by keeping themselves busy. Maria Bartels continued:

There is no radio (I dare not think of all the other wonderful comforts we’ve lost); it is too hopeless. It is best to work as much as possible, or go to the cinema for a change; that is the best medicine, so that you don’t need to think. But on Sundays I will come out to see you, to recover, and gradually the year will come to an end and we’ll look forward to a new spring. Hopefully that will bring something better than this year. ¹¹

* * *

After a while life did get better. The bombed-out population were soon issued with new ration cards, and provided with beds, warm clothes and even furniture for their new homes among the ruins. Soon there were signs that a degree of normality was being restored. By 10 August several stretches of main road had been cleared and were open to traffic. The following day the post office reopened, and a week later the city’s three daily newspapers were back in circulation. New shops were trading, a few small bars appeared, and some of the destroyed cinemas were re-established. On 20 August, the Ufa-Palast cinema opened to show Geliebter Schatz( Beloved Sweetheart), a romance starring Ursula Herking and Sonja Ziemann, and people like Maria Bartels could lose themselves for a couple of hours in the harmless flickering of the big screen. ¹²

The city’s utilities were a major priority, and work on them was remarkably rapid. As the Americans discovered after the war, the restoration of the city’s electricity ‘did much to reverse the original pessimistic outlook that fell over Hamburg after the raids’. ¹³It took only three and a half days to repair Tiefstack power station, and Neuhof power station was back in service after only twenty days, although it had been the main focus of 303rd Bombardment Group on the second American raid. Even Barmbek power station, all but demolished on the night of 29 July, was back in service by the end of October. ¹⁴

Hamburg’s other utilities were restored just as quickly. The air raids had hit the gas industry so hard that in the days after the catastrophe it was incapable of delivering even three per cent of pre-raid output. By the end of November, however, it was back up to 80 per cent, and gas services had been restored to all but the worst-hit areas in the east of the city. It was the same story with the water supplies. The raids had destroyed the city’s main pumping station in Rothenburgsort, and put 847 breaks in the water mains throughout the city; but within four months most had been repaired, and the pumping station was up and running. By the following spring the network of water mains was working at 97 per cent of its previous capacity. The telephone system was less of a priority, but even so many phone lines, for business use at least, were working again as early as mid-August. ¹⁵

It was not long, either, before the most important war industries were back in production. By the end of the year, the aircraft industry was operating at 91 per cent of its previous capacity. The manufacture of electrical goods, optics and precision tools was soon surpassing its previous level, and even the badly hit chemical industry was producing 71 per cent of its original total. ¹⁶

The recovery of the all important U-boat industry was even more miraculous. The Blohm & Voss shipyards had been the original target for both US raids, and had also been hit by British bombs on the first night of attacks, yet despite the complete destruction of the administration building, workshop and store buildings, the factory was running almost to capacity within two months. ¹⁷René Ratouis, a French labourer who had been in the shipyard when it was hit, could barely believe his eyes when he returned to work there at the end of September: ‘To our great astonishment, the Blohm & Voss factory hardly seemed to have suffered from the bombardments of July at all. We were completely bewildered by the thought that the incendiaries could have missed the most important factory in Hamburg.’ ¹⁸The recovery of the U-boat yards was underlined on 28 September when the first Walter U-boat Wa 201 entered the water. Far from being knocked out of the war, the Blohm & Voss yards appeared to be flourishing once more. ¹⁹