In the wake of all the physical recovery, the morale of the people of Hamburg also picked up. Hannah Kelson lived in the west of the city at the time, and she remembers the atmosphere becoming quite positive fairly soon after the disaster:

Slowly some form of order returned. In fact, it returned remarkably quickly. I remember reading afterwards that the intention of the air raids had been to break the spirit of the population. And I think I can say with total authority that this absolutely did not happen. People’s spirit was quite tremendous. I know much is made of the spirit of the British during the Blitz, no doubt with every justification, but I think the same could be said about the civilian population, certainly as I saw it and knew it in those days, and I was right in the middle of it. There was no question of defeatism, or a sense of wanting to give up. In fact, if anything I think it strengthened people’s resolve and gave them more backbone. ²⁰

Even in the east of the city the recovery in morale was remarkable. By the end of the year, Pastor Jürgen Wehrmann was able to look back with pride at the way his parishioners had dealt with the crisis:

The population of Eilbek was growing from day to day. One met ever more people in the street, their faces lit up with joy over the reclamation of their home town. I spoke with them and began to visit them in what they often sincerely called their apartments. It was now becoming quite apparent: Eilbek was beginning to rise up out of the ruins. ²¹

The people of Hamburg were coping surprisingly well.

In an attempt to bolster this fragile new sense of resolve, a succession of party leaders came to visit the city. The first was Goering, whose visit on 6 August was the first item of news in the Hamburger Zeitungthe following day. He was followed by Himmler, on the thirteenth, then Goebbels and Wilhelm Frick on the seventeenth. Admiral Doenitz visited the docks to survey the damage done to the Blohm & Voss shipyards. The general panic and dismay that had gripped the higher echelons of the Nazi Party in the days just after the catastrophe had now subsided – so much so that they were already trying to put a positive spin on events. On 19 August, State Secretary Georg Ahrens, who had accompanied Doenitz, was already writing to his relatives about what he called the ‘Miracle of Hamburg’:

The intention of the enemy to strike a blow at the very foundations of the Reich has failed, and though Hamburg and the Hamburgers have received wounds that will bleed for a long time yet, the fact they have survived this blow in relative safety means that the enemy’s method of murdering women and children in the major cities will not succeed in bringing down the Reich, not even if he makes the same attempt on other major cities. Amidst all the pain and hardship there is perhaps a positive thing that has come out of this: many would have believed that such a blow would have meant a complete breakdown… Now we are all convinced not only that our city, our bleeding city, will live, but that the eternal German Reich will never come to an end when the people show such faith, such strength and such courage. ²²

Rhetoric like this might have provoked a sneer from most ordinary Hamburgers, but the essence of the State Secretary’s words was undeniably true: the Allies’ grand strategy of trying to undermine the Reich by bombing had not worked. Nor would it work in the coming years. Despite all they had been through, and all they were still suffering, the people of Hamburg had not given up.

The symbols of their determination to survive were all around them in the gradual clearance of the rubble, the restoration of electricity and water, and the stubborn pockets of life among the ruins. Throughout the city messages were written in chalk on the front of bombed-out houses, saying, ‘Wir leben’ (‘We are alive’). They had been intended to reassure friends and neighbours in the direct aftermath of the catastrophe; now they seemed more like a statement of defiance.

Then, at the beginning of September, just a month after the firestorm, something happened that had a huge psychological effect on the people: the trees began to bloom. There are numerous accounts of this strange natural phenomenon. ²³Presumably it was some kind of defence mechanism in the tree population to ensure the survival of the species, but for the people of Hamburg, the sight of those apparently dead trees springing into glorious life became a unique symbol of hope. As autumn approached, Gretl Büttner wrote:

A miracle happened in the ‘dead city’. By the end of August and the beginning of September the charred, burned trees sprouted new life; light green leaves dared to come out. So close to autumn, it was spring once again over the endless horrors. White lilacs bloomed in the destroyed gardens of the houses. Chestnut trees once more lit their white candles. And in this continuing life something mild and comforting, a change from helpless hatred to sorrow or resignation took place. One not only saw the dark, accusing debris. One saw the future again and learned to hope once more in the midst of the worst time of grief. Like a mantle… Nature spread her strangest spring over the thousands of still bleeding wounds of the city. Hamburg was not dead. Hamburg must not die. ²⁴

22. Famine

Eating no longer seemed a pleasant necessity, but rather a dark law that forced them to swallow, to swallow at any cost, in a hunger that was never satisfied but appeared instead to swell…

Heinrich Böll ¹

Hamburg held on for almost two years before the city was forced to surrender. There were many more raids – a further sixty-eight, to be precise, involving a combined total of more than eleven thousand aircraft. There were many more casualties too: 5,666 men, women and children lost their lives, and a further 6,463 were injured. ²The numbers might have been far worse, but the people of Hamburg were no longer prepared to take risks with air raids. At the first sound of the siren they now headed directly for the nearest reinforced bunker. Even when the sirens were not ringing they did not feel safe in their ruined apartments and makeshift homes: ‘It is like lying in a coffin,’ said one survivor, ‘waiting for the lid to snap shut.’ ³‘We live through a fearful symphony of horror,’ wrote another. ‘There is no day, hardly a night without air-raid warnings… The end is bound to be near, whichever way it comes.’ ⁴

The long endgame of the war began in June 1944, when the British and American armies launched their invasion of mainland Europe. By March 1945 they had fought their way across France to the Rhine, and by the end of April they had reached the west bank of the Elbe, overlooking Hamburg. Along the way they had captured hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, they had crushed the Luftwaffe and inflicted a devastating firestorm on the beautiful city of Dresden. By now it was obvious even to Hitler that the end was in sight. On 30 April he retired to the back room of his bunker and committed suicide.

One of Hitler’s last instructions was a message to all his troops ‘not to give up under any circumstances, but… to continue the fight against the enemies of the Fatherland’. As always, they were to resist the Allied advance to the last man. ⁵To his eternal credit, Hamburg’s gauleiter disobeyed those instructions almost immediately. Having seen his city devastated from the air he was unwilling to stand by while the Allies finished off the job from the ground. On 3 May, Karl Kaufmann handed over the city to the British Second Army without firing a shot. In the midst of a brutal, often insane war, it was an admirable example of common sense. Five days later, the rest of Germany followed suit, and surrendered unconditionally. The Second World War in the west had ended.