* * *

The scenes that greeted the British troops as they marched into the city were shocking in the extreme. Even battle-hardened soldiers were appalled by what they found. Tommy Wilmott, who had fought his way across Europe with the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry sums it up succinctly: ‘All I remember about Hamburg was the smell. Even where we were, standing back looking on it, the smell from Hamburg was awful. The smell of death. It was terrible.’ ⁶

Alongside this frightful odour was the terrifying physical devastation. Dr P. J. Horsey was used to some fairly disturbing scenes – he had been among the group of medics sent to help the victims of Belsen concentration camp in the final days of the war – but he, too, was shocked by the sight of Hamburg when he visited in mid-May:

The city itself was the scene of utter destruction. In the dock area, with one or two exceptions, there were acres and acres of rubble, which showed little evidence of having once composed houses. In many places even the streets were buried. Of the few buildings which did still stand, the majority had been gutted with fire, or were so badly damaged as to be uninhabitable. In spite of this the streets were full of Germans walking about purposefully: what they were doing or where they lived I cannot think… ⁷

There is an implied guilt in Dr Horsey’s account, especially when he describes the people he came across in the street:

Some of the Germans looked away when we passed them: the children looked at us with great curiosity, but were kept well out of our way by their mothers, as though we might kick them. Most of the women looked at us with hate in their faces, but the men looked more cowed and ashamed. ⁸

The truth is that men like Dr Horsey had had no idea what to expect when they came to Hamburg. They might have read in the newspapers about how the city had been ‘wiped off the war map’, but they had no concept of what that meant, and the reality was beyond their wildest imaginings. Another British eyewitness, Philip Dark, remembers the Hamburg landscape with horror. Lieutenant Dark was a prisoner-of-war who had been transported through the city in mid-April, just before the surrender. What he saw there would stay with him for the rest of his life.

… we swung in towards the centre and started to enter a city devastated beyond all comprehension. It was more than appalling. As far as the eye could see, square mile after square mile of empty shells of buildings with twisted girders scarecrowed in the air, radiators of a flat jutting out from a shaft of a still-standing wall, like a crucified pterodactyl skeleton. Horrible, hideous shapes of chimneys sprouting from the frame of a wall. The whole pervaded by an atmosphere of ageless quiet, a monument to man’s power of self-destruction… Such impressions are incomprehensible unless seen… Coventry and Bath, any bombing in England, just can’t be compared to this. ⁹

The last point is perhaps the most important of all. Until they arrived in Hamburg, most British soldiers thought they knew the worst of bombing – they had witnessed it at home in London, Glasgow, Southampton and countless other cities. But the German Blitz on Britain was insignificant compared with what they saw in Hamburg. The rubble, the ruins, the smell – as one British official wrote in 1946, it seemed ‘impossible ever to rebuild this city… Another site must be developed for the traffic of the Elbe, to replace the essential heart of this historic port.’ ¹⁰

Of course, not only Hamburg was affected: by the end of the war the devastation had spread to every corner of the Reich – as the refugees of 1943 had predicted – and post-war descriptions of Germany’s other cities are equally devoid of hope. Cologne was a city ‘recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble and loneliness of complete physical defeat’. ¹¹Dresden no longer resembled ‘Florence on the Elbe’ but was more like ‘the face of the moon’, and planning directors believed that it would take ‘at least seventy years’ to rebuild. ¹²Munich was so badly devastated that ‘It truly did almost make one think that a Last Judgement was imminent.’ ¹³The damage in Berlin was so great that a former envoy to President Roosevelt described it as ‘a second Carthage’. ¹⁴

This, then, was the final result of the bomber dream, the fruit of decades of investment and research. The Allies had perfected the art of devastating cities. As a consequence barely a town in Germany remained untouched by destruction.

* * *

In the aftermath of war, the Allies set about trying to rebuild the shattered country. Under the Marshall Plan the Americans agreed to pour $29 billion into Western Europe, and by far the biggest share was to go to Germany. ¹⁵With the British and the French, they steered the western half of the country towards recovery, and eventually to prosperity. However, while the Allies are fond of congratulating themselves on creating the foundations of the German ‘economic miracle’, it is important to remember that things got much, muchworse for Germany before they improved.

When the Allies had taken over they had inherited an extremely efficient economic system. British observers were astonished to find that, despite all the bombing and disruption, Germans were still spending evenings at the theatre and the opera, hair and beauty salons were still open, and food was still relatively plentiful. The welfare system ensured that every German citizen was fairly well looked after, no matter what had happened to their homes. After Dr Horsey visited Hamburg in May 1945 he was able to write that ‘All the Germans I ever saw were well dressed and looked very well fed.’ ¹⁶

Under Allied control, however, the situation changed dramatically. By the time Victor Gollancz arrived in Hamburg in the autumn of 1946, the people had been reduced to scavenging for food, malnutrition was rife, and children could only attend school on alternate days because they were obliged to share their shoes with their brothers and sisters. ¹⁷Worse still was the threat of disease, which was much more of a danger than it had ever been in the aftermath of the firestorm. Tuberculosis was five times as prevalent as it had been before the war; penicillin was in short supply; there was only enough insulin available to treat a third of the diabetics in the city, and only enough bandages for a fifth of those who needed them. ¹⁸One British medical officer, who mistook Gollancz for a visiting politician, came up to harangue him:

What on earth are you politicians in London up to? Do you realize what’s going on here? Ignoramuses see some people in the streets looking fairly well nourished but don’t realize that they are living on carbohydrates and have no resistance, and they forget that the most seriously undernourished people are at home. The present figure of tuberculosis is appalling, and it may be double next year. An epidemic of any kind would sweep everything before it. We are on the edge of a frightful catastrophe… ¹⁹

Katherine Morris, who worked for the British administration in the city, backs up Gollancz’s observations. When she arrived in 1946 the faces of many Hamburgers ‘were almost yellow with malnutrition’. ²⁰Crowds of German children routinely gathered outside the British clubs and barracks to beg for food, while other, even more hopeless people, were forced to scavenge in the city’s dustbins: ‘Spectral figures, gaunt and ragged, were moving with the lifeless gait of some macabre nightmare along the pavement… drifting from ash-can to ash-can, poking among the contents for something to eat, their rags flapping in the wind. (It became increasingly obvious why one never saw a cat in this city.)’ ²¹Germans had never suffered like this while the war was on. Until now, hardship to this degree had been confined to foreigners and forced labourers – but under Allied occupation, everybody suffered.