Perhaps the most poignant legacy of the firestorm is in the attitudes of those who survived its horrors. Klaus Müller still has an irrational fear of fireworks. His sister, who suffered from blackouts in the overpacked bunkers as a child, still cannot bring herself to board a full underground train. ³⁵Some of the people quoted in this book admitted to experiencing flashbacks, especially on the catastrophe’s anniversary, when memories roll before their eyes ‘like some appalling horror film’. ³⁶At least two experienced nervous breakdowns later in life that put them in hospital. ³⁷

For those people, and for countless more like them, the firestorm is not merely something that happened over sixty years ago. It is a continual burden, like a disease without a cure, that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

23. The Reckoning

You can’t have this kind of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets

Dwight D. Eisenhower ¹

After the war, the British and American governments spent a great deal of time and energy trying to discover exactly how effective their bombing had been in Germany. The Americans immediately set up the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, and travelled all over the country interviewing factory managers and gathering captured German documents that described the damage caused by the bombs. Not to be outdone, the British set up a Bombing Survey Unit of their own. Both groups looked very carefully at what had happened at Hamburg in particular – partly because the attacks on this city had been so dramatic, but also because the damage had been so well documented by the Hamburg authorities at the time.

This was what they discovered: over the course of the six British and American attacks, the entire eastern quarter of the city and much of the western quarter had been razed to the ground. The number of homes that were incinerated by the firestorm defies the imagination: 40,385 residential buildings were either completely obliterated or rendered so badly damaged that they were uninhabitable. They contained around 275,000 apartments, or roughly 61 per cent of Hamburg’s total living accommodation. None was rebuilt until after the war. A further 109,471 homes were less badly damaged, but the city’s economy had been wrecked so completely that two-thirds even of those remained unrepaired until after the war was over. ²

Among the homes were the other buildings that make up a city: shops, schools, offices and so on. According to the American bombing survey, 3,785 industrial plants were destroyed by this series of raids, as were 7,190 small businesses, employing 21,000 craftsmen. About five thousand of the city’s seven thousand retail stores were also destroyed. ³The Hamburg chief of police also claimed that 83 banks, 379 office buildings, 112 Nazi Party offices, seven warehouses, 13 public utility premises, 22 transport premises, 76 public offices, 80 military installations and 12 bridges were also completely destroyed. All of those buildings could be considered military targets, at least to some degree. A further 437 buildings were destroyed that had nothing to do with the war whatsoever, including 24 hospitals, 277 schools, 58 churches, 77 cultural centres (cinemas, theatres and opera houses), and one zoo. ⁴

By any normal standards, Hamburg had ceased to exist. Even in those areas where the buildings were still standing many of the streets were blocked with rubble, making travel all but impossible. The trams could not run, and all of the central subway and overground railway stations were out of action. There was no running water, no electricity and no gas. There was no radio, no postal service and no telephone. But, most importantly, there were no people. In the wake of the firestorm almost the entire population had fled, leaving the ruins devoid of human life.

If the material destruction was breathtaking, the human cost was truly tragic in scale. In just one week, 45,000 people had lost their lives. A further 37,439 had been injured, while almost a million people had fled the city and were now officially homeless. ⁵All that they owned – everything from clothes and furniture to ornaments, letters and photographs – had been burned or blown to pieces in the raids.

To put these numbers in context, the death toll at Hamburg was more than ten times greater than that of anyprevious raid. At Nagasaki, where the Americans dropped their second nuclear bomb, the immediate death toll was 40,000 – about five thousand fewer than at Hamburg. ⁶The devastation of this Hanseatic city cannot, therefore, be compared accurately with the sort of destruction

normally associated with conventional bombing: it was more akin to the annihilation that would soon become possible in the nuclear age.

* * *

The question remains as to what all the destruction achieved. Did it knock Hamburg’s U-boat and aircraft industries out of the war? Did it prevent the rest of Hitler’s war machine working efficiently? Did it shorten the war to any degree? Or did it merely take the lives of innocent civilians, who in any case contributed little to Germany’s war effort?

It cannot be denied that the immediate effect on Hamburg’s industries was huge. Almost half of the city’s 81,000 commercial and industrial buildings had been completely destroyed, and the majority of its workers had fled. By the end of the year 226,000 people had still failed to come back to work – that is, 35 per cent of the city’s workforce. ⁷With no buildings to work in, and no people to do the work, the drop in industrial output was massive. In August 1943, Hamburg produced only half of the total output it had achieved in July. By the end of 1943 the city was still producing only 82 per cent of its normal capacity. To some degree Hamburg never truly rallied from the shock of these raids, and throughout the rest of the war industrial output never fully recovered. ⁸

After the war, the Americans estimated that Hamburg lost 1.8 months of its entire industrial production as a direct result of the raids, about half of which was intended for the armed forces. ⁹This meant that fewer supplies were sent to the Russian Front, fewer aircraft took to the skies, and fewer U-boats were launched to attack British shipping in the north Atlantic. To be more precise about this last point, twenty U-boats that would otherwise have taken to the seas around Britain were prevented from doing so. ¹⁰When one considers that U-boats had been responsible for decimating the British economy before 1943, any reduction in their numbers, by whatever means, was essential to the Allies.

However, impressive though such figures are, it is important to remember that they represented only a temporary setback for the German war machine. Despite the enormous destruction in Hamburg’s residential areas, the main industrial areas of the city remained relatively untouched. Much of the harbour complex had been spared, and even those parts that had suffered quite badly were soon repaired. For example, the Neuhof power station, which suffered direct hits in the US raids, was back up and running within twenty days. ¹¹As I have mentioned, the city’s most important war industries were also coping extraordinarily well (see page 304).

According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, the effects of the 1943 catastrophe were nowhere near as disruptive to the war economy as the much smaller attacks later in the war, which targeted the city’s transport links with the Ruhr. Even the British had to concede that, despite the huge destruction such attacks caused, they ‘had only an irritant effect on German production’. ¹²So does this mean that the bombing didn’t work? Is it conceivable that the deaths of 45,000 people could have had little or no effect on the outcome of the war?