Authors: Roger Moorhouse
the journalists were providing information to Germany’s enemies about
military targets in the capital. By mid-September 1940, barely two
weeks after they had started, the bombing tours were officially
cancelled. As Oechsner recalled:
I went on the last of these bomb tours on September 11th. As usual,
we traipsed from hospital to hospital, none of which had sustained any
damage worth mentioning, and when we found bomb craters in the
streets we were promptly informed of the existence of some unsus-
pected hospital or children’s home a hundred or so yards away, ‘which
without a doubt this bomb was meant to hit’.40
The real story that day was in what the Propaganda Ministry decided
not to show – the damage sustained in the Wilhelmstrasse, in the
administrative heart of the Nazi state. ‘What the Nazis had originally
tried to laugh off as a joke’, Oechsner wrote, ‘had now become a
serious matter.’41
Already in that autumn of 1940, the government had revealed plans
for a massive public works programme to build air raid shelters and
to overhaul air defence provisions across northern Germany. Hitler’s
Sofortprogramm
, or ‘Emergency Programme’, envisaged a network of
public bunkers in Berlin, Hamburg and other major cities, which would
provide protection for the civilian population. In addition, existing
shelters and cellars were to be reinforced and brought up to a minimum
safety standard. Finally, three enormous flak towers were to be built
in the capital, which would not only each provide safe shelter for eight
thousand civilians, but also serve as the cornerstones of a reorganised
and strengthened air defence system. Berlin would emerge as the best-
defended and best-protected city of the war. Never, in the field of
human conflict, would so much concrete be poured in response to so
few incendiaries.
Until those plans were realised, however, Berliners got on with their
lives and made the best of the facilities that they had. Though the
raids were not yet especially heavy or concentrated, Berliners were
nonetheless well prepared. The original Air Protection Law had, after
a taste of things to come
147
all, been in force since 1935 and most households would have received
at least rudimentary training in air raid procedure.
Responsibility for ensuring the public’s adherence to such procedures
fell to the
Luftschutzwart
, or ‘air raid warden’, who was in charge of
each block or group of houses. His role was a vital one, encompassing
the maintenance and provision of each cellar, as well as ensuring the
cooperation and compliance of those civilians under his authority. He
supplied leaflets advising each household on procedures and require-
ments and, in those first months of the war, was primarily concerned
with bringing ‘his’ cellar up to the required safety standard. To this end,
he allocated tasks to the various households under his supervision:
sandbags had to be sewed, filled and stacked, placards had to be made,
signs had to be painted and cellar windows had to be boarded and
sealed.
Inside the cellar, benches and sometimes bunk beds were supplied
as well as all the essentials required for self-defence: first-aid kits,
buckets of water for fighting fires, sand for extinguishing incendiaries,
shovels for clearing debris, and axes and picks in case a cellar should
be blocked in by rubble. Structural alterations were sometimes
required. Ceilings, for instance, had to be reinforced with wooden
beams and stays. Partition walls to neighbouring cellars also had to
be furnished with a ‘breakthrough’, an area of deliberately weakened
brickwork, which could be smashed down to effect an escape to the
neighbouring cellar in the event that the entrance should be blocked
or otherwise rendered impassable.
Lastly, there was the protocol for the raid itself. Those who had
paid attention to the instructions they had been given would have
known that, when the alarm sounded, they were required to turn
off the water, gas and electricity and open the windows and doors,
while observing blackout discipline. Then they were to proceed,
briskly but calmly, to the cellar, taking with them only a small,
prepared suitcase containing essentials, such as a gas mask, a change
of clothes and any important documentation. There they were to
sit out the raid, maintaining order and calm, and wait for the all-
clear to sound.
So much for the theory. For many, the reality could be rather
different. Berlin’s growing complement of foreign and forced labourers,
for example, often faced a difficult task getting into air raid shelters
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berlin at war
at all, and those who succeeded could face insults and prejudice from
the Germans already there. Fred Oechsner recalled the sometimes
highly charged atmosphere. ‘I ceased going down to the cellar of my
apartment house altogether, partly because of the boredom of having
to sit around in the cold for four or five hours at a stretch . . . and
partly because the neighbours made rather pointed remarks about
“your British friends up there”.’ This difficulty was echoed by another
American journalist, Henry Flannery, who recalled the following
exchange in an air raid shelter:
I was standing by a pillar when one of the young soldiers staggered up.
‘I heard you talking English’, he said . . . ‘I used to be in England’,
the soldier continued. ‘I was there for a year – played a piano in an
orchestra. I liked it, liked the people, had a grand time.’ Then he stiff-
ened, leaned towards me, shook his finger in my face. ‘But now,’ he
cried, ‘it’s war, and I hate the English. I don’t want to do anything with
them, except kill them.’
The conditions, in an air raid shelter surrounded by drunken Storm
Troopers, were not the best in which to defend the English. I merely
answered that I could understand his feelings, and tried to determine
which wall to move to.42
Berlin’s Jews also faced considerable difficulties. In most cases, they
were not permitted to enter the communal air raid shelters at all, and
were obliged to congregate in the hallways of their buildings, where
they were at much greater risk. Occasionally, however, and especially
where a building had numerous cellars, one room might be given over
for their use. However, the extent to which ordinary Berliners enforced,
or even knew about these measures, is questionable. In one instance,
a woman explained to her air raid warden that her building had two
cellars: one was always crowded and the other was comparatively
empty, so she usually took the quieter one, which in any case had a
‘more cheerful’ atmosphere. ‘But don’t you know?’ the air raid warden
replied. ‘Those are for Jews.’43
For many, the sound of the air raid siren, wailing across the city, was
something to which they would never grow accustomed. In fact, the
signal consisted of three separate sounds. The first – three long tones,
of a constant pitch – served as a warning, while a single, long, constant
a taste of things to come
149
tone served as the all-clear. The main siren, meanwhile, was a ‘menacing
howl’, which would emanate from countless locations dotted around
the city. It was a sound that one eyewitness described as ‘a cacophony
of loud and quiet sirens . . . an asynchronous concert. A nasty sound,
up and down from too high to too low. It fairly chased one out of bed.’44
Christa Becker recalled how ‘The siren seemed much louder at night.
When they had tested in the daytime, it felt less threatening and was
muffled by the noise of the city. But at night its angry howl echoed
terror from house to house.’45
Some took the siren as the signal to begin their well-rehearsed
routine, preparing their property for the possibility of being bombed.
One Berliner recalled how well-drilled his household was:
When the siren began its warlike howl, we flung ourselves out of bed,
as though the devil himself were after us, and hurried, half-asleep to
our allotted tasks: wake Puppi from the sleep of the innocent, open
the curtains, up with the blackout roll, window open, shutters folded
back, doors open, mains fuse out, mains water off . . .46
For others, just the experience of being woken and of stumbling
down into the cellar in the early hours was distressing. Gisela Richter
was one of those who found that the worst aspect of the air raids
was the lack of sleep: ‘I would never have thought that sleep could
be so sweet, and how the whole body suffers when you don’t get
enough of it.’ Consequently, Gisela sought to stay for as long as possible
in her bed, sometimes until the flak was already firing, before finally
conceding to go down into the cellar. There she would be received
by her nemesis – the
Luftschutzwart
, Frau Schumm – with a withering
look. In time, her sleep deprivation grew so bad that Frau Schumm
was forced to adopt new tactics:
she would stamp up the steps and ring our doorbell. I would answer
that I was coming, and . . . would go back to sleep. Finally, Frau Schumm
was given a key, and she would come right up to my bed, shake me
awake, and then stand there for as long as it took for me to get up . . .
In those days, my nerves were so shot that sometimes I didn’t care
what would become of me, I just wanted to sleep!47
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berlin at war
The cellars themselves could be surprisingly well appointed, with
cots and bunk beds and space for their inhabitants to read, play chess
or do their knitting. In time, themed board games were even devel-
oped to keep children occupied, while simultaneously reinforcing the
principles of air raid procedure. Some cellars, however, though func-
tional, were often damp and offered few creature comforts. One Berliner
described his in the most unflattering terms as ‘a gloomy and unstable-
looking construction, supported on crooked beams, where people
perched on ramshackle seats, wrapped up against the cold, and listened
anxiously to events outside’.48 The prospect of spending any length of
time in such places was one that few greeted with any enthusiasm.
Others complained of the boredom. One young Berliner detested
the cellar of his block with such a passion that often neither his mother
nor the local air raid warden was able to persuade him to go down
there. ‘It stank’, he recalled,
it was damp, cold and dark with a pile of mouldering potatoes in the
corner. Worst of all, there was nothing that we could do. We were so
bored. We children could not run around, we had to sit still. I hated
it, and just wanted to stay in my bed in our apartment. I made such a
scene when the siren sounded that my mother had to practically drag
me down the stairs.49
The boredom and the stench of potatoes were the least of most
people’s worries. The experience of a raid could really shred one’s
nerves. As one Berliner recalled: ‘it was calm in the cellar, nobody said
a word, but we could feel the fear’.50 Christa Becker described one
raid in the autumn of 1940:
People looked different that night. Faces were grey. The sparse light
from the bulb allowed no colour. Some people were in their night
clothes, wrapped in robes or coats hastily thrown over bed-warm
bodies . . .
A violent shudder convulsed our building. The walls of our shelter
shook. A few boxes fell from their shelves . . . A fearful silence followed.
Sentences stopped in mid-stream. Instinctively we ducked
.
.
.
‘Varroom!’ the walls shook.51
a taste of things to come
151
Despite the hardships, however, most Berliners got on with life and
in some cases a new spirit of friendship and community grew directly
from the shared experiences: it was, as one Berliner summed up, ‘a
difficult time, we had to stick together, we had to help each other’.52
For some, the air raids provided an opportunity to meet one’s neigh-
bours, to chat or to gossip; advice could be sought or given, assistance
requested. Others made more intimate contacts. An increase in promis-
cuity certainly accompanied the air raids, and many a relationship had
its first seed sown in the damp, sweaty environment of a shelter or
cellar.
That autumn William Shirer made a new acquaintance when he
found himself seated next to William Joyce, alias ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, in
the cellar beneath the Berlin radio headquarters. Joyce, a renowned
fascist and senior member of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF),
had fled Britain as war loomed in 1939 and had surfaced in the German
capital where he was immediately set to work making English-language
propaganda broadcasts. As neither Shirer nor Joyce had any particular
desire to see out the raid in the cramped shelter, the two stole past
the guards and proceeded to Joyce’s room. Shirer described his
companion in curiously ambivalent terms, mentioning both the