Authors: Roger Moorhouse
Oranienburger Tor via the Stettiner Bahnhof to Reinickendorf. All the
big railway stations are badly hit: Leipzigerstrasse, Potsdamerstrasse; also
the Arsenal and the Academy of Music. Kurfürstendamm and
Charlottenburg are in flames . . . Last night Spandau was apparently hit
very hard. Everywhere it is still burning, ruins are constantly collapsing.41
Goebbels, too, had the chance to witness the effects of ‘total war’
when he left his bunker beneath Wilhelmplatz on the evening of the
24th to drive to his country residence at Schwanenwerder to the west
of the capital:
What I saw was truly shattering. The whole Tiergarten quarter has
been destroyed, so has the section round the Zoo. While the outer
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façades of the great buildings are still standing, everything inside is
burned to the ground . . . you see nothing but remnants of walls and
debris . . . Groups of people scamper across the streets like veritable
ghosts. How beautiful Berlin was at one time and how run down and
woebegone it now looks!42
In the aftermath, some sought to carry on as normal. Dieter
Borkowski attempted to get to school from his home in Kreuzberg
early on 22 November:
That morning, the tram only went as far as Hallesches Tor. I tried to
turn in to the Saarlandstrasse, [but] on both sides the house fronts were
in flames. Glowing sparks flew around the passers-by; like me many
people were running in the direction of the Anhalter Bahnhof, as one
could get down into the S-Bahn there, or via Potsdamer Platz into the
U-Bahn. Mountains of rubble, crying people in between, everywhere
clouds of smoke from still-burning houses.43
Missie Vassiltchikov had a similar experience trying to get to work
two days later. Having equipped herself with a pair of military goggles
and a headscarf, she gamely set off for her office in the nearby
Tiergarten. Her own street, Woyrschstrasse, was not too bad, but soon
the scale of the damage became apparent:
one block away, at the corner of Lützowstrasse, all the houses were
burnt out. As I continued down Lützowstrasse the devastation grew
worse; many buildings were still burning and I had to keep to the
middle of the street, which was difficult on account of the numerous
wrecked trams. There were many people in the streets, most of
them muffled in scarves and coughing, as they threaded their way
gingerly through the piles of fallen masonry. At the end of
Lützowstrasse, about four blocks away from the office, the houses
on both sides of the street had collapsed and I had to climb over
mounds of smoking rubble, leaking water pipes and other wreckage
to get to the other side.
When she turned the corner into Lützowplatz, where her office
was located, she saw that that building too was burning. Standing for
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a few moments to take in the scene, she finally decided that there was
nothing else to do but to retrace her steps and return home.44
Surveying the scene, Gestapo officer Otto Kramer made a list in
his diary of the destruction wrought in the capital that week. It made
for sobering reading:
State Opera, German Theatre, National Gallery, Invalidenstrasse
Museum, Hotel Bristol, Charité Hospital, City Hospital, French
Embassy, Schulstrasse Maternity Hospital, Lichterfelde-East Rail Station,
Swedish, Turkish, Iranian and Slovak Embassies . . . Jerusalem Strasse,
Friedrichstrasse, Wilhelmstrasse, Unter den Linden, Alexanderplatz . . .
Potsdam Station, East-West Axis . . .
He went on to note the suburbs worst affected: Pankow, Siemensstadt,
Charlottenburg, Borsigwalde, Wittenau, Reinickendorf, Heiligensee,
Neukölln . . . ‘On the streets’, he concluded, ‘it looks like a battle-
field.’45
The atmospheric effects of the raids were also substantial. Hans Liebig
wrote to his wife on 29 November describing conditions in the capital:
‘You can hardly breathe in the city for the smoke. When the sun came
out on Wednesday, you just couldn’t see it. We had to have a light on
all day as the sky was a dirty yellow. You can’t imagine it unless you
have experienced it for yourself.’46
The bombing of that November week also hit Berlin Zoo. Located
to the immediate south-west of the city centre and home to nearly
four thousand animals, it found itself under attack on the night of
22 November 1943. Ursula Gebel, who lived nearby, recalled the tragedy:
That afternoon . . . I had been at the elephant enclosure and had seen the
six females and one juvenile doing tricks with their keeper. That same
night, all seven were burnt alive. The entire zoo was destroyed by bombing.
The hippopotamus bull survived in his basin [but] all the bears, polar
bears, camels, ostriches, birds of prey and other birds were burnt. Every
enclosure, except the animal hospital, was destroyed. The tanks in the
aquarium all ran dry, the crocodiles escaped, but like the snakes they froze
in the cold November air. All that survived in the Zoo was the bull elephant
named Siam, the bull hippopotamus and a few apes.47
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In the aftermath, grisly stories abounded about exotic animals from
the destroyed zoo finding their way into the city’s parks and water-
ways, where they were often targeted by the hungry citizens of Berlin.
Hans-Georg von Studnitz noted in his diary the ‘fantastic rumours’
that were circulating: ‘Crocodiles and giant snakes are supposed to be
lurking in the hedgerows of the Landwehr canal. An escaped tiger
made its way into the ruins of the Café Josty, gobbled up a piece of
Bienenstich
pastry it found there – and promptly died.’48
It is easy to dismiss such stories as so many urban myths, but the
account of one eyewitness suggests that there may have been a grain
of truth in them. Josepha von Koskull lived in nearby Charlottenburg
and on the morning after the raid was walking close to the burnt-out
Zoo when she saw a ‘feral-looking Alsatian’ coming towards her.
Taking pity on the creature, which she noticed seemed ‘exhausted and
distraught’, she was considering giving it her breakfast roll, when two
uniformed zookeepers appeared. The ‘feral-looking Alsatian’, it tran-
spired, was an escaped wolf.49
After the ferocity of the attacks on the capital of that week in late
November 1943, the following month saw only a handful of major
raids. Of these, the worst was that of the night of 16 December, in
which a large RAF force bombed the same central and south-western
districts of the city – Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf and Kreuzberg –
that had been hit three weeks earlier, at the cost of over six hundred
lives. Then, on the night of 29 December, the bombers hit the southern
and south-eastern suburbs, returning on two consecutive nights that
same week to bomb the same area, mainly Tempelhof and Neukölln.
As Ruth Andreas-Friedrich’s laconic diary account of that week
suggests, the bombing had become strangely routine:
The old year ended in horror; in horror the new year begins. Heavy
night raid on December 29. Heavy night raid on January 1. The heav-
iest night raid of the war on January 2.
We move rubble. We nail up corrugated board. Here we are without
water, transportation, or current. The telephone is dead too, and we
learn only by roundabout ways whether our friends . . . are alive.50
The last major raid of this period, that of the night of 15 February,
demonstrated not only the vastly enhanced offensive capacity of the
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RAF, but also the effectiveness of Berlin’s civilian defences. That night,
891 aircraft were dispatched to the German capital. Of these, some
800 planes – including more than 500 Lancasters – reached their target,
and bombed districts across the city from Wedding and Pankow in
the north, to Zehlendorf in the south. Yet, though tremendous mater -
ial damage was caused, only 169 lives were lost on the ground.
Astonishingly, the RAF lost more air crew over Berlin that night than
the city ‘lost’ civilians.51
The ‘Battle for Berlin’ finally came to an end after a largely inef-
fective swansong on the night of 24 March 1944. Berliners had little
reason to feel relief. Though the scale and destructive power of those
raids seen during the winter of 1943–4 would scarcely be seen again
over the German capital, the bombing would nonetheless continue –
accelerate even – as the war proceeded inexorably towards its end.
Indeed, in the last full year of the war, Berlin would be raided more
than 150 times – every other day on average – with RAF Mosquitoes
and daylight USAAF raids making the bombing a round-the-clock
torment for those on the ground.
Bombing was an experience that was shared by all Berliners, regardless
of their racial origins or their social standing; from foreign forced labourers
to refugee Jews, from the well-heeled, petty aristocrats of Dahlem to the
communist tenement-dwellers of Friedrichshain. As one observer noted:
‘The bombs fell indiscriminately on Nazis and anti-Nazis, on women and
children and works of art, on dogs and pet canaries.’52 For many, bombing
would become the overriding memory of the time, an ordeal that was
almost emblematic of life in the Reich capital.
The universal nature of the experience meant that bombing could
become a subject of almost obsessive interest. Many youths devel-
oped a talent for plane-spotting, despite the fact that they were all
supposed to be underground by the time the raids hit. Benedikt
Dietrich, for instance, was adept at swiftly identifying all kinds of
enemy planes, helped by the fact that his father – the local air raid
warden – had been issued with identification charts.53 Others became
experts in the technological aspects of the bombing; they would eagerly
make enquiries at local bomb sites, and claimed to be able to identify
the type of bomb dropped from the damage caused. Some became
obsessed with collecting shrapnel, or even the strips of aluminium foil
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used to jam German air raid defences. When Christabel Bielenberg
rushed into a shelter in the suburb of Dahlem in the autumn of 1944,
she noticed that the woman next to her was counting aloud:
Suddenly, ‘Eight’, she said loudly and firmly, ‘peace now until the next
wave comes over.’ Sure enough our refuge quietened itself and she
removed her feet from the wall opposite. ‘Eight? What’s eight got to
do with it?’ I wondered if she had found some magic formula. ‘Eight
bombs in each bomb cradle,’ she announced with professional exacti-
tude, ‘and we were obviously in direct line.’54
Impressed by the woman’s knowledge of the intricacies of aerial
warfare, Bielenberg asked her how long she thought the raid would
last. ‘“Not long,” she said, “an hour, perhaps two.”’ To Bielenberg’s
astonishment, the lady – who was middle-aged and dressed in an ‘odd
assortment of rather well-cut clothes’ – went on to explain the bombing
tactics, the ‘carpet raid’:
‘They send over high-flying pathfinder planes which drop lights, . . .
Christmas trees we call them. They drop them at each corner of a large
square – one, two, three, four’ – she drew a square in the dust on the
floor with the toe of her shabby button boot. ‘Then, my dear, over come
the heavy bombers and drop everything they have into the square. Friendly,
isn’t it?’55
But the subject that dominated conversation most overwhelmingly
was the destruction caused. As one diarist noted, there were few other
topics of conversation in Berlin:
Alarm, alarm and still alarm. You hear nothing else, see nothing else,
think nothing else. In the S-Bahn, on the street, in shops and buses, every-
where the same scraps of conversation: ‘completely bombed out’ . . .
‘roof taken off’ . . . ‘wall collapsed’ . . . ‘windows out’ . . . ‘doors out’
. . . ‘bomb-damage certificate’ . . . ‘lost everything’. It is as if there is no place anymore for the usual subjects.56
Most Berliners endured the Allied bombing campaign in the cellars
of their homes. There, following procedures and precautions laid down
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earlier in the war, they hunkered down with their neighbours, friends
and family and hoped for the best. Those who headed for the city’s
bunkers, meanwhile, lacked a little in camaraderie, but gained in the
additional security that their purpose-built concrete refuge gave them.
Yet, the bunkers were not generally popular. Many Berliners felt uneasy
about leaving their homes, especially as an official instruction required
them to leave their doors and windows open, so as to minimise the
damage caused by the pressure wave of any nearby explosion. Quite
rightly, they were concerned that such measures encouraged theft.
In addition, they hated the crush and panic they faced each time
they wanted to enter the public bunkers, all of which operated on a
first-come-first-served basis. As a result, many eyewitnesses recalled