Authors: Roger Moorhouse
being faced with the inevitable knot of civilians all trying to enter at
the same time, often driven to a frenzy by the wailing sirens. Ursula
von Kardorff recalled trying to get into the zoo bunker in 1944: ‘It
was eerie’, she wrote, ‘a mass of people all running in the dark, with
the flak already firing, all making for the entrances, which are much
too narrow. Torches are lit and then the shout goes up of “Lights
Out!” Then the people push and shove and squeeze themselves in,
and one wonders how it all seems to sort itself out.’57 French labourer
Marcel Elola was more damning. Witnessing the crush to get into the
bunker on Landsberger Platz in the spring of 1944, he recalled:
When the sirens go off, a huge stream of people head in the direction
of the entrance. It is terrible to watch, as the women and children are
shoved and even trampled by men, who are just as afraid as they are.
The air raid wardens are just not in a position to establish any authority:
those in charge are either children or old men. There is not the slightest
discipline.58
It could be more than just a nuisance. On New Year’s Day 1944,
twenty-one Berliners were trampled to death when the queue for a
public shelter was panicked into a stampede by a nearby raid.59 At Neu
Kölln, in the summer of 1944, meanwhile, a large number of civilians
were caught trying to enter a converted subway station. As the flak
was already firing and the sirens wailing, there was considerable urgency,
but for whatever reason those at the entrance to the shelter became
stuck. It took soldiers ten minutes to clear the bottleneck, but by that
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time ten civilians had already been killed, asphyxiated in the crush or
trampled underfoot.60
Inside the cellars and bunkers it was often little easier. The claus-
trophobic atmosphere was oppressive, the lack of privacy rankled, and
there was the all-pervading stench of sweat, urine and halitosis – the
inevitable consequence of cramming a large cross-section of humanity
into a small space for any length of time. People tended to deal with
the stress in their own way. Some babbled and talked incessantly, others
prayed or fussed over their children. The majority were left alone with
their thoughts. Ursula von Kardorff recorded the complexity of
emotions that raced through her mind during a raid in the spring
of 1944:
Now and then the light goes out. I wonder if that’s a bomb landing
close by? Next to me there is a small child, quite calm. He has no idea.
Will we suffocate here? Or be slowly roasted like in the bunkers in
Hamburg? An unpleasant thought. I wonder if I have a guardian angel?
. . . I wonder if my house is still standing. And, if it is, ‘they’ will
certainly be back tomorrow anyway.61
For many Berliners fear was the defining emotion of the period.
One did not simply ‘get used to it’; rather, as many eyewitnesses
suggest, it grew with each raid, layered with the gruesome experi-
ences of loved ones or friends, the visions of destroyed buildings, and
the memory of lines of corpses laid out for identification. Josepha
von Koskull recalled the many horror stories that did the rounds,
‘about being buried alive, about charred bodies that were shrunk to
the size of small children, and that could be buried in a margarine
tub. Often it was said that the impact of a heavy air mine . . . would
burst one’s lungs bringing death.’62 Panic attacks were not uncommon.
One diarist described a woman having a ‘screaming fit’ as she was
being escorted up into one of the Berlin flak towers: ‘She thought she
would die there, “I have a husband and son at the front”, she screeched.
“I am not going up there”. Finally, she was removed . . . I thought, if
panic breaks out in here, God help us.’63
Even for those who managed to keep their fears in check, the experi -
ence was profoundly unpleasant. The same endless sitting in rather
uncomfortable surroundings, with a small case at one’s feet containing
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329
valuable documents and other necessities; the same staring at the bare
walls, listening to the murmured prayers and sobs of those whom fate
– and the RAF – had thrown together.
By far the worst part, however, was the sheer cacophony of a raid:
the distant, menacing thud of falling bombs, growing louder and more
threatening as the bombers approached. Though many reassured them-
selves with the mantra that ‘if you can hear the bomb then it won’t
hit you’, the noise was profoundly disconcerting:
After the first impact, the light in the bunker went out. A burning candle
was placed on the stairwell of each floor. Around us, whilst the bombs
fell and death and destruction raged, there was breathless quiet.
Somewhere a rumble started; a terrible rolling of thunder that comes
nearer; the bunker rocks, but holds, and the rumble fades away. Then
another one starts with terrible blasts, again it seems to roll towards us,
comes close, and then crashes away into the distance. For a long time
after the last explosion is heard, there is absolute silence in the bunker,
amongst young and old. Then the realisation dawns, that it’s over.64
For some, however, that terrifying crescendo of explosions did not
dissipate, or rumble off into the distance. Near the end of a raid, Ruth
Andreas-Friedrich and her partner were contemplating returning
upstairs to their apartment, when a ‘thundering hell’ broke loose
around them:
we fall to our knees, slide along the floor like repentant sinners towards
the pillar that is the single support of the house walls . . . Broken glass
scatters around us. Masses of dark-gray dust whirl through the air.
Smoke, flames, sulphur-coloured fog . . . We choke and cough. Fire to
the right. Fire to the left. A deluge of flames from all sides. . . . Time
stands still; eternity has begun . . . Stones topple; a storm thrusts a
whirlpool of sparks through the shattered windows.65
Leopold Deutsch described another direct hit, on his home in
Kreuzberg in the spring of 1944:
With our backs to the wall, we heard the first detonations as they came
closer and closer. The emergency light was switched on. Suddenly, there
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was a particularly loud crash and the light went out, so the Hindenburg
lights were lit on the table. . . . Shortly afterwards, there was another
detonation. I watched as – almost in slow motion – the ceiling fell inwards
like a trapdoor close to the entrance. The Hindenburg lights went out,
and I could hear only the din of falling masonry and debris. The rubble
rose like the tide, until I passed out.66
Only a child at the time, Leopold was one of the few to be brought
alive out of the ruins of the shelter.
Renate Knispel recalled being rescued from what was left of her
cellar in January 1944. She and her family had only just reached the
shelter, when the building received a direct hit:
One had the feeling that one’s head would be ripped off. We were
buried up to our waists. Beneath the rubble I squeezed my mother’s
hand. She squeezed back, so I knew she was alive. We waited to be
rescued. Finally, there was a knocking on the wall from the people next
door, and one of us knocked back. Then they knocked a hole in the
wall and pulled us out one by one. We were taken through their cellar,
in which we were astonished to see that the light still worked. When
the neighbours saw us they started laughing. We did not understand
until someone handed us a mirror. We were completely covered with
a thick layer of grey dust.67
It is not surprising that the air raids provoked a fatalistic – even
apathetic – attitude among Berliners. Ursula von Kardorff reckoned
that such attitudes had become the norm: ‘if it comes, it comes’, one
acquaintance of hers averred, ‘you cannot escape your fate’.68 One girl
remembered her mother telling her in 1943 that the family would from
then on sleep together, with their heads all in the same direction. If
a bomb hit them, she reasoned, they would at least all die together.69
Those killed would be pulled from the ruins by their former neigh-
bours, or by teams of soldiers or forced labourers thrown together
for the purpose. Marcel Elola recalled the grisly task of recovering the
bodies of a family from a collapsed house:
With the others, we pulled out the three adults, or rather what remained
of them. They were torn to pieces and their remains could be removed
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331
in a washbowl. Then we pulled the little girl out of the rubble. Her
body was in one piece, her eyes protruding. We laid her in the yard
on a pile of stones. Her dress was hardly torn. She had often come to
the factory and we had given her chocolate. Another image that I will
not forget: this child, lying there on her back, arms crossed, as though
she had just fallen asleep on the piles of rubble and ash; all that remained
of her family.70
Initially, any unidentified corpses would be laid out in the street so
that a name might be provided by neighbours and passers-by. After the
larger raids, however, the potential shock caused by leaving large
numbers of corpses on public display was such that the dead were laid
out, incongruously, in school halls and gymnasiums. In many cases,
the severity of the injuries meant that identification was almost impos-
sible. When a girls’ school on the Neuenburgerstrasse was hit early in
1945, the hundred or so corpses of the young victims were laid out in
nearby buildings to be identified by their distraught parents, but their
injuries were such that only a few of them could be named.71 In due
course, those few were handed over to their next of kin for burial. The
remainder were interred in a dedicated section of a local cemetery.
For those fortunate enough to survive a raid, the first task was to
check if their homes were still intact. Ursula von Kardorff was among
those bombed out in the raid of 1 February 1944. While the attack
was still raging, she had left the cellar and climbed the stairs, only to
find her apartment burning fiercely and realise that there was little
left to rescue. ‘We dragged what we could find down the stairs’, she
wrote in her diary the next day, ‘and simply threw beds, books, and
cushions out of the window.’ ‘Somehow’, she concluded, ‘I always
knew that it would come to this.’72 Others were unable to salvage even
the essentials. Erich Neumann could save only the family dog and a
case of beer, when his mother’s bar was bombed in 1944.73
In many cases, the bombed-out had nowhere to go. Official instruc-
tions held that they were to seek shelter initially with friends or family,
but failing that they would be rehoused by the authorities. In the short
term, the Nazi welfare organisation, the NSV, took care of refugees,
setting up tents in the city’s parks, while field kitchens – wheeled stoves
with tall chimneys, known affectionately as
Gulasch-Kanonen
– dished
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up hot food and soup. Thus fortified, the bombed-out would begin an
interminable round of office visits and form-filling, in search of new
accommodation, replacement furniture and clothing, much of which
came from ‘evacuated’ Jews.
Many, however, were reluctant to leave what remained of their
former homes and preferred to camp out among their few rescued
possessions. For some, it seems the act of repairing and making good
represented a form of continuity, even of sanity. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich
recognised this point. ‘Why make repairs?’ she questioned:
Why do millions of people keep starting all over to build up what may
be in fragments again within the next hour? . . .
I think I know the answer. We make repairs because we have to,
because we couldn’t live another day if we weren’t allowed to make
repairs.
If our living room goes, we move into the kitchen. If the kitchen
is smashed, we transfer to the hall. If the hall is in ruins, we set up in
the cellar. Anything so long as we can stay at home. The most dismal
scrap of home is better than any palace somewhere else. That’s why
they all come back someday – the people whom the bombs have driven
out of the city. They root among the stone fragments of their ruined
houses; they go to work with shovel and broom, hammer, tongs and
pickaxe, until one day a new home rises out of the charred foundation
– a Robinson Crusoe stockade, perhaps, but a home nonetheless. You
can’t live if you don’t belong anywhere.74
Thus many Berliners ended up living beneath canvas in a ruined
shell of their home, without heating and lacking even the most basic
creature comforts. As Ursula von Kardorff explained, that existence
could be sorely trying:
Our flat: without a door, windows, heating, light, water, telephone and
gas, is worse than a wooden hut in the wilderness. A civilisation destroyed
makes one feel completely helpless. Come the evening, when the dusk