Berlin at War (32 page)

There they received food, ration cards and sympathy. The official

Wehrmacht report, released the following day, summed up the events:

‘In the night, British aircraft systematically attacked residential areas

of the Reich capital. High-explosive bombs and incendiaries brought

death and injury to numerous civilians and properties sustained roof

fires and damage.’16

Hidden within that report was a key admission: Berlin had witnessed

its first civilian deaths from aerial bombardment. In fact, as well as

the thirty or so who were injured, ten Berliners lost their lives that

night, with two more dying of their injuries in the following days.17

Four men and two women were killed on the street by flying debris.

Tragically, a young mother lost both her children after her home took

a taste of things to come

141

a direct hit. She had gone down to the cellar alone, and had left the

children in their beds as she had not wanted to wake them.18

The German press was outraged, denouncing the RAF as ‘bandits’,19

and attacking Churchill for such a ‘dastardly act of cowardice’.20 Most

of their ire was directed at the fact that the British, while claiming to

have attacked military targets, had succeeded only in bombing a resi-

dential district. ‘The battle in France was too dangerous for [the RAF]’,

one newspaper editorial mocked, ‘so they flew to Germany and chose

non-military targets. Their bombs fell on hospitals and clinics, on resi-

dential suburbs, on farms, on cemeteries and churches, on Goethe’s

summer house in Weimar and on Bismarck’s mausoleum.’ It went on

to pillory the RAF for its ‘one-sided war’ on the German civilian popu-

lation, and its ‘cowardly and outrageous methods’ of dropping its

bombs ‘blindly’ on ‘women and children’.21 As the raids continued,

this theme would be one that the press would return to almost on a

daily basis. Ironically, perhaps, every news report that denounced such

actions by the RAF was surrounded by other articles listing which

‘military installations’ across Britain that the Luftwaffe had apparently

succeeded in hitting.

The political fallout was substantial, especially when the RAF

returned over three consecutive nights the following week. Hitler was

outraged, perceiving the raids as a calculated insult.22 In early September,

he took the opportunity of a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, where

he had been scheduled to talk about the annual winter charity collec-

tion, to rage about British actions and threaten the most blood-curdling

revenge:

And should the Royal Air Force drop two thousand, or three thousand,

or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then we will now drop 150,000;

180,000; 230,000; 300,000; 400,000; yes one million kilograms in a single

night. And should they declare they will greatly increase their attacks

on our cities, then we will erase their cities!

We will put these night-time pirates out of business, so help us God!

The hour will come that one of us will break, and it will not be National

Socialist Germany.23

The day before this speech, in a quiet corner of the southern suburb

of Neukölln, four of the casualties from the Kottbusser Strasse raid had

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berlin at war

been laid to rest. In the St Jakobi Cemetery a ceremony was held with

both the Lord Mayor of Berlin, Julius Lippert, and the deputy Gauleiter

of Berlin, Artur Görlitzer, in attendance. An SA military band was also

present, along with honour guards from the police and the Hitler Youth

and the cemetery was bedecked with Nazi flags, wreaths and flaming

pylons.24 Defiant speeches were made and sombre faces were fixed.

For all the politicking and outrage, it would have been clear to

many Berliners that week that the war had entered a new phase. Not

only had British aircraft demonstrated their ability to reach the city,

but they had shown themselves able to bomb almost at will and take

the lives of Berlin’s civilians. The myth of the capital’s inviolability –

which had been shared by all sections of the city’s society – had been

irrevocably shattered.

William Shirer reported that the raids had made a considerable

impact:

The main effect of a week of constant British night bombings has

been to spread great disillusionment among the people here and sow

doubt in their minds. One said to me today: ‘I’ll never believe another

thing they say. If they’ve lied about the raids on the rest of Germany

as they have about the ones on Berlin, then it must have been pretty

bad there.’25

The official mood report of the SD arrived at essentially the same

conclusion:

The attacks on Berlin have aroused considerable interest across the

Reich, as people were wholly convinced that not a single aeroplane

could reach the city centre. The population is thereby reminded of

announcements, which claimed that enemy aircraft would be unable

to attack Berlin. However, as it has recently been shown that it is possible

for the English even to linger over the capital and drop their bombs,

without suffering appreciable losses, the expectations for the capital’s

defence have clearly not been fulfilled.26

Almost exactly a year into the conflict that Hitler had unleashed,

the war had come home to the German capital.

* * *

a taste of things to come

143

After that debut, the raids continued into the autumn of 1940 and

quickly became a regular occurrence. The city was raided on average

four nights per week, but air raid alarms sounded almost nightly. Few

of its districts escaped attention. Many prominent sites were damaged,

including the Reichstag, Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, the criminal

courts at Moabit and the Palace at Charlottenburg. Industrial targets

hit included the Henschel works at Schönefeld, the Arado aircraft

factory at Babelsberg, Rheinmetall-Borsig at Tegel and Daimler-Benz

at Genshagen. Berlin Zoo also took a number of hits and, despite the

large letters ‘USA’ that had been painted across its roof, even the

American Embassy found itself under fire when a number of incen-

diaries fell in its gardens.

That September, the German capital was bombed nineteen times.

On the night of the 23rd, for example, over eighty RAF bombers

subjected Berlin to a four-hour alarm, which was only lifted shortly

after 3.00 a.m. Two days later, the bombers returned, this time

confining Berliners to their shelters for five hours. The attack, which

was concentrated on the city centre as well as Schöneberg and

Kreuzberg, damaged a hospital and numerous residential streets.

The bombing continued into October, with the city being hit four-

teen times that month. On the night of the 7th, the RAF arrived so

early over the German capital – soon after 10.00 p.m. – that the Berlin

public was in many cases caught out in the open, leaving the cinema

or returning late from work. According to one eyewitness, many

Berliners simply stood in the street, necks craned towards the sky,

where the searchlights had begun scanning the heavens and the distant

rumble of aero-engines could already be heard. ‘Look at that’, they

said in astonishment, ‘they are already here.’27

The raid that followed was one of the heaviest experienced so far,

with two hundred high explosives dropped as well as a huge number

of incendiaries. Among the targets hit were the Lehrter and Stettiner

stations, as well as the Robert Koch Hospital, the Lazarus Hospital, a

maternity clinic, a children’s hospital and a cemetery chapel.28 The

Propaganda Ministry had a field day.

Later that month, Goebbels himself toured those districts of southern

Berlin, mainly Schöneberg, Wilmersdorf and Steglitz, that had been most

grievously affected. Among his uniformed entourage, the Propaganda

Minister stood out in his white overcoat and matching fedora, as he spoke

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berlin at war

earnestly with officials and consoled civilians. Yet for all his smiles, his

encouragement and his sympathy for those bombed out, Goebbels was

worried. As he confided to his diary a few days later, on 26 October:

‘Report on morale from the [Sicherheitsdienst] . . . things are none too

rosy. We absolutely must do more to keep morale high. The continual

air raid alerts are making the people nervous. We must be careful.’29

In November, the frequency of the raids fell again, with the capital

being hit on only eight occasions, although a number of those raids

were substantial and the lengthening nights allowed the RAF to arrive

ever earlier over the city. On one occasion, 14 November, the raid

began before 9.00 p.m. and lasted for over four hours, damaging the

Schlesischer railway station as well as marshalling yards at Tempelhof

and Grunewald.30 As Goebbels noted in his diary, the destruction

wrought was ‘more serious than hitherto’.31 British losses were also

high and a number of aircraft were reported as crashing in the city

and its immediate hinterland.

The last raid of 1940 – on the night of 20–21 December – was also

a peculiarity. Where the British usually arrived over the city at around

midnight, on this occasion they surprised many by appearing shortly

before 5.00 a.m. Then, after the all-clear had been given, a second

wave of planes arrived – soon before 7.00 a.m. – thereby sending

bleary-eyed Berliners scuttling down into their cellars once again. The

raids concentrated on the area of Alexanderplatz, as well as Wedding

and the Lustgarten. In the process, the Arsenal, the Protestant cathe-

dral and a number of museums were damaged.32

After a short hiatus in the early months of 1941, the raids resumed

in March with sporadic attacks over the central areas of the city, which

continued into the summer, but without the intensity or frequency

that had been experienced in the autumn and winter of 1940. Indeed,

in the second half of that year, RAF activity over the German capital

dwindled almost to nothing. Though Berlin was occasionally over-

flown, and leaflets were still dropped, it was subjected to only a handful

of serious raids.

The precise numbers of Berliners killed during the opening phase

of the air war cannot be ascertained precisely, but some salient events

can nonetheless be sketched out. On 4 September, for example, 10

civilians were killed in a raid on the Görlitzer Station.33 Three weeks

later, on 23–24 September, 22 Berliners were killed and 83 injured.34

a taste of things to come

145

Twelve of them died in a single incident, when a bomb penetrated

the entrance to an air raid shelter on Lüneburgerstrasse in Moabit

before exploding.35

The heavy raid of 7–8 October, meanwhile, brought the highest

death toll recorded in the capital up to that point, when 31 Berliners

were killed and 91 were injured. Eight of the dead were discovered in

the south-eastern suburb of Köpenick, where an air raid shelter

collapsed.36 William Shirer recorded the luck of one of the city’s civil-

ians that night:

One young woman I know owes her life to the fact that she missed

her suburban train by about twenty feet. She caught a second one about

fifteen minutes later, but it did not run very far. The first had been hit

square on by a British bomb and blown to pieces, fifteen passengers

perishing!37

Two weeks later a second air raid shelter collapsed, this time in

Carmerstrasse in Charlottenburg; fifteen civilians were killed.

It was not only civilians who found themselves in the line of fire.

The following month, 10 Polish labourers were killed when a bomb

penetrated a section of train tunnel near the Stettiner Station, which

was being used as a shelter.38 Later, on the night of 14–15 November,

33 workers were killed when a British bomber was shot down over the

southern district of Marienfelde, where it crashed into a
Reichsarbeitsfront
barrack.39

The official reaction of the Nazi state, in the early phase of the air

war, alternated between righteous indignation and mockery of the

perceived shortcomings of the RAF. The Propaganda Ministry worked

hard to push its twofold agenda, stressing how ineffectual the bombing

raids were on the one hand, and complaining on the other that civilian

targets were being hit. It also organised tours of every fresh bomb-

site, encouraging all foreign correspondents still in the capital to join

officials in inspecting the damage, so as to better ‘manage’ the unfolding

news stories.

The American journalist Fred Oechsner was one of those who was

often invited along on what he called the ‘dawn bombing-inspection

junkets’. Initially, he recalled: ‘the Propaganda Ministry did its best to

pooh-pooh the significance of the raids’, but gradually, as the autumn

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berlin at war

nights closed in and the bombing grew more serious, Goebbels’ offi-

cials found it increasingly difficult to dismiss them so easily. They also

began to complain about ‘unfair reporting’ and even suggested that