In Lokstedt, in the north-east of the city, Wanda Chantler was struggling to wake a room full of women and convince them to come to the air-raid shelter. She was a twenty-year-old Pole who worked in a forced-labour camp packing cans of fish for soldiers at the front. As first-aid officer at her barracks, she was obliged to go to the shelter, but few of the others would join her.
First of all there was a great big howl of sirens. And the girls all said, ‘Oh, it’s like this every night – nothing will happen.’ They went off so often, those sirens: we sometimes got them twice a night. We all got so fed up, particularly those that were on the day shift, because they had no sleep – the planes never came in the daytime, they always came in the night. But these girls said, ‘We’re not getting up. Nothing will happen.’ 12
Reluctantly, she and five other women trudged down to the makeshift underground shelter on the other side of the compound – a move that probably saved her life.
Elsewhere, other Hamburgers were showing similar reluctance to go to the shelters. Hannah Kelson was fourteen, and had a typical teenager’s response to any suggestion that she should leave her bed just because the RAF might be coming: ‘Let them come, I don’t care.’ 13For some it was the conditions in the bunkers kept them away. Martha Bührich, a fifty-seven-year-old teacher who lived in Barmbek preferred to sit on a stool in the doorway of her bathroom rather than go to the ‘community bedlam’ of the air-raid bunkers. 14Some of the shelters were uncomfortable because people brought as much as they could carry ‘just in case’ – not only jewellery and important papers, but suitcases, pet dogs, cats and even chickens. 15It is not surprising that many wanted to avoid the shelters unless it was absolutely necessary.
There were other reasons to stay above ground: a raid on the city could be a spectacular event, and many Hamburgers admit that they often stood in their doorways or on their balconies during an attack to watch the progress of the bombs. The novelist Hans Erich Nossack recorded watching some women on the roof of a neighbour’s house applauding as a British plane, caught in searchlights, was shot down. 16Civilians have always turned out to watch battles from a supposedly safe distance – however, as Nossack makes clear, the true reason that they watched was not to see the battle in the sky but the unfolding destruction of their city. ‘I had one unequivocal wish,’ he says. ‘Let it get really bad!’ 17
Tonight Nossack was not on his balcony to witness events: he was on holiday in the countryside, just to the south of the city. Like many others he was unmoved by the sound of the sirens. It was the noise of aeroplanes humming overhead that snapped him into action.
I jumped out of bed and ran barefoot out of the house into this sound that hovered like an oppressive weight between the clear constellations and the dark earth, not here and not there but everywhere in space … One didn’t dare take a breath for fear of inhaling it. It was the sound of eighteen hundred aeroplanes [ sic] approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or even more air raids, some of them very heavy, but this was something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end. 18
In the centre of town many others were also beginning to realize that this was the full-scale raid they had been dreading. State Secretary Georg Ahrens was now broadcasting a warning over the radio on all channels: ‘Go immediately to your air-raid shelters! Enemy bombs may drop within the next three minutes!’ 19Soon the streets were busy with people making their way to the public shelters. There was still plenty of time, but they ran anyway, out of a desire to get a good place in the bunker and genuine fear for their lives.
For those who were late, further confirmation arrived of what lay in store for them. Cascades of bright red and yellow marker bombs, and later green ones too, fell over the city, filling the night with a miraculous glow. For one woman at least, on fire duty at one of the city’s department stores, the Tannenbäumewere a sight she would never forget: ‘I stood there looking out of the hatch at the wonderful sky. This was something one would otherwise never see … The whole sky above Hamburg alight – prettier, much prettier than a firework display.’ 20
Sixteen-year-old Gotthold Soltwedel, who was serving as a flak helper on the huge flak tower in the centre of town, also saw it:
I can still remember the first ‘Christmas trees’ exactly. Dazzling coloured flames hung over us on little parachutes; and likewise on the ground, in the middle of the Heiligengeistfeld, colourful incendiaries lay as markers for the bombers. I can also still hear the first bomb howling down. It was very near. As if on command we charged away from the guns and into the entrance of the bunker, knocking our Leutnantto the floor in the process. He screamed at us dreadfully and called us cowards. 21
By now there were very few people out in the open – even the majority of fire wardens had taken cover, coming out intermittently to conduct quick patrols of the buildings. Earlier in the year, Goebbels had discussed with Hitler the idea that fire wardens should be stationed on the roofs of houses during air raids so that they could combat incendiary bombs as soon as they fell, but he soon realized that this would cause too many casualties. 22In general, only official observers and those manning flak batteries were around to see the sheer mass of marker bombs, incendiaries and the spectacular explosions of the 4,000-pound ‘cookies’ and 8,000-pound ‘blockbusters’.
From his flak battery in the north east of the city, Rudolf Schurig had a panoramic view of the unfolding situation:
We soon saw anti-aircraft fire at eight o’clock, and then they were there: direction Eimsbüttel, Altona. The first Tannenbäumefell there, a glowing green hail of fire, which was to mark the target for the following aircraft. And suddenly the sky above that district was as light as day. A large number of bright parachute flares, which ignite very low down and slowly drop, lit up the district as if it were an enormous freight depot, lit by many flood lamps. Here the first anti-aircraft shells were fired, the first of our new artillery. How it thundered! … At each volley we had a feeling of security. We would show the Tommies what it meant to attack Hamburg, our Hamburg! 23
Things started to go wrong when the effects of the RAF’s new radar-jamming device, Window, took hold. As Rudolf Schurig was soon to discover, his earlier sense of security had been misplaced:
Everything seemed to be going well, as we had practised in exercises and battle hundreds of times. But suddenly our radar apparatus stopped working. This happened regularly to this highly sensitive machinery, and would quickly be fixed; in the meantime we would switch to the neighbouring battery. But they were unable to give us any information, as their radar was also broken … It was then confirmed that none of the radar in Hamburg was functioning; we did not yet know why … A paralysing terror began to creep over us. We felt like someone who has been given a rifle to defend himself, but who is blindfolded at the same time. 24
For Johann Johannsen, who was manning a flak battery in Altona, things were even worse. Altona was directly beneath the RAF marker flares, and was about to receive the full force of the bombs.