The German War (20 page)

Freiburg may have been a convenient fiction, but on the night of 11 May 1940, the RAF launched its first air raid on Germany, against Mönchengladbach in the Ruhr. In the weeks following France’s capitulation, the RAF stepped up its night attacks, sending over hundreds of bombers at a time. The more significant raids, like that of the night of 23–24 June on Dortmund, left one dead and six wounded and in Düsseldorf seven people were killed and seven wounded. RAF targeting was so inaccurate, however, that by July farmhouses and villages were being hit. Both the regularity and the aimlessness of the bombing forced German civil defence volunteers to tighten air raid precautions across the towns and cities of north-western Germany. In Hamburg, the ‘chief complaint’, Shirer found, ‘was not the damage caused but the fact that the British raids robbed them of their sleep’, as every false alarm drove the city’s entire population from their beds. The clamour for retaliation grew.
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At rallies, Nazi speakers dropped hints of powerful new weapons, sparking a rash of rumours about an invasion of Britain. Gliders, like those used to such effect against Norway and Belgium, were to land paratroops, while countless new tanks and naval vessels were said to be ready. There was talk of a force of 2,000 Stukas and huge new bombs; of jet aircraft capable of flying at 1,000 kilometres an hour; of death rays and something even the SD did not seem to understand and just quoted verbatim, ‘“the deployment of liquid air with electron dust”, causing unheard-of explosive force and spread of heat’. As the weeks rolled by bringing no news of military action, astrologers again did a brisk trade. Political rumours ran riot too. Lloyd George and the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII) were said to be in Berlin; George VI had abdicated and Churchill fled. Some geopolitically minded citizens wondered aloud whether Germany had an economic interest in preserving the British Empire. Indeed, Hitler asked the same question and worried that its dismemberment would benefit not Germany, but ‘foreign great powers’.
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Even after his ‘peace offer’ was rejected, Hitler hesitated over his final decision. He had ordered his commanders to prepare operational plans for the ‘war against England’ in early July, but it was not until 1 August that he finally issued a directive to the Luftwaffe to start the ‘England attack’. The day before he had ordered the General Staff to begin planning for a military campaign against the Soviet Union, on the grounds that it remained Britain’s last potential ally on the Continent. That Hitler was already thinking about conquering the Soviet Union in preference to invading Britain indicates both his cautious appraisal of Germany’s chances of challenging the power of the Royal Navy from the air, and his long-cherished desire to force the British to become German partners. During July and early August, the Luftwaffe ringed the North Sea and Channel coasts from Norway to western France with new bases; and it tried to win temporary control over the Channel, successfully attacking British convoys until the Admiralty was forced to halt their passage. In Berlin, construction crews began erecting review stands on the Pariser Platz in preparation for another victory parade. This time they were decorated with large wooden eagles, which were given a lick of gold paint. Thanks to the terrible English summer weather, ‘Eagle Day’, as the attack was code-named, could not be launched until 13 August.
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For the first three weeks the Luftwaffe attacked the airfields of RAF Fighter Command. On 18 August, it was the turn of Biggin Hill in Kent: returning German pilots reported seeing the airfield in a sea of flames, runways destroyed, buildings ruined and no sign of enemy aircraft or anti-aircraft fire. They concluded that the base was ‘completely destroyed . . . wiped out of existence’. They were astonished by the ease with which they were winning the battle. ‘Young men,’ a returning pilot explained excitedly to the ground crew, ‘that was nothing at all: we had imagined a quite different defence.’ By 19 August, the Luftwaffe claimed to have shot down 624 British planes, with the loss of 174 of their own. That night, as the German air force expanded its bombing of the aircraft industry, it began to target the outer London suburbs of Wimbledon and Croydon. On 24–25 August, it was Harrow and Hayes, Uxbridge, Lewisham and Croydon, and on 28–29 August, Hendon, Southgate, Wembley and Mill Hill, but also the inner London boroughs of St Pancras, Finchley and the Old Kent Road. Hitler had forbidden the bombing of London, but mission creep took its toll on a capital ringed with military bases and industrial plants.
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Although it was much easier for the Luftwaffe to reach Britain from their new Continental bases than it was for the RAF to strike at Germany, Churchill ordered an immediate response to the first accidental raid on London. On the night of 25–26 August, twenty-two Hampden and Wellington bombers struck Berlin. It was a pinprick raid, causing slight damage, but it defied the promise issued to the home front by Hermann Göring. At the outbreak of the war, he had gone on the radio to pledge that if a single plane reached the Ruhr, then his name was ‘not Göring but Meier’. Now they had penetrated all the way to the Reich capital. Playing on the Reich Marshal’s famous fondness for the chase, wits soon starting calling the air raid sirens in Berlin and the Ruhr ‘Meier’s hunting-horn’, or simply referred to him pithily as ‘Hermann Meier’. A second minor raid on Berlin followed on 29–30 August, killing ten and injuring twenty-one people. The psychological and strategic consequences were enormous. Berliners were shocked that British planes could penetrate so deeply into German airspace; Hitler also.
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He seized the first opportunity to address the nation, speaking to a young female audience of nurses and social workers assembled to launch the Party’s Winter Relief Fund on 4 September. ‘I waited three months without answering the British night bombing in the hope they would stop this mischief,’ Hitler told the packed Berlin Sportpalast. ‘But Herr Churchill saw this as a sign of our weakness. You will understand that we are now answering, night for night and on an increasing scale. And when the British air force drops two or three or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then we will in one night drop 150, 180, 230, 300, 400,000, a million kilograms.’ Pausing to let the wild applause die down, Hitler continued, ‘When they declare that they will increase their attacks on our cities, then we will erase their cities from the earth.’ William Shirer was there, and recorded that ‘the young nurses and social workers were quite beside themselves and applauded frenetically’. Suffering from a heavy cold, the American found the screaming audience very trying, but was still impressed by the way Hitler ‘squeezed every ounce of humour and sarcasm out of his voice’ promising, ‘We will put an end to the work of these night pirates, so help us God. The day will come when one of us two breaks and it will not be National Socialist Germany.’ Two hours later, the speech was broadcast. The pledge to ‘erase’ British cities would be long remembered.
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Even Hitler’s overt threat was couched in what had become the accustomed, defensive, retaliatory terms with which each step of the war had been justified. A few days earlier, Shirer had recorded a conversation with his cleaner, a woman from a working-class family, married, he surmised, to an ex-communist or socialist. ‘Why do they do it?’ she asked. ‘Because you bomb London,’ Shirer replied. ‘Yes, but we hit military objectives, while the British they bomb our homes.’ ‘Maybe,’ Shirer interjected, ‘you bomb their homes too.’ ‘Our papers say not,’ she argued. ‘Why didn’t the British accept the Führer’s offer?’
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On the evening of 7 September, a fanfare introduced a fresh special announcement: ‘for the first time the city and port of London’ had been attacked ‘as a reprisal’ for RAF raids. In fulfilment of the Führer’s threat, 3,000 planes had ‘set their course for London’. ‘Chasing through the night sky like comets’, they had left behind ‘one great cloud of smoke [which] tonight stretches from the middle of London to the mouth of the Thames’. The military bulletin did not forget to state that the Luftwaffe was waging ‘fair and chivalrous warfare’, restricted to ‘military objectives’. The next day all the papers carried the same headline: ‘BIG
ATTACK
ON
LONDON
AS
REPRISAL’. Although only 348 bombers, protected by 617 fighters, had attacked the British capital, returning pilots broadly confirmed these reports, having seen ‘thick black clouds of smoke, which grew like giant mushrooms’ from 50–60 kilometres away. Dropping large oil bombs as well as high explosive bombs, they ignited major fires in the East End docks. The RAF had barely troubled them.
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On the night of 10 September, the British bombed the centre of Berlin again, hitting the American embassy and Goebbels’s nearby garden: Shirer noted that it was ‘the severest bombing yet’, but it was still minor compared to what the Luftwaffe was doing. When the BBC mistakenly claimed that the nearby Potsdamer station had been hit, Shirer was not surprised to be told by ‘at least three Germans’ that ‘they felt a little disillusioned at the British radio’s lack of veracity’. Even the respectable
Börsen Zeitung
insisted that ‘While the attack of the German air force is made on purely military objectives – this fact is recognised by both the British press and radio – the RAF knows nothing better to do than continually to attack non-military objectives in Germany.’
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From September 1940, huge resources were devoted to civil defence, especially to building massive ferroconcrete bunkers for the urban population of northern and north-western Germany. Many rose slowly above ground: great, rectangular, windowless fortresses. The Berlin towers were erected in three parks. The first opened in April 1941 in the Tiergarten near the Zoo, its four-metre-thick walls surmounted by flat roofs and smaller, square corner towers which served as the platforms for the anti-aircraft guns, radar equipment and searchlights. A second was completed at Friedrichshain in October 1941, and a third at Humboldthain the following April. Each could accommodate 10,000 people. They were not only places of protection; the towers also became symbols of the national ‘will to hold out’. Similar massive fortresses were built in the Hamburg neighbourhoods of St Pauli and Wilhelmsburg. At Hamm in the Ruhr, six bunker towers were inserted into the ring of the town walls, projecting the image of a medieval fortified town. In Dortmund, the local planners equipped the tunnels that had been sunk 15 metres below the city for an underground railway system in 1937. They now offered shelter to 20,000. Hanover also opted for tunnels. Essen, the capital of the Krupp armament empire, was equipped with serious anti-aircraft artillery and a bunker-building programme began which would make it one of the best-defended cities in Germany. The public bunkers could only ever accommodate a minority of the urban population – no more than 10 per cent of Berliners, for example – but their psychological importance and utility are hard to overestimate. Most citizens relied on the basements of their apartment blocks, where windows and doors were replaced with steel, blast-proof ones. For those with the money, space and contacts, the building of private shelters in their gardens also continued apace.
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The regime had been so confident in the Luftwaffe’s ability to defend German airspace that it had made no plans to evacuate children. While London children boarded trains at Liverpool Street as early as September 1939, most German children remained at home. When evacuation finally began, it remained voluntary and families were reluctant to send their children away. On 10 July 1940, the first special train left Münster, but volunteers from the Nazi Women’s Organisation had to go from door to door browbeating parents in order to fill the 200 places.
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On 27 September 1940, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s Party Secretary, notified higher Party and state officials that a newly ‘extended’ programme of ‘sending children to the countryside’ was now under way, the
Kinderlandverschickung
or, as it was universally called, the KLV. The name had comforting connotations of the summer camps for workers’ children from the big cities which had been pioneered by church and Social Democratic welfare organisations before and after the First World War – and which the Nazis had taken over and continued throughout the 1930s. Bormann forbade the use of the fear-inspiring term ‘evacuation’, and did everything in his power to reinforce the fiction of an an ‘extension’ of limited, recuperative spells in the countryside away from the ‘areas threatened by air attack’.
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Hitler entrusted Baldur von Schirach with the task of drawing up the guidelines and organising the KLV. As the former leader of the Hitler Youth before he became Gauleiter of Vienna, Schirach hoped to elbow aside the schools and the Ministry of Education to implement his own educational programme. He wanted the single-sex homes, or ‘camps’, for 10- to 14-year-olds to serve as a showcase. By redeploying youth hostels and requisitioning hotels, convents, monasteries and children’s homes, Schirach’s staff rapidly assembled a stock of 3,855 buildings with places for 200,000–260,000 children. The National Socialist People’s Welfare organised special trains, paid for the children’s health care, and even arranged for local families to do their laundry. The Hitler Youth had never freed itself completely from parental and teacherly constraint and would not succeed in doing so now, but Schirach conceived his scheme as a permanent element of youth education designed to last into the post-war era and greatly enhance the Hitler Youth’s influence. Fearing just such a development, priests in the largely Catholic Rhineland waged a low-level – and not very successful – campaign against parental take-up.
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To the frustration of local Nazi officials, consent remained a parental prerogative. By insisting on this, Hitler reined in the anti-clerical wing of the Party and forced functionaries to win public backing. Ironically, for a regime so bent on reassuring its citizens, the evacuation scheme’s success depended on parents’ fear for their children’s lives. In Berlin and Hamburg 189,543 children were evacuated in the first two months of the national scheme, by which point rumours in Dresden were describing Berlin as a devastated city. As the scheme was extended to the vulnerable cities of north-western Germany and parents desperately sought to save their children from the danger of a direct hit, numbers continued to rise, reaching some 320,000 by 20 February 1941, 413,000 by the end of March and 619,000 by late June.
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