October 22, 1943

The Destruction of
Kassel

O
n October 22, 1943, Bomber Command managed to unleash its second
firestorm.

Kassel had already been attacked on October 3; they had pounded the
Henschel locomotive works and an ammunition depot west of Ihringhausen
there, but missed the city center. The next night Frankfurt's center was
damaged, the Gagernstrasse Children's Hospital received a direct hit in the air
raid shelter, ninety children, fourteen nurses, and a female doctor died, as well
as another 414 civilians. The 406 machines achieved fires, but none remotely
resembled what ten squadrons of 569 machines left in the second Kassel
attempt.

416,000 incendiary bombs

416,000 incendiary bombs fell at a density of up to two per square meter, thanks to
the highly accurate marking this time. Houses in the city center were usually hit by
several stick incendiary bombs and two liquid incendiary bombs. The old inner city
was Kassel's fate.

 It was not hot on this late autumn evening as in Hamburg, although very dry. The
bomber stream stretched for a hundred and fty kilometers. When the rst wave
began bombing at 8:55 p.m., the last wave ew over Bonn-Koblenz. It succeeded in
hitting sharply the targeted point, the Martinsplatz around the Martinskirche with the
princely crypt. In the residence of the former Landgraves of Hesse, a rich ensemble
of half-timbered houses had been cherished, out of civic pride, as a local estate
beyond compare. Exactly what Harris was looking for. Presumably, the precise and
powerful impact in this relighter accomplished it, because within fteen minutes the
downtown blazed.

The liquid incendiary bombs, penetrating deeply all oors of all houses, set res from
roof to basement, the mine bombs opened all roofs and windows within ve hundred
yards, the ame passing through like a furnace on full draft. There was no way
through stairways and corridors. Although there was a supply of water in cisterns,
extinguishing ponds and, above all, in the Fulda, independent of the pipe system,
once the restorm has formed its arena, it is impenetrable.

A thousand-year-old city like Kassel is made of materials that shorten the process in
time. The depth of history of such a structure shortens the end. It comes too quickly
to stop it. The restorm took forty- ve minutes to reach its zenith. The re ghting
forces with six standby units and two turntable ladders did not bother him further. A
Ruhr Valley city with its fast neighboring re departments would not have been left
quite so defenseless. Kassel stood alone, with the nearest major city a hundred and
fty kilometers away

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 In the Kassel attack, one in ten died in the inner city area. A total of 10,000 people
were killed. This corresponds to a rate of 4.42 percent; Hamburg recorded 2.73
percent. It was to take almost a year before a comparable number of people were
annihilated in Darmstadt, but in a city half the size. Of those present there, 10.6
percent fell. Firestorm and wild re are closely related events, only the lethality of the
former is far higher, and it occurred less frequently. The incendiary weapon was most
likely to call it forth in historic cities of moderate size. The res of Hamburg and
Dresden, remembered as memorials of the bombing war, are solitaires. It was a war
of wear and tear more characteristic of a city like Braunschweig: a dozen major
raids, 2905 dead, eighty percent destruction of housing in the inner city, thirty-three
percent overall. The bulk of the losses were borne by 158 medium-sized German
cities

Fire Engineerin
At the beginning of the war, Bomber Command considered its explosive and high
explosive bombs to be the main weapon. It was not until 1942 that it was understood
that explosives could not be used to ght a bombing war. They were an element that
only interlocked with another, the incendiary, to exert the greatest weapon power
ever experienced. Their destructive success was controlled by the mixture,
sequence, and density of fragmentation, mine, and incendiary munitions

In 1940 and 1941, the bomber pilot had two terms for his drop: hit or miss. Two years
later, a different war prevailed. Research staffs studied development maps and aerial
photographs, colored the incendiary sections, calculated the composition of the drop
mass required for each city, evaluated images of the last air attack, and learned from
them for the next. When the charge was released, a ash bomb also dropped and a
camera operated. Scouts photographed what had been accomplished the following
day. The war of strategists and swashbucklers always consisted of experience facts,
incursions and intuition. Science added to it the meticulousness of the laboratory

It turned out that cities could basically be burned down from the air, even the
German ones sturdily built of bricks. From the ignition point of view, the relevance of
a city grows from the outside to the inside. The outer ring was created by the 19th
and 20th centuries, it contains industrial sites and settlements of more modern
construction. Steel girders were used, re compartments were built in, spaces were
widely enclosed. This is the outer ring. Further inward, the Gründerzeit has allowed
unsound quarters to proliferate in large metropolises, containing little air, gloomy,
absorbing heat well and burning quickly. Beyond is the 18th-century city with its
rectangular street pattern, three- to six-story buildings with common partitions,
masonry on wooden beams, and false ceilings lled with tamping material. Roof
ridges run parallel to the street and into each other. The core of the town is the old
town, originating from the medieval or early modern building pattern. The streets are
narrow, winding and twisted. Beamed frames hold the houses, now lled with brick,
but once plastered with mud, which is still in all kinds of patchwork. Dividing walls are
cobbled together so that they pass re from neighbor to neighbor. The attics are
divided with abundant wood. Wherever such cores existed, they were the natural
target, which in turn served as kindling for the immediate surroundings

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The block was identi ed as the Achilles' heel of the expanded inner district. Originally
a square of residential buildings, it had become a mixed form with stores and
commercial businesses on the rst oor. Quickly proliferating, they seized the
formerly vacant yard space. Stuffed warehouses, workshops, gladly set up in wood,
offered themselves as excellent re bridges. The ame needs narrowness. Streets
far narrower than their houses high. The chance of the bomb to fall on a ammable
Bahnhofstraße Kassel
area increases with the disappearance of open spaces, front gardens, gaps between
buildings.

Bahnhofstraße, Kassel

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Fatefully, the house points its most ammable part upward, where the bomber
operates. The roof, with its tile and entablature structure, allows a re to start that
grows downward. This lasts a long time, about three hours per oor. One can also
set the detonation point lower. The bomb penetrates three or four ceilings with its
weight, ignites, and then takes advantage of the wooden oors; it's a matter of
setting the fuse. All that's missing is the draft

After the four-thousand-pound blockbuster blew away roofs and windows far and
wide, houses formed chimneys and the re materials rained in. A safe refuge was the
German cellar, built either as a brick vault or as a concrete pour with steel beams.
The cellar ceiling provided excellent protection against explosive forces. It was only
defenseless against the incoming combustion gases and the loss of oxygen. At rst,
there was no idea of these main effects of re warfare. What was well known,
however, was the intervention of the re ghting forces.

Fire trucks after the attack

Where they appeared in time, the re nowhere overcame the boundary of the block
in which it had been set. Without the failure of the re ghters, no wild re occurs.

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 Fire ghters after the attack on Kasse

It needs routes to the damage site and to water. Against this, the demolition bombs
intervene. The type with oversized heads in the front and guide ns in the rear bores
deep into the soil and tears up the network of pipes. In addition, the road is cratered
and impassable, but only for a short time. Water would have to be tapped from rivers
and re ponds set up as a precaution, debris cleared. The lighter, blunt
fragmentation bomb with a timed fuse that remains on the ground therefore stretches
the attack. It detonates and hurls its bullet-like fragments for hours after the attacker
has left the scene. The re defenders are forced into the dugouts for such a long
time, if not, they are worn down

The mixing and calibration of the dropping mass kept the bombardment researchers
incessantly busy. Nobody but them knew how to penetrate such a complicated
process. The burning property of the target in space and time was one thing. On the
other hand, natural events had an effect, temperature, humidity, wind. Finally,

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 everything got mixed up by human nature. No formula existed for the pilots.
Unpredictable parts of their cargo regularly fell into places not speci ed. It did little
good to factor behavioral variables into the plans; they rarely varied as intended. In
the alternative, targets were massed, approached dozens of times. After the war
ended, the country was considered "overbombed.

Neuer Wilhelmsplatz, Kasse

Never before had the history of war known a weapon entirely directed by scientists
like the incendiary attack. Use and invention overlapped. When technology,
equipment and skill were together, the war ended. Without an imagined concept of
annihilation, the weapon would have remained as blunt as when it began. It groped
its way forward in an alternation of trial and correction. Fires had originally been
thrown to illuminate the nighttime target area for the demolition bombs. Comparative
aerial photo analysis rst revealed that seven thousand tons of munitions in
explosives caused thirty kilometers of damage, but in incendiaries one hundred and
fty kilometers. The realization that a city is easier to burn than to blow up, but that a
suf cient re requires both, did not solidify until the summer of 1943. It was an
empirical fact. It was preceded by a gamut of bombs, some that worked, some that
didn't.

One failure was the tiny incendiary plates 'Razzle< and "Decker," a celluloid strip
with a layer of fabric to which a piece of white phosphorus was stapled. In the
summer of 1940 the Royal Air Force dropped huge quantities of it on forests and
elds to destroy German crops as well as to burn the Black Forest, the Thuringian
Forest, and the heights of the Harz Mountains.

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 In the summer of 1941, the experiment was repeated with the fty-pound canisters
full of rubber phosphorus solution. Trials in England had been promising, and tens of
thousands of canisters were produced, which burst on impact with the ground; the
yellow-gray liquid ignited from atmospheric oxygen. As it turned out, the German
forests and elds did not catch re; they were too green, too moist; the bomb
required tinder-dry crops. In order not to have to scrap the supply, they dumped it on
the cities, so on September 8, 1941 on the Berlin districts of Lichtenberg and
Pankow. Thirty thousand units fell on Wuppertal

A great success, on the other hand, was the dark red 30-pound liquid bomb;
designed in 1940, manufactured in 1941, and three million dropped by 1944. It was
eighty-three inches long, cigar-shaped with a tail unit, and perforated three stories.
By means of a small detonation, it hurled seven pounds of viscous incendiary mass
over an area fty by forty feet. The benzene-rubber solution fed an intense thirty-
minute re, unquenchable by household agents. Lübeck and Rostock in particular
fell victim to it. The incendiary panel in the Air Ministry nevertheless removed it from
service at the end of 1944 because it had only one-fourth the burning power per
pound of its weight of the stick incendiary bomb.

A next attempt to top this four-pounder, the 30-pound ame-jet bomb, divided
opinion. Many commanders considered it a rework that impressed in laboratory
testing but was too complicated to function. This because of its effective ejection of a
ve-meter-long, half-meter-wide fountain that sprayed for sixty seconds. Its
production advantage, the absence of scarce magnesium and rubber, it owed to the
413,000-fold application. It operated on six liters of gasoline and was highly prized by
German re ghters, who dumped the numerous unexploded ordnance into its tanks.
The methane gas igniter remained unreliable. In 1944, the year of its mass
production, they searched for a pristine city for systematic testing and found none.
Braunschweig was chosen as the second best object. On the night of April 23,
32,000 fell on the city, but with unclear results, similar to subsequent attempts with
Kiel (July 24), Stuttgart (July 24-29), Stettin (August 17), and Königsberg (August
30). A resounding success was achieved with Kaiserslautern alone on the night of
September 28. Thirty-six percent of the built-up area was destroyed, and one
hundred forty-four civilians, mostly women and children, were burned alive. However,
stick bombs were also mixed in, and nally Bomber Command, especially since
there was not much left to burn, decided to phase out the ame jet model and leave
it with the four-pounder, the perfect bomb of this war.

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Under its eighty million copies, German cities became incendiary ruins; never has a
single weapon wreaked such widespread destruction. Dresden was bombarded with
650,000 of them. It was a narrow rod, fty- ve centimeters long, with an electron
shell, an alloy of magnesium and zinc. The octagonal pro le was chosen for ease of
packaging. This way they t better into the bulk tubs. The rods separated easily after
dropping, gained high velocity and penetrating power due to the slender cross-
section, but did not follow a directed path, but spun. Their ballistic advantages were
tested in the summer of 1936 and were not changed during the war. In mid-1942,
small explosive charges were tted to keep re ghting forces at a distance with
fragments. A simple ring pin detonator set seventeen thermite pills on re via
primer, priming paper, ring set, and ring pills. A jet of ame shot out, and the
electron body melted into a white-hot mass. After eight minutes it was extinguished.
In the open air, the process had no effect at all; but if it combined with the
combustible materials of the house, res spread for miles.

Old center of Kassel burns

All the destruction came from the transformation of the house, which was the real re
mass for the street and the city. The electron thermite rod got this property out of it.
For this he needed rst of all direct access, which was provided by the blockbuster,
as well as concentration and mass. Imperial Chemical Industries, in association with
the R.A.F., had the part dropped from all heights in 1936; it always ignited and never
broke. A government order for four and a half million was issued in October; when
war broke out, ve million were in stock.

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 Robustness, intense re and astronomical number made the electron thermite rod in
tandem with the blockbuster the insurmountable re war weapon. A fatal effect was
added in 1944 by a simple addition. The rods were no longer dumped from bulk bins
off the ship, but bundled into targetable clusters that disengaged just before impact.
The density of evidence now increased considerably, making it possible to produce
the restorms that engulfed Darmstadt, Heilbronn, Pforzheim and Würzburg. A
bombardment stretched over days with the various re mixtures of gasoline, rubber,
synthetic resin, oil, liquid asphalt, jellies and small amounts of metal soaps, fatty
acids as well as some phosphorus unleashed a level of destruction surpassed only
by nuclear weapons

Dugway prooving ground – German village, interio

To multiply res in an urban area, the Americans tested vulnerabilities in model

analysis. For this purpose, they built German and Japanese test cities to clarify
details. The principle that civilian quarters offered only nakedness to concentrated
re from the air was easily recognized. Because it seemed so simple, it was
adopted. More complex was the transport. A eet of a few thousand planes, carrying
their tonnages far and wide and safely to their destinations, required other industrial
reserves than the thermite rod.

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 Dugway prooving ground – German villag

Nevertheless, the 2.7 million tons which the Western Allies threw on the European
theater of war, 1,356,828 of them on Germany, report an immense production battle.
The entire Allied apparatus of science, technology, industry, and organization, which
in this theater of war lifted into the air 1,440,000 times a bomber and 2,680,000 times
an escort ghter, deserves to be called the greatest military giant of all time. In the
1944-45 section, personnel engaged in the European air war numbered over 1.8
million. In British Bomber Command, the actual incendiary eet, a carrier or ghter
aircraft ew a mission 389,809 times. Bomber Command operated on 1481 nights
and 1089 days. Great Britain spent a scant half of its war costs on air power; the
United States spent thirty- ve percent

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 The deceptive safety of the cellar

In Kassel, many chains of cellars with openings existed, but always ended where the
block ended. In the cauldron of the con agration such a passage is usually too short,
there are only exits into the ame. In the re war the earth cave does not protect for
a long time, because it poisons the air. But it is unpredictable. Combustion produces
heat and gas, the main means of attack on the body. The re rarely ignites it, but
puts it under radiant heat or carbon monoxide. From an uncertain moment the
protection of the cellar ceases, it must be abandoned, otherwise the occupant
suffocates or succumbs to heat stroke. The cellar preserves a deceptive coolness
when the house is on re. People think they are in the best of hands there. Outside,
explosives detonate, sparks y, and boiling magma from the house chases through
the area. Then, when all instincts advise to stay, the escape hole must be
abandoned. The rock slowly absorbs the radiant heat, glows through, and becomes
an oven
The rule of thumb
said to leave the
basement house as
soon as the house
is on re and when
smoke moves in.
The depth
participates in the
circulation of air
and is not sealed
against the re
gases. They are
odorless, the
smoke warns, but
not reliable.

Countless
basement crews
have forever fallen
asleep next to the
smoldering res of
coal supplies. The
gases often owed
through those wall
passages that
served to escape.
In the excitement,
they often hacked
them open as soon
as the rst impacts
came. Then, if
necessary, the way

“Residents from 73 all recovered dead. Ebert“

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 was already clear; but likewise for the oxide. Stock charcoal from someone,
somewhere not remote, caught heat, began to smolder, and sent gases long through
the trestle. Fire chemistry generates them in rich form: smoldering stock, the house
above in bright ames, the pull of rushing street winds creating negative pressure in
the cellar, which in turn draws gases down from upper burns, the 'injector effect'. All
this leads into the chambers. At its peak, the re produced two unbearable spaces,
the blazing exterior space and the gas- lled interior space. In Kassel and Hamburg,
seventy to eighty percent of the re victims were gassed in the basement. American
investigators calculated the total causes of death in the bombing war as 5 to 30
percent as a result of explosions, pressure, and debris blast; 5 to 15 percent as an
effect of hot air; and 60 to 70 percent as carbon oxide poisoning.

The Kassel police chief stated about carbon oxide gas, "This gas, which is lethal
without being noticed, can develop in all res and therefore will always occur in large
res, even if no coal is used for ignition." The oxide had penetrated into cellars
through wall breaches, he said. Those who ed from it into the streets of the old town
could advance at a run thirty meters, if after that came an open space of a hundred
square meters in diameter, where breathing air was available. "In narrow streets, it
can be expected without further ado that people burned without a trace. The air was
so hot that you felt you couldn't breathe." In addition, "collapsing houses, falling,
burning beams and parts of walls constantly resulted in life-threatening situations."
People had been tempted "to wander from wall breach to wall breach, nally to await
death huddled together in an air-raid shelter that seemed safe.

Salvaged victims from an air-raid shelter in Kassel

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 For many people it would have meant salvation from asphyxiation if underground
tunnels had led from the system of wall breakthroughs out of the old town area to the
Fulda and Aueseite. This was the failure of the chief of police as the local air-raid
warden. He had had nine thousand cellar breakthroughs created, most of which
opened in the same place, in the re

Eyewitness report
The events of the night of October 23, 1943, are embedded in the accounts of 120
survivors recorded ve months later by the Kassel Missing Persons Tracing Of ce

"I was at home with my wife that night of the bombing. We were alone, because our
son was a soldier in the East. After dinner I listened to the radio, but it stopped at
about 7:40, and for the rst time during the war I brought suitcases and my other
belongings down to the basement of the four-story apartment building. Carrying them
downstairs was very dif cult for me because I am a leg amputee."

The factory couple stepped out on the balcony and watched the southwestern sky, it
was dark and cloudy. On the pavement echoed footsteps of last passers-by, late
evening, people go home.

The silencing of the radio also interprets the housewife Dorothea Pleugert, née
Herzog, as a sign. "That's when we got dressed and dressed the children. We still
made fun, I made everything pure, today comes the Tommy." That was the name of
the British.

Survivors of the attack the next day

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 Ottilie König, a master glazier from the Pferdemarkt, was celebrating her 50th
birthday and sat down at the set table "when the siren sounded. Have then taken our
ready suitcases and the wardrobe, which hung in the closet, into the basement." This
lay with the sole 3.60 meters deep under the street. A hatch led into the garage,
closed by a lid. "Because of the air pressure, the lid always ew up and settled
again. We always ducked and thought, now it's coming down." According to the
amputee's observations of recent terrorist attacks on other cities, they have all
occurred shortly after dawn.

Propeller noises hum in the air; there may be yovers. The siren calls from the
school building. No ak spotlights shine, "yet I got spooked. 'Come on, let's go to the
basement, I don't think it's true'." The couple are the rst in the basement. Just
arrived, "the oodgates of hell open that you could believe the end of the world had
come.

The chaos the next day

The other inhabitants of the house come rushing into the cellar in ight. Most of them
only with little hand luggage and some of them insuf ciently clothed." The soldier's
wife Elisabeth Schirk had not heard the alarm right away. "My husband was on
vacation, it was a bit lively at our place." When they both climb into the basement, all
the householders are already sitting there. "We heard impact after impact. We
thought it was all crashing everything was collapsing on us. Smoke didn't come in,
nor did the smell of lime, but it did smell like dirt. And that's when we went through

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the breach through 7 and right after 5. And that's where we stood for a while and
went in and out of the corner.

Gretel Simon, the young mother of Irmgard and Brigitte, sees the direct hit on the
Gasthof 'Sommer' in the ditch at the moment of the alarm. "And there I still say to my
grandmother 'look, the people all look black coming out of there through a shaft'."
Then she rushes with grandmother and children to the well-constructed cellar in the
inn 'Zur Pinne. "If I had stayed with us, then yes, everything would have been ne.
What was going on in the Pinne, I can't tell you that well, because I fainted, and
when I woke up again, my daughter screamed, 'Mum, I'm suffocating'."

Survivors with their belongings

The air-raid shelter of the amputee factory owner "was well-prepared by human
standards. During the rst bombing at about 8:25 p.m., the bricks of the
breakthrough ew around like rubble. Now, after each close impact, a swirl of dust
and air passed through the cellar holes, so that at any moment one had to believe
that the house would collapse. The crashing of the nearby houses penetrated the
terrible thunder of two fallen factory chimneys, both of which hit neighboring
properties. A view through the cellar hole revealed only a small part of the sky, which
shone glowing red." After three quarters of an hour it became quieter, two men went
up, "but they came back immediately with the terrible news: all the houses, the whole
neighborhood is on re. But their own house was not yet on re.

Dorothea Pleugert, who did not have her own house cellar, had gone to
Wildemannstrasse 30, where the residents of 32 were already sitting, "because
everything was on re there right away. Then our janitor came and said we had to
get out, the whole house was already on re, but just don't make a fuss. Then a man

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 went through the breach, looking for an escape route. The man shouted, "It's
impossible, everything is on re here." Then we wanted to get out into the street at
Frege, and the phosphorus ran down the stairs. That's when we ran back again.

Ottilie König, the master glazier, didn't know what to do, the house was on re on the
third oor. "The men were still trying to extinguish the re, then when they looked out
the window, they realized that the old town was already a sea of ames. They came
down to the basement and warned us to get ready to leave because the re was
getting lower." People came out of the
cellars from the Horse Market and asked
what to do. They came through the cellar
breaches looking for a way out. "We told
them that with us the best option was
because you could walk diagonally across
the street to Kasernenstraße and then to
Martinsplatz. Most of them paid no attention
and kept crawling through the cellars.

The soldier's wife Schirk and her husband

had no luck. "The men then tried to see if
we couldn't get out and then when the lights
went out, my husband said I should sit there
with the little one. He was still running
around there trying to gure out how he
could save us. At last, when he couldn't do it
anymore, he said, "Come on, let's lie down
there, it's no use. purpose." The people in
the room were pretty quiet, only the little
children were screaming terribly." The
parents, their twelve-year-old boy, and the
little girl lay down to sleep

Gretel Simon was awakened from

unconsciousness by her child's shouting.
"She was lying there in the cellar among all
the dead. And I had my youngest in my
arms and the child lived until six in the
morning ." Gretel Simon fainted again from
the gases. "Because the big one was
always screaming, that's why I kept waking
up, I guess that was good." Then the
youngest lay at her feet. Because no light
was shining, she could hear Irmgard, the
older one, just not see her. "And I wanted to ask a neighbor if she had any matches,
but the woman was already dead and cold.

The amputee factory owner was determined to break out in view of the increasing
heat of the re. "When I announced this opinion in the cellar, a general commotion
set in. Even my wife said 'we have to get out of here, the re wall is coming towards

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 us'." The neighbors lay down on the ground for a long time, one woman holding her
head with both hands and pulling her jacket over her ears. "Little Marga used to call
out 'are we going to be dead now?" One said, 'we can't get out of here, there's re
everywhere.' The escapees dipped blankets, coats and hats in water, each taking a
sip of cognac from the factory owner. "It was French Hennessy. We had saved that."
Standing outside, the group bounced back. "The rst view of the street was a view of
hell. All the houses, almost every cobblestone was burning as if powered by oxygen
blowers." Some
wanted to go back
to the basement.
"Then we can die
on the street, too,"
the amputee said,
"if only the
wooden leg
doesn't start
burning." He could
not get his leg
over the piles of
rubble

In the meantime,
Dorothea Pleugert
and the people
from
Wildemanngasse
had found an exit,
had wandered
through re for
half an hour, and
had to rescue
themselves in a
basement of the
city's sanitation
department; they
could go no
further. "Then the
police and re
department came:
'We should get
out, otherwise we
will burn to death!'
Then many spoke:
'We want to wait
until a car comes.'
"'You can wait a long time.' Then there was a woman in this cellar who had to give
birth. And because there was no one to help her, there was a man who washed his
hands and wanted to help her. That's all I know about this woman.

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 The master glazier was driven to ee at around half past nine by her daughter and
her daughter's friend. "Now get going, we don't want to suffocate." Ottilie König gave
her the shopping bag, in it "our cutlery with bread and butter." They were to run to
Martinsplatz, where they would nd enough air. "And that was the last we saw of
them." The mother took her mother by the hand, soon lost her. "I myself was driven
by the restorm into St. Martin's Church, where three hundred people barricaded
themselves until it burned over our heads. The organ was on re, the choir, the roof,
the great bell had fallen." A Wehrmacht unit brought out the occupants. "Now I'm
alone with my husband, it was our only daughter."

Destroyed St. Martin’s Church

Dorothea Pleugert who was now waiting with Mrs. Pfarr and her three children still in
the cleaning cellar, did not dare to come out, also because the children were
burdensome. "Then one came and said she should get out right away, he would still
bring the other child, who was in the back of the cellar. But she refused, saying 'I'm
not leaving here without my child<

The amputee and his group had accidentally stumbled onto a wide street, "otherwise
we wouldn't have been able to save ourselves. So we came to the
Unterstadtbahnhof, where there were already many people. We thought we could
get some air now. Air, air, air. Around us a picture of horror. Mothers with their small
children squatted on the bare ground and fell down from exhaustion. One woman
cried out for her husband: 'Have you not seen my husband?’ "Dear woman, how
should I know your husband?’ "Yes, such a single man." Another woman kept
shouting, 'I have lost everything, I have lost everything.' 'Oh don't drive us crazy too,

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 shut up, we lost everything too.' We had our pockets full of apple. I had an apple in
my hand and gave little Marga one too, then a woman came, 'oh just let me have a
bite'. Then she almost snatched the apple away from me. The thirst was unbearable.
And then there was Mr. Lingens. He lay down on the ground and cried. We asked:
"Where is your daughter and your boy?< "I don't know anything, I don't know
anything. They saved themselves, but with severe burns." Our hope was that we had
at least saved the things in the basement. Here we had gotten everything down:
dishes and beds and blankets and dresses and hats and shoes and furs and all the
bookkeeping, the cash register. Churchill, the bastard, got it all.

Dorothea Pleugert had made it to the Fulda Bridge with her girlfriend and three
children. "Then we crossed the Schlagd. Then when we got to the top of the traf c
circle, there was a woman with a child in her arms. "Someone pressed the child into
my hand, it doesn't belong to me at all."" When Dorothea Pleugert passed the 'Pinne'
in the morning in search of her mother, people were carrying out the living and the
dead on stretchers. "The children who were recovered from the 'Pinne' there were
mostly wrapped in cloths, so we couldn't recognize them that way. Their faces were
also mostly dis gured."

Rebuilt Fulda bridge a few years after the war

It was soldiers who at half past seven in the 'Pinne' also dug out the Gretel Simon. "I
woke up there. I called out 'dear man, help me pull the child out'. I couldn't turn
myself in at all, because the dead were all lying at my feet. Then two soldiers came
and pulled out the big child and me. The small one was already freezing.

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 On Saturday morning, the soldier's wife Elisabeth Schirk, who had gone to sleep in
the cellar with her family, woke up lying on the pavement in Jägerstraße and was
transported to a Red Cross camp. "The other morning I had a wail for my loved ones
and that's when I tried to see if I could walk. Now I walked from the Red Cross to
Jägerstraße alone, half fainting. And there my husband lay dead on the street. And
then they said that there was an air raid warning, so we had to leave. So I ran into
the bunker on the Schlagd. And when the alarm was over, I went there again, and
when I got to Jägerstraße, my boy was the rst to lie there, they had just taken him
out in the meantime. I screamed so loudly that they sent me away. A woman told me
she had seen my husband die on the street, why were they only taken out on
Sunday? My husband was young and strong, he would certainly still have lived.

The Dyin
Because the cellar was a protective chamber and a burial chamber in one, there was
much debate about the point of passage. It was necessary to leave the cellar in time;
when this time came depended on the effect of the attack. What was happening
outside? Visibility was poor. In front of the cellar windows, concrete shields against
splinter impact stuck, in front of
the doors, time-fuse ammunition
exploded. The situation, which
could not be seen below, was
unclear above, changed every
minute, the survivors acted right,
the dead wrong, there was no
other way to recognize it. In
addition, the longer one thought,
the cloudier the understanding
became. The oxygen decreased
and thereby the insight. A leaden
tiredness sank on the brain.
Those who knew better tried to
carry away those for whom
everything was the same, or the
effort was too great, the decision
too dif cult, the risk too high.
There were life and death
struggles and pleas. Husbands
did not make wives break away,
neither by pleading nor by force.
Larger children left timid mothers,
Victims of the attack
some ran to their doom, others
suffocated, the lucky ones were
helped by chance, and this was the majority. The misfortune of the losers was
reported by the salvage crews and anatomists

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 The inhalation of the gas accelerated the heart activity, a trepidation occurred before
the consciousness sank into the bottomless pit. Different the dwindling of the
oxygen, which is laboriously sought, slurped, last in the bottom layer, because below
oats the rest. Hamburg anatomists Gräff and Baniecki examined the still warm
cellars and made exact descriptions of the human remains. "In many cases they
were sitting on chairs or on steps in rows or singly on benches; yes, I could nd one
corpse standing leaning against the wall, others lying in some posture on the oor.
Not infrequently they were covered with cloths, or they had some kind of object, a
steel helmet or woollen stuff on their heads, and on their faces occasionally a gas
mask." The descriptions repeat the remark "as if asleep." From Darmstadt, the
opening of cellars "in which the coke had burned" has been handed down. Salvage
troops of the Wehrmacht "could only be moved under alcohol." Those rescued "sat
there like ghosts, hooded, with blankets and cloths in front of their faces, with which
they had sought protection from the smoke.

The cellar as a refuge of the body in the re war was indispensable, because there
were enough of them. How do you suddenly provide one and a half million
Hamburgers with a reproof secondary shelter? It was not until the summer of 1943
that it dawned that there was really nothing else to do. The swarms of bombers
would not disappear by ghter planes any more than by ak. The war from the air
had to be fought and left most Germans with no better protection than their cellars.
Inscrutably, the familiar vaults changed over to the enemy in the re attack and
became hostile. Even constant calls to move out the coal supplies were met partly
with docility and partly with the question, where to? One did not expect to be gassed
by one's briquettes. Out of inertia, the point remained open. The problem of air
draught, which could not be solved in the matter, was different. House dwellers
instinct pulls to the basement when something explodes, splinters and burns outside.
But the coolness underground is only a time shift. The basement is a cooled furnace.
Like a heating fuel, the burning block transfers embers to the basement rock that
holds them. Salvage crews could not touch buried basements days to weeks after
wild res because there was too much heat in them. The burned bodies, if not
touched by the ame, were mummi ed, and only in the anatomy could it be
determined whether gas, oxygen loss, or heat had caused death. had caused death.
One wanted to know. For a chamber to become an oven, drafts must enter it

At the end of 1943, after the experience of Kassel, Dresden's air-raid wardens began
to mesh the cellars of the old town with mined and bricked-in passages under the
street ceiling. Corridors and cellars joined together to form a mesh network. In
Dresden, the escape to the Fulda, which had been blocked in Kassel, was to be able
to lead from any of the meshes north to the Elbe and south to the Großer Garten

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