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Germany’s city-dwellers were obliged to spend up to half of each twenty-four hours in cellars and shelters. Nazi officials’ exploitation of privileged access to the best-protected refuges caused widespread resentment. In a public shelter in Bochum, party members were reported to have ‘made themselves comfortable with a few crates of beer’ while less fortunate citizens were exposed to the fury of bombardment. Hitler devoted vast resources to his personal safety: 28,000 workers and a million cubic metres of concrete – more than the weight of materials employed throughout 1943–44 on all Germany’s public shelters – were used to construct his East Prussian headquarters and Berlin bunker. A twenty-two-year-old Luftwaffe woman auxiliary described her disgust about the experience of a night in a Krefeld public bunker in November 1944:

At the front of the room men and women of all ages were knocking back schnapps … Thick clouds of tobacco smoke make sleep impossible. From one corner there came a jumble of noise of women shrieking and men mumbling drunkenly … Children and old people lay asleep among the adults, wrapped in woollen blankets and tattered rags, on wooden plank beds or in chairs. Everywhere there were slumped, exhausted bodies and haggard faces … a terrible fug of the smell of dirty underclothes, sweat and stale air almost took your breath away. A long way away a child was quietly weeping, while from the other side there came the sound of snoring and groaning.

Savage penalties were imposed on air-raid looters: on 5 March 1943 Kasimir Petrolinas, a sixty-nine-year-old Lithuanian, was caught by a policeman taking three damaged metal bowls, value one Reichsmark, from rubble in Essen. After a special court convicted him, within hours he was shot by firing squad. In March 1944 an eighteen-year-old named Ilse Mitze was charged with stealing eight vests, five pairs of knickers and thirteen pairs of stockings following an October 1943 raid on Hagen. In her defence, it was said that she had earlier helped to dig out victims. Her employer admitted that she was ‘difficult’ and ‘had a sweet tooth’, but added that she was ‘industrious and respectable’. Hagen’s medical officer, giving evidence, dismissed her as ‘a stupid, impudent and mendacious psychopath’. She was condemned to death, a sentence which caused even the local security authorities to protest. Mitze was nonetheless guillotined in Dortmund in May, and her fate proclaimed on wall posters to deter others.

The inhabitants of Germany’s cities experienced a scale of terror and devastation far beyond anything the Luftwaffe inflicted on Britain in 1940–41: a successful bomber attack unleashed a vision of hell. Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg wrote from Hamburg during its July 1943 firestorm: ‘For two whole hours this ear-splitting terror goes on and all you can see is fire. No one speaks. Tense faces wait for the worst at every gargantuan explosion. Heads go down automatically whenever there is a crash, and features are trapped in horror.’

The grotesqueries of destruction were boundless. Ursula Gebel wrote of a November 1943 attack on Berlin, during which many bombs fell on the city zoo. ‘That afternoon … I had been at the elephant enclosure and had seen the six females and one juvenile doing tricks with their keeper. That same night, all seven were burnt alive … The hippopotamus bull survived in his basin, [but] all the bears, polar bears, camels, ostriches, birds of prey and other birds were burnt. The tanks in the aquarium all ran dry; the crocodiles escaped, but like the snakes they froze in the cold November air. All that survived in the zoo was the bull elephant named Siam, the bull hippo and a few apes.’

Martha Gros lived in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt. On the night of 12 September 1944, this large industrial town suffered an attack by Bomber Command’s 5 Group which killed at least 9,000 people. ‘We stood in the farthest corner of the shelter,’ she recounted:

There was Hauptmann R. in full uniform,