All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [308]
I shouted ‘Let’s get out,’ but Hauptmann R. grabbed me: ‘Stay here, they’re still over us.’ At that moment the house opposite was hit. A tongue of flame, about five metres long, whipped towards us, cupboards and other furniture burst open and fell on us. A terrible pressure forced us against the wall. Now R. shouted: ‘Get out and hold hands.’ By using all his strength he dragged me out from under the wooden wreckage. I dropped my cash box and pulled Miss H with me, and she grabbed Mr G. We climbed through the hole leading to the back. Our house was burning. I heard the ceilings collapse, watched my beds go up in flames. In the midst of the garden it was incredibly hot and there was so much smoke that we all knelt on the ground, holding our heads as low as possible, and occasionally scooping up earth and holding it against our hot faces.
In cellars and shelters beneath a nearby hospital, under battery emergency lighting, sheets were soaked in salad oil to ease the pain of hideously burned casualties, most of whom died. Water was cut off. A stench of roasted flesh filled the air. Doctors operated hour after hour, far beyond exhaustion. The corpses of some of the dead appeared unmarked – they had succumbed to asphyxiation or internal injuries inflicted by blast. Many people suffered eye damage from acrid fumes or blazing fragments whirling through the air. Ottilie Bell described a near-miss: ‘There was a crash, the lights went out, the radio went dead. We all fell on our knees, mouths wide open. My sister-in-law was praying loudly for our lives. Our puppy, barely six weeks old, started barking with terror.’
Housewife Grete Siegel said: ‘We were all petrified … Old women leaned against their garden walls in nightgowns and caps, shivering with terror and cold. Those who had been burned had blisters the size of fists on their faces, necks, everywhere. One woman had strips of skin hanging from her face … I glimpsed a charred corpse, about sixty centimetres long, lying on its face. That’s how all of them were … In the Palaisgarten we saw countless bodies, nearly all of them naked: one had only a sock on, others just suspender belts or a strip of shirt; there was a young blonde girl, who looked as if she was smiling.’ In cellars, dead victims of suffocation sat like ghosts, wrapped in blankets and with cloths tied in front of their faces: ‘The stench was horrific.’ When morning came on 13 September, in Martha Gros’s words, ‘there was a deathly silence in the town, ghostly and chilling. It was even more unreal than the previous night. Not a bird, not a green tree, no people, nothing but corpses.’ Ottilie Bell said, ‘All one could see were smouldering ruins. Not a single house left standing in our thousand-metre-long street.’
Between 1943 and 1945, such scenes were repeated day after day, night after night, in Germany’s cities. Beyond the sufferings of the civilians, the morale of their menfolk on distant battlefields suffered grievously from hearing the tidings from home – and eventually from seeing the destruction for themselves. ‘What a homecoming it was!’ wrote a German soldier who returned from the Russian front in 1944. ‘We had heard, of course, about the Allied air attacks on the German cities. But what we saw from our [train] windows was far beyond what we had expected. It shocked us to the very core of our being. Was this what we had been fighting for in the east? … The faces of the civilians were grey and tired, and in some of them we could even