Inferno - Max Hastings [310]
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 fartherest corner of the shelter,” she recounted:
There was Hauptmann R. in full uniform, me, Fräulein H and G, holding each other’s hands and listening to [the planes] zooming over us. One of the first explosions was close. My heart fluttered, there was a fearful crash, the walls shook. We heard cracking noises, then a collapse and hissing flames. Plaster began to fall on us, and we expected the ceiling to collapse. The lights had failed. About thirty seconds later there was a second terrible explosion, the door blew open and I saw, bathed in bright light, the staircase above collapsing and a river of fire pouring downwards. The safety curtains were burning.
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