CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

When the water supply dried up, Bodo Reuter—the TENO officer—took an HJ boy’s bicycle and cycled through the bombs and shrapnel to report to the Burgomaster at the Rathaus. He hurried through the sandbagged entrance and pushed past the police chief. Impatiently he waited while a messenger from Frenzel’s Stube completed his report. A bomb there had killed twenty-five people including eight of the Burgomaster’s guests who had been having a few final drinks in the bar. The ground floor of the Stube had been converted into an emergency mortuary.

‘Next,’ said the Burgomaster, turning his blank eyes to Bodo Reuter. It was as if he had not heard the report, thought Bodo, and perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he was waiting until tomorrow before coming to terms with such news.

‘Why didn’t you phone?’

‘The phones have gone, Herr Bürgermeister. The western half of the power net is out of action. I could have phoned you from Party HQ, but that journey was almost as long as coming here directly.’

‘The Western side?’ said the Burgomaster. He looked at his telephonist; she nodded. In the part of town near the old market the electricity supply was carried on overhead wires from building to building. Some of those streets were now tangled with broken wiring, impeding pedestrians, blocking traffic and injuring cyclists.

‘Report,’ commanded the Bürgomaster.

‘The city stream is flowing well, Herr Bürgermeister. And the broken pipe on Mönchenstrasse has been repaired but there is hardly any water coming through it.’

‘Why?’

‘They have had four or five bombs on Mönchenstrasse. Only the first bomb made a crater in the road and severed the pipes but the others have cracked the joints. There might be a dozen leaks along the length of the street; it would take many hours to dig down to repair them.’

The Burgomaster listened to Bodo with an almost inhuman calm. He turned back to his map. At first he had placed a big red pin into the site of each bomb but it was ten minutes since he had run out of red pins. He fingered Mönchenstrasse and without turning round said, ‘Voss’ house was hit?’

‘Voss is dead, Herr Bürgermeister. He was putting sand upon an incendiary bomb when he was killed by blast. Some of them contain an explosive charge.’

‘The fool,’ said the Burgomaster. Outside there was no respite from the bombing. ‘Run hose the whole length of Mönchenstrasse. Take your water directly from the city stream.’

‘Do you realize how much hose that is?’ objected Bodo Reuter. ‘And what will it give us? One single branch. We may as well pee on the fire.’

‘There’s no alternative,’ said the Burgomaster. His hair was standing up from his head. His stiff wing collar had come unclipped from his collar-stud and it waggled in the air, making him look like a music-hall comic.

Reuter turned to leave but the Burgomaster took his arm and dragged him roughly towards the map of the town. There was a tremendous explosion nearby and although the others in the room ducked these two men seemed not to hear it.

‘Where?’ said the Burgomaster. ‘Show me where.’ His voice was not his natural one, and for a moment the fireman was afraid of this comical-looking wretch with the scarecrow evening suit and white brick-dust down his waistcoat.

‘We’ll string out the hose, Herr Bürgermeister,’ said the fireman.

‘No alternative,’ said the Burgomaster. He said it as though it was a little dictum that he lived by, and indeed for the last half-hour he had.

A Luftschütz girl finished typing a short note and passed it to the Burgomaster for signature. He called an HJ messenger. It was little Jürgen Löwe, the barber’s son.

‘Cycle quickly to Nehringstrasse, the fire at the bakery. They must demolish the houses behind it to create a fire break. The senior TENO officer will need this written order.’

‘I’ve no bicycle, sir.’

‘How dare you come here without it? The safety of the town depends upon a good messenger service.’

Jürgen was only fourteen. This was his first week of official duty and he was downcast by the Burgomaster’s scolding.

‘You’ll run all the way. And next time you come on duty, don’t dare forget your bicycle.’

‘I didn’t forget it, sir,’ said the child. ‘I was blown off it at the corner of Dorfstrasse and Zillestrasse. I could only find a wheel and that was badly bent.’

‘Get along with you,’ said the Burgomaster. ‘And be careful.’ The little boy ran out of the room clasping his bluepainted messenger’s helmet as though it was an Iron Cross.

‘It’s finished,’ said the telephonist. ‘The bombers have gone.’ She logged the call from the observer post on the Venlo road and soon there were more calls confirming the report.

Scarcely believing it, the Burgomaster climbed the steps from his Control Room like a man whose joints had aged overnight. The others followed him and as they emerged through the sandbagged entrance the glare made them half close their eyes. The fires were dragging the air across the flat farmland and creating a warm breeze. The more air consumed at ground level the higher were the flames and the greater was the heat at the fire’s centre and the lighter its colour. Apart from the spectacular sight of the gas-holder the highest flames were from the Nurses’ Training Centre. Thank God that, at least, was evacuated without casualties. They could feel the heat of the fires and hear the roar of them, but the hum of the aircraft had all but disappeared. Suddenly from the Liebefrau church there was a tremendous crash. A sheet of flame rose and sprinkled white-hot sparks across the roofs of the town.

The firemen had been expecting it. Half of a canister of incendiaries jettisoned by Munro’s young brother Ian had been the deciding factor. Molten lead had been dripping on to the firemen below for some minutes. As soon as the men on the church roof saw the trusses buckling they hurried back down to the ground. The bells fell soon after that with a monstrous din. The stonework of the outer walls was expanding and it made angry growls and sudden cracks. The nave of the church was ablaze and the great stained-glass window had never shone more beautifully than it did in the Liebefrau’s final agony. A buttress fell with an awful crash. The stonework continued to expand until, with an earth-shaking roar, it released the roof upon the burning interior. Sparks flew into the air for a thousand feet and the windows flashed red.

The fifteenth-century altarpiece, the carved pulpit and the painting of the martyrs that was said to be a Van derWeyden were gone for ever. The firemen turned away from the church. For some time their hoses had been directed upon the old houses and Frenzel’s Stube on the far side of the Platz. One of the priests had become almost violent when the firemen refused to put their hoses upon the church. He had refused to believe that it was too late.

That sly fool Frenzel had stored five barrels of blackmarket schnapps and fifteen sacks of sugar in his apartment above the restaurant. The heat had fired the sugar and was exploding the schnapps barrels like high-explosive bombs, squirting burning alcohol on to TENOs and firemen in the street and as far as the neighbouring houses. In the cellar sat the Frenzels and their three young daughters. The firemen urged them to go to the shelter round the corner in Studentenacker, but the girls would not leave their mother. Frau Frenzel in turn would not leave her husband and Herr Frenzel would under no circumstances leave his cellarful of French wines. It was bad enough to sit there with the smell of his black-market Westphalian hams scorching. He cut another slice of Frau Frenzel’s Schlumperwerk and bit into the sweet apple filling. It was always like this when he was worried; he ate without even being hungry. The firemen hoisted another hose up the face of the building to a second-storey window and tried to prevent the fire moving downwards. Frenzel’s restaurant had become an emergency mortuary and the firemen were picking their way between rows of corpses laid out on the floor of the bar and awash with water from the hoses.

The hardware store on the other side of Liebefrauplatz was a similar fire hazard. Eight drums of paint had caught fire and were pouring down the staircase like molten lava, trapping and endangering twenty people in the cellar. The TENOs were digging towards them through hot masonry.

Near the gasworks a crowd of over a hundred civilians had formed a human cordon across the road and beaten up the crew of a fire engine who were on their way to the hospital and would not attend to their blazing homes.

In Florastrasse Herr and Frau Meyer who had been married that afternoon were sitting in a cellar under their parents’ house together with a dozen guests. A Romanian cantor was singing the ancient songs of the wedding feast.

Herr Holländer, the man who had married the couple that afternoon, was at that moment opening the heavy door of a deep shelter in Kaiserin-Augustastrasse. He looked in every few minutes. It was a grimy street, not far enough away from the gasworks to be disassociated from the slums that surrounded it. Correctly garbed and with dimmed torch to hand, he looked around and then noted the time. Most of the occupants were brewery workers who on account of their early rising resented bitterly being told to take shelter. It was the law, as Holländer told them this night. It wasn’t a decision of his, it was the law.

Most of them were snoring and there was a smell of stale breath and unwashed bodies. None of them would thank him for his concern. Holländer believed that they all hated him. He believed that they thought him a rodent-faced bureaucrat who used his job as Blockwart to interfere and pry into the business of his neighbours with the full backing of authority. Holländer’s wife was a meek little creature—the rat and the mouse, someone had once called them. She did not believe that anyone could think such things of her husband, let alone say them. She was wrong and he was exactly right.

He closed the door behind him and hurried up the stairs. He had the keys of all of their apartments in his bag. Perhaps he should make sure that no fire-bombs had fallen into any of them. His was a grave responsibility and he met it with diligence and thoroughness. Perhaps the first apartment should be old Frau Klietmann’s.

Andi Niels had succeeded in persuading the tall Viennese nurse to leave the dance hall ‘for a breath of fresh air’, but she wouldn’t go to the Annex with him. So they had gone out across Koller Meadow and had been lying on the grass in a state of semi-undress when Tommy Carter’s Lancaster arrived. One of his TIs splashed fire upon them so that they had assumed the strange boxer’s pose that burned bodies take up. Both of them had shrunk to four-and-a-half-foot lengths of carbon.

For all the people in Altgarten the departure of the bombers brought a merciful quiet for which they had almost ceased to hope. Although warm winds roared through the narrow streets to feed the fires and carry away the cries of the injured, dying and trapped, at least most of the town was still intact.

Two hundred and sixty bombers had attacked Altgarten in the twenty-eight minutes between 01.24 and 01.52, which is an average of 9:3 aircraft per minute. Of these aircraft, one hundred and fifty-six bombed within three miles of their aiming-point. Only eight aircraft ignored the Altgarten fires and passed over them to bomb Krefeld by means of the H2S apparatus.

Most of the aircraft had a bomb-load of 14,000 lb and although twenty-five per cent of the RAF’s high-explosive bombs were duds, it still meant that for several minutes at a time in Altgarten it was no easier to distinguish between the explosions of individual bombs than it is to identify those of a fast-revving car engine. Now that the bombers had gone the silence was curiously oppressive. When the Burgomaster spoke his voice seemed unnecessarily loud.

‘Thank God,’ said the Burgomaster. The others turned to look at him. It was not a National Socialist sentiment. The Burgomaster did not care. ‘Thank God,’ he said again.

There were clouds across the moon: cirrostratus thickening to become altostratus. Half an hour ago the moon had been a sharp-edged disc with a halo, but now it had become a soft white blob. For a moment the moon darkened behind the thickening cloud. There were chunks of fractostratus too, scudding across the town so close to the rooftops that they glowed bright red and flickered like little private hells in the sky.

‘Filthy swine,’ said Oberzugführer Bodo Reuter.

‘The Moönchenstrasse pipes,’ said the Burgomaster.

‘Immediately, Herr Bürgermeister,’ snapped Reuter. He took his small bicycle and found it difficult to ride. Odd that he had had no difficulty riding it when the bombs were falling. ‘All of your hose to Mönchenstrasse,’ shouted the Burgomaster after him. Miles to the west there was the rumble of anti-aircraft fire as the returning bombers passed over the massed batteries near the Dutch frontier.

The diesel pump in the TENO yard had been destroyed and the tank below it was afire. A thin snake of black smoke crawled through the back streets near the railway, bringing oily smears, motes of soot, reddened eyes and a taste that reached into the back of Bodo’s throat. He bit into the wet handkerchief tied across his face and pedalled faster. At the corner of Neustrasse he stopped and stared.

A curtain of dust, eddying and swirling in the air currents, moved towards the fires on Dorfstrasse. Those fires—Schmitt the butcher’s, the old insurance building and Becker’s dress shop—hone through the smoke as a fairy ballet through a theatrical gauze. By their light Reuter could see shopwindow dummies—broken, stiff and denuded by blast—scattered among the debris on the pavement. Except that where the fires burned most brightly it was clear that they were not dummies.

But it was not the fires or the bodies that made Reuter stare: it was the absence of the entire city block that until tonight had separated Dorfstrasse from this corner. Over one hundred yards square and four storeys high, it was now a tangled mess that, apart from a couple of chimney breasts, stood nowhere taller than a man. The 2,000-lb bomb from Jammy’s aircraft had exploded there. Yet elsewhere this night there fell bombs four times as heavy as that one.

Bodo climbed back on to his tiny bicycle and hurried to Gerd Böll near what was once the house of Voss.

‘You keep looking across there,’ said Bodo Reuter.

‘It’s Voss’ place. My cousin’s housekeeper is in the cellar.’ Bodo noticed that his friend’s eyebrows had been scorched and he could feel that his own were too, and his lips were cracked and raw.

They both looked at the pile of rubble where another 1,000-1b MC had demolished Voss’ house. Neither of the men spoke; there was nothing they could do. Finally they walked to the hole in the road. Their torches probed around the crater with the deft professional touch of surgeons examining an open belly.

It had been neatly done. The gas pipes were plugged with wedges and, farther along, the twisted, brightly coloured electricity cables were roughly clamped across the charred ends as if with artery forceps. The special fire and police phone lines had also been given first-aid.

Lower than those, so that the water could not leak and cause a short circuit, there were the small-capacity street water-supply pipes, but the torches did not linger upon that side of the crater. The problems were all in the centre of the street. A layer of cobblestones had been scattered for yards and the paving and broken stone under it had collapsed into the crater. There the gas pipes bent drunkenly and the 35-cm water pipe was leaking at its joints. Deepest of all, and along the very centre of the street, just exposed at the bottom of the crater was the main sewer. It received the street’s strong (ie, domestic) sewage as well as weak sewage from gutterings and rainstorm water from the street drains. The sewer pipe was lower than the water pipes so that it would receive any water that might leak from them. This, like many of the main sewers through the oldest part of town, was simply the medieval gully. Now water from the broken mains was coursing through it, moving south-west towards the sewage works. ‘A few sandbags would do it,’ said Gerd.

‘It’s worth trying,’ agreed Bodo.

‘Find the sewage manhole on Dorfstrasse, block up the outlet with a few sandbags, wait for the water to fill the sewer and then use the manhole as a sump from which to pump water.’

‘Suppose the water level gets high enough for the sewage to get into the town water supply,’ said Bodo. ‘It will be the devil of a job to clean.’

‘Then you can blame me,’ said Gerd.

For a moment Reuter was silent. Then he said, ‘Very well, Gerd, you are the doctor of engineering.’ The group of TENOs were waiting for their next orders. Meanwhile they had been giving the distracted Blockwart Storp a hand to dig down towards his cellar.

Reuter said, ‘Find the Dorfstrasse sewer inspection manhole and block the outlet with sandbags. Then tell the senior fireman at the hospital that he can take water from there.’

‘ ’Raus!’ shouted Reuter, and his men leaped aboard their lorry. The Blockwart called upon them to come back. ‘There are eighteen people under here,’ he shouted. The lorry lurched forward.

‘There are three hundred people in the hospital,’ said Gerd gently. ‘Your wife will be all right until we put that fire out.’

The Blockwart nodded. Under the ground the water from the mains was still splashing away.

Just a few yards away from where Gerd Böll and Reuter were standing, Anna-Luisa and little Hansl were trapped in old Herr Voss’ cellar. The bomb had exploded above them at the third floor. Like most of the thin-walled HC bombs it had spread its shockwave sideways. In the cellar it had not sounded as loud, or made as much disturbance, as the earlier medium capacity had done, for that one had penetrated the road before exploding.

Anna-Luisa was not frightened when she was unable to open the cellar door. She suspected that theWaffen SS officer who had stolen Herr Voss’ carpet and silver had locked it to prevent her giving the alarm. She pushed against it but it would not move. It was a solidly built door that Voss had selected specially to guard his subterranean storehouse. Anna-Luisa did not suspect that there was a couple of hundred tons of shattered masonry piled upon it.

It was very quiet there, apart from the gurgle of water. She didn’t move around much. There was only the glow of the oil lamp now that the electricity had gone off. The light glinted upon the water that at the lowest part of the ancient stone floor was three or four inches deep. This didn’t worry her either, for at its present rate the damaged pipe would take a couple of weeks to fill the cellar deep enough to drown them.

It wasn’t until the TENO men had blocked up the Dorfstrasse sewer outlet that she became alarmed. For soon the combined sewer in the street outside began to fill. Half a dozen leaks along the whole length of the street were draining into it and the level backed up until it crept along the sewage pipe to the house. At Voss’ house it reached the broken pipes above the cellar and then these too added to the flooding. For ten minutes she was horrified by the amount of water coming in. One side of the cellar was six inches deep in water but after that it virtually stopped.

It stopped because the firemen began to pump water from the Dorfstrasse manhole which by now had formed a sump. At last the firemen at the hospital had a reasonable supply of water to fight the fire. For them the fire had become a live enemy. With their newly found supply of water they were able to take their revenge upon it. Six branches were in operation on the Dorfstrasse side of the hospital. Now that the patients had been moved along to the intact wing of the building it could only be a matter of a couple of hours before the blaze was completely under control, ie, surrounded and reducing in area.

Of course it was uncomfortable for the patients. At first they had been close to panic and there was a time when the Oberstarzt from the Amputee Centre had brought ten armed soldiers to the hospital and told them to be ready to restore order in the wards at pistol-point. The turning-point in hospital morale was when Frau Thorn had thrown the contents of her bed-pan over a burning chair in the surgical ward. The story had gone through the hospital like lightning. Everyone knew Frau Thorn and everyone had laughed. It seemed to have restored the stoic German calm. The beds were crowded, with hardly an inch between them. Patients were mixed up, women and men were crowded together into corridors and storerooms, but no one complained. In one ward they were singing.

Across the road at the Amputee Rehabilitation Centre the Oberstarzt gave a sigh of relief when the bombing stopped. Already the hut nearest to the hospital fire had burst into flame. The radiation had heated the flimsy woodwork to a temperature where sparks falling upon the roof set it alight. There was no panic; there were enough soldiers among his patients to quell the spoken fears of the civilians. The nurses, helped by patients with only arm amputations, wheeled the beds out of the huts just before the walls ignited. Unfortunately those patients had to be left out in the open fields and already metal fragments had injured three of them and this had caused the others to become uneasy. But, as the Oberstarzt said, some of the patients in the huts were also being injured by fragments of broken glass.

It had been a trying time for the Oberst and he was no longer young. It was natural that people should think that the trainees in nurse’s uniform were skilled enough to handle casualties, but many of them were shopgirls and domestic servants with only a few days’ training behind them. Even the fully trained girls were really only to be trusted with dispensing hot drinks and emptying bed-pans. Goodness knows what damage the trainees had done this night!

‘Put all the patients out on the field,’ said the Oberst. ‘We’ll cool the huts off with buckets of water.’

Meanwhile on the other side of town at the Wald Hotel a crisis of another kind had occurred. It was a fine Edwardian building set in two and a half acres of parkland. Because of the high walls and the barbed wire, as well as the constant howls of fierce dogs, it was widely believed that the Wald Hotel was a secret SS centre of considerable importance. One rumour said that it housed Jewish millionaires who had bribed the SS to get them out of concentration camps and now lived here in luxury. There were stories about it being a stud farm for SS men on leave, as Frau Hinkelburg had suggested. Another rumour said that Stalin’s son, captured on the East Front, was held prisoner here. In reality it was simply a Waffen SS dog-training centre and the screams heard at night were the yelps of hungry dogs.

The dogs began to bark from the moment that the first HE bombs fell near the waterworks and the excitement of the sentries communicated itself to the dogs, for they were trained to respond to human intentions. Ian Munro’s Stirling had jettisoned its bombs when Redenbacher opened fire. Then it came low from the south across the bomber stream. Only two of its motors were still functioning; one of the others had run away and the crippled engine was tearing itself to pieces and screaming like a dental drill. It disappeared over the rise in the ground beyond the waterworks, still trying to gain height. The eager Heimatflak boys from the brewery had a go at it with their 2-cm batteries and the sky above the trees was criss-crossed with tracers and the smell of the firing drifted through the dog cages. The sounds and smells added to the excitement of the dogs and the barking increased until the dogs were running up and down their compounds in great agitation.

It was the 8,000-lb HC Blockbuster—the largest size of bomb dropped that night—that demolished a row of new houses near the cemetery and sent the dogs berserk. In one compound the dogs threw their bodies against the wire netting of their compounds, uncaring of the pain and blood. The netting tore open and the dogs ran through the hotel garden. Mausi Scheske was on guard duty; he shot one dog but was set upon by the rest of them and badly savaged. His brother opened fire and killed two of the dogs, but galvanized by fear five other dogs escaped over the gates. Poor little Mausi died of his wounds twenty minutes later, whereupon Hannes visited each of the dog compounds and shot the dogs. In twenty-five minutes he killed eighty-seven dogs, some of them fully trained and already assigned to a mountain regiment in Yugoslavia. Hannes was arrested by the guard sergeant, disarmed and locked in the old wine cellar. There was no wine there.

Standartenführer Wörth cursed the noisy dogs, but as the bombing stopped he returned to a pile of paperwork. He was sitting at a writing-table in his suite on the first floor. He had chosen this room not because of its proximity to the lake but because it had thick walls and was as far from the dog compound as he could live. His orderly entered the room at 02.00, bringing with him a youngNCO with torn trousers and a bleeding leg wound. The NCO delivered a report about the Scheske brothers and the maddened dogs.

‘Tell Hentschel,’ said the Standartenführer.

The NCO knew no one of that name. He exchanged a quick glance with the orderly, who nodded and moved his head to indicate that they should leave. ‘Heil Hitler,’ said the wounded boy.

‘Heil Hitler,’ said the Standartenführer without looking up from his desk. It was ten minutes later when the orderly came to tell him about the horse and he hurried downstairs and out into the chilly winter’s night to see if it could possibly be true.

‘Rosenknospe,’ he said. There were sugar cubes in his pocket. He’d never ceased to carry one or two since he was a child. ‘Rose.’ If only young Hentschel could have also been sewn up and put together again like the horse. Who in the regiment remembered him and had recognized the horse? Someone assigned to a veterinary farm, perhaps. ‘Rosenknospe. You’re not as young as you used to be, old girl.’ The horse whinnied, the smell and the voice had helped her recognize him. How long since he’d ridden? Such a fine horse. She’d be well cared for now.

Dieter Witting, the Standartenführer’s orderly, dozed for a few minutes after the last bombs. He was awakened by the bell and looked at the clock. It was a closely guarded secret that the CO could not go to the toilet without the assistance of his orderly. Witting put his overcoat over his pyjamas and took the case containing the syringe and tablets just in case they were needed. He went in without knocking, as was his usual practice when answering a summons.Wörth was sitting upright in his chair staring straight at the door. Witting wasn’t frightened. Wörth tried to speak and his orderly bent close to his mouth.

‘Rosenknospe,’ whispered Wörth.

‘Rosebud’; Witting had seen many men die and often their last words were incomprehensible.

‘It’s going to be all right now, sir,’ said Witting. ‘Yes,’ said Standartenführer Wörth, and died of frostbite and wounds suffered eighteen months before.

The Burgomaster did not return to his Control Room. The planes had passed over and anyway all of his phones were out of order. From now on the air-raid services must work on their own initiative. He took one of the portable stirrup pumps from the entrance and walked towards the red glow of the old town.

He walked through his town in horrified disbelief. By the lights of the big fires near the gasworks he could see a whole row of slum housing that was simply a one-wall façade like a film set; the houses themselves had disappeared. Alongside the railway station a locomotive had jumped its tracks and was now several feet away from the railway lines. As he turned north on to Nehringstrasse the whole street was a blizzard of flying sparks. The first time he saw a body—just beyond Tornow the printer’s—he stopped to look at it. It was Tornow’s son, dressed in his naval officer’s uniform. Quite dead. He recognized the body of a girl clerk too. After he’d passed fifty bodies he no longer glanced at them.

Only three minutes after he’d left his Control Room an NSKK motorcycle messenger arrived. The FLUKO at Duisburg had tried to get through by means of every official phone in Altgarten but when none of them could connect to the Burgomaster’s Control Room they ordered that a messenger should go from Party HQ. The message simply said that the second wave of RAF aircraft numbering approximately four hundred planes was approaching Altgarten. All fires must be extinguished and non-essential personnel ordered to take shelter.