The bombing of Lübeck

On the night of Saturday 28 March to Palm Sunday 29 March 1942, Britain’s bomber force attacked Lübeck, the old capital of the Hanseatic League on the Baltic. 234 aircraft of RAF Bomber Command took off, and most of their load consisted of incendiary bombs. Fire consumed a belt of buildings along the western edge of the medieval old-town island, from the cathedral to St Mary’s Church, and a large part of the St. Lorenz suburb. According to the German police, between 301 and 320 people were killed (different tallies give different figures), and more than 15,000 were left homeless. It was the first great success of Bomber Command under Air Marshal Arthur Harris, and the first raid to show in full what the new British strategy was to be: the destruction of entire districts of cities by fire.

It is often said that the raid destroyed “more than 30 per cent of the city and 80 per cent of the medieval centre”. The first figure comes from a British assessment of aerial photographs, according to which about 200 acres (some 80 hectares), roughly 30 per cent of the city’s built-up area, had been destroyed. German police figures speak of 1,468 buildings completely destroyed (about 7 per cent of all the buildings in the city), 2,180 badly damaged and more than 9,000 lightly damaged. According to German studies, roughly a fifth of the buildings in the old town were completely destroyed, and the north-eastern part of the island survived. The figure of “80 per cent of the medieval centre” is therefore greatly exaggerated, although the destruction in the most valuable quarters was enormous.

A new commander and a new directive

In the spring of 1942 Britain’s bomber force was emerging from a deep crisis. The Butt Report of August 1941 had shown that only one crew in three dropped its bombs within eight kilometres of the target, and over the smoky Ruhr even fewer. In the autumn came heavy losses, above all on the night of 7–8 November 1941, and an order to conserve strength. In February 1942 the situation changed fundamentally. On 14 February the Air Ministry issued Bomber Command with a new directive: the main object of the raids was to be the morale of the enemy civilian population, and in particular of the industrial workers. The bombing was to cover whole built-up areas, not just individual factories. On 22 February Harris took command; from the outset he held that since at night one could hit nothing smaller than a town, the town had to become the target.

Harris had a new tool at his disposal, the Gee radio-navigation system, which allowed crews to fix their position from the signals of transmitters in England. The first raids using it, against Essen and other cities of the Ruhr, proved a disappointment: the Krupp works remained untouched, and the bombs scattered in the industrial haze. Harris needed a success that would convince the government and public opinion that expanding the bomber force made sense. At the same time the British were also looking for cheap, auxiliary ways of harming the German economy, such as Operation Outward, with its balloons released over Germany.

Why Lübeck

Lübeck was a port and a medium-sized industrial city, with about 150,000 inhabitants before the war. It had the Flender-Werke shipyard, which built submarines, and factories working for the armed forces, and its port handled important trade with Sweden. It was not, however, a first-class target, and it was not chosen for its industry. Three circumstances decided the matter. The city lay relatively close, on the sea, and was therefore easy to find, especially on a clear night. It was weakly defended: according to German figures, it was protected by only five heavy and four light anti-aircraft batteries. Finally, its old centre, densely packed with Gothic houses with brick gables, timber floors and roof frames, was exceptionally vulnerable to fire.

After the war Harris wrote in his memoirs that Lübeck was “built more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation”. He explained that it was not a target of vital importance, but that it seemed to him better to destroy an industrial town of moderate importance than to fail in an attempt to destroy a large one. He added that the main object of the attack was to find out to what extent a first wave of aircraft, by starting a fire, could guide later waves to the target. Lübeck was thus to be an experiment. The British philosopher A. C. Grayling and other critics of the bombing campaign stress that the Air Staff wanted to use it to try out a technique of bombing with a high proportion of incendiary bombs, whose effectiveness the British had learned at first hand in Coventry and other cities during the Blitz. Kiel was also considered, but the choice fell on Lübeck.

Palm Sunday night

The weather favoured the attackers. There was a full moon on a frosty, cloudless night, and the waters of the Trave, the Elbe–Lübeck Canal and the Wakenitz, which surround the old-town island, reflected the light and showed the way. According to Bomber Command’s records, 234 aircraft took off: 146 Wellingtons, 41 Hampdens, 26 four-engined Stirlings and 21 Manchesters. Lübeck lay beyond the range of Gee, but the system helped over much of the route. The first wave was flown by experienced airmen in aircraft fitted with the new device. Their task was to start fires on which the following waves would home in.

The alarm sounded in the city at 11.18 p.m. The aircraft came in from the direction of Neustadt and attacked in three waves. The defences were so weak that some crews came down to about 600 metres, though the average bombing height was roughly three kilometres. About 400 tons of bombs were dropped, including some 25,000 small incendiaries and several heavy high-explosive bombs, the so-called aerial mines. The latter tore off roofs and blew out windows, and the incendiaries fell into the exposed interiors. The raid ended at about 2.58 a.m. 191 crews reported having hit the target. The RAF lost twelve aircraft (seven Wellingtons, three Stirlings, one Hampden and one Manchester).

Individual fires quickly merged into great conflagrations that leapt from street to street. German studies speak of a firestorm. A bomb hit the main water main and the hydrants stopped working, and it was hard to draw water from the partly frozen rivers and canal. Hoses froze or were cut by rubble. The fire engulfed a strip about 300 metres wide along the western shore of the island, from the cathedral as far as the Fischergrube, including the wealthy merchants’ quarter between St Mary’s Church and the Trave. St Mary’s Church, the model for dozens of Gothic brick churches around the Baltic, burned, as did St Peter’s Church and the cathedral, to which the fire spread from a burning museum. The Town Hall (PL) was damaged. The bells crashed down from the burning tower of St Mary’s. The Mann family house in the Mengstraße, described in Buddenbrooks, also burned; its façade survived. The churches of St James and St Giles and the north-eastern part of the old town came through.

Victims and losses

According to various studies, the German police recorded 301, 312 or 320 dead, three missing and 783 wounded. More than 15,000 people lost their homes, and some sources speak of as many as 25,000 left without a roof over their heads. Firms in the burned-out merchants’ quarter lost their offices, warehouses, goods and records. Trams to the suburbs started running again after a few days, but within the old town only in May.

The Nazi welfare organisation, the NSV, quickly organised help for those affected, handing out food, including delicacies unobtainable in wartime. Some of its officials, however, stole the goods intended for the bombed-out. A dozen or so of them were put on trial, and in August 1942 three were sentenced to death. Lübeck’s industrial plants suffered little and soon went back to work. The raid, aimed at the city’s buildings, did not halt German war production.

Four clergymen also became victims of the raid, in a different way. The Lutheran pastor Karl Friedrich Stellbrink said in his Palm Sunday sermon that God had spoken with a mighty voice and that people would learn to pray again. The Gestapo took this as presenting the raid as God’s judgement on National Socialism. Stellbrink and three Catholic priests with whom he had worked and exchanged material critical of the regime were arrested. In June 1943 the People’s Court sentenced them to death, and on 10 November 1943 they were executed in Hamburg. The Catholic and Protestant churches today honour them as the Lübeck martyrs.

Hitler’s anger

The scale of the destruction took the Reich authorities by surprise. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the damage was “really enormous” and that the newsreel he had watched was “horrifying”. He consoled himself that the people of northern Germany were tougher than those of the south, but admitted that if the British continued such raids, they might demoralise the population. Contrary to these fears, the morale of Lübeck’s inhabitants did not collapse.

Adolf Hitler reacted with fury. He demanded a response that would pay the British back in kind. On 14 April 1942 the Wehrmacht High Command passed on to the Luftwaffe his order to conduct raids “of a retaliatory nature” against towns whose destruction would hit the civilian population. On the night of 23–24 April, as Bomber Command was beginning a series of four similar raids on Rostock, German bombers attacked Exeter, and in the following weeks Bath, Norwich and York. German propaganda announced that the Luftwaffe would bomb every building marked with three stars in the Baedeker guide, and this gave the attacks their British name: the Baedeker Blitz. The Luftwaffe, however, whose main forces were fighting in the east and in the Mediterranean, could send at most a few dozen bombers over England at a time. The retaliatory raids killed more than 1,600 Britons and destroyed historic buildings, but they did not change the course of the air war.

In April 1942 Thomas Mann, the Lübeck-born writer then in exile, spoke to the Germans over the BBC. In one of his monthly broadcasts, “Deutsche Hörer!” (German Listeners!), he said that the fate of his native city affected him, but he recalled Coventry and reminded his listeners that the Germans were paying for an air war they themselves had started.

Place in the war

The raid on Lübeck was a turning point in the British bombing offensive. For the first time Bomber Command had inflicted on a German city destruction comparable to that which the Luftwaffe had inflicted on English cities. In London it was taken as proof that the new method worked: a first wave of experienced crews starts the fire, and the following waves bomb the glow. Winston Churchill told Roosevelt that further attacks on this scale would follow. On 30 March, two days after the raid, the Prime Minister’s adviser Frederick Lindemann submitted a memorandum on bombing working-class districts so as to deprive as large a part as possible of the population of German cities of their homes. It became one of the justifications for expanding the bomber force, although its calculations were disputed by some scientists.

The next stages came quickly. After Rostock in April, on the night of 30–31 May 1942 Harris sent more than a thousand bombers against Cologne. In the following years Bomber Command, ever larger and equipped with four-engined Lancasters and Halifaxes and new navigational aids, turned most of Germany’s large cities into ruins. In the summer of 1943 a firestorm in Hamburg killed some 34,000 people, and in February 1945 Dresden was destroyed. These raids remain one of the most disputed chapters of the war: their defenders point out that they tied down huge German anti-aircraft forces and destroyed the war economy; their critics, that they made the civilian population the main target.

Lübeck was never again the target of a major British raid. From 1944, thanks to the efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross, its port was used for shipments of parcels for Allied prisoners of war in Germany. Reconstruction took decades: St Mary’s Church was rebuilt first, the cathedral was completed only in 1982, and St Peter’s in 1986. The shattered bells were left on the floor of the south tower of St Mary’s as a memorial. Since 1987 Lübeck’s old town has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List.