The evacuation of Berlin

At the beginning of September 1943 trains full of women, children and elderly people were leaving Berlin’s stations. War chronicles record under 3 September that Nazi Germany began evacuating civilians from the capital. This needs qualifying: the evacuation did not begin on 3 September. Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister and also Gauleiter of Berlin, had issued the call to leave the city at the beginning of August, after the catastrophe in Hamburg – according to some accounts on 1 August 1943. Around the turn of August and September, after two major British raids, Goebbels ordered it speeded up, and on the night of 3–4 September the city was hit by another attack. The date in the chronicles thus marks the moment when departures from Berlin turned into a mass exodus.

The shadow of Hamburg

Berlin had been bombed since August 1940 (the first RAF raid on Berlin), but for three years the raids were infrequent and relatively light. Even a series of five attacks in January and March 1943 (the RAF raids on Berlin in January 1943) destroyed mainly residential districts in the south of the city and, according to British studies, killed about 650 people. Everything changed at the end of July. In Operation Gomorrah British and American aircraft destroyed a large part of Hamburg, and the firestorm of 27/28 July killed most of the roughly 34,000–40,000 victims. Around a million people fled or were taken out of Hamburg.

For the leaders of the Third Reich it was clear that the capital would be the next target. Goebbels, who had headed the Berlin NSDAP organisation since 1926 and was Reich Defence Commissioner for the Berlin district, was responsible for the city’s civil defence. According to his diary, discussions about evacuation took place in the first days of August, and leaflets were delivered to homes calling on everyone whose presence in Berlin was not essential – women without work, children, the elderly – to go to relatives in the provinces or to designated reception districts. Formally the evacuation was voluntary. Men and women employed in industry and offices had to stay, because without them Berlin’s armaments factories would have come to a standstill.

Schools sent east

The best-organised part of the evacuation was the removal of school-age children. The Third Reich had the machinery ready for this: the so-called extended evacuation of children to the countryside (erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung, KLV), launched on Adolf Hitler’s orders in the autumn of 1940 after the first raids on Berlin and Hamburg. It was run by the Reich Youth Leadership under the supervision of Baldur von Schirach, with the participation of the Hitler Youth, the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV) and the school authorities. Until 1943, however, only some families had made use of the scheme; many children came home after a few months.

Now whole schools were sent away. Schirach’s decree of 15 June 1943 ordered that they be moved in their entirety, with their teachers, so that the classes of pupils remaining in the city would not have to be merged. Formally participation was still voluntary, but parents who did not want to send their child found themselves under growing pressure – their child’s school simply ceased to exist in Berlin. The trains carrying children, and mothers with young children, went above all east, beyond the reach of the British bombers: to East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, the Warthegau in occupied Poland, the Sudetenland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The empty school buildings were turned into auxiliary hospitals and collection points for those bombed out.

At the same time the city prepared to defend itself against fire. Residents had to clear junk out of their attics and place buckets of water and sand on the stairwells, and openings were knocked through the walls between the cellars of neighbouring tenement blocks so that people could escape from a buried shelter through the next building. The experience of Hamburg – where many people had suffocated in cellars – was not to be repeated.

Three raids around the turn of August and September

Arthur Harris, the head of RAF Bomber Command, was waiting for the longer nights that would allow his bombers to fly to Berlin and back in darkness. The first of three major raids took place on the night of 23–24 August 1943. More than 700 bombers took part, but the target markers fell too far to the south and most of the bombs hit outlying districts and open ground. Lankwitz suffered most – in Berlin the night was remembered as the “Lankwitz bomb night”. According to German figures 854 people were killed and some 2,600 buildings destroyed or damaged. Many of the dead turned out to have been killed outside the shelters, which prompted Goebbels to tighten the air-raid regulations. That night the RAF lost several dozen aircraft – its heaviest loss on a single raid since the beginning of the war.

The second attack, on the night of 31 August–1 September, was even less accurate: some bombs fell as much as several dozen kilometres from the target. In Berlin itself 68 people were killed, and bomber losses again exceeded 7 per cent. It was after this raid that Goebbels ordered the accelerated evacuation of children and young mothers. The third raid, on the night of 3–4 September, was carried out by more than 300 Lancasters. It again missed the main aiming point, but destroyed residential blocks in the north-western districts, among other things. Plötzensee Prison, where death sentences were carried out, was also damaged. When several condemned prisoners managed to escape in the confusion, the authorities hanged about 250 prisoners, many of them foreigners, over several nights from 7 September; these events went down in history as the “bloody nights of Plötzensee”.

RAF losses in the three raids were so heavy that in September Harris broke off the attacks on Berlin. He resumed them only in the second half of November, when the nights were at their longest.

How many left

The numbers of evacuees given in the literature vary, depending on what is counted and up to when. According to British historians of the raids on Berlin, some 790,000 women and children had left the city by November 1943. Other studies state that by 1944 a total of about 1.2 million people had been evacuated, roughly a quarter of the city’s population, and German literature even gives a figure of one and a half million people who left Berlin. Before the war Berlin had more than 4.3 million inhabitants.

The evacuation did not go smoothly. The railways, burdened with military traffic, could not keep up. Families did not want to be separated; husbands stayed in the city, and wives did not want to leave them. In the reception districts there was friction with the hosts, who complained about demanding city folk, while the newcomers complained about primitive conditions and the boredom of the countryside. Many women with children returned to Berlin after a few weeks or months, despite pressure from the authorities. Nor could the authorities send away all the mothers, because their labour was needed in the capital’s armaments industry.

Significance

The August and September raids proved to be a prelude. On the night of 18–19 November 1943 Bomber Command opened the Battle of Berlin – a series of more than a dozen major raids on the capital lasting until the end of March 1944. The very first November attacks, especially the raid of 22–23 November, destroyed whole blocks of the city centre, killed thousands of people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. Goebbels again called on everyone who did not have to stay to leave. Thanks to the evacuation carried out since August, there were far fewer children in the city during the Battle of Berlin than there had been in Hamburg in July, which undoubtedly saved many lives and also eased the burden on the rescue services and supplies. Harris did not achieve the goal he had set himself – Berlin was not destroyed like Hamburg, and Germany did not surrender – and Bomber Command’s losses in this campaign were the heaviest of the whole war.

The Berliners sent east found themselves, in part, in a trap that was hard to foresee at the time. East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and the Warthegau, regarded in 1943 as a safe hinterland, became the front in 1944 and 1945. Many evacuated families and KLV camps had to flee before the Red Army in the winter of 1945, together with the local German population. Berlin, abandoned by roughly one in four of its inhabitants, survived the raids only to become, in April and May 1945, the field of the last great battle of the war in Europe.

The evacuation of Berlin was also an important political signal. A regime that had assured people for years that the enemy would never reach the capital had to admit that it could not defend it. Goebbels tried to turn this to advantage, showing himself in the bombed districts and presenting survival of the raids as proof of the nation’s toughness, but for millions of Germans leaving with their children to stay with strangers in the provinces was one of the most tangible proofs that the war Germany had unleashed had come home to them.