RAF raids on Rostock

Many war chronologies record a heavy RAF bombing of Rostock under 24 April 1942, and under 27 April that the city had been bombed for the fourth night running. Both entries refer to a single series: over four consecutive nights, from 23/24 to 26/27 April, the British bomber force, RAF Bomber Command, attacked the Hanseatic port on the Baltic and the Heinkel aircraft works on its outskirts. The first raid failed; the next three reduced most of the old town to ashes. After Lübeck, Rostock was the second German city that Bomber Command under Air Marshal Arthur Harris deliberately burned, and the first that German propaganda called the victim of a “terror raid”.

Why Rostock

In the spring of 1942 Rostock had about 130,000 inhabitants. It was an old Hanseatic and university town on the Warnow, a dozen or so kilometres from the river’s mouth on the Baltic at Warnemünde. Its medieval and early modern centre, with four great Gothic parish churches and tightly packed streets of brick-gabled houses with timber floors and roof trusses, resembled Lübeck. What interested the British most, however, was industry. On the north-western edge of the town, at Marienehe on the Warnow, lay the main works and design offices of the Heinkel company, which built He 111 bombers for the Luftwaffe and was working on new aircraft types. At Warnemünde there were the Arado aircraft works and a shipyard.

After his success over Lübeck on 28/29 March, Harris was looking for a similar target. Rostock met the same conditions: it lay on the coast, so it was easy to find on a clear night; it was weakly defended; and its old centre was highly vulnerable to fire. It lay far beyond the range of the Gee radio-navigation system, which meant that a raid depended on the moon and the weather. For two weeks in April the raids on Cologne, Hamburg, Essen and Dortmund had ended with bombs scattered through the clouds. At the end of the month came clear, moonlit nights, and Harris returned to the Baltic.

The plan called for a division of forces. Most of the aircraft were to attack the old town with loads made up largely of incendiary bombs, while a smaller group attacked the Heinkel works. The raids were carried out mainly by No. 5 Group of Bomber Command, supported on the last night by No. 3 Group. According to German studies, the crews were to attack from low altitude, about a thousand metres, making use of the moonlight. The centre of Rostock was chosen as the main target because, as at Lübeck, that was where the density of timber buildings was greatest.

Four nights

On the night of 23/24 April 1942, 161 bombers took off: 143 for the town and 18 for the Heinkel works. That same night, independently of the British raid, the Luftwaffe attacked Exeter, opening a series of reprisal raids on English cities. The first attack on Rostock failed. According to British analyses, most of the bombs meant for the town fell three to ten kilometres from the target, and the Heinkel factory was not hit. The German Order Police recorded six houses destroyed, seven people killed and 32 injured. Four aircraft did not return.

The following night, 24/25 April, Harris sent 125 bombers: 91 to the town and 34 to the aircraft works. This time the bombs hit the centre. According to German figures, about 500 houses were destroyed or damaged, the town lost its electricity, and the number of fires exceeded what the local fire brigade could handle. Fire units came to help from Güstrow, Wismar, Bad Doberan and Hamburg. As for Heinkel, the sources differ: according to British data the factory was again missed, while according to the East German historian Olaf Groehler the damage caused production to fall by about ten per cent. Bomber Command lost one aircraft.

The third raid, on 25/26 April, was made by 128 aircraft, 110 over the town and 18 over the factory. Several hundred high-explosive bombs and several thousand small incendiaries fell. Great fires engulfing entire blocks broke out in the old town. The Heinkel works were also hit; according to some studies, part of the documentation for the new He 219 night fighter was burned, delaying work on it. On the morning of 26 April between 30,000 and 40,000 inhabitants were homeless. According to the available tallies, no aircraft was shot down over Rostock that night.

The fourth and last raid, on 26/27 April, was made by 106 aircraft. This time half of them attacked the Heinkel works, which were to take the main blow. It was the most effective of the four attacks: the works were heavily damaged, and in the town the fires completed the destruction of the previous nights. British assessments described this raid as a model example of precision bombing at night. Three aircraft did not return. In all, over the four nights Bomber Command sent about 520 aircraft against Rostock, of which about 400 attacked the town, and lost fewer than ten.

Destruction and casualties

According to German data compiled in histories of the air war over Rostock, the raids completely destroyed 1,765 buildings and badly damaged 513. Some 130 hectares of built-up area burned, roughly 60 per cent of the town centre; other tallies speak of the destruction of about half the old town. British assessments based on aerial photographs indicated a similar or even greater scale. Of about 130,000 inhabitants, some 35,000 lost their homes.

St Peter’s Church, the town’s oldest church, was burned out, and its tall spire collapsed together with the bells. In St Nicholas’s Church (PL) the tower and nave burned and the nave vault fell in. St James’s Church was badly damaged. The municipal theatre and many historic town houses burned, including part of the buildings around the market square. St Mary’s Church, however, survived with its famous medieval astronomical clock: according to local tradition it was saved by the sexton Friedrich Bombowski and his family, who put out the incendiary bombs falling on the roof.

Given the scale of the destruction, the death toll was relatively low. According to German figures, 204 or 221 people were killed and 89 injured; the town authorities gave 216 dead, among them 187 civilians, 27 soldiers and two foreigners. British analyses linked this figure to the fact that many inhabitants fled the town after the first nights. A mass flight and evacuation from Rostock to the surrounding villages began at that time. In May 1942 a plot was laid out in the New Cemetery for more than two hundred victims of the April raids.

“Terrorangriff”

The raids shook the Reich authorities even more than the destruction of Lübeck. Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary at the end of April that the raid had been more devastating than the previous ones, that the town’s community life had practically ceased and that the situation in some districts was catastrophic. He wrote of seven-tenths of the town destroyed, of more than a hundred thousand people evacuated and of panic. These figures, based on the first chaotic reports, were far higher than the later police data, but they convey well the impression that Rostock made in Berlin.

According to British and German historians, it was in German communiqués on the Rostock raids that the term “Terrorangriff” – “terror raid” – appeared for the first time. Goebbels insisted that all British attacks on towns be called this, while German ones were to be presented solely as “retaliation”. This served both domestic propaganda and the justification of the Luftwaffe’s operations. As early as 14 April, after Lübeck, Adolf Hitler had ordered reprisal raids on English towns in which the destruction would fall above all on the civilian population. Now, with Rostock burning and the Luftwaffe bombing Exeter and Bath, Goebbels noted that Hitler intended to repeat such attacks night after night “until the English are sick and tired of terror raids”, and that he shared his view that cultural centres, spas and civilian districts had to be hit.

The German response nonetheless remained limited. The Luftwaffe, whose main forces were fighting in the east and over the Mediterranean, could send at most a few dozen bombers over England at a time. At the end of April it attacked Exeter, Bath, Norwich and York, and in the following months other towns with historic buildings. These raids killed more than 1,600 Britons in all, but they could not compare with what Bomber Command was able to inflict on German cities.

Place in the war

Rostock confirmed what Lübeck had shown: a town that was easy to find, weakly defended and built largely of timber could be burned down at night with incendiaries, even without precise navigational aids. In London this was taken as proof that the new strategy of area bombing could produce results. A few weeks later, on the night of 30/31 May 1942, Harris sent more than a thousand bombers against Cologne, and in the years that followed he reduced most of Germany’s large cities to ruins. At the same time it was after Rostock that German propaganda permanently adopted the language of “air terror”, with which it described Allied raids until the end of the war and which, after the war, was taken up by some far-right writers.

Rostock itself was bombed many more times. On the night of 8/9 May 1942 British bombers attacked Warnemünde and the Arado works, losing a dozen or so aircraft to anti-aircraft defences that had been strengthened since April. From the summer of 1943 the American air force carried out daylight raids on the aircraft works in Rostock and Warnemünde. According to German research, 617 people were killed in raids on the town during the whole war, among them more than a hundred forced labourers and prisoners of war, and by 1945 about 85 per cent of its dwellings had been destroyed or damaged. After the war, in the days of the GDR, the ruins of St James’s Church were pulled down; the churches of St Peter and St Nicholas were rebuilt, and the tower of St Peter’s regained its spire only after German reunification.