The raid on Berlin of 3 February 1945

On Saturday 3 February 1945, shortly before noon, about a thousand Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers of the American Eighth Air Force appeared over Berlin. According to the Eighth Air Force’s operational chronicle, 1,003 aircraft were dispatched and just under 940 of them reached the city. In two waves, between 11.02 and 11.52 a.m., they dropped more than 2,000 tons of high-explosive bombs and about 250 tons of incendiaries on the city centre, above all on the Mitte district and the north-western part of Kreuzberg. The weather was good and a strong wind fanned the fires. It was the largest American raid on the capital of the Reich since the beginning of the war and – measured by the number of dead – the most tragic of all that Berlin experienced.

Bombs struck the railway stations, the government quarter on Wilhelmstraße, the headquarters of the Gestapo, the Reich Chancellery and the building of the People’s Court. In the last of these its president, Roland Freisler, was killed – the judge who a few months earlier had been sentencing to death those involved in the plot against Hitler.

Berlin – a front-line city

By the beginning of February 1945 Berlin was no longer a distant rear area. The Soviet Vistula–Oder offensive, launched in mid-January, had in three weeks moved the front from the Vistula to the Oder. On 31 January units of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front seized a bridgehead on the Oder at Kienitz, about 70 kilometres from the capital of the Reich. Some Berliners claimed they could hear the sound of distant gunfire. Thousands of refugees from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia were pouring into the city’s railway stations, while trains carrying troops and supplies eastwards passed through the capital’s rail hub.

Adolf Hitler had returned to Berlin on 16 January, after the failure of the Ardennes offensive, and spent more and more of his time in the bunker beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery. Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin and Minister of Propaganda, announced that the city would be defended to the last; anti-tank ditches were being dug and Volkssturm units formed.

Why Berlin

The choice of target followed from the situation on the Eastern Front and from the political calculations of the Western Allies. At the end of January 1945 an idea known as Operation Thunderclap was revived in London: a massive air strike on Berlin and other cities of eastern Germany – Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz – was to paralyse the movement of German troops and refugees behind the front and help the advancing Red Army. Winston Churchill pressed the Air Ministry on the matter just before leaving to meet Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta. The Allies also expected the 6th SS Panzer Army, withdrawn from the Ardennes, to pass through Berlin on its way to the Oder. In fact Hitler sent it to Hungary, but this was not yet known.

General Carl Spaatz, commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, designated as targets Berlin’s railway junctions, including its stations and marshalling yards, and the government quarter. The commander of the Eighth Air Force, General Jimmy Doolittle, had doubts. According to American air historians, he believed that bombing the city centre would kill many civilians for little military effect; he preferred to strike at synthetic fuel plants. Spaatz, backed by General Dwight Eisenhower, nevertheless regarded the attack as a matter of “great political importance” – it was to show the Russians that the West was supporting their offensive. Doolittle carried out the order.

The attack

The bombers took off from airfields in East Anglia and flew in two great formations: the 1st Air Division first, then the 3rd Air Division. They were escorted by several hundred North American P-51 Mustang fighters – the Eighth Air Force chronicle gives 575. German fighters scarcely appeared, because the Luftwaffe was short of fuel and experienced pilots, and many of its fighter units had just been transferred to the east. The main obstacle was the anti-aircraft artillery around the city. The crews bombed from 7–8 kilometres up, under a clear sky, aiming visually.

The lead bomber of the 1st Division, carrying Lieutenant Colonel Robert Rosenthal of the 100th Bomb Group, took a direct hit over the target. The burning aircraft reached the aiming point and released its bombs, after which the crew bailed out; Rosenthal was the last to leave the aircraft, just before it exploded. He came down with a broken arm in territory already held by the Red Army; Soviet soldiers recognised him as an ally and helped him get back to his own side. In the whole operation the Americans lost, according to various tallies, between 21 and 23 bombers; more aircraft returned damaged.

The first wave, between 11.02 and 11.18 a.m., struck the area around the stations and the government quarter; the second, up to 11.52, a wider area of the city centre. The Anhalter Bahnhof and the Potsdamer Bahnhof were wrecked together with their extensive tracks, and bombs also fell on the Tempelhof rail junction. The Reich Chancellery, the NSDAP Party Chancellery and the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße were damaged; American accounts also list the ministry buildings on Wilhelmstraße among the targets hit. The newspaper quarter around Kochstraße and the commercial district on Ritterstraße burned down. The Berlin Palace and the State Opera on Unter den Linden were gutted; the opera house had been rebuilt only two years earlier after a British raid in April 1941.

Casualties and damage

German figures from February 1945, on which Berlin historians rely, record 2,894 dead. According to the same sources at least 20,000 people were injured and about 120,000 were left homeless. A total of 2,296 buildings were completely destroyed and more than 22,000 flats were rendered uninhabitable. Several hundred factories working for the armaments industry were also reduced to rubble. The dead included prisoners and forced labourers, who were usually not allowed to use public shelters, as well as refugees from the east waiting in the stations.

Some of the literature, particularly American and British, gives a figure of 20,000–25,000 dead. This comes from early, unverified estimates and finds no confirmation in German documents; German historians regard it as greatly exaggerated. It is therefore generally accepted that some 2,500–3,000 people were killed. This is fewer than in the great British night raids on Hamburg or, later, on Dresden, because the attack took place by day, with high-explosive bombs predominating, and Berlin’s broad streets and masonry buildings did not favour the development of a firestorm. For Berlin itself, however, it was the bloodiest single raid of the entire war.

The death of Roland Freisler

Among those killed on 3 February was a man whose name had become a byword for Nazi justice. Roland Freisler, formerly state secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice and a participant in the Wannsee Conference, had since August 1942 presided over the People’s Court, the tribunal set up to try cases of high treason. It was he who in February 1943 sentenced the students of the White Rose to death, and from August 1944 he conducted the trials of the 20 July conspirators, in which he shouted at and mocked the defendants. In January 1945 he sentenced Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, who was executed on 23 January.

On Saturday 3 February the court was sitting in its building on Bellevuestraße, near Potsdamer Platz. In the dock sat Fabian von Schlabrendorff, the officer who in March 1943 had planted a bomb on Hitler’s aircraft and was later involved in the 20 July plot. When the sirens wailed, Freisler adjourned the hearing and ordered the defendants to be taken to the shelter.

Accounts of what happened next differ. According to one version, Freisler stayed behind in the building to collect his files and was killed at about 11.08 a.m., crushed by a piece of ceiling or a column when a bomb hit the building; he is said to have been found clutching files, among them Schlabrendorff’s. According to another, based on eyewitness accounts, he was struck by a bomb splinter in the courtyard or in the street as he ran for the shelter, and bled to death in front of the court building. The story of the judge who died saving his files is thus only one version and cannot be confirmed. What is certain is that Freisler was killed in the raid, in the People’s Court building or just outside it. He was buried quietly in his wife’s family grave; his name was not put on the headstone.

The death of the court’s president interrupted Schlabrendorff’s trial. When the case was resumed in March 1945, the court – according to the defendant’s own account – acquitted him, finding that his statements had been extracted under torture. The Gestapo nevertheless did not release him; moved through a succession of camps, he lived to be liberated in May 1945. Fabian von Schlabrendorff survived the war, wrote one of the first accounts of the German resistance, and in 1967–1975 was a judge of the West German Federal Constitutional Court.

Freisler was succeeded by Harry Haffner. The People’s Court went on trying people and sentencing them to death until April 1945, but without the notoriety that Freisler had given it.

Berlin under the bombs

Berlin had been bombed since August 1940, when several dozen British aircraft attacked it in retaliation for bombs dropped on London. Its hardest ordeal was the air Battle of Berlin at the turn of 1943 and 1944, when Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris’s Bomber Command attacked the city by night, including on 20 January 1944. The British suffered heavy losses then without breaking the city. The Americans began daylight raids on Berlin in March 1944, paying a high price for them in battles with German fighters.

The raid of 3 February 1945 showed how much Germany’s position had changed since then. A thousand bombers flew over the Reich in broad daylight almost unhindered by fighters, and the Luftwaffe could no longer defend even the capital. At the same time the raid had little effect on the fighting on the Oder: much of the damage to the railways was quickly patched up, and German troops also reached the front by other routes.

Place in the war

The next day, 4 February, the meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin opened at Yalta. There the Deputy Chief of the Soviet General Staff, General Aleksei Antonov, asked the Western Allies for air attacks on communication centres in eastern Germany, naming Berlin and Leipzig. This prepared the ground for further attacks under the Thunderclap plan, foremost among them the raid on Dresden on the night of 13/14 February. On 26 February the Eighth Air Force again sent more than a thousand bombers over Berlin, and on 18 March it carried out the attack that was, by tonnage, the heaviest in the city’s history. The RAF’s light Mosquito bombers came over Berlin almost every night until April. The historian Olaf Groehler estimated the total death toll of the air raids on Berlin over the whole war at 29,000–30,000; other estimates are lower.

On 16 April 1945 the Red Army launched its advance from the Oder on Berlin. The city that had suffered its bloodiest raid on 3 February became a battlefield in April and capitulated on 2 May. Because Freisler died from an American bomb and not by the sentence of a court, one of the most compromised judges of the Third Reich never answered for his judgments. After the war not a single judge of the People’s Court was finally convicted in West Germany.