The raid on Elberfeld and the evacuation of the Ruhr

On the night of 24–25 June 1943, 630 bombers of the British RAF Bomber Command attacked Elberfeld, the western part of Wuppertal, which had survived the May raid on Barmen. Fire consumed almost the entire centre of the district, and according to German figures some 1,900 people were killed. It was one of a dozen or so heavy raids with which Air Marshal Arthur Harris continued the Battle of the Ruhr in June. Its result was not only the destruction of yet more cities on the Rhine and the Ruhr, but also the beginning of the mass removal of their inhabitants – above all children and mothers – to quieter regions of the Reich.

June over the Ruhr

The offensive that Harris had opened in March with a raid on Essen reached its peak in May and June 1943. Bomber Command now had more than 700 bombers with crews ready to fly – increasingly four-engined Lancasters and Halifaxes – and the Oboe navigation system, which allowed Mosquitos to mark a target in the Ruhr to within a few hundred metres, regardless of cloud and industrial haze. After the May attack on the Möhne and Eder dams, the bombers returned to the method that was the essence of the battle: night raids by several hundred aircraft on city centres, with a large proportion of incendiaries.

In June the targets changed almost night by night. On the night of 11–12 June, on the eve of Whitsun, more than 700 aircraft attacked Düsseldorf; a firestorm destroyed the old town and the city centre, and according to German figures some 1,200–1,300 people were killed. The following nights brought raids on Bochum, Oberhausen and Cologne. On the night of 21–22 June more than 650 bombers burned out the centre of Krefeld: more than a thousand people were killed and tens of thousands lost their homes. A day later Mülheim an der Ruhr was attacked, and most of its buildings were destroyed; then came Elberfeld, and on the night of 25–26 June Gelsenkirchen.

The heaviest blow came at the end of the month. On the night of 28–29 June, the feast of St Peter and St Paul, more than 600 aircraft bombed Cologne. In this raid, remembered in the city as the “Peter-und-Paul-Angriff” (the Peter and Paul raid), 4,377 people were killed – more than in any earlier attack on a German city. The town hall and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum burned down, and the cathedral was badly damaged.

The raid on Elberfeld

Wuppertal stretches in a belt more than ten kilometres long along the valley of the river Wupper. On the night of 29–30 May bombers had destroyed its eastern part, Barmen, but Elberfeld had suffered hardly at all – and that was where many of those bombed out had taken refuge. Bomber Command regarded the city as an unfinished target and on 24 June assigned 630 aircraft to a renewed attack: 251 Lancasters, 171 Halifaxes, 98 Stirlings, 101 Wellingtons and 9 Mosquitos.

The route was almost the same as a month earlier. German warning posts received the first reports of aircraft over the Scheldt estuary around midnight, but until the last moment did not know which city was the target; only after 1 a.m., when target-marking flares – which the Germans called “Christmas trees” – blazed over the valley, did the control centre in Duisburg conclude that it was Wuppertal. The bombs began to fall almost at once. According to the British report, some 1,080 tons of high explosive and more than 1,200 tons of incendiaries were dropped.

The fire covered an area of about 12 square kilometres. Some 3,000 residential buildings were destroyed and 2,500 damaged. According to German tallies, about 1,900 people were killed, including 1,046 women, 716 men and 141 children; some accounts give a figure of about 1,800. Some aircraft dropped their bombs too early, on areas west of the city, but British analysis of aerial photographs put the destruction of Elberfeld’s built-up area at 94 per cent. Bomber Command lost 34 aircraft that night – more than five per cent of those dispatched – and with them most of their crews; the night fighters and anti-aircraft batteries of the Ruhr, reinforced in the spring of 1943, were taking an ever heavier toll.

In the two raids – on Barmen and on Elberfeld – more than 5,000 people were killed in Wuppertal, and tens of thousands lost their homes. A city that until the spring had barely known bombing became within a month one of the most devastated in Germany.

Evacuation

After every raid tens of thousands of people were left without a roof over their heads. Some found shelter with relatives or in undamaged districts, but more and more had to leave the cities. The Reich authorities relocated the bombed-out (in German Umquartierung), especially women with small children and the elderly, to less threatened districts in the south and east of the Reich. Older children were sent away under the Kinderlandverschickung – a programme run since 1940 by the Hitler Youth and the Nazi welfare organisation, the NSV – to camps and foster families in the countryside, and even to Hungary, Slovakia and the Protectorate. The men, workers in the armaments industry, stayed where they were.

The frequently encountered statement that the June raids had already triggered a mass evacuation of the civilian population needs qualifying: in June 1943 it was mainly a matter of the bombed-out and of families who chose to leave of their own accord. A truly mass, organised evacuation began a few weeks later. On 15 June the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach ordered whole schools to be moved out of threatened cities, and from July, under the so-called extended Kinderlandverschickung, entire classes were sent away from the Ruhr together with their teachers. Formally, departure was voluntary, but school closures and pressure from officials left parents little choice; people spoke wryly of “voluntary compulsory dispatch”. Even so, many parents refused to be parted from their children – in Bochum alone some 6,000 pupils stayed at home right up to the end of the war. Estimates of the total number of children, mothers and young people sent away in this way by 1945 range from two to six million.

Propaganda and morale

The consequences of the raids were the responsibility of the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, who since January 1943 had chaired an interministerial committee on air-raid damage. In June he toured the Ruhr: he spoke at a memorial ceremony for the victims of the raid on Barmen, and in Dortmund’s Westfalenhalle he promised some 20,000 listeners retaliation for the bombing. Propaganda fed rumours of a new miracle weapon and blamed the raids on the Jews, the supposed “masterminds” of the Allied air war. At the end of June Goebbels recorded in his diary the words of Adolf Hitler that the destruction of the city centres was, “from a higher point of view”, not so bad, since the Ruhr cities were ugly and badly built, and the bombs would make room for new town-planning schemes.

According to German historians, the first months of the battle drew people closer together, but in the summer of 1943 the mood changed: a sense of helplessness in the face of the raids combined with increasingly open criticism of the authorities, although it did not lead to revolt. People exhausted by nights in the shelters were preoccupied above all with survival.

Significance

June 1943 was the hardest month of the Battle of the Ruhr. According to German estimates, some 15,000 people were killed in the raids on the cities of the Rhine and the Ruhr in May and June – Germans and forced labourers from the occupied countries. The British paid a high price: over the whole battle, from March to July, Bomber Command lost, according to the British official history, 872 aircraft and some 6,000 airmen killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The economic effects are assessed in different ways. The historian Horst Boog held that armaments production lost a few weeks at most in all, and that industry began to disperse; Adam Tooze called the Battle of the Ruhr a turning point in the history of the German war economy, because it halted the growth in steel and munitions output on which Albert Speer’s armaments plan depended.

The battle went on for several more weeks, with further raids on Cologne, Gelsenkirchen, Aachen and Essen, until Harris turned to a new target. At the end of July he launched Operation Gomorrah – a series of raids on Hamburg in which a firestorm killed some 35,000 people. After Hamburg, evacuation from threatened cities affected millions, and in August Goebbels called on everyone who did not need to remain in Berlin to leave. The extended Kinderlandverschickung continued until the end of the war and became one of the largest internal migrations in German history.