The raid on Kassel

On the evening of 22 October 1943, 569 heavy bombers of RAF Bomber Command appeared over Kassel in northern Hesse. In a raid lasting less than half an hour they dropped several thousand high-explosive bombs and hundreds of thousands of small incendiaries on the city. The old town, densely packed with timber-framed houses, caught fire, and the fires merged into a firestorm – the second in Germany after Hamburg. Between about 6,000 and 10,000 people were killed, according to various sources, and roughly 150,000 inhabitants were left homeless.

Some chronologies describe the raid as a “seven-day firestorm”. That is a simplification: the firestorm proper – a hurricane of fire drawing in air from the whole surrounding area – broke out within an hour of the start of the raid and raged for several hours that night. The burnt-out ruins, rubble, coal stores and cellars, however, went on smouldering for many days; according to German studies, aerial photographs showed the city still burning a week later.

An armaments city

Kassel, a city of more than two hundred thousand inhabitants in 1939, was one of the more important centres of the German armaments industry in the heart of the Reich. The Henschel works built locomotives – including the Class 52 wartime engines – lorries and, from 1942, Tiger heavy tanks. A Henschel branch outside the city produced aero engines, as did a plant belonging to the Junkers concern in the Bettenhausen district. In three plants on the edge of the city worked the Fieseler aircraft company, known for its Storch liaison aircraft, which in 1943 was building Fw 190 fighters under licence and preparing production of the Fi 103 flying bomb, later known as the V-1. The city was also the headquarters of the Wehrmacht’s Military District IX, and important railway lines linking northern and southern Germany ran through Kassel.

For British planners, however, what counted above all was that the old town on the Fulda, with its tightly packed medieval and early modern houses, was – in the language of Bomber Command directives – particularly susceptible to fire. Since February 1942, under the Area Bombing Directive, the RAF had been raiding whole cities with the aim of destroying industry, but also workers’ homes and the “morale” of the civilian population. The commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, believed that the systematic destruction of cities would hasten the end of the war more than any land operation.

Kassel had been bombed before. In May 1943 the flood wave from the Eder dam, breached by British airmen, reached the city in weakened form. At the end of July American B-17s attacked the Fieseler works, and on the night of 3–4 October more than five hundred RAF bombers struck Kassel in strength for the first time. Thick cloud and a strong westerly wind, however, carried the markers eastwards: the bombs fell on the northern suburbs, the surrounding villages and the Fieseler works, while the city centre was spared.

The night of 22–23 October

On the afternoon of 22 October, 322 Lancasters and 247 Halifaxes took off from airfields in England – figures from the Bomber Command operational record. To mislead the defences, a small force of Lancasters and Mosquitos dropped markers and bombs over Frankfurt am Main, and flares also appeared over Cologne. That night the British also used Operation Corona on a large scale for the first time: from radio stations in England, fluent German speakers impersonated German controllers and gave false instructions to the night fighters. The Germans quickly saw through the ruse, and – according to British accounts – the airwaves filled with two “controllers” arguing over which of them was genuine. Some fighters nonetheless managed to reach the bomber stream.

The alarm in Kassel was sounded late. At around 8.45 p.m. German time the target-marking aircraft appeared over the city. The first markers, dropped blind with the help of airborne radar, fell too far away, but crews marking the target visually corrected them and lit up the city centre. The inhabitants called the target indicators drifting down on parachutes “Christmas trees”. In accordance with the method Bomber Command was already using, successive waves of bombers released their loads in a fan around an aiming point near the Martinsplatz, so as to bring the whole old town under fire. According to the operational record, 486 crews bombed.

High-explosive bombs and heavy blast bombs fell first, tearing off roofs and blowing out windows and doors. Then – according to German records – more than 400,000 four-pound stick incendiary bombs fell into the exposed attics of the timber-framed houses. After twenty-odd minutes the raid was over, and the whole old town was ablaze.

The firestorm

The fires quickly merged into one. Heated air rose above the city centre in a column, while from below a hurricane-force wind rushed in from all sides, fanning the flames. According to German accounts, the firestorm reached its peak about three-quarters of an hour after the raid. Kassel’s fire brigade stood no chance: the city lay far from other large centres from which help could arrive quickly, and the bombs had damaged the water mains. The destruction of the air-raid command post cut communications between districts after only half an hour; no all-clear was sounded, and many inhabitants stayed in their cellars.

It was in the shelters and cellars that most of the victims died. Openings knocked through the walls between the cellars of neighbouring houses, prepared in case people were buried, allowed them to pass from building to building, but when a whole district was burning there was nowhere to escape to. People died of carbon monoxide poisoning or suffocated for lack of oxygen, and those who tried to get out into the streets perished in the flames and the superheated air. Many bodies were dug out of the rubble only after many days.

Casualties and destruction

The number of victims is not known precisely. German local studies give between about 6,000 and 10,000 dead; the figure most often cited is about 10,000. The dead included the city’s inhabitants, refugees from cities bombed earlier, wounded soldiers in hospitals, and forced labourers and prisoners of war, for whom there was often no room in the shelters. Around 150,000 people – roughly half the population – were left homeless; the authorities evacuated tens of thousands of them to nearby towns and villages.

The old town was almost completely destroyed – about 97 per cent, according to German records – and in the outer districts most of the residential buildings were destroyed. Only fragments of the historic buildings survived: of the burnt-out St Martin’s Church, only the walls and the roofless towers remained. Administrative buildings, museums and library collections went up in flames – part of the heritage of a city where the Brothers Grimm had worked in the 19th century. By post-war calculations there were several dozen cubic metres of rubble for every inhabitant.

The British lost 43 bombers – 7.6 per cent of the force dispatched; according to the Bomber Command operational record, 25 Halifaxes and 18 Lancasters. They carried about three hundred airmen, who were killed or taken prisoner.

The armaments plants also suffered. The Henschel factories, including those making locomotives and tanks, were damaged, as were the Fieseler works. According to some studies, the destruction in Kassel delayed preparations for series production of the Fi 103 flying bomb, which – together with the raid on Peenemünde and the attacks on the launch sites in France – pushed the start of the bombardment of London back to June 1944. Kassel’s armaments industry, however, as in other bombed cities, resumed production within a few weeks, and some of the works were moved to smaller plants and underground shelters in the area.

In the Reich and in Britain

The raid on Kassel came a week after Black Thursday, when the Americans lost 60 bombers over Schweinfurt – as many as in the August raid on Schweinfurt and Regensburg – and three months after Operation Gomorrah, which had reduced much of Hamburg to ashes. For the German population it was further proof that Hermann Göring’s propaganda assurances of the Reich’s invulnerability were hollow. The authorities tried to limit the spread of news about the scale of the destruction, while Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda called the raids “air terror” and promised retaliation with a new weapon. Reports on popular morale recorded growing war-weariness, but not the revolt that some British planners had hoped for.

In Britain, Bomber Command judged the raid the most destructive since Hamburg. Harris presented such results as proof that the campaign against cities was working, and was soon preparing a series of massed raids on Berlin, due to begin in November. Criticism of area bombing was voiced in Britain, among others by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, but in 1943 it was a minority view.

Significance

Kassel was the second German city, after Hamburg, in which a bombing raid caused a firestorm, and one of the German cities with the highest death tolls from bombing in the whole war. The raid showed that Bomber Command – thanks to navigational aids, radar, specialised target-marking crews and new methods of jamming the defences – could, in favourable conditions, destroy a chosen city in a single night. In the years that followed, similar firestorms were caused by the raids on Darmstadt in September 1944 and Dresden in February 1945.

The debate over the moral and military assessment of such raids continues to this day. On the one hand, the bombing forced Germany to divert enormous resources – fighters, anti-aircraft artillery, men and materials – to the defence of the Reich at the expense of the fronts, and hampered production. On the other, its main victims were civilians, and the armaments industry recovered quickly. After the war Kassel’s old town was rebuilt in modern form, and the anniversary of 22 October is observed in the city every year as a day of remembrance for the victims.