The raid on Pforzheim

On the evening of 23 February 1945, ten days after the destruction of Dresden, British bombers fell upon Pforzheim – a medium-sized town in Baden, on the edge of the Black Forest. The raid lasted a mere 22 minutes, but the firestorm it unleashed consumed almost the entire town centre. According to official German figures, some 17,600 people were killed. In the number of victims the raid was surpassed only by the bombings of Hamburg in 1943 and of Dresden, and in proportion to the population it was the deadliest air attack on any city of the Third Reich.

The town of goldsmiths

Pforzheim, at the confluence of the Enz and the Nagold, had about 79,000 inhabitants according to the 1939 census. Since the 18th century it had been Germany’s capital of jewellery and watchmaking, known as the “Goldstadt” – the golden city. During the war hundreds of small jewellery and watchmaking workshops were switched to precision work for the military, above all fuzes for shells and bombs and parts for instruments. The workshops were scattered throughout the town, often on the ground floors and in the back buildings of tenements in the old centre.

Until 1944 the air war largely passed Pforzheim by. The first American raid, on 1 April 1944, killed 95 people; further attacks by the US air forces, including on Christmas Eve 1944 and on 21 January 1945, did limited damage. Small groups of British Mosquitoes also appeared over the town on nuisance raids that drove the inhabitants into the shelters. Although Pforzheim was also a railway junction on the line from Karlsruhe to Stuttgart, along which troops were moved to the Rhine, in November 1944 it was placed on the Allied target lists only in the lowest, fifth category of priority.

Why Pforzheim

The reasons for choosing the target survive in British documents. A report prepared for RAF Bomber Command in June 1944 described Pforzheim as one of the centres of the German jewellery and watchmaking trade, which had “probably become of considerable importance for the production of precision instruments”. The guide to targets in German towns known as the Bomber’s Baedeker stated in its August 1944 edition that “almost every house in this town is a small workshop”. The operation order for 23 February spoke of the intention to destroy “the built-up area and the associated industries and railway facilities”.

The wording was typical of the area bombing that Bomber Command had conducted since 1942 under Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris. The target was not a single factory but the whole town centre – with its inhabitants, workshops, offices and transport. Some historians, especially German ones, point out that the more important armaments plants had already been moved out of Pforzheim, and that the choice of target may have been decided above all by the flammability of the cramped old town with its many timber-framed houses – in other words, by the intention of breaking the population’s morale. British defenders of the raid stressed, for their part, that the dispersed production of fuzes was a genuine military target that could not have been destroyed any other way. As with Dresden, the dispute continues to this day.

The raid

The alarm was sounded in the town at 7.45 p.m. Five minutes later the first aircraft arrived over Pforzheim from the west. According to British figures, 380 aircraft took part in the attack, code-named “Yellowfin” in RAF documents: 367 Avro Lancaster bombers of Nos. 1, 6 and 8 Groups of Bomber Command and 13 Mosquitoes of the target-marking units (Pathfinders). The bombers came in at a relatively low altitude of about 2,400 m and in 22 minutes, by 8.12 p.m., dropped – according to German studies – some 1,575 tons of bombs: a mixture of high-explosive bombs, aerial mines and incendiaries. A strong wind carried some of the target-marking flares onto open ground to the south-east, but the town centre was hit with great accuracy.

The raid was directed from the air by the master bomber, Captain Edwin Swales of the South African Air Force, a native of Durban attached to one of the RAF’s Pathfinder squadrons. Although his Lancaster was hit twice by a German night fighter, Swales stayed over the target until the end of the attack, correcting the bombing. On the way back he kept the damaged aircraft in the air so that his crew could bail out over Allied-held territory, and was killed when it crashed in France. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross – the last to be won by a Bomber Command airman during the war. Twelve aircraft failed to return from the raid.

The firestorm

In the narrow streets of the old town the fires quickly merged into a firestorm, which reached its greatest intensity only about 10 minutes after the attack began. The water mains failed. Every building burned in an area about 3 km long and 1.5 km wide. People died in the explosions, in collapsed and smoke-filled cellars, from carbon monoxide poisoning and lack of oxygen; burning incendiary compound poured through the cellar windows into the shelters. Many tried to save themselves by jumping into the Enz and the Nagold and drowned in the icy water. The glow could be seen more than 150 km away, and the smoke rose to some 3 km.

The Wehrmacht communiqué of 24 February devoted two sentences to the raid: early on the evening of 23 February a “heavy British attack” had been made on Pforzheim. The real toll was catastrophic. Officially some 17,600 dead were counted, among them – according to one study – about 500 forced labourers and prisoners of war from other countries. Many victims could not be identified; they were buried in mass graves in the main cemetery, often whole families together. What share of the population this represented depends on the population figure used: against the 1939 census, more than a fifth died; against the roughly 65,000 people in the town at the turn of 1944 and 1945, about a quarter; and some estimates put it as high as 31 per cent. The British bombing survey set up after the war found that about 83 per cent of Pforzheim’s built-up area had been destroyed – “probably the greatest proportion in one raid during the war”. In the town centre destruction reached 80–100 per cent; in the quarter around the market square, home to more than 4,000 people in 1939, nobody lived for years after the raid. Some 30,000 inhabitants left without a roof over their heads were fed by field kitchens.

After Dresden

The raid on Pforzheim came at a moment when British bombing of cities was beginning to raise more and more doubts on the Allied side, too. After the destruction of Dresden, German propaganda portrayed the Allied raids as “terror”, and on 17–18 February an Associated Press dispatch appeared in the Allied press reporting that the air commanders had decided on deliberate terror bombing of Germany’s great cities. Meanwhile the campaign continued unchanged. On 22 and 23 February, at the same time as the raid on Pforzheim, the American and British air forces were carrying out Operation Clarion – massed strikes on transport targets all over Germany, including small towns that had so far been spared. Pforzheim, however, was not part of that operation but a separate night area raid by Bomber Command.

For Harris the raid was one more application of the strategy he had defended for three years: the systematic destruction of German cities, beginning with Operation Gomorrah over Hamburg. Critics pointed out that in the spring of 1945, with the Allied armies on the Rhine and the Red Army on the Oder, the military purpose of such strikes was ever smaller and the civilian casualties ever greater.

Place in the war

Pforzheim was one of the last great area raids of the war in Europe. In March 1945 Bomber Command dropped more bombs on Germany than in any other month of the war, and raids on cities went on until April. On 28 March Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in a memorandum to the Chiefs of Staff, questioned the continued bombing of German cities “simply for the sake of increasing the terror”, citing Dresden; under pressure from the military he eventually toned down its wording. In mid-April Harris was ordered to end area bombing. Fighting around Pforzheim went on for several more weeks; in April 1945 the town was taken by French troops. Earlier, in March, inhabitants of nearby Huchenfeld, among them members of the Hitler Youth, murdered several British airmen who had been shot down – a crime that years later became the starting point for gestures of reconciliation.

After the war Pforzheim’s town centre was not reconstructed but built anew, with wider streets, in the style of the 1950s. The rubble was carted to the Wallberg hill on the outskirts of the town, which rose by about 40 m and became a monument to the destruction. Pforzheim, together with Dresden and Hamburg, remains one of Germany’s chief symbols of the air war, and at the same time the subject of historians’ debate about where the line runs between striking at the armaments industry and killing the civilian population.