Raids on Berlin in November 1943

At the end of November 1943 Berlin lived through its heaviest week of bombing since the start of the war. In the space of five days RAF Bomber Command sent several hundred heavy bombers over the Reich capital three times: on the nights of 22/23, 23/24 and 26/27 November. The first of these raids proved to be the most effective RAF attack on Berlin of the entire war. Whole blocks of the western districts burned, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the Deutsches Opernhaus in Charlottenburg and much of the zoo were reduced to ruins, and the dead were counted in thousands. War chronologies record the week in three entries – the destruction of the opera house (23 November), the continuing heavy bombing (24 November) and the heavy civilian losses (27 November) – but all of them concern a single series of attacks.

The campaign against the capital

The November raids were part of a campaign that Air Marshal Arthur Harris had opened on the night of 18/19 November 1943. The British called it the Battle of Berlin. At the beginning of November Harris had argued to Winston Churchill that sustained attacks on the capital – ideally together with the Americans – could wreck the city “from end to end” and cost Germany the war, at a price of 400–500 bombers lost. The American Eighth Air Force, however, bled white over Schweinfurt in October, was unable to join in, and Bomber Command acted alone.

The first raid of the new campaign – 440 Lancasters on the night of 18/19 November – met thick cloud and did relatively little damage. Berlin was in any case a difficult target: sprawling, with broad streets and brick tenement blocks whose cellars offered shelter and hindered the spread of fire. The city was protected by the strongest anti-aircraft defences in the Reich, including three flak towers in the Tiergarten, Friedrichshain and Humboldthain. Since August, after the catastrophe of Hamburg, the city authorities had been preparing for the worst: several hundred thousand women and children had been evacuated, passages had been knocked through between cellars and attics had been cleared of inflammable junk.

The long November nights allowed the bombers to reach the target and return under cover of darkness. The weather was usually atrocious, so the navigators and the Pathfinders (No. 8 Group, which marked the targets) relied on the airborne H2S radar, which showed the outline of the ground beneath the clouds. Dense cloud made accurate aiming difficult, but it also kept some of the German night fighters on the ground.

The night of 22/23 November

On the evening of 22 November 764 bombers took off from England – 469 Lancasters, 234 Halifaxes, 50 Stirlings and 11 Mosquitos. It was the largest force sent against Berlin since the beginning of the war. Thick cloud lay over the city, but the Pathfinders, guided by radar, dropped a concentrated cluster of parachute flares above it, and the crews of the main force bombed into its centre. The Pathfinders marked the target at around 8 p.m. Twenty-six aircraft were lost (25 according to some tallies), about 3.4 per cent of the force – few by Berlin standards, because most of the German night fighters did not take off from their fog-bound airfields.

High-explosive bombs and hundreds of thousands of small incendiaries fell mainly on the residential districts west of the centre: Tiergarten, Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, Wilmersdorf and Spandau. Thanks to the dry weather firestorms broke out in several places – smaller than in Hamburg or in Kassel a month earlier, but destroying entire blocks. The neo-Romanesque Memorial Church on the Kurfürstendamm was gutted; its mutilated tower still stands today as a war memorial. The Deutsches Opernhaus on Bismarckstraße burned down – a house under the propaganda ministry of Joseph Goebbels that rivalled Göring’s State Opera. Its company played in the Admiralspalast until the end of the war. The New Synagogue, which the Wehrmacht had been using as a store for years, was badly damaged, as were Charlottenburg Palace, several churches, the British, French, Italian and Japanese embassy buildings, the barracks at Spandau and the works of Telefunken, Siemens, Osram and Daimler-Benz.

The zoo by the Tiergarten suffered enormous losses. Roughly a third of the animals still left in it were killed, including seven elephants in the wrecked elephant house. In the days that followed fantastic rumours circulated in the city of crocodiles and snakes lurking along the Landwehrkanal and of a tiger said to have taken refuge in the ruins of the Café Josty.

According to German police reports, cited by the Canadian official history and by German researchers, more than 1,750 people were killed, including about 500 in a single large shelter that took a direct hit; nearly 7,000 were injured and some 175,000–180,000 lost their homes. Other studies, which include bodies found later in the rubble, give about 2,000 dead. Several million ration cards also went up in flames.

The second night – 23/24 November

Harris struck again the very next evening, while fires were still raging in Berlin. On 23 November 383 bombers, almost all of them Lancasters, flew to the city. The bombing, once again carried out through cloud on markers dropped by radar, lasted from about 7.58 to 8.15 p.m. This time the German defences were better prepared: the night-fighter controllers used the Zahme Sau tactic, guiding their aircraft into the bomber stream and over the target itself. The RAF lost 20–21 aircraft, more than 5 per cent of the force.

The bombs again fell on the districts already wrecked the previous night and on the centre. Among the targets destroyed were aero-engine works and the Siemens and BMW factories in Charlottenburg, as well as the power station at Spandau. The zoo was hit once more. According to German reports quoted by the Canadian official history, 1,315 people were killed, 6,383 were injured and a further 300,000 or so lost their homes. Some studies give a figure rounded to about a thousand dead.

The entry found under 24 November (“the heavy bombing of Berlin continues”) refers to the effects of this very night: the bombs fell on the evening of 23 November and the fires were fought throughout the following day. The next night, 24/25 November, only six Mosquitos appeared over Berlin, and the large raid planned for 25/26 November was cancelled because of the weather (the main force went to Frankfurt that night).

The third night – 26/27 November

The third great raid of the week was prepared with a new ruse. On the evening of 26 November two forces flew out over the Continent: 443 Lancasters (with 7 Mosquitos) bound for Berlin and 178 bombers for Stuttgart. They flew a common route as far as the area of Frankfurt am Main and only separated there. The German controllers concluded that Frankfurt was again the target – according to the Canadian official history Göring himself, present that night in the command post of the Reich air defence, ordered all the fighters sent there. Over Berlin the sky cleared at times and the bombers met heavy anti-aircraft fire, while some night fighters, which had been fed into the bomber stream earlier over the Netherlands, accompanied them all the way to the target. The Berlin force lost 28 Lancasters (6.3 per cent), and more aircraft crashed on their return in thick fog over the English airfields.

This time most of the bombs fell on the northern suburb of Reinickendorf, a partly industrial district, and on the centre and Siemensstadt with its electrical engineering works. The Alkett works in Borsigwalde – the main producer of StuG III assault guns – were hit hard. Goebbels noted in his diary that the factory was “almost completely destroyed” and that machinery and tools that were practically irreplaceable had been lost to production. According to production figures Alkett turned out 255 StuG IIIs in October 1943 and a mere 24 in December; production was partly moved to new halls, and on 6–7 December the matter was discussed at a conference with Hitler. After this night the city authorities recorded 981 houses destroyed, some 25,000 newly homeless and about fifty works badly damaged or destroyed. Judging by the figures for the week as a whole, the number killed that night was clearly lower than on the two previous nights – so the familiar phrase about “enormous civilian losses” under 27 November should be understood as the toll of the whole week rather than of the third night alone.

The city after the raids

As Gauleiter of Berlin and also chairman of the committee for bomb damage in the cities of the Reich, Joseph Goebbels personally directed the relief operation. On the morning of 23 November he wrote in his diary: “Fires burning everywhere… Transport in a hopeless state… The destruction in the government quarter and in the western and northern suburbs is appalling… It seems as though hell itself has been let loose upon us.” Soldiers, sappers, prisoners of war and forced labourers were brought into the city to clear the rubble; field kitchens were set up, extra food rations were handed out and thousands of the bombed-out were taken to the provinces by special trains. On 26 November Goebbels noted with relief that the fires around the Wilhelmplatz had gone out and that a return to “some sort of order” had taken two days instead of the weeks he had expected. Propaganda stressed the composure of the Berliners and promised retaliation; the foreign press, kept away from the bombed cities for months, was invited on 23 November by the press office of the Auswärtiges Amt (the Foreign Office) to a conference in the ruined capital.

The rebuilding of the zoo was given political priority – the armaments minister Albert Speer, whose ministry had also suffered in the raids, assigned 750 prisoners of war to the clearing work.

The week’s toll

The three November nights were Berlin’s heaviest ordeal since the start of the war. According to figures cited in the English-language literature, nearly 4,000 inhabitants were killed in the week of 22–27 November alone, some 10,000 were injured and between 400,000 and 450,000 lost their homes. The exact figures vary from source to source and depending on whether they include those who later died of their wounds and the bodies recovered from the rubble in the following weeks. Among the victims were also forced labourers and prisoners of war, who – like the Jews still remaining in the city – were often denied access to the shelters. Bomber Command lost more than 70 bombers and several hundred airmen in the three raids on Berlin, not counting the aircraft that crashed on their return.

For Harris the week was an encouragement: aerial photographs showed wide expanses of burnt-out districts, and intelligence reports spoke of chaos in the capital. He pressed on with the attacks, convinced that Berlin could be broken as Hamburg had been.

Significance

The November raids were the most destructive phase of the campaign the British called the Battle of Berlin. Bomber Command attacked the Reich capital more than a dozen times more, up to the night of 24/25 March 1944, while also striking other cities in the meantime to disperse the German defences. Yet the campaign did not deliver what Harris had promised. Berlin – sprawling, built of brick and stone, well defended and usually covered by cloud – did not burn like Hamburg, and the German night-fighter defence grew steadily stronger. Bomber Command’s losses over the whole campaign (from November 1943 to March 1944) exceeded a thousand aircraft, more than 500 of them in the raids on Berlin alone; the night of 30/31 March 1944 over Nuremberg, which cost 95 bombers, became the symbol of the crisis of the British night offensive. Most historians judge the Battle of Berlin to have been a defeat for Harris.

For Berliners, November 1943 marked the beginning of life amid the ruins. The German historian Olaf Groehler, working from the documents, estimated the death toll of all the wartime raids on Berlin at about 30,000 (other estimates range from about 20,000 to nearly 50,000) – fewer than in Hamburg alone in the summer of 1943. The heaviest attacks on the capital were still to come in 1945, at the hands of the American day bombers. The burnt-out tower of the Memorial Church, preserved beside the new church built in 1959–1963, is today a reminder of the night of 22/23 November 1943.