The raids on Frankfurt

On the night of 22/23 March 1944 more than 800 heavy bombers of the British RAF Bomber Command attacked Frankfurt am Main. It was the second of two great night raids on the city within five days. Together with the raid of 18/19 March and the American daylight attack of 24 March, it destroyed the medieval old town – one of the most precious historic ensembles in Germany. Chronologies record under 22 March the bombing of Frankfurt “with heavy losses among the civilian population”. That is true, though it needs figures: according to the city’s records about a thousand people died on that one night, and more than 1,400 in the two March night raids together. There were fewer victims than in Hamburg in the summer of 1943, but the destruction of the city was comparable.

Frankfurt before March 1944

Frankfurt, which had some 550,000 inhabitants before the war, was an important rail and road junction, home to chemical, electrical and metalworking plants, and a centre of trade. Until the autumn of 1943 it had suffered relatively little from air raids. The first great night attack came on 4 October 1943: some 400 RAF bombers burned a large part of the eastern districts, and 529 people were killed, among them 90 children and 16 staff of the children’s hospital in the Ostend, whose shelter took a direct hit. From that autumn the Americans bombed the city too. The Eighth Air Force’s daylight raid of 29 January 1944, in which more than 800 Flying Fortresses and Liberators reached the city, killed over 900 people; on 8 February bombs meant for one factory fell on another and killed 165 workers in its shelters.

Residents then began to leave the city in large numbers, and schools were sent to the countryside under the Kinderlandverschickung evacuation scheme. Yet several tens of thousands of people still lived in the narrow lanes of the old town, among more than a thousand half-timbered houses. The medieval cellars of these houses, linked by passages into an underground network since 1940, were meant to serve them as shelters.

For Arthur Harris Frankfurt was one of the cities to be attacked in the intervals between the raids on Berlin. The winter air Battle of Berlin was costing Bomber Command more and more, and the German night defences were learning to anticipate its targets. Strikes on distant cities of the Reich, flown by roundabout routes, were meant to disperse the German fighters and sustain the impression that no large city was safe. In February the American and RAF daylight offensive against the aircraft industry, known as Big Week, showed at the same time that the Luftwaffe was beginning to lose the struggle for air superiority over Germany.

The night of 18/19 March

The first of the March blows fell on Saturday 18 March. Bomber Command sent 846 aircraft to Frankfurt: 620 Lancasters, 209 Halifaxes and 17 Mosquitos. At the same time nearly a hundred aircraft were laying mines off Heligoland, and a dozen or so Mosquitos staged a feint raid on Kassel. The German defences split their night fighters, and only some of them caught the bomber stream just short of the target, and in cloud at that. The British lost 22 aircraft, or 2.6 per cent of those dispatched – a low figure for that winter.

According to the Bomber Command operational record, the marker aircraft marked the target accurately. The sirens sounded in the city at 9.13 p.m., the first bombs fell a quarter of an hour or so later, and the attack lasted about an hour. The eastern part of the old town suffered most: a belt of destruction stretched from the Old Bridge over the Main to the Konstablerwache square. The Carmelite monastery burned, as did St Paul’s Church, where the first all-German parliament had sat in 1848–1849. The firefighters could not save it: the pressure in the hydrants dropped, hoses and pumps were lacking, and the professional fire brigade had orders to protect industrial plants first. Later waves of bombers, usually flown by the least experienced crews, scattered and also hit the western districts and the chemical works at Höchst. According to city figures 421 people were killed that night, and about 55,000 lost their homes.

The night of 22/23 March

Four days later 816 aircraft came over the city – 620 Lancasters, 184 Halifaxes and 12 Mosquitos. This time the bomber stream crossed the Dutch coast north of the Zuiderzee and only then turned almost due south. This manoeuvre and a diversionary minelaying operation in the Bay of Kiel deceived the Germans: the defence controllers took Hanover to be the target, and Frankfurt itself received no timely air-raid warning. The radio reportedly spoke only of a single nuisance aircraft over the city. When the sirens sounded at around 9.45 p.m., bombs were already falling. The night fighters found the stream only late; the RAF lost 33 aircraft, 4 per cent of the force.

According to German records, some 500 aerial mines, 3,000 heavy high-explosive bombs and 1.2 million incendiaries fell on the city centre in three waves. The western part of the old town was ablaze within a quarter of an hour or so. A firestorm raged around the Großer Kornmarkt and the Großer Hirschgraben. The family home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, where the poet was born in 1749, burned down; its furnishings had been moved to safety beforehand. In the overcrowded cellar of a house on the Großer Kornmarkt more than 150 bodies were later found – the people had suffocated because the explosions had buried the exits before the fire arrived.

Elsewhere in the old town the underground network of linked cellars saved many lives. About 800 people had taken shelter beneath the Römer town hall and the neighbouring houses. A fire officer ordered them evacuated while the raid was still going on, against the wishes of the local air-raid wardens, and firefighters used water curtains to keep open a passage from the burning old town to the Main. Of the more than a thousand half-timbered houses of the old town, only one survived – the Haus Wertheim, which stood right by that passage. Almost all the churches of the city centre burned, and the cathedral, where the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire had been elected and crowned, was gutted, although its tower survived. The clock on the tower of St Catherine’s Church stopped at 9.43 p.m. and went on showing that time for another ten years.

The toll

According to city records 1,001 people were killed on the night of 22/23 March, and some 120,000 were left homeless. About 9,000 fires were counted in the city, and they were still being fought several days later with the help of fire brigades from across the region. Many of the dead suffocated in buried cellars or were killed by blast. The transit camp for captured Allied airmen, Dulag Luft, in the Westend district, was also destroyed. Two people died there, and the next day the surviving prisoners were marched through the city under a guard that had to protect them from embittered residents. The camp was moved to Wetzlar.

On the morning of 24 March bombers of the American Eighth Air Force appeared over Frankfurt. Their target had been the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt, but cloud covered it and a large part of the force bombed Frankfurt as a secondary target – 162 B-17s according to the Bomber Command war diary, about 175 of the 262 aircraft dispatched according to German studies. Once again bombs fell on the ruined city centre, where the coffins of the victims of 22 March were still waiting to be taken away, and around the station, where people who had lost their homes were waiting to be evacuated. The city chronicle later judged that the three raids of 18, 22 and 24 March, planned jointly by the British and American air forces, were “the worst and most fateful blow” in Frankfurt’s history, one that quite simply ended the existence of the city built up since the Middle Ages.

Over the whole of March some 11,000 residential buildings and 136 public buildings – schools, hospitals, museums, university buildings and the opera – were badly damaged or destroyed. More than 180,000 people lost their homes, of whom around 150,000 left the city. On 26 March Gauleiter Jakob Sprenger declared Frankfurt a “front-line city”, and the Party press called for hatred of the “bestial enemy”. Electricity was restored as early as 1 April, and in April and May a few cinemas and cafés reopened, but the residents’ mood never recovered, especially as the situation on the fronts deteriorated sharply in the summer of 1944.

Place in the war

The March raids on Frankfurt were among the last great attacks of Harris’s winter offensive, waged in parallel with the Battle of Berlin. They showed what Bomber Command could achieve when it deceived the defences and marked the target accurately: two raids, which cost it 55 aircraft in all, destroyed the heart of a large city. At the same time they were among the last occasions on which Harris could freely choose German cities as targets. From April 1944 the RAF’s heavy bombers were subordinated to the preparations for the invasion of France and directed mainly against French and Belgian railway junctions.

Frankfurt was nevertheless bombed until the end of the war. The last great RAF raid, on 12 September 1944, devastated the Bockenheim district; 172 people died in a single shelter pierced by a heavy aerial mine. According to official statistics 5,559 people were killed in some 75 raids on the city, among them prisoners of war and forced labourers. Of the city’s 550,000 inhabitants, about 230,000 remained in March 1945, half of them without a home. The old town within the former fortifications was 90 per cent destroyed.

After the war Frankfurt was rebuilt largely in modern form. St Paul’s Church was the first building to be rebuilt, for the centenary of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1948; Goethe’s house was reconstructed by 1951. Some of the houses on the Römerberg square were recreated in the 1980s, and a section of the old town between the cathedral and the town hall only in the 21st century. In 1955 Lord Mayor Walter Kolb decreed that every year from 20 to 23 March flags of mourning should be flown in the city in memory of the destruction of old Frankfurt.