Air raid on Darmstadt
During the air raid on Darmstadt , the capital of the People's State of Hesse on the night of 11/12. September 1944 - the so-called "fire night" - largely destroyed by units of the RAF Bomber Command .
The attackers
The attack, followed by a firestorm , was ordered by Air Marshal Arthur Harris of No. 5 Bomber Group of the Royal Air Force , which was a unit specialized in the systematic destruction of civilian land targets. The No. 5 Bomber Group was responsible for the area bombing of Dresden , Kassel , Braunschweig , Pforzheim , Hamburg , Stuttgart and Würzburg . The unit used a combination of high explosive and incendiary bombs . In the best military case, this combination led to a firestorm. The fire multiplied the damage caused by the explosive and incendiary bombs used. The command background of the bombing was the British Area Bombing Directive (instruction for area bombing).
The preparation
There were no serious reasons for Darmstadt as a target. The military writer Max Hastings explained the Bomber Command's choice of targets using Darmstadt as an example: "On a given night, a compound of weather, forces available and the state of the German defenses determined which was chosen for attack." ( "On that night, a mixture of weather conditions, available units and the state of the German defense determined the choice of the target." ) At the time of the attack, 5 Group was experimenting with new marking and bombing methods. Their effectiveness was best tested on an undestroyed city. In addition, your own losses should be minimized in this test by keeping the flight route over enemy territory as short as possible. All of these criteria applied to Darmstadt.
The exact selection of the districts to be bombed was made on the basis of aerial photographs , population density maps and fire insurance cadastre maps. The cadastral maps had been deposited by German fire insurance companies with British reinsurance companies before the war. The Darmstadt Old Town was selected as a core area of the attack, as there was the wood proportion of the total building volume at its highest. This made it the ideal core target area for igniting a firestorm in Darmstadt.
Before the bombing, the fan-shaped target area was Mosquito - Quick bombers by red and green marker body (so-called Christmas trees) delimited. This was monitored by a master bomber flying at high altitude, which was connected to the marker pilots via radio. The attack began at 10:35 pm with the setting of a white marker on the "parade ground" (a prominent undeveloped area in the west of the city between Rheinstrasse and Holzhofallee southeast of the main station, where the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences is today). From him a green marking chain was thrown to the old Darmstadt slaughterhouse and a red marking chain - at a 45-degree angle from the target point to the first - to the Böllenfalltorstadion. First, some green markings were driven off by the wind in the direction of Darmstadt main station, which was not in the planned target area. The master bomber had them canceled with yellow markings and re-thrown part of the green chain of markings. Then the master bomber checked the Darmstadt target area again on a deeper flight path, determined the exact approach heights and released the attack.
The bombing
The target area of the attack on Darmstadt was essentially the densely populated city center - especially the medieval old town. The bombardment began at 23:55. It took less than half an hour. The Royal Air Force used 234 bombers.
In Darmstadt, the British RAF tested the tactics of fan attacks for the first time. First, thousands of high-explosive bombs in the shape of a quarter circle and several hundred air mines were dropped. The roofs were torn open by the pressure waves of the explosions. Afterwards, more than 250,000 electron thermite sticks were thrown over the city area, which fell into the torn roof trusses of the houses and set them on fire within a very short time.
The parade ground (now Berliner Allee) served as the approach destination. First, three squadrons threw their bombs along the green marking (target point slaughterhouse), then three more squadrons along the red markings (target point Böllenfalltor). After this was completed, a wave - consisting of four squadrons - dropped bombs on the area within the two marker legs. Within an hour, thousands of smaller building fires spread into a firestorm.
Fire fighting
First of all, the Darmstadt fire brigade extinguished its own fire station located in Kirchstrasse (city center) so that the equipment for fighting the fires could still be available. In the entire Rhine-Main area , major alarms were given for all fire brigades and all available fire fighters were brought together in Darmstadt. By six in the morning, over 3,000 firefighters had already arrived with 220 motorized syringes. However, these could not bring the firestorm under control and also not get to the thousands of people buried in the basements of the old town. The enormous heat development of well over 1,000 ° C and the heavily damaged roads hindered the fire-fighting and rescue work decisively. The firestorm could only be contained at its edges.
Victim
The majority of those who sought refuge in cellars - unless they were killed by debris during the attack - suffocated or burned in the cellars. It was seldom possible to escape from the cellars via the streets, as the heat was too great and the tar of the road surface had also partially caught fire. 11,500 people were killed in the attack on the densely populated city center. Around 66,000 of the 110,000 inhabitants at that time became homeless. Around 20 percent of the victims were children under the age of 16. For every 100 men dead, there were 181 women dead. Among the dead were 368 prisoners of war and 492 forced laborers . Allied air raids (a few smaller ones followed) up to the end of the war in 1945, according to different estimates, killed a total of between 12,500 and 13,500 people in Darmstadt. The White Tower houses the calligraphic memorial Darmstadt Brandnames , which lists around 4,000 victim names. Most of the victims were buried in a mass grave in the Darmstadt forest cemetery. Every year on the anniversary of the attack, a memorial event, organized by the city of Darmstadt, takes place at the memorial in the city center.
Damage
99 percent of the old and inner city, the actual city center, were destroyed, a total of 78 percent of Darmstadt's buildings. The property damage from the attack was then estimated at 1.5 billion Reichsmarks . Potential targets of military or armaments industry importance - such as the industrial area in the west of the city, railway facilities and military facilities, for example on the Kavallerieand or in the south of Bessungen - were hardly damaged in the attack because they were not in the actual target area.
On September 13, a day and a half after the RAF, the Eighth Air Force bombed the depot . Not only did it cause damage there, it also destroyed a residential area in the north of the city that had survived the night attack unscathed.
See also
literature
- Max Hastings: Bomber Command . Michael Jones, London 1979, ISBN 0-7181-1603-8 , pp. 303-326
- Klaus Schmidt: The fire night. Documents from the destruction of Darmstadt on September 11, 1944. Schlapp, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-87704-053-5 .
- James Stern: The Invisible Debris. A journey in occupied Germany in 1945. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-8218-0749-0 .
- Jörg Friedrich: The fire. Germany in the bombing war 1940–1945 . 11th edition. Ullstein Verlag, Munich 2002.
Web links
- Memorial and mass grave in the forest cemetery at sites-of-memory.de
- Pictures of the Royal Air Force (Prestrike) ( Memento from September 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) c4660.jpg ( Memento from September 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) c4659.jpg ( Memento from September 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Max Hastings: Bomber Command . Michael Jones, London 1979, ISBN 0-7181-1603-8 , p. 307
- ↑ Darmstadt commemorates the fire night of 1944 on September 9, 2004
- ↑ Max Hastings: Bomber Command . Michael Jones, London 1979, ISBN 0-7181-1603-8 , p. 326
- ^ Fonts memorial in the White Tower; Echo, December 17, 2014 ( Memento of the original from December 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Max Hastings: Bomber Command . Michael Jones, London 1979, ISBN 0-7181-1603-8 , p. 322
