Air raids on Mannheim

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During the Second World War there were heavy air raids on Mannheim . The attacks began in December 1940 and lasted until mid-March 1945. Mannheim experienced over 150 air raids and was the most heavily attacked city in what is now the state of Baden-Württemberg .

Background and process

As part of Operation Abigail Rachel , the first targeted area bombing of civilian targets took place in Germany. On December 16, 1940, around 100 tons of high explosive bombs and 14,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on Mannheim. The British had been waiting for an opportunity to carry out such an attack to test the combined use of high-explosive and incendiary bombs . This should achieve a maximum extensive degree of destruction. Mannheim, or its inner city, was considered ideal for an experimental attack. Mannheim's city center, designed as a city ​​of squares , offered almost ideal conditions for studying the effects of the bombing with the help of aerial photographs . Internally, the attack was declared in retaliation for German attacks on Coventry and Southampton . The new bombing strategy was officially ordered by Churchill on December 1, 1940 . He declared the new strategy on December 12, 1940 in the British War Cabinet. On December 13, 1940, this officially approved Operation Abigail Rachel as an experimental attack, but on the condition that this decision could not be published. The "bomber crews rightly regarded this attack as a terrorist attack". On December 16, 1940, eight bombers dropped incendiary bombs to mark the target. However, they missed the core target area of ​​the city center. Therefore 100 of the 134 bombers that followed missed the target area of ​​the city center. The German losses in this attack amounted to 34 dead and 81 injured. The lesson from the great dispersion of the bombers over Mannheim was the development of the attack tactics of the stream of bombers, with the aim of dropping a maximum number of bombs in the shortest possible time over a defined area. Despite the little success of this attack, other Operation Abigail Rachel-style operations were planned and performed.

This attack marked the beginning of a change in British aerial warfare strategy away from precision attacks on military targets and towards area bombardment of civilian targets, especially densely populated city centers. This development culminated in the British Area bombing directive in early 1942 .

Mannheim experienced the largest air raid on the night of September 5th to 6th, 1943. A large part of the city was destroyed. In 1944, another attack almost completely destroyed Mannheim Palace . Only one of the 500 rooms remained undamaged. During the war, a total of 25,181 tons of bombs fell on Mannheim. Around 1,700 people were killed in the attacks in Mannheim. This corresponded to a loss rate of 0.6% of the population. The low number of victims relative to the frequency and severity of the attacks was due in particular to the massive expansion of air defense. By autumn 1943 around 150 air raid shelters with a nominal capacity of 120,000 places had been built. With the usual overcrowding of the bunkers, they offered the 284,000 inhabitants almost full protection. In the city center in particular, very large underground bunkers were built.

As part of the Manhattan Project , the United States War Department selected the industrial centers of Ludwigshafen and Mannheim as possible targets for an atomic bomb to be dropped on Germany . This did not happen because Mannheim was occupied by US troops at the end of March 1945, two and a half months before the Trinity test succeeded in detonating an atomic bomb for the first time .

See also

• List of Allied air raids on the German Reich (1939–1945)

literature

• Boog , Stumpf and Rahn (editors): Germany and the Second World War , vol. VI: The Global War Oxford University press, 2001, ISBN 0-19-822888-0
• Volker Keller: Mannheim in the bombing war 1940-1945 . Wartberg Verlag, Gudensberg-Gleichen 2003, ISBN 3-8313-1372-5 .
• Dieter Wolf: Air war events in Mannheim 1939-1945 , Mannheim City Archives, Mannheim 2003 ( online ; PDF, 1.4 MB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Jörg Friedrich: The fire. Germany in the bombing war 1940–1945 . P. 279.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Jörg Friedrich: The fire. Germany in the bombing war 1940–1945 . P. 78.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Horst Boog: Germany and the Second World War: The global war , pp. 507-509.
4. ↑ Bomber Command Campaign Diary 1940 ( Memento November 1, 2006 in the Internet Archive )