Air raid on Hanau on March 19, 1945

The air raid on Hanau in the early morning of March 19, 1945 was the last, but also the heaviest air raid on Hanau in World War II . The city was largely destroyed by units of the RAF Bomber Command . The attacks on the city followed the British strategy of moral bombing .

The attack

The attackers

British AVRO Lancaster as deployed over Hanau

The attack was under the orders of Air Marshal Arthur Harris of the No. 5th Bomber Group of the Royal Air Force (RAF). The No. 5 Bomber Group was responsible for the area bombing of Dresden , Kassel , Königsberg , Braunschweig , Pforzheim , Hamburg and Darmstadt . 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 initial damage caused by the high explosive bombs. The aim was the systematic destruction of civil land targets. The industry on the outskirts (special metals, vacuum pumps, etc.), however, was not the target of the attack.

preparation

Indirect preparation

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 with British reinsurance companies by German fire insurance companies before the war. The inner city of Hanau was the core area of ​​the attack.

Immediate preparation

The RAF used 227 Lancaster bombers and 8 Mosquito aircraft for the attack , a total of 279 aircraft with more than 1950 crew members. The attack was prepared by a radar interference ( chaff interference ). The RAF aircraft flew into the Reich between Cologne and Bonn, initially pretending to be Kassel as their destination before turning sharply to the southeast. So the planes of the German defense flew to Kassel and arrived there at the time when the attack on Hanau began. The convoy of British bombers was about 110 km long.

Before the bombardment, the target area of ​​Mosquito aircraft was marked by 70 red and green light bombs (so-called "Christmas trees") and the target area was illuminated as bright as day by another 804 light bombs. This was monitored by a master bomber flying at high altitude, which was connected to the marker pilots via radio. After this was finished, the Hanau target area was checked again from the master bomber on a deeper flight path, the approach heights were determined and the attack cleared.

Air alarm

No air raid had been triggered: the German air surveillance had not recognized the danger in time due to the British deceptions. The majority of the population was only alerted by the first bomb explosions and went to the air raid shelter .

The bombing

The target area of ​​the attack on Hanau was essentially the densely populated city center. The target point was in the middle of the city center. The bombardment began at 4:24 a.m. and ended around 4:40 a.m. and lasted only about 17 minutes. Due to the clear weather conditions, the bombs could be dropped in a very targeted and concentrated manner.

First, 117 heavy and medium explosive bombs and 225 air mines were dropped. The roofs were torn open by the pressure waves of the explosions. Then 360,000 stick bombs (643 tons ) were dropped over the city area, which fell into the torn roof trusses of the houses and set them on fire within a very short time. Within a short time, thousands of smaller building fires spread into a firestorm . The departing British bombers could see the fire 100 km away. A total of 1200 tons of bombs were dropped in this attack on Hanau.

consequences

Victims and damage

Former memorial plaque for the war victims in the main cemetery

The majority of the victims were people who had sought refuge in the bomb shelters . Some of them were killed by rubble during the attack, they were suffocated or burned there. Escape from the cellars was seldom possible because the heat was too great and the tar of the road surface had also partially ignited. The attack on the densely populated city killed up to 2,003 people. 382 dead could no longer be identified. 2,240 houses were destroyed. Then 87 percent of the city center was destroyed. That corresponded to 80 percent of the building fabric of Hanau, a degree of destruction as in hardly any other city in today's Hesse . There were only seven houses left in the city center. The city's population fell below 10,000. Hanau lost a large number of its cultural monuments .

The RAF lost a bomber in the attack.

A memorial at the main cemetery in Hanau also commemorates the victims of the air raid on March 19, 1945.

reconstruction

During the reconstruction of the city , the ruins of the city ​​palace , the commandant's office , the armory and the city ​​theater were demolished against great resistance from the citizens and civil society organizations, such as the Hanau History Association , as well as most of the remaining remains of the medieval city fortifications . The surrounding wall of the Walloon half of the Walloon-Dutch double church is a ruin and memorial to this day. The cityscape of Hanau has changed radically from its appearance before 1945 as a result of the air raids and the reconstruction.

See also

• Air War in World War II
• List of Allied air raids on the German Reich (1939–1945)
• List of air raids on Hanau during World War II
• Air raid on Hanau on January 6, 1945

Web links

• Ludwig-Geißler-Schule Hanau: The Hanau project on March 19, 1945 (PDF, 7.76 MB)
• Offenbach-Post: aerial photos remember Hanau's fateful day , article from March 9, 2010

literature

• Helmut Blome: Hanau. Destruction and rebuilding. Documentation by the Hanauer Anzeiger (!) On March 19, 1945 . Hanau 1985.
• City of Hanau (ed.), Karlheinz Hoppe (editor): Hanau. March 19, 1945. 50th anniversary of the destruction on March 19, 1945 . Hanau 1995.
• Magistrate of the City of Hanau (Ed.): Hanau March 19. 50th anniversary of the city's destruction in 1945 . Hanau 1995. ISBN 3-926011-30-0
• Richard Schaffer-Hartmann: The night when Hanau went under. March 19, 1945 (= German cities in the bombing war ). Wartberg-Verlag, Gudensberg-Gleichen 2004, ISBN 3-8313-1471-3 .
• Hans-Günter Stahl: The aerial warfare over the Hanau area 1939-1945 = Hanauer Geschichtsblätter 48. Hanau 2015. ISBN 978-3-935395-22-1 , esp .: pp. 327–381.

Remarks

1. ↑ Contrary to an opinion that has been rumored again and again, the historic Hanau old town was not selected as the core area of ​​the attack on the grounds that the proportion of wood in the total building mass was highest here. The old town had already been largely destroyed in the air raid on Hanau on January 6, 1945 (Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , pp. 274-310).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. Arthur Harris: Bomber Offensive - Sir Arthur Harris - Marshal RAF - The Memoirs of one often the greatest and most Controversial Commanders of World War II . London 1947. ND 1990, p. 147.
2. ^ War diary of the Bomber Command, quoted in Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 328.
3. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 329.
4. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 370.
5. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 327.
6. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 331.
7. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 327.
8. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , pp. 329, 333f.
9. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 327.
10. ↑ See map sketch of Bomber Command, shown in: Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 332.
11. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 338.
12. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 330f.
13. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 329.
14. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 339.
15. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 334.
16. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 339.
17. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 338.
18. ^ War diary of the Bomber Command, quoted in Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 328.
19. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 338.
20. ↑ Stahl: Der Luftkrieg , p. 330.