Dispatch From Berlin, 1943: The Story of Five Journalists Who Risked Everything by Anthony Cooper & Thorsten Perl

Author:Anthony Cooper & Thorsten Perl [Cooper, Anthony & Perl, Thorsten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2023-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

* ‘It’s cold here … come here, please.’

CHAPTER 9THE DEAD

While would-be evaders like Lowell Bennett and Norm Ginn were being trucked to Berlin and inducted into the German POW system, their dead comrades were being processed for burial. We followed Nordahl Grieg’s Lancaster, H-Harry from the Australian 460 Squadron, to the point where it was shot down in the ‘orchestrated hell’ over Berlin’s satellite city of Potsdam. We will now return to that location to see how ordinary German civilians experienced the 2 December raid, and what happened to the airmen who did not survive the destruction of their bombers. Potsdam was often overflown by bombers intent upon hitting Berlin and was routinely hit by wayward bombs intended for the capital. Formerly the royal residence for the kings of Prussia until the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918, its location on the southwestern approaches to the capital frequently placed it right on the bombers’ approach path. For example, when the raid alarm sounded in Potsdam on the night of 2 December 1943, that was the 158th such alarm for the satellite city and its environs.

Just like the inhabitants of the much-bombed capital city to the east, the residents of such frequently overflown towns and villages on the outskirts of Berlin had to take cover in improvised bomb shelters whenever the raid alarm sounded. For example, the Sander family in the village of Kleinmachnow outside Potsdam had turned their house’s cellar into a bomb shelter, with the floor overhead reinforced by tree trunks cut to size and propped up beneath the floor joists. This family shelter was used by the Sanders’ neighbours as well; the man of the house, Eugen Sander, alerted the neighbours to the raid alarm by sounding his bugle. Any residents of these satellite communities who flouted the air-raid regulations to leave the shelter and steal an illicit look outside were well placed to witness fiery confrontations between British bombers and Berlin’s defences during the bomber stream’s contested passage across the flak zone. For example, from the gloom of the blacked-out village of Flottstelle outside Potsdam, the Thurnhofer family had a viewpoint eastward towards Berlin, and during the 2 December raid one of them risked leaving the basement bomb shelter to look outside: to the northeast this daring eyewitness was confronted with the awesome sight of a wide inverted cone of ‘blood red’ sky hanging over the capital, the pyrotechnic amalgam of searchlight beams, flak bursts, parachute flares, and fires.

During such raids the sight of blazing British bombers plunging to destruction became almost routine for those whose duties kept them above ground at posts around Potsdam, such as the thousands of men and boys serving in the numerous flak, searchlight and fire brigade crews. For these people, it was so common to see a flaming British bomber arcing downwards through the night sky somewhere out towards the horizon that such an event was scarcely worth recording. On the other hand, the destructive arrival of a shot-down bomber within one’s own locality was sufficiently rare for each such incident to be vividly remembered.

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