by Giles Milton
Even the warden recognised that they were doomed either to be burned alive or to suffocate from the asphyxiating gases. ‘The only thing we can now do is pray,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s make a circle.’
The girls drew together and listened as the man praised God. Hannelore pinched herself to see whether she was still conscious. ‘We had given up and were waiting for the end.’
On the other side of town, Martha Luise Rodi’s mother and sister had also sought refuge in their cellar and were listening to the roar of the flames. For them, as for so many in Pforzheim, the greatest danger was hidden. As the firestorm tore through the old town, it poured forth a cocktail of poisonous gases that seeped into the underground shelters and snuffed out the lives of all those trapped inside.
The two ladies were saved by the quick-thinking owner of the building who had taken shelter with them. He was aware of the hidden danger and insisted they leave the cellar, even though the streets above presented many additional hazards.
Clambering out of the shelter presented considerable difficulties for Martha Luise’s mother. With crippled feet, she found it hard to climb up the small ladder. It was even more difficult for her to crawl out through the burning house. They emerged at last to find the entire neighbourhood on fire. However, the two ladies were fortunate that their apartment stood next to the River Nagold, which created a barrier of sorts to the flames.
On the previous day, the river had been in high flood because of all the melting snow, but that very morning, the water level had dropped. They were therefore able to make their way along the muddy banks and eventually reach the Rodi family house.
By this point, Martha Luise and her children had crept into the garden to see the extent of the destruction in the valley below. As they stood there, watching the glow of the town on fire, they became aware of two familiar figures struggling up the hill.
‘I’ll never forget the first image of them arriving,’ wrote Martha Luise in a letter to her absent daughter. ‘There was a background of flames that filled the sky. Grandmother had her typical silhouette – it was unmistakably her – but the backdrop of flames was extraordinary impressive.’
Hannelore Schottgen had given up all hope of survival. The cellar was by now insufferably hot and smoke was pouring in from the outside. The warden suddenly got his strength back and began to bang on the wall with renewed effort, trying to smash a hole through to the adjoining cellar. As he did so, Hannelore and the others became aware of faint noises through the wall from people next door. ‘We could hear them knocking. A stone gave way, and then a second, and they helped from the other side until the opening was big enough for us to squeeze through.’
No sooner had they reached safety than there was a tremendous crash. The ceiling of the cellar they had just vacated slumped in on itself, bringing down tons of rubble from the building above.
Acutely aware of the dangers of toxic gas, the warden in charge of the new shelter forced open the iron door that led to the street and poked his head outside. ‘Quickly!’ he said to the girls. ‘Come immediately, it’s burning everywhere. Soon there won’t be any air left to breathe.’
The girls were fearful of stepping into the conflagration but the warden insisted. ‘You know that we’re not allowed to stay in the cellars when it’s burning,’ he said. ‘There are no more bombs falling. Come on! Quickly!’ Hannelore followed him but the others were too scared and stayed behind.
The sight of the town burning from end to end was deeply shocking. ‘Massive flames everywhere – a sea of fire, like a hot tempest. Walls completely red hot and enormous pieces of rubble that were also red hot.’
Hannelore lost all feeling of orientation; she was concentrating on trying to escape the heat, but wherever she turned, the streets were blocked with burning masonry.
In the midst of the chaos there were incongruous scenes. One side street that had not yet been touched by the firestorm was filling with people trapped by the fire.
Some of them ran towards her, saying: ‘You can’t get through here. It’s too hot.’ She and the warden turned back, only to be met by more refugees milling about in complete despair. ‘There’s no way out; there’s just heat, heat.’ Hannelore was suddenly struck by the awful realisation that they were going to be burned alive.
‘Come on,’ someone shouted. ‘Right, down the side street. We must go down there. You won’t get through that one, you’ll burn.’
A loud scream announced the arrival of yet another crowd, bringing news that all avenues of escape were now closed.
The warden with Hannelore now took a decision that was ultimately to save both their lives. He told her to cover her hands and face with her coat and make a charge through the burning street towards the river. It was their last hope of survival.
Hannelore could not longer think, but just blindly followed the shouts of the leader: ‘Come on, keep going, step by step.’
Hannelore begged him to tell her how much further it was to the river.
‘Come on, keep going,’ he shouted in answer. ‘Step by step.’
They pressed on doggedly through the burning rubble until they felt a faint breath of air. At long last they had reached the river and slumped on to its bank where they were shielded from the worst of the heat. Hannelore lay on her front, placed her nose just above the water and focused on simply trying to get oxygen into her lungs.
In Eutingen, Wolfram’s parents once again emerged from their cellar and stepped out into the garden, to be met by an awesome sight. ‘To our horror,’ wrote Marie Charlotte in a letter, ‘we could see the entire town in flames. A gigantic black cloud of smoke was drifting along the Enz valley.’ The acrid-sweet stench of burning houses, furniture and corpses hung in the air.
Although they were three miles from the epicentre, the flames were so bright that Marie Charlotte had to shield her eyes. The moon, so pristine and beautiful an hour earlier, was now hidden by a ghastly wreath of smoke. There was an unreality to the scene. ‘The sky was completely red,’ she wrote. ‘Black smoke shaded the soft light of the moon and made Eutingen appear as a peaceful and sleepy little village.’
Marie Charlotte experienced a feeling of helplessness, for nothing could be done for friends down below so long as the inferno raged. ‘We felt so anxious and worried about all the people we knew who must be trapped in the flames.’
There was also a feeling of guilt that their own little world had been saved. ‘We had a deep feeling of gratefulness that we had been spared. Nothing is broken and there is no sign of any damage around the house, except for one window in the workshop which is smashed.’
As she and Erwin watched the fire sweep a path along the Enz valley, they heard a curious cracking and rumbling noise: it was the sound of buildings collapsing into themselves.
Both of them would later recall being paralysed by a sense of helplessness as they gazed across the valley below. The only practical thing to be done was to prepare the house for any survivors. ‘We stayed up very late in expectation of homeless people turning up,’ wrote Marie Charlotte. ‘Finally, the doorbell rang and Ysole and Gunthe were outside, together with her fiancé, a very nice Flemish man.’ They had picked their way across burning rubble and witnessed the most harrowing scenes. All three were singed and blackened with soot. ‘They were desperate to get their breath back and to quench their thirst.’ After washing their blackened faces, they told Marie Charlotte and Erwin how they had managed to make their escape.
In the lower village of Eutingen, Sigrid Weber and her sisters had also emerged from their shelter, crowds of soot-covered people coming from the direction of Pforzheim, picking their way along the banks of the river.
They walked in silence, the shock of the bombing having robbed them of speech. Homeless, blackened by fire and grieving for loved ones who were still caught in the inferno, they poured into the village in search of shelter from the February chill.
Hannelore Schottgen remained slumped on the river bank for
many hours, waiting for the fire to burn itself out. Much later that night, when the inferno was a spent force, she found her way along the bank of the river to her parents’ house. Miraculously, it had been spared by the fire.
The entrance door had been ripped off, all the glass had gone from the windows, the curtains were hanging in the trees and the garden was hittered with roof tiles. However, the house was still standing. She called out for her parents but was met with a ghostly silence. No one answered.
She made her way to the Stollen, where small groups of dazed survivors were beginning to congregate. Then, unexpectedly, she experienced her second miracle of the night. Her parents were among the crowd. ‘My mother screamed when she saw me. My hair and clothes were completely black.’ But she was still alive.
For Hannelore, the sight of her mother also provoked a welling-up of emotion. She collapsed out of tiredness. Someone helped her on to a chair, wiped her face and gave her something to drink. It was dawn before she would see the grim reality of what had happened to Pforzheim.
Thirty miles away in Stuttgart, Captain Max Rodi had been first alerted to the fact that something was seriously awry by the distant drone of aircraft. Drafted back into the reserves as an officer some months earlier, and charged with tracking the path of enemy planes, he had climbed to the top of his Stuttgart watchtower shortly before 8 p.m. As he gazed in the direction of the town that was home to his beloved wife and children, he was shocked by what he saw. A dull orange glow hung in the sky and seemed to grow in intensity with every minute that passed.
He immediately realised that the aircraft were attempting to create a firestorm in the centre of Pforzheim, just as they had done in Dresden. The distant flames were already so bright that they hit up the pall of toxic black smoke, visibly hanging in the air. As Max stood there, desperately anxious for the safety of his family, he felt a curious tingling sensation on his face and arms. It was ash. Ash was pouring from the heavens. ‘A massive rain of ashes,’ he later wrote. ‘Even in Stuttgart, I got ash on me, falling from the sky.’
Soon after, he noticed that the glow in the sky had suddenly become much brighter. It was clear that a fire of cataclysmic proportions was devouring Pforzheim. He made repeated attempts to get news of his family but without success. The wires were down, the lines were dead. In desperation, he begged his commanding officer, Oberleutnant Steller, to allow him to return home. This was immediately granted.
With no vehicles available, Max climbed on to his trusty bicycle and set off on the four-and-a-half-hour ride. As he neared the town, he was met by the acrid stench of burning.
He was still some distance from Pforzheim when he came across the first survivors. They told him that the entire town had burned down and that only the outskirts were still standing. This last bit of news brought some comfort: although he feared for his extended family, there was still hope that his wife and children had survived.
He pushed on towards Pforzheim until his path was blocked by rubble. Leaving his bike in a house by the waterworks, he started walking through a biting black smoke.
There was not a single building left standing. Every house had been consumed and had collapsed in on itself. The rubble stood metres high, making it very difficult for Max to get through the blocked streets.
He was hoping to pass his mother-in-law’s house on Nagoldstrasse on his way home, but it proved impossible to orientate himself in the tangle of ruins. When he arrived at what he thought was the correct place, he found that nothing was standing.
Although it was not easy to locate the right heap of rubble, he eventually managed to find the remains of what he thought to be her flat. The trapdoor to the cellar was open, suggesting that whoever had been inside had also been able to get out.
Max was by now desperate to get to his own house and check on his wife and children. In the light of both the moon and the fire, he began the slow climb up the hillside until he at long last reached the garden gate. He was greeted by a sight that brought him the greatest possible comfort. His little home was unharmed, peaceful and quiet in the moonlight.
He and Martha Luise sat up into the early hours, reliving everything they had experienced over the previous few hours. It was too awful for words. ‘You just cannot imagine it,’ Martha Luise would later write in a letter to her daughter. ‘A catastrophe without name.’
Two miles away in Eutingen, Wolfram’s mother was in full agreement. It was clear from a glance across the valley, which was still glowing a dull orange, that their lives would never be quite the same again.
‘The English definitely made a proper job of it,’ she wrote. ‘I now know the meaning of rubbing something out.’
As the night wore on, a steady trickle of people began appearing at the Aïcheles’ home. Wolfram’s father lit a bonfire in the garden and dusted off an iron cauldron that was normally stored in the cellar. Marie Charlotte then began preparing food for more survivors who were sure to appear in the hours to come.
‘People have been turning up to say that they’re still alive,’ she recorded in a letter written on the following day. ‘And every time, you hear yet more horror stories of what happened.’
Chapter Fifteen
Counting the Cost
‘No body. Not even a bone. The whole street had disappeared.’
Pforzheim was still smouldering when dawn broke on the following morning. A thick veil of dust hung in the air and black smoke drifted across the valley. It was eerily silent and would remain so for days. ‘Everything is deathly quiet,’ wrote Martha Luise Rodi to her absent daughter. ‘Everyone is paralysed and speechless and dumb.’ The only noise to be heard was the occasional rumble of a crumbling building.
Hannelore and her parents had returned to their damaged house at some point during the early hours of the night. Utterly exhausted, they tried to snatch some sleep in the basement kitchen, which had lost its windows and patches of plaster but had otherwise survived the bombing intact.
Others, too, began to take refuge here, grateful for shelter from the winter chill. It became very cold in the small hours and everyone huddled together. From time to time, Hannelore’s mother made some malt coffee or peppermint tea to keep them all warm.
As it grew light, small groups of acquaintances also began to fetch up at the house. Some had little parcels with them: something they had managed to save from their former lives. One had an old violin. Another was clutching a pair of ski boots.
At one point, a close friend, Ferdinand von der Sanden, arrived at their kitchen door. The joy of seeing him alive was quickly checked by the expression on his face. Hannelore immediately realised that something terrible had happened. ‘He looked really depressed. When we enquired after his wife, he pointed at the bag he had with him and which he had put on the kitchen floor. “What’s left of her is here.”’
He showed them the ashes and remains. ‘But I recognised her.’
He was in a highly distressed state, gasping for air and trying to regain his composure. He just managed to tell them: ‘Her face and shoulders were cut off. They lay under a big beam of wood. That’s probably what stopped her burning completely. It must have fallen on her.’ He paused for a moment before asking them if they would accompany him to the cemetery, then collapsed in tears.
Hannelore made her way outside. In the half-light of a new dawn, she gazed across the ruined town. Almost nothing was left standing: the familiar townscape of old had been obliterated. The British Bombing Survey Unit would later calculate that 83 per cent of the town centre had been destroyed, concluding that it was ‘probably the greatest proportion in one raid during the war’.
One of the few structures left standing, alone and incongruous, was the conical spire of the Stadtkirche. Its tiles had been blown off and its windows were shattered but its internal structure of beams was intact, pointing accusingly at the sky from whence the destruction had come.
Hannelore picked her way through the smoking rubble, passing little groups of peopl
e, silent and shell-shocked, who were heading towards the ruined centre of Pforzheim. Survivors were working frantically, trying to clear paths through the debris and look for friends who might still be alive.
Many were in despair, tears streaming down their cheeks as they pulled the corpses of loved ones from the ruins. ‘On the roadside there were bodies which had been dug from the rubble, put there in order that people could identify them. Everywhere there was an awful smell of decomposition and smoke.’
Hannelore and her mother were making their way along what remained of Durlacherstrasse when they bumped into Gretel, an old family friend. ‘There were two tiny blackened corpses lying on the street like bits of burned wood. Gretel pointed to one of them and said: “That’s what’s left of my mother.”’ As she said this, a Nazi block-leader approached and started haranguing the women for being so unpatriotic as to commiserate over their dead.
Death was everywhere on the morning of 24 February. There were carts filled with corpses; there were even people pushing wheelbarrows containing dead bodies, sometimes with an arm or a leg dangling over the side.
Three miles away in Eutingen, Marie Charlotte was bracing herself for what she knew was going to be the most distressing day of her life. She, like so many other of the village inhabitants, was getting ready to head down the hillside into town to find out which of her friends had survived the catastrophe.
‘A horrible sight,’ she would later write in a letter to Wolfram’s older brother, Reiner. ‘Climbing over rubble, walking over corpses. There is no end to the horror.’
She had tried to prepare herself for terrible scenes, yet it still came as a huge shock to see the entirety of Pforzheim in ruins.
