Bombing of Berlin

The Bombing of Berlin marks the moment when a war long experienced through reports, policy, and expectation reaches the capital itself. In Angelus Thomsen’s account, the first multi-squadron bombardment comes after years of uneven raids and a lull in 1942. Its destructive force is measured not only in dead, injured, and homeless people, but in a city whose streets reveal the human cost of a war fought elsewhere.

Before the First Major Bombardment

Unlike Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, Munich, Mainz, and the Ruhrgebiet, Berlin remained largely intact through the earlier years of the war. The city had endured dozens of nuisance raids in late 1940 and early 1941; these then tapered off, and 1942 passed without an attack. The reprieve did not produce confidence. Berliners knew that a major assault was likely, and the long anticipation gives the eventual bombing the quality of a feared arrival rather than a wholly unexpected disaster.

The first large bombardment described comes after the Day of the Luftwaffe, with its parades, march-pasts, and ceremonies. On the night of March 1–2, sirens wake Thomsen with three sustained chords followed by a rising, wavering howl. He puts on his dressing gown without urgency and joins a gathering in the Hotel Eden wine cellars. The scene begins in an atmosphere of social ease; roughly ninety minutes later, that levity disappears as the bombardment seems to move toward the sheltering group.

The Night of March 1–2

Thomsen renders the approaching attack as a vast, stumbling presence, its impacts like prehistoric thunder. The image makes the bombardment feel at once impersonal and bodily: the people below cannot see or control the force above them, and briefly imagine a range of possible deaths, from burning and crushing to suffocation and drowning. Then the destructive presence veers away to the east. The immediate group survives the passage, but the reprieve does not undo what has happened across the city.

The reported toll is immense: hundreds dead, thousands injured, and perhaps a hundred thousand left homeless. Thomsen’s account fixes the devastation in a few material impressions—the carpet of crackling glass underfoot and a fume-laden, sulphur-yellow sky overhead. He reads the raid as the war coming home to the place from which it began, and specifically to the Wilhelmstrasse, bringing the consequences of German aggression into the political heart of the capital.

A City Emptied of Young Men

The damage is also registered in the people missing from the streets. After the bombardment, the city’s changed condition becomes apparent: there are no young men, except those returned wounded, on crutches, in handcarts, or in rickshaws. The visible street population includes bowed work crews made up of labourers from subjugated lands, municipal police, and the SS. In the pubs around Potsdamer Platz, empty sleeves, empty trouser legs, and smashed faces make the consequences of military service and injury impossible to overlook.

This absence complicates any picture of the capital as a protected centre of power. Berlin has been spared the earlier destruction inflicted on other German cities, but it is neither untouched nor socially whole. The bombing’s aftermath exposes a population marked by mass injury, displacement, and the removal of men from ordinary civilian life.

The Final Raids and Retrospective Memory

A later visit to Berlin adds the final phase of the city’s bombardment to the account. In 1948, as Thomsen travels to meet Hannah, a local guide identifies two cleared bomb sites and attributes them to raids in mid-April 1945, the last on April 21. By then, the Russians were in Berlin and shelling the Chancellery. Thomsen notes that the bombers were British, whom he regarded as the least hateful and least hated of the combatants; his reflection that wars grow old, rotten, and mad frames the ruined streets as the accumulated wreckage of a conflict outlasting any single raid.

The postwar journey makes the earlier warning that Berlin would soon face a sky black with planes feel less like a passing prediction than the beginning of a long reckoning. The first major bombardment, its civilian toll, and the later bomb sites belong to different moments, but together they trace the war’s arrival in the capital and its continuing imprint on the city after the fighting has moved on.