The Allied bombing of Berlin

The Allied bombing of Berlin first becomes an immediate presence in the narrative on the night of March 1–2, after years in which the capital had seemed to escape the destruction inflicted on other German cities. The first multi-squadron bombardment breaks that lull: sirens summon Angelus Thomsen from bed to the wine cellars of Hotel Eden, where a party’s brittle levity gives way to the sounds of a vast attack approaching and then abruptly passing eastward.

The First Bombardment

Unlike Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, Munich, Mainz, and the Ruhr, Berlin had remained largely intact. It had endured nuisance raids in late 1940 and early 1941, but these subsided; in 1942, there were no raids at all. The reprieve did not feel permanent. People knew the sky would eventually darken with aircraft, and the expectation hung over a city still standing while other places had already been struck.

The attack came after the Day of the Luftwaffe, marked by parades, a march past, and grand ceremonies. On the night of March 1–2, sirens woke Thomsen. He put on his dressing gown without haste and joined a drinks party in Hotel Eden’s wine cellars. For ninety minutes, the gathering sustained its decadent air; then the levity vanished as the bombardment seemed to advance through the city like a blind, stumbling giant, each step accompanied by a prehistoric thunderclap. Those below wondered whether they would be atomized, scorched, crushed, smothered, or drowned. At the moment of greatest uncertainty, the attack lurched away eastward, leaving the immediate scene of danger behind.

The City After the Attack

The damage was counted in bodies and displacement: hundreds dead, thousands injured, perhaps a hundred thousand homeless. A carpet of crackling glass covered the streets beneath a sulphur-yellow, fume-laden sky. For the narrator, the bombing meant that the war had finally come home to the place where it began, reaching the Wilhelmstrasse and the political center of the Reich.

The attack also exposed a city emptied of its young men. After half an hour on the streets, their absence became unmistakable: lightly guarded work crews brought in from subjugated lands, municipal police, and SS remained visible, but young men did not. The exceptions were the wounded, on crutches or being moved in handcarts and rickshaws. In the pubs around Potsdamer Platz, empty sleeves, empty trouser legs, and smashed faces made the human cost of the war visible; at night, rows of jackboots left in hotel corridors for polishing briefly resembled amputated limbs.

The destruction remained legible in the landscape in April 1945. On the way to meet Hannah, Thomsen crossed two block-sized bomb sites, cleared of rubble but still carrying the smell of doused gasoline. A guide attributed them to the raids of mid-April, the last on April 21, when Soviet forces were already in the city and shelling the Chancellery. The bombers had been British, whom Thomsen regarded as the least hateful and least hated of the combatants. His later reflection widened beyond the identity of the attackers: wars, he thought, grow old, rotten, and mad, and the larger they are, the faster they age.

The Bombing Beside the Crime

The narrative places the attack on Berlin beside a different account of the war’s violence: the deliberate expansion of the extermination policy. In a later conversation in the Tiergarten, Konrad Peters traces the authorization for a “total solution” to a letter signed on July 31, 1941, and describes how proposals to deport Jews to remote, barren territories gave way, under pressure from officials in Poland, to killing women and children as well as men. The juxtaposition does not make the bombing and genocide equivalent. It sets the capital’s new exposure to war against violence that the regime had already organized and directed elsewhere.

Peters further argues that gas chambers and crematoria accelerated murder and spared the killers’ nerves, but were not essential to the policy: bullets and pyres could have achieved the same end. He cites the Einsatzgruppen’s killing of well over a million people by shooting. Against that account, Berlin’s devastation marks not the beginning of Nazi violence but the moment its consequences become physically unavoidable in the capital. The air raid brings the war home; the surrounding narrative refuses to let that reversal obscure the regime’s prior and ongoing crimes.

Scars Amid Ordinary Life

The April 1945 journey also places the bomb sites within a city already returning to ordinary use, though not to wholeness. The railway station was functioning despite a distant, tangled structure of mangled track, and the route passed cleared blocks whose lingering odor of doused gasoline kept destruction present after the rubble had been removed. Nearby, teenagers practiced soccer, ducks gathered at a circular pond, and a swan moved alone across the water. These details do not erase the damage or establish that the bombing had ended; they show how daily life and visible wreckage occupied the same landscape.

The sequence fixes Berlin’s last air raids within a final convergence of violence: the last bombing described came on April 21, while Soviet forces were already in the city and shelling the Chancellery. The attack therefore belongs not to a clean transition from war to peace, but to the city’s collapse under overlapping assaults. Against that background, the later act of meeting Hannah in a public garden carries no promise that the past has been repaired. The route makes the city’s altered condition tangible: its transport still operates, its public spaces still host familiar routines, and its bomb-cleared blocks remain marked by what has happened.