The Nazis did not rely solely on flak and fighters to protect their capital from enemy “air pirates,” as Goebbels called them. They sought to confuse the attackers by camouflaging prime targets and by erecting dummy government buildings on the outskirts of the city. They enshrouded the “Ost-West Axis” under a camouflage net replete with lawnlike greenery and fake fir trees. (The netting, however, did not hold up well; the first big wind tore large holes in it, leaving pieces of wire and canvas dangling from tree branches all over the Tiergarten.) The Victory Column at the Great Star was likewise draped in netting, and the golden goddess on the top was painted a dull brown, which left her looking as if she had just come back from a Caribbean vacation. The Deutschlandhalle, which during the war was used to store grain, disappeared under a giant tent painted to look like a park from the air. Because enemy planes used Berlin’s lakes as navigational guides, the authorities covered parts of them with giant wooden rafts designed to give the impression of housing projects. The main government district was “moved” to a vacant lot beyond the Ostkreuz railway station by way of a collection of wooden and canvas structures vaguely resembling well-known buildings. Another major decoy site was established at Staaken on the western approaches to the city; it was built of movie sets from a prewar film studio.
In the end, the elaborate decoys and camouflage probably made little difference. With the heavy flak, frequent cloud cover, primitive bombing sights, and frayed nerves, bombardiers rarely hit what they were aiming at anyway. As late as 1943, an Allied bombing assessment admitted that out of 1,719 bombers so far sent to Berlin, only twenty-seven had managed to drop their bombs within three miles of the target. Assessing one of its raids on Berlin, the RAF’s 83rd squadron commented: “The success of the attack was not due to our accurate bombing but to the Germans for building such a large city!”
If the early Berlin raids were not particularly accurate, or, for that matter, particularly deadly—there were only 222 fatalities in 1940, 226 in 1941—they were nonetheless psychologically unsettling. Howard K. Smith, who reported from Berlin for the United Press, noted that “Mornings after raids, people were in a miserable mood from lack of sleep and nervous strain. . . . Friends parting at night created a new farewell term, in place of
