March 1, 1943, the date on which Allied bombs almost claimed the Rosenstrasse center, was the annual “Day of the Luftwaffe.” On this date each year Germans were ordered by the Hitler regime to honor the accomplishments of the Nazi air force. By staging a large-scale raid on that day, the enemy intended to help the Germans celebrate. The March raid was part of a bombing campaign against Berlin that was much more extensive and deadly than the raids of 1940/41, which, from the British point of view, had been disappointing. The city was so spread out (900 square miles), and contained so many open spaces, that the bombers had difficulty hitting specific targets or wiping out large contiguous areas. In fact, the early raids had achieved so little by the end of 1941 that the British suspended attacks on Berlin for about a year to concentrate on easier targets and to develop technical improvements that would, they hoped, make it easier to hit the German capital.
As of early 1942 the British Bomber Command was under the leadership of Arthur (“Bomber”) Harris, who believed that “area bombing” of large cities and industrial centers could bring an enemy to its knees without the need for a ground invasion. His strategy harmonized with a decision reached at the Anglo-American Casablanca Conference (January 1943) to “wage the heaviest possible bomber campaign against the German war effort,” although neither Churchill nor Roosevelt expected bombing alone to win the war. American bombers joined the crusade against Berlin shortly after Casablanca, hitting the city for the first time on January 27, 1943. Interestingly enough, they had practiced for this operation by bombing mock-ups of Berlin apartment houses designed by the modernist architect Erich Mendelssohn, who had gone into exile in the United States. The Combined Bomber Command was now able to deliver a one-two punch, the British (still) flying by night, the Americans by day. Although Allied losses were extensive, the bombers began to do serious damage to the city. In March 1943 alone over 700 Berliners died in raids. There were casualties also at the Berlin zoo, whose terrified animals, along with the city’s children, were surely the most innocent victims of a war that had now truly “come home” to the German capital.
The war was coming home more viciously on the battlefront as well, in terms of increased losses of soldiers who hailed from Berlin. During the first year of the war, Berlin had sacrificed its native sons at the rate of 361 per month. In the second year the number went up to 467 per month, and in the third year to 661. Then, in the six-month period between October 1942 and April 1943, soldiers from Berlin died at an average of 1,565 a month.
Some of the losses occurred at the Battle of Stalingrad, which raged from September 1942 to the end of January 1943. The Nazi government predicted a glorious victory in this crucial battle, but on February 1, 1943, the German forces surrendered, marking the Reich’s greatest defeat to date. The disaster was so immense that Goebbels’s propaganda machine could not ignore it or disguise it as a strategic redeployment. The propaganda minister ordered a three-day period of mourning. At the same time, however, the defeat gave impetus to an initiative that Goebbels had been trying to sell to Hitler for some time: mobilization for “total war” on the home front. Heretofore, the minister insisted, Germany had been fighting with one hand tied behind its back because it had not demanded enough sacrifices from the folks at home. With Hitler’s permission, Goebbels staged a huge rally at the Sport-palast on February 18, invoking the “great tocsin of fate” at Stalingrad to call for a new kind of war, one “more total and radical than we can even imagine today.” No longer would the Nazi regime be hindered by “bourgeois squeamishness.” Every German, high and low, must be made to sacrifice for the common cause. “Now people, arise, and storm, break loose!” he shouted.
In the wake of Goebbels’s jeremiad, the regime began closing down businesses not vital to the war effort. All women between seventeen and forty-five were required to register for possible conscription into the labor force. To ensure that the capital was in the vanguard of the new commitment, Goebbels shifted 300 men from his own ministry to the Wehrmacht and replaced them with women. He shut down a number of luxury shops and restaurants, including Horcher’s, which had been serving gourmet meals to bigwigs without demanding ration cards. (The Gauleiter took special pleasure in closing Horcher’s, because it was Göring’s favorite eatery.) Berlin’s theaters and cinemas were also ordered closed, but with soldiers coming home on furlough it made sense to maintain some distractions, so these venues were reopened after a few days.
