Even as he was demanding greater sacrifices from the populace, Goebbels continued to live high off the hog himself, entertaining his actress friends at the sumptuous villa he had expropriated from a Jewish banker on the Wannsee island of Schwanenwerder, and driving around town in a new armor-plated Mercedes, a Christmas gift from Hitler, who worried that some malcontent might blow up Goebbels in Berlin just as anti-Nazi partisans had assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942.
In the event, no one came close to killing Goebbels (a would-be assassin trying to lay a mine at Schwanenwerder was immediately apprehended and executed), but morale in Berlin was badly shaken by the grim news from Stalingrad and the resumption of Allied bombing. The SD, which kept its finger on the pulse of popular opinion, reported increasing signs of defeatism. The myth of Hitler’s invincibility was now increasingly “on the defensive.” Ursula von Kardorff wrote bitterly in her diary on January 31, 1943: “How gloriously our Führer has saved us from collapse, the Jews, and Bolshevism. In actuality we have Stalingrad, Wornesch, Ladogasee, Illmensee, Rshew [German defeats in Russia], the fleeing Army of the Caucuses. The Jewish deportations. Can one still pray? I cannot do so anymore.”
Yet there was worse to come, much worse. In late August and early September 1943 the Allies launched the largest air attacks to date against Berlin. This was the opening phase of the attempt to bomb the Reich into submission. On the night of August 23/24, 1943, the RAF dispatched 719 aircraft to Berlin. The British suffered grievous losses, due mainly to a highly effective fighter defense mounted by the Luftwaffe, but they managed nonetheless to drop 1,706 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the city. As a result, every government office building in the Wilhelmstrasse was at least partially damaged, as were an officer cadet school at Köpenick and the barracks of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler in Lichterfelde. A total of 854 people were killed, many of them because they had neglected to seek shelter, a fact that infuriated Goebbels, who threatened to shoot people who did not abide by the air-raid regulations.
Waves of raids over the course of the next three months were deadlier still. A big attack on the night of November 22/23 dumped 2,501 tons of bombs on the city, and subsequent raids in December, including an especially lethal one on Christmas Eve, caused severe damage. These raids killed more than 8,000 people, destroyed 68,226 buildings, and rendered a quarter-million Berliners homeless. Especially hard hit were the city center, Alexanderplatz, and Charlottenburg. Among the prominent buildings to be damaged or destroyed were Speer’s War Industry Ministry, the Naval Construction Headquarters, the Charlottenburg Palace, the “Red Town Hall,” the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the KaDeWe department store, the Technical University, and the Romanisches Café. Also hit was Hitler’s private train, which was parked at a railway siding.
To reduce the human casualties occasioned by the bombing, and to relieve the strain on resources in the capital, Goebbels ordered the evacuation of children, non-working women, and the old. Berlin’s designated
What happened next was bad enough to generate a full-scale exodus. In July 1943 about 3,665,000 registered inhabitants remained in the capital (there were thousands more unregistered residents: forced laborers, displaced persons, people in hiding); but by January 1945 the figure had dropped to 2,846,000. Over the course of that period Berlin’s schools were shut down, resulting in the wholesale transfer of students and teaching staffs to the hinterlands, whose residents worried about strains on their own resources. Also transferred out of Berlin were many vital industries, including parts of the giant Siemens operation, which were dispersed around the country. This proved to be the beginning of the end of Berlin’s dominant place in German heavy manufacturing.
