te between the people who had to descend into the shelters of the residential buildings, which was the majority of the population. Here in Berlin the determination came about that it was approximately 80 percent that sought protection in the cellars of their buildings. Only 20 percent had the possibility to ride out the incident in a so-called shellproof concrete bunker. In these home air raid shelters the lights often gave out immediately upon bombardment, and that led to an outcry, particularly from the children. That was fear. Women were also often in over their heads in this situation. Reassuring words were offered by the air raid marshal, and the situation then often quieted itself. In the central bunker complexes one had little to fear along these lines. There, neither the noise of bombs nor other noises were as intensely perceptible as in the home air raid shelters. Directly on Alexanderplatz, I myself witnessed in 1943 impacts in the vicinity of this bunker complex which did not lead to the eruption of panic.
Q: The people were so accustomed to that? Or how must one envision it? Was that a fate to which one acquiesced? One tried to survive. How must one imagine the mindset of the people with regard to that?
The mindset of the people has to be viewed in various ways. Often there were women there, and I can remember such scenes myself, that the women sat in the cellar and had a letter, an official letter, and that they absolutely could not grasp that they had received a death notice from the front. These women were near despair. I still remember that, as the light became somewhat darker for whatever reason, a woman there attempted to slit her wrist. That was an act of desperation.
After 1945, as I rediscovered my former neighbors who had also survived the war, I learned of other things. For example, that in air raid shelters, even in home shelters which were in no way bomb-proof, national socialist songs were sung during the bombing. For example the Horst Wessel Song.
Q: How does one react as a child to the fact that a woman slits her wrists, or that you have to see mutilated, charred people? How did you react to that?
Yes, this question of the suicide attempt of this woman. That was actually new. That was horrifically new. That didn’t fit in the upbringing, in the entire mode of perception which one had picked up personally at home in the educational process. Perhaps a different example.
Once again to turn attention to the bombing on the night of November 23rd, 1943, as we left the bunker on Alexanderplatz after the approximately 40-minute assault, and we neared our apartment, we came to a corner house, which had been torn in half by the blasts. A so-called aerial mine had dissected the house. At this time, the new Friedrichsstrasse, into which we had to turn, was closed.
There were already hastily summoned OT-men — rescue workers of the Organization Todt, members of the armed forces — and above all firefighters on duty. They extracted people from a broad hole in the rubble and laid them out on the sidewalk, one by one. These people had no major injuries. But I saw quite clearly, because we couldn’t go down the street, that blood ran out of the corner of their mouths. Their lungs collapsed due to the air pressure of the extremely heavy bombs. They told us that later.
The firefighters talked with one another, and I was astonished when I saw that they had bottles of Schnapps. I discovered later that they gave out alcohol for such missions. I said then to my mother, who had not understood that, “Mom, the firefighters, they’re talking so funny. What kind of firefighters are they?” Then she briefly exchanged a few words with a fireman and smirked a bit, despite the situation, and said, “Manfred, the firefighters are from Leipzig. They’re Saxons.”
So as a child one registered attentively that even linguistically the rescue workers are of a different nature. In fact, in my research with reference to my activity in the Society of the Berlin Underworlds, I have found that 53% of the Leipzig firefighting units, the most har