“That was an event where many people simply wandered in a certain direction without orientation, sometimes even towards a fire. They simply ran anywhere. My mother took hold of us and held on tight.”
Manfred Gräber was just a young boy during the bombing of Germany. With clarity he recalls trips to the air raid shelters and Nazi racism and paranoia.
This interview has been translated from its original German.
Q: If you think back to when you were six years old, what comes to mind when someone says “bombing war,” “air assault”? What kind of feeling, what kind of memory comes to the fore?
For me, the bombing war is, even today, very strongly associated with the wailing of a siren. The siren that sounded the alarm with a howl through those darkened streets is deeply embedded in my memory to this day, even as an older man. In the summer months, when I occupy myself with leisure activities like fishing on the water in Brandenburg, outside Berlin, I hear at times in the distance the cry of a siren, very faintly. A swelling and ebbing away. Perhaps I should mention in this context a forest fire which broke out, and which set off the fire alarm in a town. I called my wife’s attention to it repeatedly, “Don’t you hear the siren?” She said, “I don’t hear any siren.” And yet this subtle rising and falling tone from that time has always stayed in my memory.
Q: Can you describe that? An attack, when the siren sounds, just the process, what was it like at that time?
At night when it became dark outside, along with the darkness fear came over the city, and in the apartments and the houses of the people. At night, one was afraid above all else of the night attacks, which often were carried out between the hours of 8pm and 11pm. A sure sign of this was that, for those who had a radio, it was quietly audible in the rooms of the house, and then the news station interrupted the program and announced the approach of enemy combat units. In 1943, there was also still a so-called cuckoo which was heard over the radio. When the cuckoo’s call sounded, there were approximately 20 minutes until the sirens wailed at full alert. Full alert was a swelling and fading sine wave in the 200-500 MHz frequency range. Particularly outside of the house, if one on the street turned in the direction of Alexanderplatz, as in 1943, then precisely this siren was eerily audible and elicited fear and terror.
On the other hand, when the attack came to an end, a long, sustained tone flowed through, and it was as if this tone relieved the tension of the whole situation. Many people spoke out to that effect, saying, “We have been spared again,” or “We have arisen from this.” I actually still have this sensation, because in the communities of Brandenburg the sirens from the war remain standing. Here in Berlin they have been dismantled. We have them in museums. But when these sirens can be heard from a distance, this is not exaggerated, a light tingling runs over one’s back. The second issue was the blackout, which had a very frightening effect on the children.
Q: Why fear and terror? Why did it elicit that at the time? How do you explain that?
The emergence of this sound, of the siren, wasn’t the most decisive factor in and of itself. Already as a child one picked up on and sensed very observantly the conversations of the adults and everything which happened in the surrounding environment. Often, from my personal experience, adults underestimate children, that at their age they understand and assimilate and process one thing or another quite articulately.
For example, it emerged that thousands of people burned to death in Hamburg. However, that fact wasn’t popularized through the press or the radio, but rather in the form of a whispering campaign and rumors. One didn’t know anything exact, but one knew nevertheless that something had happened. This also stemmed from the approximately 1 million refugees from Hamburg, from whom it spread to the population in the Brandenburg area. And so, concretely related to the situation in the Fall of 1943, one was afraid in Berlin of e