Call Me Meyer

To Berliners he was Herr Meyer, or just Meyer

In September 1939 Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering was feeling pretty good about himself. Poland had been crushed in a matter of weeks and Nazi soldiers were putting their feet up in what was left of Warsaw, the Polish capital city that Goering’s Luftwaffe had played a large part in destroying. Victory had seemed so easy and achieved at such small cost. There was only one small problem, Germany was now in a world war of its own making.

Unwilling to sit by as another promise was broken, another treaty abrogated or another eastern European country was swallowed up, France, Britain and its Commonwealth had declared war on Germany. Many Germans, despite their lightening victory over Poland, were anxious about what the future held. In particular, they were nervous that planes would reign destruction on Berlin and Munich as their own planes had done at Guernica in Spain in 1937 and Warsaw in 1939. Ever full of bombast, Goering, as head of the German air forces, thought he was the man to assuage those fears.

It was only a matter of time, the Reichsmarschall asserted, that the French and British would seek peace. Victory was inevitable. Goring was not alone in this. All of the top-ranking Nazi’s, including Hitler, said something along the line that the war was already won, the Allies just didn’t realise it yet. Germany’s armed forces had demonstrated their invincibility in Poland and if the Western allies did not seek terms, their militaries would be easily defeated by the Wehrmacht. So confident was Goering that during an address in September 1939 he had boasted, “No enemy bomber can reach the Ruhr. If one reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Goering.  You may call me Meyer.” Meyer, as every German understood, was an insult. The Reichsmarschall was basically saying that if bombs fell on the Ruhr-or by extension anywhere in the Reich-you could call him a stupid ass.

American B-17 bombers over Berlin. By 1944 the Allies were launching raids of 1,000 planes on German cities. Goering had once boasted that there was no need for air raid shelters in the German capital because Allied planes could never get through.

For the first three months or so of the war, it seemed Goring and his cronies were right, no bombs fell on Berlin, or anywhere else for that matter. The period of the “Sitzkrieg” saw the two opposing armies throwing snowballs at one another along the Franco-German border while a tiny Finnish army battered the Soviet horde sent to invade their country. Hitler boasted in a New Year’s message that, “The Jewish-capitalistic world will not survive the twentieth century.” And it appeared that he was right.

April and May saw British and French forces humiliated in Norway when they launched an ill-conceived and wretchedly managed attempt to help the Norwegians stave off a German invasion of their country. Then, on May 8, the might of the Wehrmacht was unleashed on the West. Within days Goering’s bombers were dropping bombs indiscriminately on Belgian and Dutch cities; most notably Rotterdam on May 14. With aircraft covering their advance, the panzers sliced through Allied defences in the Netherlands and Belgium before pinning what remained of the British Expeditionary Force against the Channel and moving into the interior of France. June 4 saw the last ship take what remained of the BEF away from Dunkirk and 10-days later the swastika flew from the Arc de Triumph. A week later it was all over. France had surrendered to Germany; Hitler controlled Europe and England was alone. Overjoyed by their victory, the German people were able to forgive Goering the few small raids by French and British bombers that had reached Germany; damage was minimal and casualties few. Besides, with France defeated, Britain could not long maintain its defiance.

But it would. Already on June 4 Winston Churchill had delivered his famous “Finest Hour” speech in which he declared that the Battle of Britain was about to begin. This battle would be unique in that it would be fought in the air. It would be a test not for the Panzers but for Goering’s pilots and bomber crews. The Luftwaffe would have to destroy the Royal Air Force before any landing in Britain could be attempted. Throughout that summer the Luftwaffe repeatedly attacked the RAF and its installations but, in a rare show of restraint, their pilots were instructed to avoid dropping bombs on civilian targets in London.

This caution, however, came to an end on the evening of August 24 when, due to poor navigation, Nazi bombardiers dropped their payloads not on the outskirts of the British capital but on central London. Civilians were killed and houses in the centre of the city were burning. The London fire brigade was still putting out the blazes set by the German bombing when Churchill met with his cabinet, which quickly agreed to launch a retaliatory raid of their own on the German capital.

Flying at the extreme limits of their range, a force of 70 RAF bombers reached Berlin and dropped their bombs in and around Tempelhof airport. What Goering had assured his fuhrer and the German people could never happen had. In terms of what was to come, the mission was inconsequential; there was almost no damage and casualties were few. A second raid the next evening caused only slightly more damage, the most notable casualty was one of the elephants at the zoo. While the damage was slight, the shock was profound. American journalist William Shirer was in Berlin when the bombs fell, 

We had our first big air-raid of the war last night. The sirens sounded at twelve twenty a.m. and the all-clear came at three twenty-three a.m. For the first time British bombers came directly over the city, and they dropped bombs. The concentration of anti-aircraft fire was the greatest I’ve ever witnessed. It provided a magnificent, a terrible sight. And it was strangely ineffective. Not a plane was brought down; not one was even picked up by the searchlights, which flashed back and forth frantically across the skies throughout the night.

The Berliners are stunned. They did not think it could happen. When this war began, Goring assured them it couldn’t. He boasted that no enemy planes could ever break through the outer and inner rings of the capital’s anti-aircraft defence. The Berliners are a naive and simple people. They believed him. Their disillusionment today therefore is all the greater. You have to see their faces to measure it.

Goring made matters worse by informing the population only three days ago that they need not go to their cellars when the sirens sounded, but only when they heard the flak going off near-by. The implication was that it would never go off. That made people sure that the British bombers, though they might penetrate to the suburbs, would never be able to get over the city proper. And then last night the guns all over the city suddenly began pounding and you could hear the British motors humming directly overhead, and from all reports there was a pell-mell, frightened rush to the cellars by the five millions people who live in this town.

I was at the Rundfunk writing my broadcast when the sirens sounded, and almost immediately the bark of the flak began. Oddly enough, a few minutes before, I had had an argument with the censor from the Propaganda Ministry as to whether it was possible to bomb Berlin. London had just been bombed. It was natural, I said, that the British should try to retaliate. He laughed. It was impossible, he said. There were too many anti-aircraft guns around Berlin.

I found it hard to concentrate on my script. The gunfire near the Rundfunk was particularly heavy and the window of my room rattled each time a battery fired, or a bomb exploded. To add to the confusion, the air-wardens, in their fire-fighting overalls, kept racing through the building ordering everyone to the shelters. The wardens at the German radio are mostly porters and office boys and it was soon evident that they were making the most of their temporary authority. Most of the Germans on duty, however, appeared to lose little time in getting to the cellar.

It was the first raid on Berlin, 362 more would follow. Berliners grew used to the constant bombing and they took to calling the air raid sirens that announced the arrival of yet more Allied bombers as “Meyer’s trumpets.” Doubtless Goering was not amused.

Their menfolk dead or missing, in 1945 more than 60,000 women from the ages of 15 to 50 were conscripted to clear the rubble from what remained of Berlin. Today, throughout Germany they are remembered as the TrummerFrauen, “the rubble women.”