The attached 1941 Collier's Magazine article reported on how the people of Berlin were faring after one solid year of R.A.F. bombing. By war's end it was estimated that as many as 580,000 Germans had been killed as a result of the Allied bombing campaign (many of them were children and far more women than men). This article examines what Berlin life was like when the bombs fell.
Click here to read about the bombing of Japan.
Here is an eyewitness account of the bleak lives lead by Berliners during the summer of 1943:
"The food situation in Berlin is horrible. At the [Grand Hotel Esplanade] there was no choice on the menu. You either ate what was there or went hungry... There was no bread or butter served at the hotel... The people of Berlin were unfriendly and distant. Although I could not speak their language, I could sense their fear of bombing and disgust with the war. They seemed to be mechanical men, robots, just following daily routine." This Collier's article clearly illustrated the gloom that hung over the German home front of 1943:
"Nobody escapes war service in Germany. Children serve in air-raid squads; women work very hard...The black market flourishes everywhere. More fats are required, as are fruits and vegetables, for the people's strength is declining. A report I have seen of Health Minister Conti shows that the mortality rate for some diseases rose 49 percent in 1941 - 1942."
Click here to read about the dating history of Adolf Hitler. A report by a Swiss journalist as to what becomes of the Germans who are left homeless after the bombings:
"In most cities they immediately get 200 marks cash payment. The money is fresh and clean from the press... With cup in hand, the bombed-outers wait in the streets for the army goulash truck to drive up and give them a feed. Sometimes they wait for as much forty-eight hours. People who don't like or cannot get the army goulash build themselves a fire and cook the horses, dogs and cats that lie around the street..." Here is a 1943 article that was cabled from Stockholm, Sweden, relaying assorted eyewitness accounts of the Allied bombing campaign over the German city of Hamburg in 1943:
"The people of Germany have now learned, through the terror-filled hours of sleepless nights and days, that air mastery, the annihilating blitz weapon of the Nazis in 1939 and 1940, has been taken over by by the Allies...The most terrible of these punches has been the flood of nitroglycerin and phosphorus that in five days and nights destroyed Hamburg."
Click here to read about the bombing of Japan.
It was an Englishman nick-named "Bomber Harris" who planned and organized the nightly raids over Nazi Germany: click here to read about him. "The most striking thing about Germany today is its quiet. There is no noise. The people are sullen... There are no parades, no bands, no singing in Germany now. When American internees heard the Allied bombers, saw cities in flames and felt the shock of four-ton bombs, they knew why."
This account of war-torn Germany was written by one of those internees who was incarcerated since December of 1941 and subsequently released in March, 1944. | 
