Nordhausen is located to the south of the Harz mountains. On 6 November 2019, a five-hundred-pound bomb was found next to the city theatre and as a result 15,000 people had to be evacuated overnight within a radius of one kilometre. The bomb was made safe but this was one of many such emergencies in the town.
Thus the bombing of Nordhausen is not just about April 1945, it is something very real in the town today. In this video I am going to look at the consequences of the bombing of Nordhausen and suggest what the target may have been. At the same time, you can see what Nordhausen looks like today – remember that this town was almost completely rebuilt.
Nordhausen was almost completely destroyed in bombing attakcs on 3 – 4 April 1945. At least 8,800 people were killed in these raids. It had been attacked earlier during the war. It was a logical target. To the north of the town lies the former concentration camp of Mittelbau Dora, where deep in the Kohnstein mountain the V1 and V2 weapons had been manufactured. Outside the tunnels was a large railway station, today a meadow, which was a suitable target for attack. The Allies could not reach the production facilities underground, but they could reach the transport infrastructure coming from the tunnels. Even at this stage of the war, with the western Allies now deep inside Germany and the Red Army about to attack Berlin, these revenge weapons remained a threat. But the bombing attacks of 3 – 4 April do not appear to have been made to hit either weapons production, infrastructure, military defences or German troops.
Nordhausen had 42,000 inhabitants before the Second World War. This number rose to 65,000 inhabitants by the beginning of March 1945 mainly due to evacuees and refugees. It was a reception area for evacuees from Berlin, Hamburg and the Ruhr. There were no military facilities within the town itself except for an air base which was used as a training site and, for a time, aircraft hangar for aircraft that towed gliders. Until the bombing raid, the air base was still used to refuel fighter planes. The Boelcke Barracks had housed the Air Intelligence School but that had not been used for military purposes since the autumn of 1943. At the beginning of 1945 it was used as a subcamp of Mittelbau Dora. There were many military hospitals in the town and its immediate surroundings, with a total of around 1,000 wounded. Many of the factories in the town had been converted to war use.
The number of air raid alarms in Nordhausen grew constantly in 1945. There were 174 in March 1945. The town was on the path for Allied bomber streams to Berlin. The constrant air raid alarms would have kept many people in the shelters for long periods of time denying them sleep. Some no doubt got so used to the alarms that they ignored them.
In late 1944, British long-range reconnaissance aircraft had photographed the city and its surroundings. At the end of March 1945, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) gave the decision to destroy Nordhausen to the Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force . Air Marshal Arthur Harris , issued the order for a double strike over two days on 2 April aiming to hit the Boelcke barracks and the city of Nordhausen. It seems as though the planners believed there were high ranking Nazis in the barracks rather than sick concentration camp prisoners. The 3,466 British aircrew involved in this mission were told that the aim of the attack was: “To kill military and Nazi personnel evacuated from Berlin to these barracks”
Who might these high ranking Nazi personnel be?
The Allies realised that cutting off the head of the dictatorship was the quickest way to ending the war but hitting Hitler was considered to be almost impossible as he hardly ever presented himself in public and was too well protected. The same applied to other leading figures of the Reich. However not everyone had access to such protection. As such the SOE made a list of ten high ranking SS leaders that could possibly be killed. These people were head of foreign intelligence Walter Schellenberg, head of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller, mass murderer and economist Otto Ohlendorf, head of the SS main office Gottlob Berger, head of the SS Leadership Main Office Hans Jüttner, head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office Oswald Pohl, head of the concentration camp inspectorate Richard Glücks, Himmler’s liason officer to Hitler Hermann Fegelein, head of the Ordnungspolizei Alfred Wünnenberg and Hans Kammler.
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