Anna A

Title

Anna A

Description

Anna A's account of the events at Hohenzollernstraße nos. 26 and 28, Hindenburg-platz.

Date

1944-03-13

Temporal Coverage

Spatial Coverage

Coverage

Language

Type

Rights

This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.

Contributor

Identifier

Record 28
BKasselVdObmv10028

Transcription

Translated from the original in German: Present is Mrs Anna A., formerly of Hohenzollernstraße 28, now of Söhrestraße 15, and makes the following statement:
When the alarm came, we went immediately down to the cellar. We took our suitcases and blankets with us. And then it kicked off immediately, blasts everywhere. We were always lying on the ground, we fell over from the terrible air pressure and Yeee – we were on the ground. The men always wanted to go up and have a look but that was not possible. Those [phosphorous] canisters were dropping. We too had several canisters in the house, they came in from the sides. We could hear shouting from the neighbouring building where the restaurant Zeppelin was: “Fire!” We wanted to help but the smoke made it impossible and then we knocked through the breakthroughs. Then they came through to our cellar and wanted to get through to Kronprinzenstraße but they all came flooding back because everything was blocked, so they said. And so we went through the Zeppelin and through the restaurant where everything was on fire. The emergency crews did not leave us alone: “Get out, out, out!” In the street, we only saw fire, both sides were ablaze. We had already soaked our blankets in the cellar and wrapped them around us. Then we ran to the Viktoria shelter in front of the train station. It was about half nine. Everything was overcrowded in there.
After an hour, the air became so bad, we went out again, up the whole of Kölnische Straße, to the little fir forest but then we were warned that it was full of duds, so we ran through the fire, down Dörnbergstraße and sat down on a bench on Hindenburgplatz. My husband and I were on our own. My daughter had gone to shelter at the train station and my boy was on duty that night, in Bahnhofstraße. They are both alive. Thank goodness! We sat there with Mrs Schunk and her eight-year old boy, both from our house. A security guy came and said to us: “Dear people, leave; there’s a dud which can go off any minute.” So we went on, down Diakonissenstraße, when the dud went off; we felt the air pressure from it. There were a large number of storm troopers; they said we should go down Herkulesstraße to the secondary modern school. That’s where we went and waited till morning. The dud had exploded about midnight. Then we were given some food. We then walked to Harleshausen where we have friends. We stayed there for two days and then went to Lohfelden to my daughter’s flat. We fetched our suitcases two days later from the cellar; my daughter had salvaged our bedding during the raid. These things had survived in the cellar. Our daughter had bad smoke poisoning and had already been given injections for it in the shelter at the train station. My husband is very upset by the raid. He is already damaged from the First World War and now he had to go through this.

Citation

Vermisstensuchstelle des Oberbürgermeisters der Stadt Kassel, “Anna A,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed March 28, 2024, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/8685.

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