Bombing of Kassel in World War II
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The city of Kassel in Germany was severely bombed during World War II. Kassel is in the northern part of the federal state of Hesse, between Frankfurt (190 km south), and Hanover (160 km north).
In the early 1940s it was the capital of the Prussian province of Kurhessen, seat of a Regional Supreme Court (Oberlandesgericht), and headquarters of the authorities responsible for highway and railway construction for Central Germany
Kassel was home to the Henschel locomotive, engine and vehicle plants, the Fieseler aircraft plant, and several other important industries. The Henschel railway works were considered the biggest in continental Europe. The city was the important transportation and communications centre for Central Germany, with north/south traffic (Hanover-Frankfurt), and east/west traffic, (Ruhr-Thuringia, Saxony), intersecting there.
Kassel was considered a strategic target for Arthur Harris´ Bomber Command. Both the RAF and the USAAF had flown several light raids on the city´s industrial areas during 1942 and early 1943. Kassel became the target for a major airstrike on the night of October 2, 1943. Fortunately for the city the pathfinders responsible for marking the target were not able to find the center of the city, so most of the bombing fell into the eastern suburbs of Ihringshausen and Bettenhausen, causing considerable damage. An ammunition store was also hit but, in general, the attack by the 444 bomber force was a failure.
Bomber Command returned on October 22 with a force of 569 bombers, with zero hour being set at 8.45 pm. The main-force attack was covered by a feint attack on Frankfurt am Main which began five minutes before the main raid. German air defence concluded that Frankfurt would be the target so all the defensive night fighters diverted there just as the main raid on Kassel began.
The pathfinders clearly marked the target (Martinsplatz in central Kassel) so well that within five minutes the whole ancient town was illuminated. Within the next 80 minutes the waves of bombers dropped at least 1,800 tons of high explosives and incendiaries. The high explosive bombs demolished or extensively damaged buildings, but the incendiaries did the worst damage. Ton for ton, they had been found to be four to five times as destructive as high explosive 1 (http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm#taotraw).
The heart of Kassel consisted almost completely of wooden houses. The bombing was so intense that incendiary bombs fell with a density of up to two per square meter. Each building in the city center was hit by at least two liquid incendiary bombs and several of the 460,000 fire-sticks rained on the city.
After 15 minutes of attack the whole inner city was ablaze in a firestorm like the one at Hamburg, creating temperatures of 1500°C and above. It was consuming nearly all oxygen and sucking fresh air into the fire. People desperately trying to escape the fire zone were caught by the 100 mph wind, stripped of their clothes, and sucked back into the fire. Most residents who fled into the cellars died from asphyxiation.
Only a few minutes after the attack begun, the main telephone exchange was hit and disabled, so fire brigades could not be directed to the places where they were needed. The firestorm was well underway before police could provide communications for the fire brigades, but even then destruction of the city´s water pipes made it impossible to extinguish the inferno.
Kassel, which had a pre-raid population of 236,000 (1939), burned for seven days. It is believed that at least 10,000 people died and 150,000 inhabitants were bombed-out that night, and the city center was 95 per cent destroyed. It took weeks to collect all the corpses from the streets and out of the ruined cellars.
Many more raids were flown on Kassel before the end of the war, but no one was anywhere near as devastating as the raid of October 22, 1943. When the Americans captured the city in March 1945, only 50,000 people were still residing there.
After the War, Kassel was one of the last major cities in West Germany to be rebuilt. It has never regained either its pre-war population or its importance. Due to the inner-German border, which only ran 30 km east of the city, most of its former hinterland then lay behind the Iron Curtain. Many of the city´s industries moved away, the former Regional Supreme Court moved to Frankfurt, as did the railway authorities.
To stop the decline, the Federal Government decided in 1955 to make Kassel the seat of two federal courts, the Federal Labor Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht), and the Federal Social Court (Bundessozialgericht).
After reunification, Kassel became the "boomtown" of central Germany for a few years, with population rising to 207,500. But in recent years Kassel has again fallen back, since the nearby Erfurt in Thuringia is much more attractive to investors.