Bombing of Lübeck in World War II

The attack on the night of 28 March 1942 created a firestorm that caused severe damage to the historic centre, with bombs destroying three of the main churches and large parts of the built-up area.

[1] Because of the hoar frost there was clear visibility and the waters of the Trave, the Elbe-Lübeck Canal, Wakenitz and the Bay of Lübeck were reflecting the moonlight.

[7] A. C. Grayling in his book, Among the Dead Cities, makes the point that as the Area Bombing Directive issued to the RAF on 14 February 1942 focused on undermining the "morale of the enemy civil population", Lübeck – with its many timbered medieval buildings – was chosen because the RAF "Air Staff were eager to experiment with a bombing technique using a high proportion of incendiaries" to help them carry out the directive.

The RAF was well aware that the technique of using a high proportion of incendiaries during bombing raids was effective because cities such as Coventry had been subject to such attacks by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz.

In the opinion of Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, the raid fulfilled the RAF's directive, as he wrote in his diary: "The damage is really enormous, I have been shown a newsreel of the destruction.

We can't get away from the fact that the English air-raids have increased in scope and importance; if they can be continued on these lines, they might conceivably have a demoralising effect on the population.

[8] In 1944 Eric Warburg, liaison officer between US Army Air Forces and RAF, and Swiss diplomat Carl Jacob Burckhardt, as president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, declared the Lübeck port a Red Cross port to supply (under the Geneva Convention) allied prisoners of war in German custody with ships under Swedish flag from Gothenburg, which protected the city from further Allied air strikes.

The mail and the food was brought to the POW camps all over Germany by truck under supervision of the Swedish Red Cross and its vice president Folke Bernadotte, who was in charge of the White Buses too.

A group of three Catholic clergymen, Johannes Prassek, Eduard Müller and Hermann Lange, and an Evangelical Lutheran pastor, Karl Friedrich Stellbrink, were arrested following the raid, tried by the People's Court in 1943 and sentenced to death by decapitation; all were beheaded on 10 November 1943, in the Hamburg prison at Holstenglacis.

Stellbrink had explained the raid next morning in his Palm Sunday sermon as a "trial by ordeal", which the Nazi authorities interpreted to be an attack on their system of government and as such undermined morale and aided the enemy.

The film, featuring the home front activities of a family in Lübeck, attempted to use the raid as moral justification for continued resistance against the Allies.

The memorial of the bombing of Lübeck is a statue by the sculptor Joseph Krautwald, who was commissioned in the 1960s to produce a work that reflected the experience of the victims.