“In the summer of 1952 we had flown to Europe for the first time with ten-month-old Jeremy and had brought baby food and disposable diapers with us for the entire six weeks…. On the day of our arrival in Hamburg we learned that a memorial for the civilian victims of the major attacks on Hamburg was to be inaugurated the next afternoon in the Ohlsdorf cemetery. We were excited to see what we would hear there and were then pleasantly surprised. We took the tram through Barmbeck, which was still largely destroyed. Facades of five- and six-story houses loomed grotesquely into the air. The devastation in this former working-class district was much greater than in the more bourgeois district of Eppendorf, where almost no bombs had fallen. The intention to break the morale of the population was just as counterproductive in Hamburg as it was in London in 1940. The main speaker at the Ohlsdorfer Friedhof was the First Mayor of Hamburg, Max Brauer, who had been Mayor of Altona before 1933 and who had spent the Nazi years in exile after he was released from prison. He emphasized that the bombing of Hamburg was preceded by the destruction of Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry by the German air force, and referred to the expulsion and murder of Hamburg’s Jews. In 1943, when the bombs fell on Hamburg, most of the residents were powerless, but many were partly to blame for the continued existence of the Nazi regime. We did not expect such clear words. Afterwards we spoke to several people who all agreed with Brauer. The next morning I attended history class at a grammar school in St. Georg. The teacher I talked to for a long time, a student of the liberal Catholic historian Franz Schnabel, who was banned from writing and teaching during the Nazi era, made a very positive impression on me. It was different with the landlady in the pension where we lived, who wanted to know whether I would have been ready to fight against Germany and didn’t want to see that Germany had been wrong.”
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 142f (translation)