Qualla: Bombing of Braunschweig (15 October 1944)

Bombing of Braunschweig (15 October 1944): Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Around five in the morning on 15 October 1944, with the centre of Braunschweig burning and some 23,000 people sealed into bunkers beneath it, a fire brigade lieutenant named Rudolf Prescher proposed making it rain. The idea was a long hose punched full of holes and laid through the fire, kept under constant spray so that the jets from each hole overlapped into an unbroken corridor of artificial rain — a Wassergasse, a water alley. The people in the shelters had two ways to die: suffocate as the fires above burned the oxygen out of the air, or walk into a firestorm. Prescher's crews took the hose in. By seven o'clock they had reached the bunkers. All 23,000 walked out.

Image: Public domain

Bombing of Braunschweig (15 October 1944): A Green Flare Over the Cathedral

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit USAAF, Public domain. The aircraft of No. 5 Group lifted off around eleven the previous night: 233 Lancasters, each carrying about six tonnes, with seven Mosquitos alongside. They ran south of the Ruhr, turned north near Paderborn and crossed Hanover. Behind them, an elaborate lie was being told to th...

Image: USAAF | Public domain

Bombing of Braunschweig (15 October 1944): A Firestorm Is a Design

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The raid was part of Operation Hurricane, ordered on 13 October to demonstrate to Germany the overwhelming superiority of the Allied air forces. Duisburg took the RAF's main effort of roughly a thousand bombers, Cologne the USAAF's twelve hundred. Braunschweig — around 150,000 pe...

Image: Public domain

Bombing of Braunschweig (15 October 1944): Ninety-Five of a Hundred and Four

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gauleitung der NSDAP, Public domain. By half past six the fire had organised itself. Superheated air rose off the burning quarter, cool air rushed in beneath it from every side, and the resulting winds were strong enough to pick up furniture and knock people down. About 150 hectares of the old town were alight. The ...

Image: Gauleitung der NSDAP | Public domain

Bombing of Braunschweig (15 October 1944): Who Was Not Let In

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit USAAF, Public domain. Braunschweig had unusually good shelters. The Braunschweig Armour, a bunker construction standard developed at the city's technical university, became a reference across the Reich, and the city was thick with reinforced Hochbunker. Its people were also practised: between 1939 and...

Image: USAAF | Public domain

Bombing of Braunschweig (15 October 1944): The Second Destruction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Brunswyk, CC BY-SA 3.0. More than ninety percent of the medieval core inside the Oker ring was gone; across the city as a whole, forty-two percent. Some 3,670,500 cubic metres of rubble had to be moved. Clearing began officially on 17 June 1946, and the city did not declare the job finished until 1963. ...

Image: User:Brunswyk | CC BY-SA 3.0