The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

A few weeks before the “Immediate Program,” Hitler had also ordered the construction of six vast “Flak-towers” in Berlin. The extraordinary scale of the buildings appealed to his sense of the architecturally gigantic, like the plans for the rebuilding of the capital. Their solid design, modeled on a towered Gothic castle, was deliberately intended to express both grim defiance and grotesque physical power, a blend of function and ideology, “like a fantastic monstrosity,” one eyewitness wrote, “from a lost world, or another planet.”61 They were planned to provide not only enhanced antiaircraft fire but protection for up to 20,000 people, artworks, museum collections, essential defense services, hospitals, and a Gestapo office. Towering above the surrounding Berlin townscape, coated in green paint to make them less visible from the sky, the colossal towers were prestige buildings. Their cost in labor and resources was prodigious, the “Berlin-Zoo” tower consisting of almost 200,000 tons of concrete, stone, and gravel. The first was completed by April 1941, the second by October, and the third by the spring of 1942. Hitler approved two more tower sets to guard the port in Hamburg; one was finished by October 1942, a second just before Operation Gomorrah, in July 1943. Between them they could hold 30,000 people. Two more tower pairs were built in Vienna in 1943 and 1944, capable of holding not only the cultural treasures of the city, but at least 40,000 of its inhabitants. The ...