, Ballantine Books, New York: 1966, pp. 139-148:
That was the situation when, early on May 13th, the advance party of Lieutenant-General Hubicki's 9th Panzer Division rolled across the Moerdijk bridge to the cheers of the investing paratroops. Dordrecht was at last subdued, and in the evening the first tanks reached the southern end of the Maas bridges in Rotterdam.
III/IR 16 still held the crossing against all odds. The Willems bridge was now under heavy artillery fire. The Dutch even tried to reach it with gun-boats, but failed. German losses had been heavy, and Lieutenant Colonel von Choltitz was ordered to withdraw his sixty-man bridgehead of mixed infantrymen, sappers and paratroops under First Lieutenant Kerfin from the northern bank. But he failed utterly to reach them, for now not even a mouse could cross the bridge alive; either by day or night.
At 16.00 hours on May 13th two civilians began waving great white flags at the southern end of the Willem bridge. As the firing ceased, they advanced hesitantly. One was the vicar of Noorder Eiland—the island in the Maas occupied by the Germans—the other a merchant. Von Choltitz bade them take themselves to the Dutch city commandant and emphasised that only by capitulating could Rotterdam be saved from devastation. In the evening the emissaries returned,
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trembling with fear. Their own countrymen had informed them that their closely populated island would be flattened by artillery that very night. If, Colonel Scharroo had said, the German commander had any proposals to make, he should send officers. He did not treat with civilians.
Destiny then took its course. Undoubtedly the Rotterdam garrison could effectively bar any further German advance to the north. From the strictly military point of view there was no reason why it should yield.
Understandably the German high command could equally press for a swift conclusion of the operation. It wanted Holland "cleaned up" as soon as possible in order to free forces for the main thrust through Belgium into northern France. Furthermore the 18th Army, as it attacked Holland on May 13th, feared that British landings were imminent. Thus at 18.45 General von Kuechler gave the order "to break the resistance at Rotterdam by every means".
The tank attack across the Willems bridge was fixed for 15.30 hours on May 14th, and would be preceded by artillery fire and a pinpoint bombing raid on a limited area at the northern end to paralyse the enemy's power of defence.
Meanwhile, the supreme command of the forces at Rotterdam had passed from Lieutenant-General Student to the general commanding XXXIX Panzer Corps, Rudolf Schmid The latter was instructed by the 18th Army commander, von Kuechler, "to use all means to prevent unnecessary bloodshed amongst the Dutch population" Accordingly, in the evening of May 13th, Schmidt drew up a new demand for Dutch capitulation, and had it translated. Unless resistance was terminated without delay, he wrote to the city commandant, he would have to use all means to break it.
"That," he added, "could result in the complete destruction of the city. I beg you, as a man with a sense of responsibility to take the necessary steps to prevent this."
The fateful May 14, 1940, dawned. From now on hour, every minute, counted. At 10.40 the German emissaries, Captain Hoerst and First-Lieutenant Dr. Plutzar interpreter, crossed the Willems bridge with the letter.
they were taken to a command post, where they had to wait.
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Then," blindfolded, they were driven through the city by zigzag routes and finally fetched up in an underground vault. ' "We had a long and anguishing wait," said Dr. Plutzar, "well aware that precious time was ticking away."
At last, at 12.40, Colonel Scharroo received them. They at once informed him that only immediate capitulation could save the' city from heavy air bombardment.
But Scharroo felt he could not make the decision alone. He would have to get in touch with his supreme commander at The Hague. He told the Germans he would send over an emissary at 14.00 hours.
As soon as General Schmidt heard of this -offer—the last chance—he sent a signal by radio to Luftflotte 2: "Attack postponed owing to parley."
At 13.50 the Dutch emissary duly crossed the bridge. He was Captain Bakker, the commandant's adjutant. On the Maas island he was met by Lieutenant-Colonel von Choltitz. A despatch-rider went off to the Corps HQ of Major-General Schmidt, just a few hundred yards to the south. Besides him, Lieutenant-General Student of the Air-Landing Corps and Lieutenant General Hubicki of 9th Panzer Division were also waiting there to hear the city commandant's answer to the urgent capitulation demand of the morning. Did the Dutch realise the seriousness of the situation?
Choltitz, waiting with Bakker on the. bridge for the few minutes till Corps was advised, seized the opportunity once
more to emphasize the deadly danger with which Rotterdam was threatened. But the Dutch officer looked about him
sceptically. There was not a shot to be heard. After days of fighting there seemed to be a cease-fire suddenly. As for the German tanks, allegedly all ready to swarm over the bridges into the centre of the city, there was not a sign of them.
Perhaps they did not exist? Perhaps the Germans had hurled their imprecations "to save Rotterdam" just to hide their own weakness.
In dismay Choltitz, and soon afterwards the German generals , were forced to recognise the fact that the Dutch
commandant, Colonel Scharroo, saw no immediate necessity to surrender. He still held the major part of the city, with his
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forces outnumbering the invaders even south of the Maas, while the remnants of the German 22 (Airborne) Division still holding out under Graf Sponeck in the northern outskirts' with a few hundred men were no longer capable of launching any attack. Why then should he capitulate? In any case the Dutch supreme commander, General Winkelmann, had ordered him to answer the German demand evasively.
Captain Bakker had accordingly brought a letter for General Schmidt in which the Rotterdam commandant professed to have found an error of form in the German communication of the morning. It went on: "Before such a proposal can be seriously considered, it must carry your rank, name and signature. (Signed) P. Scharroo, Colonel commanding Rotterdam troops."
As General Schmidt glanced through this letter it was just 14.15. The Dutch emissary had no power of negotiation concerning the surrender. He was solely authorised to receive the German conditions.
But it was only at 14.15, too, that the Airborne Corps' signals section at Waalhaven succeeded, on the frequently interrupted wavelength, in getting through to 2 Air Division with the vital message: "Attack postponed owing to parley." At that very minute KG 54 under Colonel Lackner was over the German-Dutch frontier on its way to Rotterdam. Three quarters of an hour earlier its hundred He 111s had taken off from Delmenhorst, Hoya/Weser and Quakenbruch in order to be punctually over the target at the appointed zero hour of 15.00.
The previous evening a liaison officer of the Geschwader had flown to meet General Student in Rotterdam, and taken back with him exact details of the operation, above all a map on which the enemy resistance zones had been marked.
were indicated by a triangle at the northern end of the bridges. Only within this triangle was KG54 permitted drop its bombs.
Now, on his approach, Colonel Lackner in the leading aircraft had this map spread on his knees. Copies had been given to his Gruppen and squadron commanders. attack was confined to a strictly military target. The power-
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ful Dutch defence force to the north of the two bridges was to be immobilised by a short, sharp blow from the air, to enable the German troops to cross. Every bomber crew had further been instructed that on the north bank was also a small bridgehead of sixty Germans, whose lives must be safeguarded.
But there was one thing the crews did not know: that at this very moment surrender negotiations were coming to a head, and that pending their outcome the German army commander had cancelled the attack. Lackner only knew that such a possibility was on the cards.
"Just before take-off," he reported, "we received information from operations headquarters on the telephone that General Student had radioed that the Dutch had been called upon to surrender Rotterdam. On our approach we were to watch out for red Very lights on the Maas island. Should they appear we had orders to attack not Rotterdam, but the alternative target of two English divisions at Antwerp."
The question was: would they recognise the lights amongst all the haze and dust raised by five days of fighting?
Meanwhile General Schmidt was writing out in his own hand, point by point, the conditions of surrender that an
out-matched opponent could honourably accept. He concluded with the words: "I am compelled to negotiate swiftly,
and must therefore insist that your decision is in my hands within three hours, namely at 18.00 hours. Rotterdam South, 4.5.1940, 14.55 hours, (Signed) Schmidt."
Captain Bakker took the letter from him and returned at once to the city. Von Choltitz escorted him to the Willems bridge, and he hastened over it. Now it was exactly 15.00 hours--the time originally appointed for the air raid. "The
tension was appalling," wrote Choltitz. "Would Rotterdam surrender in time?" At that moment there came from the south the sound of any aero-engines. The bombers were on their way! Soldiers on the island loaded the Very pistols.
"Those of us on the spot," continued Choltitz, "could only hope that the necessary orders had been given, that the
144 THE LUFTWAFFE DIARIES
communications had not broken down, and that the high command knew what was happening."
But now the high command had no more control over the course of events. For half an hour, since it eventually got Schmidt's signal, Luftflotte 2 had been doing its best to contact KG 54 on the radio and recall it. The command directly responsible for it the "Air Corps for Special Purposes"—had also put out urgent recall messages. As soon as its chief of staff, Colonel Bassenge, received the vital signal in Bremen, he dashed into the signals office in person and rushed out the agreed code-word for the alternative target.
Unfortunately only the Geschwader's own operations room was keyed to the same frequency as the aircraft in the air, and before the orders had been received and handed on much time was lost. At Munster Luftflotte 2's operations officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Rieckhoff, leapt into a Messer-
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Schmitt 109 and raced to Rotterdam. He hoped literally to divert the attack in person.
Even this brave endeavour came too late. The Geschwader was already lined up on its target. The radio operators had already withdrawn their trailing aerials, thereby drastically affection reception. All attention was now directed to the attack.
There remained just one slender chance: the red Very lights.
Shortly before it reached the target the Geschwader, according to plan, divided into two columns. The left one, under I Gruppe's commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Otto Höhne, turned to approach the triangle from the south-west, while Lackner himself went straight on.
"Though there were no clouds in the sky," he reported, "it was unusually misty. Visibility was so bad that I took my column down to 2,300 feet to be sure of hitting the required target and not the Lieutenant 'Kerlin] and his sixty men, or the bridges themselves."
At 15.05 he crossed the Maas and reached the city's edge. The altitude was ideal for medium flak, and it duly came up. With the target ahead, no evasive action was possible. All eyes were fastened on the course of the river. In the middle of Rotterdam the New Maas makes a loop to the north, and just west of its vertex are the twin bridges. Even in the prevailing mist and smoke their straight lines were still discernible, as were the outlines of the Maas island.
Yet despite their concentrated attention, neither pilots nor observers spotted any of the red light signals. All they saw were the little red balls of the Dutch flak which came dancing up in strings to meet them. Rotterdam's fate was just
few seconds away—seconds during which Choltitz's men on the island fired Very lights by the dozen.
"My God! there's going to be a catastrophe," cried Schmidt. With Student he stood at a point where Stieltjes Straat forms a circus, watching the bombers as they passed slowly overhead, palpably seeking their target. Both generals seized Very pistols and fired vertically into the air. And still the men above saw nothing. All ground signals were swal-
146 THE LUFTWAFFE DIARIES
lowed up in the haze and drifting, smoke from burning houses and the oily black clouds rising up from the passenger steamer Straatendam, set on fire by artillery.
Then it was too late. The starboard column of KG 54 droned over the target and the 100- and 500-lb. bombs went whistling down. They struck precisely in the triangular zone, in the heart of the Old City. After that it was the turn of the port column, with Lieutenant-Colonel Höhne and the staff section at its head.
"Never again," he reported after the war, "did I fly an operation accompanied by such dramatic circumstances. Both my observer, prone in front of me manning the bomb sight, and the radio-operator seated behind knew the signal I would give in the event of the bombing being cancelled at the last moment."
From the south-westerly direction of his approach the target was easy to recognise. On the inter-corn. the observer counted out his measurements. Höhne concentrated solely on the island, scanning it for the possible "barrage of red Very lights". But he, too, saw nothing. Finally his observer called out: "I must let go the bombs now or they'll fall away from the target."
Höhne gave the word, then immediately caught his breath. Faintly, and just for a second or two, he had glimpsed "not a barrage but just two paltry little Very lights ascending". Turning round, he shouted to the radio-operator the code-word to turn back.
For his own machine it was too late. The automatic release had already functioned, and the bombs went down. The same thing happened aboard the section's other two planes close behind. But for 1 Squadron the short space interval sufficed. Before the bombardiers could set their levers the radio-operators gave the stop signal. They hesitated, turned questioningly around, then gazed down again on the city.
Everywhere they saw the flash of explosions. Clouds of debris spread over the houses, and columns of smoke rose upwards. Had the command section ahead not dropped its bombs? Why suddenly should they not do so? No, the orders
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were clear. The aircraft turned away. Höhne led his Gruppe to the south-west and its remaining bombs fell on the British.
So it was, that out of KG 54's hundred He 111s, only fifty-seven dropped their bomb-load over Rotterdam, the remaining 43 having been arrested from doing so at literally the last second. Subsequent enquiries elicited that, apart from Lieutenant-Colonel Höhne, not one man had spotted any of the Very lights that in fact had been sent up from the Maas island in an unbroken stream.
Altogether 158 500-lb. and 1,150 100-lb. bombs were dropped on the city—i.e., a total of ninety-seven tons. In accordance with the military nature of the mission, it was all high-explosive.
Yet the fact remains that the heart of Rotterdam was destroyed by fire. How could it have happened? High-explosive bombs—especially of the small size here used—were capable of destroying houses, tearing up streets, blowing off roofs and knocking down walls; and there is no question that the buildings hit were severely damaged. Such bombing can also start fires. With Rotterdam an international trading centre for oil and margarine products, they were likely to spread quickly. Fanned by the wind blowing towards the city, they ignited the old timbered houses. But could not the fire brigades have controlled them first?
The day after the raid a detachment of a German fire police regiment drove into Rotterdam with up-to-date fire engines. There was little left to save; the fire's fury had spent itself. The regiment's commander, Colonel Hans Rumpf, examined the causes of the catastrophe. His report brings to light one quite new detail:
"This world-wide trading city of almost a million inhabitants still retained, in the face of every modern development, the long out-moded principle of a citizen fire brigade. The backbone of this brigade consisted of a two-wheeled hand-operated contraption not unlike that invented by the painter Jan van der Heyden in 1672. Otherwise there were a small number of powered engines which, though without crews,
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could in case of need be driven to an incident, and a few pressure pumps mounted on tugboats. That was all."
Rumpf came to the conclusion that in an air raid such an out-dated firefighting organisation could not have helped at all. To which the Dutch would answer that it was perfectly adequate to cope with ordinary fires, and that they had never reckoned with the possibility of a heavy air raid on the centre of their city. Why should they? Was it not contrary to military law that a civil population should be attacked?
No law governing the air war of World War II, however, existed—an omission that was bitterly brought home to the statesmen concerned. The nearest approach to one was Article 25 of the Hague Convention of 1907 concerning surface warfare, which ran: "It is prohibited to attack or fire upon cities, villages, dwellings or buildings that have no means of defending themselves."
Inasmuch as Rotterdam was defended by every means, it was not covered by this Article. The German call to surrender—on pain of a heavy attack from the air—was, moreover, in accordance with Article 26, which prescribed that before fire is opened "the defenders shall be informed".
Finally, the suspicion has been voiced that Hitler or Goering deliberately ordered the raid in order to impress oh all their enemies the terror of the German war machine. Such a view is disproved by sober documentary evidence. This shows that the sole objective of the raid was the tactical one of capturing the key point needed for the country's occupation and of rescuing German soldiers, some of them hard-pressed, in the north and south of the city.
The real tragedy was that the raid took place while Rotterdam's surrender was being negotiated. The fact that, despite every endeavour, fewer than half the bombers were successfully recalled at the very last second, was on the German side a matter of deep and sincere regret.
It is clear to me that this bombing was not a war crime -- but was it "terrorism" to threaten to destroy the city of Rotterdam unless it surrendered?
, Ballantine Books, New York: 1966, p. 144.
, Wm. H. Wise & Co., New York: 1944, vol. I, p. 109. The large white area north of the Maas river, in the center of the photograph, shows the area which was destroyed in the bombing.
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