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Four nights later the British returned, and this time they drew blood: ten persons killed and twenty-nine wounded. Some of the bombs landed in the center of the city, close to the Gorlitzer railroad station. Mused Shirer: “I think the populace of Berlin is more affected by the fact that the British planes have been able to penetrate to the center of Berlin without trouble than they are by the first casualties. For the first time the war has been brought home to them. If the British keep this up, it will have a tremendous effect upon the morale of the people here.” It was not long before Berliners and other Germans began referring to Göring as “Marshal-Maier.”

Hoping to stiffen morale by inflaming hatred for the enemy, Goebbels ordered the papers to decry the “brutality” of the British pilots in attacking defenseless women and children. One paper even accused Churchill of ordering the RAF to “massacre the population of Berlin.”

While Churchill certainly had no objection to killing Berliners, the purpose of the Berlin raids, at least at the outset, was less to decimate the population than to take out some of the city’s vast array of military and strategic installations. Berlin, it must be remembered, was not just Germany’s administrative capital but also the nerve-center of its military-industrial complex. It housed almost one hundred barracks and depots as well as the headquarters of all the service branches. With its rail lines, airports, and canal system, it was the hub of the German communications network. It dominated the national electrical industry with its huge Siemens complex, its ten AEG plants, its Telefunken, Lorenz, and Bosch outlets, all of which made vital military components. The sprawling Alkett factory in Spandau produced self-propelled guns and half of the Wehrmacht’s field artillery. Borsig, one of Berlin’s pioneer industrial firms, made rolling stock, locomotives, and heavy artillery. A DWM (German Weapons and Munitions) factory in the northern district of Wittenau produced small arms, ammunition, and mortars. Tank chassis rolled off the assembly lines at the Auto-Union factories at Spandau and Halensee. BMW’s Berlin branch produced a variety of military vehicles, while Heinkel, Henschel, and Dornier made bombers, attack aircraft, and airplane components.

Fully aware of the capital’s crucial strategic significance, the Nazi regime went to great lengths to protect it. Fighter squadrons stationed around Berlin were ordered to intercept enemy planes before they reached the city. Because the flak installations that had been built at the outset of the war were deemed insufficient to cope with the threat of large-scale raids, orders went out in 1940 to erect better defenses. Over the course of the following year a new military-construction agency run by Albert Speer laid out batteries of flak and searchlights in a concentric pattern. The inner ring consisted of three of the largest flak bunkers ever constructed. One was near the Zoological Gardens, another in Humboldthain Park in the north, and another in Friedrichshain Park east of Alexanderplatz. The hulking structures looked for all the world like latter-day Crusader castles, with concrete walls 2.5 meters thick, window slits sheathed in steel, and towers bristling with 128-millimeter antiaircraft guns mounted in pairs. Beneath the roof level were smaller gun turrets housing multibarreled quick-firing “pompom guns” and 37-millimeter cannons for cutting down low-flying aircraft. No wonder British fliers came to regard attacks on Berlin as a nerve-wracking experience. As one Lancaster bombardier put it: “The run-up seemed endless, the minutes of flying ‘straight and level’ seemed like hours and every second I expected to be blown to pieces. I sweated with fear, and the perspiration seemed to freeze on my body.”

In addition to their role as flak platforms, the massive towers also served as airraid shelters and aid stations. All had their own water supplies, air-conditioning systems, generating plants, and hospitals. Each stored enough food to last its occupants for a full year. The Humboldthain tower had underground passages leading to the exceptionally deep Gesundbrunnen subway station, which likewise became a shelter. (Other subway stations and tunnels also served as shelters, but most of the Berlin lines were built so close to the surface that direct hits easily penetrated them.) The zoo tower, the largest of the three bunkers, devoted one entire level to the housing of some of Berlin’s most precious art treasures, including the loot Heinrich Schliemann had stolen from Troy.

The flak tower in the Tiergarten, photographed in 1945