Introduction

‘In many accounts and stories, the memory of the night of horror lives on,’ observed the author of an article that the Hessische Nachrichten published on 21 October 1950 in order to mark the seventh anniversary of the big air raid on Kassel. The piece was called ‘22 October 1943 – From the Secret Report of the Chief of Police’. It made available to the local public excerpts from the confidential experience report that had been compiled by the chief of police in December 1943. Although the journalist contended that the document contained ‘comprehensive statistical material’ that offered a broadly reliable picture of the extent of the catastrophe, he expressed severe reservations about the number of casualties that the report mentioned. He argued that the chief of police must have had an interest in downplaying the deaths. Instead he proposed to accept a figure that lay somewhere in between the official death toll of 5,830 and the rumoured figure of 70,000–80,000. When, three years later, the article was reprinted in the SPD weekly, Hessischer Sonntag, the editors inserted an annotation that went further in privileging the ‘subjective truth’ of personal memory over the documentary evidence. ‘Nobody who has lived through the destruction of the old town is willing to believe those figures,’ they averred emphatically.