The Valour and the Horror

INGE EINSPENNER:

That horrible night became the central event in the lives of the people of Hamburg. They have lived with the sense of incalculable loss ever since. V&H script

Inge Einspenner was 16, and she was right in the middle of the inferno. Like most residents of this city they find it very painful to stir up the memories of that night. But they agreed to meet with the Canadian bomber pilots to explain what it was like on the ground.

INGE EINSPENNER

It was at 12 o'clock p.m. It was daylight...From the fires. I saw people jump into the water because they were burning. When they came out, they were still burning, you know, it started all over again. Yah, I've seen many of them. I was so scared, I don't know where to go and what to do, you know.

..... because I've seen a child go on tar, you know what I mean, in the ground, and she was burning, you know, from phosphor, and from the tar, she was sticking in the tar, she couldn't move.

...in the road. And the mother, who wanted to help her, I've seen it, with my own eyes, the mother who would help her stuck too. She was sticking in the tar, she couldn't help her child. So it burned both of them. the mother, it started in the back, and the child started in the bottom. That's why she couldn't get her child. So both of them burned to death.

Because of area bombing, Harris was shunned after the war. He died bitter but unrepentant in 1984.