February 8th, 1947, was supposed to be a night filled with celebration for the residents
of Spandau in Berlin, Germany. They were hopeful that normality was near
now that World War II was over. A party would kick off the carnival season in Berlin…
but sadly, calamity struck. A fire that broke out in the ceiling of the Karlslust dancehall
quickly turned into the worst fire disaster in post-war Germany.
What led to this devastating fire? A careful analysis revealed a set
of unfortunate events that all came together to culminate in tragedy.
Karlslust was the largest dancehall and restaurant in Spandau, a borough of Berlin
in the post-war British sector. The building was formerly a German jail for prisoners of war,
and it became famous for its legendary parties.
The former prison had been renovated by adding lower false plywood ceilings over the ugly roof.
This left a gap between the two ceilings where dust silently gathered.
The plywood was decorated with pretty paper, which was also highly flammable.
The highly anticipated Saturday night fancy dress ball would take place at the two-story building
owned by Julius Loebel and his family. Loebel secured permission for a lifted
curfew from the occupying British army, allowing partygoers the rare chance to stay out late.
The excitement buzzed around the town, especially after many years of the war.
The dance hall’s capacity was 700 people; however,
the party was so popular that 750 tickets were sold. In the end,
it’s estimated that more than 1,000 people were in attendance when the ball began at 8 p.m.
Winter in Berlin is bitterly cold and snowy; in fact, that night, the temperature was as low
as -25 Celsius, or -13 Fahrenheit. The dancehall was generally comfortably heated by iron potbelly
stoves. In preparation for the party, Loebel had moved in a third iron stove and placed it
in the center of one room, running the stovepipe up through the false ceiling. He surrounded it
with wooden chairs to keep partygoers from bumping into it and burning themselves.
Having successfully heated the hall with iron pot-belly stoves before,
it seemed as though nothing could go wrong. So, what changed?
As people arrived at the party, they checked in their coats at the closet by the entrance.
To the people of Berlin, coats were highly precious; without one, they risked freezing
to death, and due to the shortage of materials and funds, it wasn’t easy to purchase a new one.
After that, guests made their way through the small entryway into the main ballroom.
It had several doors and windows, but many windows had been bricked over due to the
building’s previous use as a prison. Those that remained were barred shut.
The ballroom’s back exit was frozen shut due to the cold weather and snow,
leaving only one entrance and exit, which was only about 130cm,
or about 4 feet of space. In other words, not a lot of room for 1,000 people to pass through.
Over half of the guests at the party were between 17 and 19 years old.
British soldiers were also in attendance. Everyone was having a wonderful time for the
first three hours of the party. While people were dancing in the ballroom,
the third iron stove added earlier was quietly heating the building. Its stove
pipe was mistakenly touching a truss holding up the roof, causing the wooden beam to smolder.
Eventually, the temperature in the dust-filled gap between the ceilings reached a tipping point,
igniting with no warning for the partygoers below.
A flash flame rolled through the space between the two ceilings. The fireball
sent debris flying, and beams and plywood caught alight in a scorching secondary fire.
At the same time, on the dance floor below, the lights went out. The music stopped immediately
as the room was plunged into darkness. The one thousand guests were confused for a brief moment,
stumbling over each other and unable to see.
Then the voice of a woman cried out, “Fire! Fire!”
Immediately, panic ensued. As the terrified people ran towards the entryway in the darkness,
the blaze began to light up the ballroom. The ceiling was engulfed in flames,
and burning decor along with plywood pieces were raining down upon everyone
in their dresses and suits as they tried to flee.
Within three minutes, the entire roof of the building was engulfed. The inside of the
building lacked ventilation. The smoke created from the burning decor was so thick that people
began passing out and dropping to the floor, causing others to trip over and trample them.
The situation turned from bad to worse as the one thousand guests crowded into the entryway.
Instead of running out the front door to the street, people stopped in the smoke and flames
to find their coats. It was so ingrained upon them to protect their coats to avoid
freezing to death that they couldn’t just leave them behind in the fire.
As people this happened, the musicians also fought to move their large instruments out the
door to safety. Drums and double basses were pushed past frantic partygoers in the chaos.
A bottleneck formed, completely blocking the only exit to the outside.
Guests in the back were smothered by smoke and ash, then trampled on the ground while
those in front continued searching for their coats, completely unaware of the magnitude.
A few miles away, an army intelligence officer in the American sector had just
returned to his room when he heard a cacophony of sounds outside.
The fire brigade was frantically attempting to warm the oil to start their fire trucks.
The intelligence officer’s phone rang,
and he was ordered to report to the Karlslust building as a translator.
Rescuers rushed to the fire scene, but the trucks were still forced to obey the rules
of yielding to British and American official vehicles. The fire brigade also knew they had
to follow their 40 km per hour {25 mph} sector speed limit no matter how big the blaze was.
The British Army arrived on the scene 15 minutes after the fire began. Anti-American
and British sentiments were high after Germany had just lost a war to them.
To add to the complications, most Germans didn’t speak any English,
and the British didn’t speak German. The language barrier was hampering rescue coordination.
The American Intelligence Officer was a German linguist,
but just as he arrived, British army firefighters were rushing into the building.
As they entered, the roof collapsed, trapping them and killing them instantly.
The local German fire brigade finally arrived with their trucks. The American Intelligence Officer
translated between the British Army and the German fire brigade as they struggled to fight the fire
together. The cold temperatures meant that fire hydrants were buried under a deep layer of snow
and ice. As they dug the hydrants out of the snow, they found that they were
frozen solid, unable to be used. Only one hydrant was functioning that night.
Frantically, the fire brigade set up their hoses only to find the deep snow
froze the water before it could be sprayed on the burning building.
Finally, they decided to set up chairs from a nearby garden.
They laid the firehose across to keep it out of the snow so that the water could flow.
Meanwhile, inside the burning dancehall, fatalities were rising.
Some of the guests, realizing they were trapped without access to the single exit,
had unsuccessfully tried to smash through the bricked-over windows. A few other terrified
attendees found another door, but it led down to the cellar. Trying to escape the
thick smoke and with nowhere else to go, they ran down into the damp basement and hid there.
Herr Loebel, having escaped in the first moments, made the desperate decision to run back into the
building to find his cashbox. Sadly, he never made it, succumbing to smoke inhalation in the chaos.
The American Intelligence Officer later told his family that the Karlslust fire was the worst thing
he’d ever seen. He was a hardened infantry officer from 1943 to 1945 and participated
in heavy combat in Europe. But, despite those experiences, he said the one thing
he could never forget was the screams of those who had made it out of the dancehall
but had loved ones still trapped inside that they couldn’t save.
As dawn slowly arrived the following morning,
the scene of devastation was overwhelming for the residents of Spandau.
Rescuers searched the steaming rubble for anyone left alive but instead found thick ash and parts
of badly burned bodies. Heartbreak turned to relief for some when rescuers reached the cellar.
The few people hidden there managed to survive under the collapsed building.
Newspaper, Der Spiegel, reported that 88 people were killed in the fire,
though they later reduced the number to 80. However, the exact death toll remains an estimate.
Whether the British officers who died in the roof collapse were counted in
the death total has also been debated. The Karlsust fire is considered the deadliest
fire disaster in Germany since the air raids during the second world war.
Additionally, 150 people were injured in the fire. At the time, penicillin in Berlin was rationed.
Medical supplies and antibiotics had to be gathered up and flown from the UK
while the badly burned victims waited for help in local hospitals.
Immediately following the fire, questions began to surface.
Why were police performing safety inspections instead of the fire brigade doing them?
Why were emergency services prohibited from operating in the manner needed?
And, what was to be done for people who lost ration or food coupon cards in the fire?
To answer these questions, it is essential to understand the condition of post-war Berlin.
The city of Berlin had been completely devastated by the time World War II came to an end. It had
suffered civilian deaths numbering as many as 25,000 from the end of war air raids. As a result,
most of the city’s fire brigade had been killed while trying to save citizens from
bombed buildings and the resulting fires. Life was a struggle for survival in Germany.
Many buildings had been destroyed in the Allied bombings during the final months of the war,
leaving a severe lack of infrastructure throughout Berlin.
The fire brigade was no exception. The surviving fire trucks were old.
Due to the freezing temperatures on the night of the fire, the oil in the truck’s
engines had to be heated before starting the trucks, taking ten minutes or more.
They didn’t have radios for communication. Instead, they relied solely on the city’s
phone lines to share information about fires and coordinate their responses.
This meant that residents had to know the phone number of the fire station
closest to their location or wait for an operator to find it and connect them.
The caller then had to hope someone at the station answered the phone.
There was no centralized number like 911 to call for help,
and no dispatch center existed. Firefighters from different stations couldn’t coordinate
unless they were next to a landline phone. So, if one station’s fire trucks were out on a run,
it wasn’t easily possible to request backup from a nearby fire station.
To add to that, rules had been set in place by the British army that seriously hampered
the efforts of emergency response vehicles. If a fire truck was driving down the street,
it had to yield to any official army vehicles, even when responding to a fire. Furthermore,
the firetrucks weren’t allowed to travel above 40 km/h, or 25 mph.
During the war, sirens weren’t allowed because they were easily confused with
the air raid siren, and their use hadn’t been approved again once the war ended.
These limitations, combined with the sometimes poor condition of roads in the war-ravaged city,
seriously hampered any emergency response times.
During the winter of that year, everyone worked hard to rebuild
the missing infrastructure in post-war Berlin.
Newly built and remodeled buildings were required to have safety inspections,
but with the city being rebuilt at the same time after the bombings, inspectors were overwhelmed.
Due to the devastation the fire brigade encountered at the end of the war,
the police routinely performed fire inspections rather than experienced firefighters. They had
approved the renovations and ceiling decor in the Karlslust building without knowing any better.
A lack of infrastructure in post-war Berlin and outdated rules regarding the fire trucks
directly led to the tragic fire. That was apparent to everyone involved in the rescue
efforts before an investigation of the fire’s cause even began.
Political parties across the city raised money to help care for the injured.
Berliners who had next to nothing chipped in what little they could for the victims.
The Spandau district government gave out more than 800 coats to replace the lost ones,
and ration cards were replaced, no questions asked.
Author, Lee Hutch, whose father was the American Intelligence Officer
brought in to translate that terrible night, later wrote,
“It is often tragedy that necessitates change, and this is yet one more sad example.”
The most significant changes came about from the British Military government.
German emergency vehicles were no longer forced to yield to official government vehicles. The
speed limit was abolished, and they were allowed to attach blue lights to the top of their trucks.
A universal phone number for firefighters was established for the first time in Germany,
allowing dispatchers to take the information and call the individual fire stations.
This made the citizens of Berlin safer and eased
some lingering resentment between the German citizens and their occupiers.
Today, a high-rise building occupies the space where the Karlslust was located, at 8 Hakenfelder
Street. It’s a quiet place that bears no evidence of the 1947 fire. Nearby, a memorial stone reads,
"In memory of those who perished in the fire disaster at the Karlslust Inn on 8 February 1947".