GERMANY: Costly Clothing

Outside, it was bone cold. Inside, big stoves were stoked red-hot to warm the 800 dancers who whirled over the floor of Loebel’s Volksgaststatte, a rambling stucco dance hall and restaurant in Berlin’s British zone.

Flames suddenly flickered around one of the overheated stovepipes. In the screaming panic, a few of the dancers tried the windows. But the Wehrmacht had barred them during the war, when Loebel’s was a prison-camp storehouse. The lights went out. In a terrible burst of flame, the roof collapsed.

“For some reason,” said Corporal George Spencer, one of 40 British soldiers at the Saturday night fancy-dress ball, “most people seemed more concerned about their clothes than their lives. Almost everybody jammed into the entry way by the coat room, and there they piled up in front of the narrow door. Then the roof fell in.”

The Wehrmacht’s bars and the high value which Germans today put on their clothing cost 84 lives. Forty-four more were hospitalized, 20 were missing. It was Berlin’s worst peacetime fire disaster in 100 years.