Violence of war

The hands of the charred clock face show shortly after 2 pm. About half an hour earlier, on 14 May 1940, the German Luftwaffe had begun bombing Rotterdam. The pocket watch, a family heirloom, belonged to Johannes Hagenbeek, a Rotterdam wine merchant. Along with the watch, his shop on Wijnstraat was also destroyed. The German attack devastated around 25,000 houses, including the entire medieval city centre. More than 800 civilians lost their lives.

It was not only in Rotterdam that German air raids claimed numerous civilian victims. Large parts of Warsaw, Coventry and Belgrade were also destroyed by bombing raids that intentionally targeted the civilian population. These attacks were part of a criminal warfare that deliberately erased the distinction between combatants and civilians and claimed millions of innocent victims – especially in Eastern Europe, where the Germans waged a ruthless “war of extermination”.