The Great Fire destroys Hamburg’s historic city centre
In the early hours of 5 May 1842, night watchmen saw flames coming from a house near the Nikolaifleet, a waterway not far from the Speicherstadt warehouse district in Hamburg. The fire brigade was summoned, but was unable to put out the fire, whilst the police forbade the creation of a fire break as they feared being sued for damages by angry residents whose homes they would have to pull down. A combination of drought conditions and strong south-easterly winds enabled the fire to spread rapidly until it had engulfed much of the medieval old town. It was only halted by the presence of the River Alster and the late decision to create a fire break.
Although 1,100 well-trained firefighters – many summoned from the surrounding area – equipped with the latest firefighting technology, battled the flames for four days and nights, the destruction was immense. More than a quarter of the city area – 1,700 houses, 100 warehouses and countless public buildings – was destroyed and some 20,000 of a total of approximately 140,000 Hamburgers were left homeless. 51 people lost their lives. This made the Hamburg fire one of the largest urban disasters caused by fire in Central Europe before the Second World War. It took many decades for the damage to be repaired.
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