Hamburg - The Hospital
The military hospital in Hamburg is the main setting for much of Comrades Of War and is described quite clearly at one point when talking about the beloved sister Grethe.
Sister Grethe is still in the army hospital. For four years she nursed wounded Wehrmacht soldiers. Closed their glazed eyes, filled them with morphine when insanity hit them and caused them to howl savagely, slept with them when she felt like it, drank when her nerves rebelled. For a time she even used morphine herself. It gave relief.
For two years she nursed English soldiers. She shot hypodermic needles into them, bawled them out and otherwise carried on with them as she'd previously done with German soldiers.
The soldiers were followed by civilians. Strange and unheard of illnesses got to this hospital.
Red Cross sister Grethe became Krankenschwester. She wasn't interested in getting a ward. She gave her shots, emptied bedpans and changed sheets as usual. Once in a while she would meet an old patient - German, Norwegian, Danish, English; a Negro from the Congo, an Arab from Algiers; a Legionnaire from Indo-China shaking with fever. She would laugh on meeting them again. Drink with them in small cosy dives. More than once she had also hospitably shared her bed with them.
"We're human, after all," she said. "And it's later than you think."
Sister Grethe was a great nurse. Many looked down on her and jeered: "Immoral." But there were more who said: "A splendid girl."
If some day you go to the city on the Elbe, walk down to the Landungsbrücken. Looking up towards the Reeperbahn, you'll notice a well-hidden hospital to the left of Hafenkrankenhaus. It's a special hospital. There you'll find sister Grethe. If you're of the right sort, have a drink with her and greet her from the thousands of unknown men in green and khaki.
- Comrades Of War (Chapter 9, Bombs In The Night) |
From this description, including the reference "strange and unheard of illnesses got to this hospital" and the setting to the left of the main hospital as you look from the river towards the Reeperbahn, this is almost certainly a reference to the Bernhard-Nocht-Institut für Tropenmedizin. Their website says, "In the last years of the war, the clinical department was used mainly as a military hospital. The institute building was partly destroyed by bombs." It also includes a small picture of the hospital in 1945. Nowadays the front entrance looks like this:
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