The three bombing on March 16., 17 and 18 should throw Barcelona to soil, but even in these three days Barcelona proved its steadfastness. Before the sirens gave alarm, the planes were over the city, let fall their bomb load and disappeared, before the anti aircraft batteries could fire. The Trimotor Junkers came at a height of 8000 meters from the sea. Far before the coast they turned off the motors and arrived gliding over the city. No noise announced them, only when the bombs exploded, people saw them, when they took off again to the east.
Three days every hour, every half hour, they were not many to come, often three of them, six at most, but the more frequently. They targeted mainly the popular workers quarters, where a sufficient air protection was not possible.
It was not important to hit strategic targets. In addition would have they down-push and dangers to suspend to have itself. That was not their job. Their job was: Mass murder of the population.
In the nearly two years of war experience the manufacturers of the bombs also have learned. The 1936 labels of Madrid and Guernica, the BWS 377 the DLG 336 and 450 A 161, the 49/69 BDF (all 50-Kilo-Bombs) and particularly the heavy 13 DLK and 14 RSK had proven their outstanding striking power, but among these solid bombs with electrical ignition there were too many dud. Additionally their production cost too much iron.
In the country of the «God, who made the iron grow,» iron had become scarce under the Hitler slavery. However the Chemical-Trust, IG Farben, had become the largest industrial enterprise of the country. And after the «united steel», Krupp, Mannesman, the Dresdner Bank, the steel plants of the Rhine the Junkers airplane and engine factories with 130 million Marks shared capital had conquered in the years 1936/38 the seventh position in the Trust-dominated wartime economy of Germany. Explosives and airplanes yield the highest profits.
The new bombs were thin-walled, but their explosive force was multiplied. They explode on impact. They made not so deep holes in the streets, but they kill persons in a distance of one hundred meters. They did not reach easily the cellars, but they destroyed completely the interior of a seven floor house, in which twenty families lived. They throw a car with three passengers off the road into the second floor of a house. They often killed persons only by the force, with which they struck them. A bomb, which hit a metro-station acces, into which many persons had escaped, killed more than 100 persons.
The shelters in Barcelona, created so far, yet were not enough for half of the inhabitants. In the
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