On April 1st, 1944, 38 aircraft from the 8th Air Force bomber squadrons dropped incendiary and explosive bombs on Schaffhausen. They were actually supposed to have hit Ludwigshafen near Mannheim and the local company IG Farben, a producer of chemical weapons. Due to bad weather conditions over the European mainland, navigational errors and insufficient map material, the two bomber groups were flying much too far south. Through a gap in the clouds over Schaffhausen they thought they recognized a southern German city and located an "opportune target". The devastating bombardment lasted 40 seconds and caused an inferno. After the bombing, the historic town center and the train station of Schaffhausen lay in ruins. In the heaviest attack during the Second World War on neutral Switzerland, 40 people died, hundreds were injured and over 400 were made homeless. For a long time it was unclear whether the Americans wanted to punish Switzerland with the attack because it had supplied industrial goods to Nazi Germany. Today it is claimed that this theory is not true and that the accident was caused by radar problems. Even if the attack happened by mistake, the misery and grief in the border town on the Rhine was enormous. Hans Bader lost both his parents in the bombing hail. At that time he was 13 years old. Even today he regularly visits the grave of his parents, who were buried with the other victims of the 1944 bombing. Bader has no grudge against the pilots of the planes or against the USA. In his eyes they remain liberators.
