Dresden (18 page)

What happened at Peshtigo by accident, by a freak of nature, was a firestorm. This phenomenon arises when such an intense heat is created—eight hundred, nine hundred, a thousand degrees—that hot air's natural tendency to rise sucks all the oxygen out of the air at ground level. So there exists at some height above the ground a pillar of flame, but beneath this a vacuum that, searching for oxygen to fill it, rushes horizontally along the ground, enveloping everything in its
path. There can be a moment of stillness before the storm arrives, as before a natural tornado. Then comes a rush of searing air that roasts the lungs, leaving the few survivors with only poisonous carbon monoxide to breathe. At Peshtigo, when bodies were found, there were often “no visible marks of fire near by, with not a trace of burning upon their bodies or clothing.”

There had been several weeks of hot, dry weather all over the Great Lakes states during that fatal autumn of 1871. Seventy-two years later and three thousand miles away, at the end of July 1943, Hamburg was suffering from a heat wave of similar proportions. Daytime temperatures had reached 27 degrees Celsius (over 80 degrees Fahrenheit).

On Tuesday night, July 27, 1943, a total of 787 aircraft took off from Bomber Command bases in eastern England. This was the second in a sequence of raids aimed at Germany's second largest city, the port of Hamburg. The RAF had first attacked on July 24 by night, the Americans twice by day, without spectacular success. With almost two million inhabitants, the largest of the medieval Hanseatic ports was an important center for shipbuilding and U-boat construction, manufacturing, and the merchant marine. It was heavily defended.

What would provide the Hamburg-bound bomber fleet with protection, though, was something quite novel and sensational: a recently invented device—first used just days previously in the first RAF attack—whose purpose was to throw the German radar defenses into total confusion. Its name was window.

More than two thousand strips of tinfoil fluttered to the ground from the first of the aircraft that had been loaded with window. Each bundle of metal fragments created an echo that, to the German radar stations, was indistinguishable from that of a British bomber. Since the rate of fall was slow, it continued to give that impression for fifteen minutes. Every bomber in the stream was trained to drop one bundle, every minute, until it reached that point on the return trip.

Window caused complete chaos for the German defenses. The German night-fighter defense system had groups of aircraft, each assigned an area or “box” to patrol, of which the most westerly ones, where first contact with the RAF could be expected, were the most crucial. The Würzburg stations that guided the night fighters suddenly “saw” literally thousands of “enemy aircraft,” and initially sent
the fighters chasing all over the sky. A Luftwaffe control officer described the chaos: “It was just like trying to find a glass marble in a barrel of peas.” The on-board radar in the German fighters was also susceptible, again leading to utter confusion. “With one stroke, the whole defense was blinded!” declared General Walter Kammhuber, the commander of the German air defenses in the west.

Later the Germans would learn how to cope with the worst effects of window, but not yet. On that night the bombers still faced a severely disadvantaged enemy.

The RAF planners' idea on the night of July 27 was to exploit this situation by saturation-bombing Hamburg. With almost eight hundred aircraft involved, for the time this was a very big raid. Five group captains and two air commodores traveled as passengers to check the exciting effects of window.

A total of 2,326 tons of bombs, a high proportion of them incendiaries, was dropped on Hamburg. The main concentration was in the working-class areas of Billwärder, Borgfelde, and Hamm, which had cheaply constructed tenements lining dense, narrow streets, with few parks or open spaces. The district was actually attacked in error—the planned aiming point was about two miles away—but it was also, in many terrible ways, the perfect environment for what happened next. That night, the word “firestorm” appears in the records of the Hamburg Fire Department.

With small incendiaries raining down in their thousands and lodging inside roof spaces, and the smaller quantities of big thirty-pound “phosphor” bombs penetrating several stories to start fires inside the buildings, blazes had soon started all over the area. The bulk of the Hamburg Fire Department, meanwhile, had been concentrating on dealing with the last of the fires from the night of Saturday to Sunday, on the far side of the city. Those emergency teams that did try to reach the more recently affected districts were inhibited by craters and rubble blocking the approach roads—as had happened in Coventry almost three years before.

The big blast bombs mixed in with the incendiaries shattered walls, blew out countless doors and windows, creating drafts that fed the fires inside the buildings. The resulting updraft further caused burning sparks and debris to float over and scatter over wide areas of the neighboring parts of the city, starting fires there also. Within
twenty minutes there was a massive conflagration a square mile in extent, centered on a blazing sawmill and timber yard. By 3
A.M
. sixteen thousand apartment houses were reckoned to be on fire, along more than 130 miles of close-packed narrow streets. Trees were torn from their roots by the air rushing in to fill the vacuum over the center of the blaze, and people were blown off their feet and pulled into the flames by the same invisible force.

Like the Peshtigo fire, the great firestorm of Hamburg, on the night of July 27–28, 1943, did not only burn and char its victims. Thousands died in basement shelters from carbon monoxide poisoning. They were found perfectly preserved and still in the attitude of death, turned cherry pink by the gas but otherwise seemingly unharmed. It was two days before some of the worst hit streets had cooled down sufficiently for the rescue teams to go in to recover what remained of the victims.

At the heart of the apocalyptic fire there were no survivors found, none at all.

Four mass graves were excavated in the Ohlsdorf cemetery, on the outskirts of Hamburg, each containing up to ten thousand bodies. The postwar United States Strategic Bombing Survey conceded that the estimate of forty thousand victims might still not do the carnage of Hamburg justice. This was the worst of Douhet and Trenchard's imaginings made burning flesh. By the morning after the raid, tens of thousands had begun to flee the city, carrying what essential belongings they could, some still in their nightclothes. The authorities set up evacuation points at assembly areas such as the racecourses.

Albert Speer, Hitler's war production chief and personal architect, wrote that “Hamburg had put the fear of God in me.” He recalls informing Hitler that “a series of attacks of this sort, extended to six more major cities, would bring Germany's armaments production to a total halt.”

Goebbels, who since October 1942 had also been charged by Hitler with arranging “aid measures arising from war damage,” reacted quickly to the Hamburg disaster. He was immediately in telephone contact with the Gauleiter of Hamburg, Kaufmann:

Goebbels was so affected by Hamburg that, in a rare loss of nerve, he ordered the partial evacuation of Berlin, in case the British now turned their attention to the capital. He and the other Gauleiters had to spend the rest of the summer damping down the panic that resulted. From now on he had a twin aim in his propaganda: to label the Anglo-Americans as barbarians, but at the same time to minimize the morale effect on the German public of such increasingly frequent and severe devastation. It was a perilous tightrope walk even for the wily propaganda minister, and to keep his balance he wielded a balancing pole crafted from the very finest lies.

But the triumphant Harris could not press home his advantage by bombing other German cities, as Speer feared. For political reasons—Mussolini had fallen and the British government was trying to tip the Italians into surrender—the next night, Bomber Command was ordered to attack big-city targets in northern Italy. That raid was then canceled, but for the next two nights there was bad weather over both England and Germany, and the moment was lost.

After the huge, seemingly low-cost destruction of the firestorm night, Bomber Command had become fallible once more. Situation normal.

Dresden, a long way off, in an area as yet untroubled by air raids, had already begun to take refugees from the Ruhr and Rhine. Now came Hamburg—at least some of the evacuees ended up in Saxony. Dresden, beautiful and undamaged, only occasionally disturbed by air raid warnings, must have felt like a paradise to such people, who had become bomb damaged in body and mind.

The refugees carried with them to Saxony, at the same time, the bacillus of fear. But for the moment, the “cultural city” of Dresden seemed like a sanctuary. A sanctuary about to become crowded with pilgrims.

ALMOST A YEAR
after the beginning of the Second World War, the first air raid warning sounded in Dresden.

The sirens began to wail at 2:15
A. M
. during the night of August 28–29, 1940. The all-clear was given forty-five minutes later. There would be another eleven warnings in the city before the end of the year, mostly because of British night raids on Berlin, a hundred miles to the north. On October 20 at around 10:45
P. M
., three high-explosive bombs actually fell in a field at Bühlau, just southeast of the city, as the Gauleiter's headquarters in Dresden reported. They left two craters, eight meters across by two meters deep, and a hole that was thought to contain an unexploded bomb.

In the months to come, leaflet drops and the occasional stray stick of bombs disturbed the peace of the nearby Saxon countryside, but none fell within the Dresden city limits. In the all of 1941, there were seven air raid warnings. In 1942, four. For most Dresdeners, the war must have seemed a long way away. And all the news seemed good. Victory imminent in Stalingrad. Rommel surely about to take Cairo. Admittedly, there were the occasional funereal-bordered newspaper notices—more frequent after the summer of 1941—that carried a black Iron Cross, a message from a Dresden family, and the formula “a hero's death” or “fallen for the Fatherland.”

The otherwise cheerful advertisement section of
Der Freiheitskampf
on September 30, 1942, carried job offers by the dozen. There were lists of what was playing at the theater and the cinemas, which numbered almost fifty. The clown Charly Rivels was appearing at the Circus Sarrasani. “Dance amusements” (
Tanzlustbarkeiten
) had been banned
since April 1941; otherwise, these pages didn't feel as if they belonged to a city at war, in a country beginning to bleed to death on the eastern front. But many of the employment advertisements sought women to do traditionally male tasks—from draftspeople to dentists, laboratory assistants to butchers. And all but three of the thirteen lonely-hearts requests were from women for men.

At this time, in Dresden, almost no special precautions had been taken in case of air raids. Citizens were encouraged to keep buckets of sand and water at hand to deal with fires. Cellars and basements were fitted out, by the obedient or the careful, with emergency supplies and gas-proof doors. In factories and schools, there were the usual demonstrations of what to do in an air raid and how to extinguish an incendiary bomb, and of course there were fire alarms. Many public buildings had cellars or stores converted into shelters, though rarely were the kinds of modifications and additions undertaken that would have provided real protection. Dresden had been excluded from the Führer-Order of October 1940 (following the British air raids on Berlin), which decreed that eighty-one German towns and cities would begin the construction of certifiably bombproof shelters with immediate effect. In central Germany, Leipzig, Halle, and the nearby Leuna hydrogenation (synthetic oil) plant had been the main beneficiaries of this centrally directed building program.

The big Zeiss-Ikon complex, by this time employing over ten thousand workers in Dresden on war contracts, contained the only large private buildings to be properly secured. The Goehle-Works in the Grossenhainer Strasse, on the northern edge of the city (later notorious for its use of forced labor), had a bunkerlike appearance and was supplied with sloping slats over its windows, designed to ward off incendiary bombs. The Ernemann factory, also a Zeiss-Ikon plant, had its central stairwell and the landings on each story reinforced to withstand the impact of a thousand-pound bomb. These were factories that had been constructed since the early 1930s, when a law had been promulgated making it compulsory for all new buildings to comply with air raid regulations. Such precautions were rare, except in new factories and housing developments.

One exception was the state-of-the-art air raid shelter built beneath the Bramsch distillery in the Friedrichstadt industrial area,
complete with strengthening girders, gas filters, sealed doors and windows, and emergency exits. Dresdeners smiled incredulously when given the tour by the manager responsible, Dr. Bergander. This was air raid security gone crazy! Why would anyone ever need such a thing?

Meanwhile, from 1942 onward, the RAF had exacted a severe toll on western Germany. In March 1943 began the Battle of the Ruhr, when the RAF eventually began to cause some real damage to the industrial heartlands of the Reich. Essen, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, and the rest were battered relentlessly for the next four months. To Gee was soon added Oboe, which allowed basic blind bombing in poor visibility. Since its transmitter stations were limited in number, and it could therefore handle only a few aircraft at a time, it was fitted only to Pathfinder planes, which used it to mark the target for the following bomber fleet.

A little later came H2S, a radar set that, by registering varying echoes on a cathode-ray screen known as a “Plan Position Indicator,” enabled first Pathfinders and then bombers in general to make out the rough shape of the town or below even through cloud. The technology, perfect for following the outlines of coastlines, had at first been confined to Coastal Command, but its adaptation and transfer to Bomber Command began early in 1943, boosted by the confident assertion that “the accuracy of bombing with H2S in blind conditions will produce a concentration of bombs about the aiming-point comparable with the best results that can be achieved at present by crews in perfect visibility.” By this time Air Marshal Harris also had almost sixty squadrons fully operational, more than half of them equipped with the new Lancaster heavy bomber, which could fly fast and high and carry more bombs than any previous aircraft in the service of Bomber Command. Soon the Eighth U. S. Army Air Force would be joining them, and daylight raids would once more begin.

The development of the advanced British “heavies” (as the big long-distance bombers were called) should have been a warning signal to eastern Germany that the area was no longer beyond the RAF's normal bombing range. But through most of 1943 the Rhine and Ruhr areas (plus, notoriously, Hamburg) had been on the receiving end of Bomber Command's growing offensive power. Increasing numbers of women and children, evacuated from Düsseldorf and Dortmund,
Krefeld and Cologne, were sent to Saxony, including Dresden, for temporary resettlement. The locals wondered at these tough survivors of Allied bombing and their hair-raising stories, their cynicism and defiance. Soon Saxony came to be known as “the Reich's air raid shelter” (
Reichsluftschutzkeller
), partly because of its role as an evacuation area, and partly because the local population thought itself safe.

Without clear instructions from Berlin, the air raid protection situation in Dresden depended on the local authorities. Even after major Allied air raids elsewhere in Saxony (at the end of 1943), little progress was made in improving provision for the general public. A Construction Office for Air Raid Protection was established, but with increasingly scarce concrete, steel, and labor already earmarked for larger military projects elsewhere in the Reich, it was by now much too late to start major works in Dresden.

It was a matter of public scandal, meanwhile, that the really solid, technically advanced air raid protection in Dresden was available only to those in official positions. The “Local Air Raid Leadership of the NSDAP” shared with the office of the chief of police a reinforced bunker two stories under the surface of Albertinum, the massive neo-classical building on the Brühl Terrace that housed what had been the royal archives and art galleries. The deeply dug, well-constructed “command posts” of the
Gauleitung,
at the Lockwitzgrund, on the far southeastern edge of the city, and of the police and SS leadership at the Mordgrundbrücke, in woods on the north bank of Elbe just a brief drive from the city center, could at least justify themselves in terms of their official function.

When, in the middle of 1943, Gauleiter Mutschmann had a secure bunker constructed in the garden of his villa in the Comeniusstrasse (close to the Grosser Garten and confiscated from a Jewish businessman), he employed SS engineers from the Dresden garrison. The SS commander in the city was moved to protest to no less a person than Reichsführer Himmler:

Nor would it have been unknown to many Dresdeners that in the Ruhr, Hamburg, and Berlin, experience had proved that the safest places to take refuge were the big, government-built bunkers, which could hold hundreds or even thousands of civilians. After all, plenty of survivors from the air raids on these places were now living among them in Dresden as refugees, and one had only to ask.

 

THE ACCOMMODATION
of thousands of refugees, many of them children, from the heavily bombed areas was the responsibility of Gauleiter Mutschmann, and a highly problematic one. In early July 1943 he circulated a secret instruction to the burgomasters of the major Saxon cities ordering them to organize the enrollment of schools and entire classes (with teachers) composed of evacuees from the west.

The aim in “importing” the school groups whole was both to provide a familiar environment for the new arrivals and to make supervision through the Hitler Youth and other state organizations easier. With many school buildings already being used for military or industrial purposes, the result was vastly increased school rolls with even less accommodation. The average new intake into the school system in Dresden in 1940 was fifty-five hundred; in 1943 it was eighty-five hundred to nine thousand. Many schools were already running double shifts for their students. A worthy “Law for the Protection of School-Aged Youth” of January 1943, which provided for all children to take refuge in school shelters in case of air raids, was in fact bound to be ineffective from the outset. By 1943 almost all the schools in Dresden were devoted to the military or war-related uses, whether as stores, offices, or accommodation. This made the provision of adequate teaching space, let alone easily accessible air raid protection, difficult or impossible.

As the year went on, the children from the west were joined by similar arrivals from Hamburg and Bremen. The children were often with their school classes rather than their families. At Christmas, rather than visit their home cities, for safety reasons they would stay in their accommodation in Dresden and make toys and Christmas decorations. The older pupils took part in the Hitler Youth's war work, delivering mail and so on, to free up adults for the military and for industry.

By the end of 1943 Dresden considered itself full. It could take no more children from outside.

 

IN THE SMALL HOURS
of December 4, 1943, the industrial and mercantile city of Leipzig, famous since the Middle Ages for its musicians and its trade fairs, and more recently as the center of German language book printing and publishing, was bombed by the RAF.

There had been a raid on Leipzig in October, of modest extent and even more modest effect, aimed at the Erla factories in the city (which made one in three of the Luftwaffe's Me 109 fighters), but the December attack was, as everyone immediately realized, something else. In sixteen minutes 432 Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Mosquitoes dropped a mass of air mines and high-explosive bombs, plus 313 large and 12,550 small incendiary canisters, and just over 280,000 standard four-pound incendiaries. This was a major firebombing raid.

At first the number of dead had been estimated at the incredibly low figure of ninety-five, but by February 1944, when the clearing of the rubble and the searching of the cellars was completed, almost two thousand of Leipzig's civilians were registered killed or missing and four thousand injured. What was worrying about the attack were two things: the complete insufficiency of the fire-fighting measures, and the firestorm effect—limited but chillingly clear to those who knew how to judge such things—that Bomber Command was able to unleash that night.

The great Hamburg firestorm of July 1943 had shown Harris's planners what could be done if everything went “right,” and from then on, his planners were eager to promote other firestorms wherever possible. On October 22, 1943, another firestorm occurred in Kassel, a much smaller city of around a quarter-million inhabitants. A stream of bombers almost a hundred miles long dropped more than four hundred thousand incendiary devices, mainly on the historic center. As in Hamburg, high-explosive bombs and mines blew open doorways and shattered windows to feed the draft.

Forty-five minutes after the first bombs had fallen on Kassel, the firestorm had already reached its climax. Ten thousand civilians died, including one in ten of the inhabitants of the Altstadt and 4.2 percent of the city's total population (Hamburg lost 2.73 percent). The
weather was not hot, as it had been in Hamburg, but conditions were dry, and the thousand-year-old city's streets were narrow and many buildings half-timbered. The nearest good-sized city was almost a hundred miles from Kassel, so no substantial fire-fighting help was available until the fires had long raged out of control.

Leipzig did not lack outside help, for such assistance was quickly at hand. The problem was that the hoses of the neighboring fire brigades that rushed to the city's aid needed adaptors to fit the local fire hydrants. These were supposed to be available at each police station, but none could be found. The outside fire-fighting teams were forced to stand by helplessly as buildings burned, house fronts collapsed, and attic fires (the curse of incendiary attacks) spread laterally from house to house.