Dresden (19 page)

Add to all this the fact that more than half of Leipzig's own fire brigades had been sent to help Berlin. There the Anglo-American air forces had been conducting a systematic campaign of destruction, which would continue into the spring of 1944. The long-planned upgrading of Leipzig's venerable water system had been repeatedly postponed, meaning that, even when the hoses could be connected to the mains, the water pressure was inadequate. It was a fiasco for which the authorities—and ultimately Gauleiter Mutschmann—were wholly responsible. Most of Leipzig's Altstadt was destroyed, plus wide areas of the inner suburbs, including many historic buildings, 80 percent of the Trade Fair Center (which had been converted into workshops and factories), and a great deal of the university complex.

With regard to Leipzig, an official report made grim reading:

These words were written three weeks later by someone who had happened to be in Leipzig at the time of the raid, but whose special
knowledge was by no means haphazardly acquired: Major General Hans Rumpf, inspector of fire-fighting forces at the main office of the Order Police in Berlin. He continued:

By Rumpf's expert calculations, each fire-fighting team of eight men was faced with eighty to one hundred fires—at least ten per fireman. Add to this the incompatible fire hydrants and the ancient water supply…

The actual scale of the raid's effects approached that of Kassel and Hamburg, but the death toll was much lower. The economic warfare officer for Leipzig, attached to the staff of Defense District IV (of which Gauleiter Mutschmann was the commissioner) found a reason why: The residents helped themselves.

In other words, the Leipzigers disobeyed the authorities, emerged from their shelters to fight the fires, and for the most part survived. Whether, just over a year later in Dresden, it might have been possible to save more buildings and property if this course had been followed can never be known for certain, but the Leipzig experience seemed to teach that it was best to leave the shelter as early as possible and explore the situation in the open. Both buildings and lives were saved as a result. In the street there was the danger of fire and falling masonry, but in the enclosed world of the cellars perhaps the even greater peril of being buried alive or
suffering the insidious effects of carbon monoxide poisoning. One thing was clear: to stay in the shelters substantially beyond the end of the raid may have seemed safer, but—counterintuitively—it was actually the most dangerous course of action.

There were many more raids against Leipzig in 1944. In the course of the war, the city suffered thirty-eight attacks, eleven of them major. Leipzig became one of the favored targets for “precision” bombing by the Eighth U. S. Army Air Force, especially against the Erla, ATG, and Junkers works. These plants employed thousands of workers directly producing aircraft and parts for the Luftwaffe, and attacks on them were therefore considered essential in the campaign to destroy as much of the German aircraft industry as possible and thereby undermine the Reich's air defenses. In this the Leipzigers were fortunate. Especially in cloudy conditions, where H2S was used, the practical results of the USAAF's precision bombing could be hard to distinguish from British area attacks, but at least the Americans did try to aim for the factories (which were in the suburbs), and their preferred mix was much lower in incendiaries than Bomber Command's. There is no doubt that civilian casualties from American attacks were much lower.

All the same, nothing that happened in Leipzig boded well for Dresden, its sister Saxon city.

 

DRESDEN AND LEIPZIG
were sixty miles apart, traditional rivals in the way that only two roughly equal-sized cities vying for prominence in a small country can be. At the beginning of the war, both were thought beyond the RAF's reach. Leipzig was the first to be proved wrong, and the shock was considerable.

Not that it should have come as a complete surprise. The RAF had been creeping farther east for the past few months. In Dresden, the number of air raid alarms rose to 52 during the course of 1943, an average of one each week, and would reach 151 in 1944—an alarm every other day.

During the latter part of 1943, in response to concerns about possible air raids on Saxony, the authorities in Dresden had been making confidential preparations for a mass evacuation of the city's children—its future human capital—to places of safety in the countryside.
Accommodation for individual school classes was arranged, teachers selected to take charge of the children when the time came, and plans made with the railway authorities regarding special trains. By late November everything was in place. “Highly confidential” information packages were sent out to head teachers all over the city. The plan remained strictly secret to avoid causing unnecessary panic. Mutschmann, in his role as governor, would make the final decision: “Probably the commencement of such an operation will come in question only after the occurrence of a major air attack.”

Two days after the head teachers received the information, Leipzig was hit by Air Marshal Harris's first eastern firestorm. On December 6, 1943, they were authorized to inform their staffs, though they were forbidden to refer to “evacuation.” The approved phrase was “country vacation.” The following day Mutschmann's office produced an “Address to Dresden Parents,” which was printed and sent to the school authorities, arriving on December 9. Its tone was characteristically bland:

With Christmas just around the corner and nerves on edge from reports of the raid on Leipzig, this mealymouthed official missive was not calculated to inspire a sense of enhanced security among Dresdeners. Nor did it. A series of new announcements and orders rapidly followed. Parents were assured that any move would be voluntary. “Transfers” would in any case take place only after the Christmas holidays. Head teachers were chided for not having “prepared” the parents sufficiently for this news. The Ministry of Education specifically forbade further mention of the new instruction in the press, so as not to stoke the potential panic up any higher.

Parents' meetings were held at Dresden schools on December 11 and 12, to give the authorities a chance to explain their position, and to encourage parents who could not make arrangements with friends or relatives in the countryside to sign their children up for the government-sponsored schemes.

Unfortunately, sign-ups remained disappointing. Only four thousand children were enrolled by their parents. Almost thirteen thousand other children were either already accommodated with relatives outside Dresden, or their parents planned to arrange this in the immediate future. That left 70 percent of Dresden's children still living in the city, and therefore under threat from an Allied air attack.

Clearly, parents and children were reluctant to be parted. In many cases, fathers were away fighting at the front. The situation was not helped by a further order stipulating that mothers could not travel with their children to their new homes to “settle them in.” The authorities cited shortage of accommodation, but the real reason was that they wanted to keep control of the children and minimize disruptive parental influences.

Anita Kurz, then twelve years old and an only child (“Yes, my parents were…perhaps fixated on me”), had her father at home, but only because he had been invalided out of the army in Poland after being kicked by a horse. A sales manager for a bank before the war, he now found it hard to hold down a job. Anita's mother kept the family together by working at a shop in the Schlossstrasse. They were a close little family to begin with, and the misfortunes of war had brought them even closer together. When they received the evacuation order, there was a family conference, Anita recalled:

On January 18 Gauleiter Mutschmann issued a new order, now attempting to put indirect pressure on the parents. “If children stay behind in the endangered urban areas at the express demand of the parents, they will not be entitled to schooling.” This order was delivered to parents, who had to register their receipt of it, and expressly give or refuse permission for their children to join their school friends on the “country vacation.” The increased pressure had little effect. February brought reports that many of the children already in the
country were unhappy, missing their parents and family life. The Gauleiter wrote a confidential circular to Saxony's burgomasters and district officials, warning them about the problem and encouraging them to do their best to enforce the program.

The struggle continued throughout the year. Parents showed amazing ingenuity. They would register their children as resident with relatives in the outer suburbs or even in the country, while the children would actually be coming into the school in the inner city as normal. Even when the authorities began closing down these schools and turning them over to the military for use as hospitals, convalescent homes, and antiaircraft installations, parents still would not send their children to the country, where schools were still open. The drift back into the city continued. A Nazi Party report from August 1944 noted with an element of resignation:

Nine days later, on August 24, 1944, a daylight American raid caused the first casualties within Dresden itself. Seventy-eight Flying Fortresses of the USAAF's 486th and 487th Bomber Groups attacked the town of Freital, southwest of the Dresden city limits, with bombs falling on Gittersee and in considerable quantities on the suburb of Alt-Coschütz, which was administratively part of Dresden.

The Rhenania Ossag hydrogenation works was the target, and 241 people died. Many fatalities were from the factory, which produced a special oil used in the Wehrmacht's tanks. One casualty was, according to a comrade's account, a British POW who worked at Rhenania Ossag. He was given a soldier's funeral at the English cemetery in Dresden, with German guards firing a salvo over the grave. These British POWs, billeted at a school in Freital, were also put on corpse recovery and burial detail. One of them, Robert Lee, commented that the “shelters” in the town were basically just dugouts, which collapsed inward at the slightest impact. The British, some of whom had been working in the town for years, were on familiar, even
friendly, terms with many of the victims, who were mainly adults but also included some children.

A police report from the nearby suburb of Gittersee noted gloomily: “Trust in the leadership is diminishing steadily.”

The Freital raid was the signal for a final push on the part of the authorities. More school meetings were called. The Ministry of Education resumed its pressure, drawing up lists according to which children who refused to leave the city or were known to have left and then returned would be compelled into “useful activity” through the medium of the Hitler Youth. Teachers were instructed to make home visits to recalcitrant families. The local Nazi Party machinery was drawn into the campaign. Ortsgruppenleiter (local group commanders) were encouraged to contribute to the new publicity drive. Then, on September 15, 1944, came a brusque communication from the National Socialist People's Welfare headquarters in Berlin, which changed everything. It informed the Dresden authorities that new definitions of “total war” (Goebbels's favorite phrase) meant that there were no longer financial or human resources to spare for the protection of the civilian population. Everything was to go into the war effort; civilians would have to fend for themselves.

So the story of the city's forlorn attempt to save its children ended in failure, due to the seemingly insoluble bonds between parents and children. Would it have been different if the “country vacation” plan had not been so thoroughly mismanaged?

A few hundred Dresden schoolchildren remained safely in the country, but later in 1944 thousands of refugee children began pouring in from the endangered eastern provinces of the Reich, seeking the deceptive security of the only major German city to remain pristine and undamaged.