Dresden (34 page)

Such courage! To remain fearlessly in the safest place in the center of Dresden, and from there to rush to an even safer location outside the city—the network of bunkers housing the party leadership's bombproof HQ at Lockwitz, on Dresden's far southern outskirts.

 

WHILE THE HEART
of the city burned, parts had still been scarcely touched by the bombing, the outer suburbs especially. Other districts had been hit patchily, including the area south and southwest of the Altstadt, and the area to the east. Here there was some high-explosive damage, and fires had started, but the situation was comparable to that in an “average” bombed town.

The Johannstadt hospital complex was, after the Friedrichstadt hospital, the largest in Dresden. The Women's Clinic had grown out of a school for midwives toward the end of the eighteenth century, and now found itself in a large building between the Grosser Garten and the Elbe. It became a byword for excellence. The nearby Pediatric Clinic—the first in the world—was founded in the 1890s by a Jewish physician, Dr. Schlossmann, one of a group of doctors who had formed an association for children's health. After existing in temporary locations around Johannstadt for thirty years, in 1930, with government help, a purpose-built clinic came into being.

The clinic was thus only fifteen years old, built in a light, airy Bauhaus style and one of the most modern units of its kind in Europe. The final-stage alarm had led the medical authorities to start evacuating the patients, sick children (many with illnesses such as scarlet fever), and expectant or recently delivered mothers and their babies,
but owing to the unusually short interval between alarm and attack, few were brought to safety at this point.

The first wave of British bombers passed over. There was some damage from stray bombs, but the hospital buildings were not destroyed. Even when the attack seemed over, the doctors and nurses continued to evacuate all the mothers and children they could from the hospital. The babies were evacuated, it seems, mostly because of existing damage and the unhealthy environment created, and not because the authorities were frightened of another air attack.

The senior medical officer at the Rudolf Hess Clinic (a naturopathic establishment in the same complex) had offered his villa in the suburb of Blasewitz as a temporary refuge for endangered infants. As in the case of the Royal Warwickshire Hospital in Coventry, some of the mothers could not be moved. Where possible, they were transported down to the shelters beneath the hospital. The important thing was to save the babies, and that was done. Nurses did their best to wrap them warmly and protect them from drifting smoke, then loaded them onto trucks and set off on the journey.

Elsewhere in Dresden, especially in the only partly affected areas, those who emerged from the shelters did so mainly to check on their homes and belongings rather than to flee. Anita Kurz describes the scene in her family's apartment block:

Just a block away, Nora Lang and her family emerged to find things worse than at her friend's place.

Also in the same crowd on the Dürerplatz, after the first raid, was young Christoph Adam. His family's apartment was actually on the square. He was lucky too that his father, far from panicking, showed a capacity for improvisation.

What Christoph Adam saw were almost certainly houses set ablaze by canisters, filled not with phosphor—feared because it was rumored to stick to flesh and be impossible to extinguish—but with gasoline-based stick incendiaries. No phosphor-based bombs were loaded for the Dresden raids, as Allied records prove. Nevertheless, the sight of such sudden and uncontrollable burning unnerved them further. They became if anything more determined to leave their area and seek out a place of greater safety.

In this they followed the instructions of the air raid authorities. The Grosser Garten in the south and the Elbe water meadows to the north were the two places that had been officially designated as assembly areas, in case of people having to abandon their homes.

Rather than head north toward the Elbe, the Adam family decided to make their way south to the Grosser Garten. First, though, they decided to make a slight detour along the broad Dürerstrasse. Wider streets were less likely to be blocked by collapsed buildings. Walking due east, they came to another main street, the Fürstenstrasse (later Fetscherstrasse), which cut sharply south in the direction of the Grosser Garten. They tramped three hundred yards between burning buildings, until they reached the Fürstenplatz, about halfway to the Grosser Garten.

It was here, Christoph remembers, when they met the main Striesener Strasse, the major direct route east from the Altstadt, that “suddenly we were caught up in a whirlwind, a storm.” The firestorm was spreading out from its breeding place in the narrow streets and alleyways of the city center, reaching into the inner suburbs. The family, clinging together, struggled on.

How could they predict that things would get even worse?

 

HAVING SURVIVED
with his friend Siegfried in the air raid shelter on the Schumannstrasse, Günther Kannegiesser emerged to see that his own family's building seemed intact. On the other hand, there was smoke billowing from fires further up the Schumannstrasse, where Siegfried lived. Günther accompanied his friend there.

They ran upstairs to the family apartment on the fourth floor. An incendiary bomb had come through the ceiling and was burning inside a cupboard. Using water from the bathtub, which had been left filled in accordance with air raid instructions, the two boys had all but mastered the fire in the empty building when they noticed that smoke was creeping up the stairs. Just in time, they managed to find their way back down to street level. Another apartment in the building was on fire, and the blaze was spreading. The boys separated, Siegfried to look for his mother and Günther to check on his own family.

A few minutes later, Günther reached his home. The block was intact except for the blast-shattered windowpanes. His little sister and brother were still in the basement, but his mother was up in the apartment on the third floor, busily clearing a mess of broken glass. He noticed that it was now exactly twelve midnight. He began excitedly to tell his mother of his adventures, and how much of the city had already been destroyed.

Then the local air raid warden appeared. An officious type, he warned Günther about such loose talk and told him that, instead of spreading rumors, he should be off helping to put out fires. Günther said a half-reluctant, half-eager farewell to his mother and dashed off to the headquarters of Police District Four. There he was told simply to help wherever he could.

The boy guided his column of women and children east along the Dürerstrasse to the junction with Fürstenstrasse. But instead of turning south, as young Christoph Adam and his family had done an hour or so earlier, Günther led the way north toward the Elbe. The Johannstadt hospital complex lay between here and the river.

 

BY 11 O'CLOCK
the Altstadt was burning so extensively that the blaze was too much for the city force of a thousand firefighters. Auxiliaries and suburban units had quickly reinforced them, and fire trucks were starting to come in from other towns—eventually even from Berlin, almost a hundred miles to the north. It made no difference. As midnight approached, the firestorm had the heart of Dresden in its fierce, pitiless grip, and there was very little that anyone could do about it.

Gerhard Kühnemund, a fifteen-year-old from Leipzig, was staying with an aunt in the Serrestrasse, close to the densely built center of
Dresden, on the night of February 13. Typically for a Dresdener, his aunt did not treat the alarm too seriously. They were just in the process of leaving her apartment when the first bombs struck, rocking the building and blowing out many of the windows. They joined the rest of the neighborhood in a suddenly panic-stricken rush to the shelter. Once down there, the teenager realized that apart from one elderly man, the only other male adult present was a much-decorated young Luftwaffe sergeant. They had not been there long when neighbors pushed their way through from the cellar of the next building, screaming that everyone should leave. The entire Serrestrasse was on fire.

The Luftwaffe sergeant turned to Gerhard, indicated the Hitler Youth uniform he was wearing, and asked him if he was “a man.” To which the boy answered, “Of course.” They stormed up to the attic, where they tried to put out two incendiary bombs with water and sand. Suddenly one of the bombs blew up—it had been booby-trapped with an explosive charge in its weighted nose. The sergeant clutched his stomach. A splinter had torn out part of his stomach wall. The boy suffered a cut to his shin, which sent blood pouring down into his shoe. The sergeant recovered quickly, however. He shouted to his companion: “Let this rubbish burn.” Stumbling toward the stairs, the boy glanced out of the attic window and was appalled.

Seventeenth-century laws forbidding the construction of half-timbered (
Fachwerk
) houses in Dresden meant that it was a city of sandstone and brick. But whatever impression their Baroque facades might have given, the frames around which the blocks that crowded the
streets and alleys of the city's heart had been built were of centuries-old, dry wood. So were the floors, the panelled walls of their rooms and much of the heavy traditional furniture that filled them.

Once the incendiaries tumbled through into the lofts and garrets of the Dresden Altstadt, and—just as importantly—were allowed to burn unchecked while the inhabitants cowered in their basements and shelters, the scene was set for a conflagration of the same ferocity unleashed in the relatively modern tenements of Hamburg-Billwärder on July 28, 1943, and in the genuinely medieval hearts of Darmstadt and Kassel the previous year.

In the suburbs, it was different. The villa of Hannelore Kuhn's family in the Südvorstadt, for instance, was in one of the more lightly bombed areas, and their preparations had been thorough.