Dresden (42 page)

What the British had not managed to do to Hannelore Kuhn's family home, the American bombers achieved within a matter of minutes. “We had this phosphor coming down the stairs toward me. We had no water or sand prepared anymore. I mean we had prepared buckets of sand everywhere for the previous night, but now we had nothing.”

The house had, in fact, probably been hit by an M-17 gasoline bomb canister. Having used up all the fire-fighting materials they had hitherto kept ready, and which had helped them save the house the previous night, the family were powerless. The fires quickly raged out of control and forced them and their guests to leave their home. Hannelore adds stoically, “So I got my bicycle, and we piled our air raid luggage on it, and we set off to a place where my parents had acquaintances who owned a little house. It was still standing. There we were able to stay.”

 

IN THE COURSE
of thirteen minutes, the 311 Flying Fortresses that had actually bombed Dresden (excluding the five that decided to divert to Brüx) had dropped almost 1,900 five-hundred-pound high-explosive bombs and 136,800 stick incendiary bombs on the city. The latter amounted to about two-thirds of the weight of incendiaries that had enabled the 235 Lancasters of 5 Group to start the firestorm in the course of the first British wave.

The report that followed collated the immediate impressions of damage from the aircrew:

Three-quarters of an hour after the Flying Fortresses began their return trip, a Mosquito from the RAF's 542nd Intelligence Squadron appeared over the still-smoking ruins and took 108 photographs that were evaluated at Medmenham on the aircraft's return. Evaluation Report K.3742, submitted on February 15, confirmed that the most serious damage done by the Americans had been in the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards and industrial area, west of the city center. Fires were “burning strongly.”

The armaments factories along the Hamburger Strasse (including Seidel and Naumann, which had been hit back in October 1944) were largely destroyed. There were many deaths among the foreign workers housed in the Bremer Strasse, a little farther north toward the Elbe. Apartment blocks and factories in this mixed area burned for hours. The area around the Bramsch Distillery was on the edge of this realm of destruction, as was the Friedrichstadt hospital complex, which suffered damage but was not as badly damaged as the hospital in Johannstadt. The damage also extended westward toward the
Alberthafen
river port.

South of this area were Löbtau, where Prince Ernst Heinrich's fiancée had lived, and the areas somewhat farther east where Günter Jäckel's party of wounded were awaiting evacuation, and the Südvorstadt, where the showers of American bombs proved too much
for Hannelore Kuhn's doughty defenders of the family property. The Altstadt marshaling yards, west of the Hauptbahnhof, were also bombed. There was, however, not much left of them after the RAF's visit the previous night.

“North of the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards” was where the American bombs found Nora Lang and her little brother. Having followed the stunned crowds swarming along the Elbe meadows, avoiding the still-burning Altstadt by crossing the river on the damaged but still-usable Albertbrücke Bridge. Nora was still carrying the family suitcase with one hand and holding on to her five-year-old brother with the other. The agreed family rendezvous point, in case they got separated, was their grandfather's little patch of land and weekend cabin at Wilschdorf, several miles northwest of Dresden. So they found their way around in a loop that brought them into the area just north of Friedrichstadt. At first this seemed like a blessing, for here not all houses had been destroyed, and there were some intact welfare facilities:

Fires spread from the nearby house. The children fled the basement shelter, leaving the belongings they had held on to so firmly all through the firestorm night. When the aircraft had gone, some soldiers went back into the shelter, to try to help them find their things, but inside everything was burning, precious suitcase and all. Almost too weary to feel more than the dullest sense of fear or loss, they salvaged what they could and pressed on.

The American midday raid was far less destructive than either of the British ones. Partly this was because it ended up smaller than
planned, owing to the absence of the three bomber groups that found their way to Prague; the fact that so much of Dresden's built-up area had already been destroyed; and finally, the unusual preponderance of incendiaries. A four-pound incendiary dropped amid rubble can do little more than strike and flare ineffectually, no matter the quantities.

The people of Dresden were by this point overwhelmed by the unpredictable violence being done to them from the air.

“The people who had been made homeless during the night, and who had fled into the western part of the city,” Götz Bergander observed, “really felt as if they were coming in for special persecution in the 14 February noon raid.”

Of course they were not—in fact, had the weather not gotten in the way of the original operational plan, the USAAF would have attacked Dresden at noon on February 13, hours
before
the RAF raid. The city would have been still intact, and the course and the effects of the U. S. raid (not to mention the British one) inevitably different. But when an area is subjected to intense attack, terrified individuals understandably take it personally. The sense that the enemy aircraft are “following” you, or have “picked you out” is a strong human instinct. First the British had bombed the Altstadt, then the Grosser Garten where so many escapers from that hell had gathered. Then came the Americans, going for the undamaged areas of the western suburbs. It was as if the enemy had anticipated the Dresdeners' every move, and then killed them like cattle cunningly driven into holding pens.

By noon on February 14, the people of Dresden had suffered three devastating air attacks in just over twelve hours. Each time, the enemy had dealt fresh destruction in that very spot where the survivors had thought themselves safe. Rumors, legends and distortions spread among a terrified populace.
*

 

AS THE SMOKY SKIES
faded into dusk at the end of Ash Wednesday, and the last American aircraft returned to its base, Dresden's destruction was becoming known to the outside world. At first it was just another news item. Another routine story breaking on a war-weary world where thousands of human beings still died violently every day.

ANITA KURZ
was discovered alive late on the afternoon of Ash Wednesday. Sixteen hours before, following the second British raid, she and her parents had tried to escape the city before realizing they were trapped by the firestorm. They had been forced to take shelter once more beneath their apartment house, despite the increasingly bad air in the communal cellar. A little later, the twelve-year-old had huddled down, her face buried in the folds of her water-dampened bathrobe. She felt terribly tired—a result of the carbon monoxide that, though she didn't know it, was starting to fill the room. Her parents were still desperately discussing alternative escape plans. “My father came to me as I lay there and I said, ‘Let me lie here'. And he said to Mother, ‘If Anita wants to stay here…' And Mother nodded and murmured: ‘Then let's stay here.'”

For Anita, now a grandmother, this remains her last, indelible memory of her own parents; that short, whispered conversation as she lay exhausted on the cellar floor. Soon after, she must have drifted into unconsciousness.

Anita's savior, a soldier, had come looking for his wife. He knew that she regularly used this same local shelter. The soldier broke in through a small cellar window accessible from the street, allowing healthy air into the room. At some point as he searched the silent cellar, grimly checking the thirteen corpses it contained, he spied a tiny movement from the slight figure in the corner, wrapped in a bathrobe. He realized there was life in the room after all, and within minutes Anita was clasped in his arms, on her way to the nearest medical post. The doctor there said that in the gas-filled cellar, burying her face in
the damp robe had been the key to her survival. The water had emitted just enough vital extra oxygen to keep her breathing.

Her parents were not among the dead in the main chamber of the shelter. For a short while, there was hope they might have survived.

As the soldier's presence in the shelter proved, people were already starting to move around the city, even before the fires had gone out (some would burn for another three days). The soldier had probably come into the city with his unit to help with rescue work, and managed to find his way into his home district.

Others concerned for family members in the city did the same, whether out of courage or of foolhardiness. A young woman from Dresden, who had married and moved out to the nearby town of Hermsdorf, had watched from the roof of her parents-in-law's house as the city burned on the night of the firestorm. Early on the morning of Ash Wednesday, leaving her baby son with her husband's family (he was away in the Wehrmacht), she bicycled into the city, completely against the traffic, and found her way to Johannstadt, where her mother and unmarried sister lived. As she pedaled into the street where their apartment should have been, there were only smoldering ruins. She saw what looked like shop window dummies scattered around the area, then realized that they were dead people. Plunged into despair, she began to wander around, fearing any moment that she would see the mutilated corpse of her mother or her sister. After a while two ghostly figures emerged from the acrid haze, draped in sheets. One of them croaked a greeting. It was her mother.

Such cases—and such happy endings—were the exception.

Although it would be some time before the authorities could get out a proper newspaper for the Dresden population, by the end of the day Walter Elsner, the
Gau
propaganda leader, had managed to commandeer the services of a printer in the town of Pirna, ten miles upriver from Dresden. Here, late on February 14—around the time Anita Kurz was carried from the cellar where her parents lay entombed—with ash and singed papers blown from the burning city still descending out of the heavens, Elsner managed to produce a single-sheet “News in Brief for the Population Affected by the Air War” (
Kurznachrichten für die vom Luftkrieg betroffene Bevölkerung
), which was distributed around the accessible parts of the city by party volunteers.

Practical instructions for those bombed out of the city center were laced with off-the-shelf hate propaganda against the British (at that time it was thought that all three raids, including the midday attack, had been carried out by the RAF).

Dresdeners were told to make their way to the edge of the city, where welfare facilities would be provided. As a result, false rumors quickly spread that the entire city was being compulsorily evacuated.

In fact, people scarcely needed to be told to leave the devastated central districts. Instinct, and fear of more attacks, had sent thousands upon thousands of survivors pouring out of Dresden in all directions. The party aid posts on the edge of the city, as promised, offered help, directions, and most importantly the “Provisions Card for Air Damaged Citizens” which was required for obtaining emergency rations and accommodation. The aid offices in just one suburban district registered a thousand homeless survivors a day, every day for two weeks after the raid. The refugees were provided with temporary lodgings in everything from inns to schools and private homes, until they could be shipped on to even more outlying towns and villages. Anywhere, to relieve the pressure on the suddenly overcrowded suburbs.

Günther Kannegiesser went to his aunt's house in Meissen, twelve miles downriver, as arranged with his mother, but although he found a
meal and a bed for the night, there was no sign of her or his brother and sister. Typically, in the morning the intrepid fourteen-year-old headed back into the city—and continued to search. He was to wait more than fifty years until he found out what happened to his family.

Thirteen-year-old Nora Lang and her little brother headed north across the river toward their grandfather's small piece of land, where there was also a weekend cabin. This was where they the family had agreed to meet if they ever got separated by air raids or fighting.

Christoph Adam's family, meanwhile, walked south toward Altenburg, a picturesque small town on the Czech border, where relatives had always promised to take them in if there was trouble in Dresden. Within days he would be back at school.

Those for whom the Allied raids on Dresden had been a terrible blessing were also on the move. Henny Wolf and her father and mother had also found their way to the edge of the city. For some days they found refuge with a family friend in Loschwitz before moving into an empty house. Herr Wolf, as the only non-Jew in the household, would from now on be the only member of the family to venture out by day. Victor Klemperer had been reunited with his wife, Eva. He tore off the telltale yellow star on his coat. Together they found their way north to a welfare center near Klotzsche airfield, where they reported themselves as homeless Aryan victims of the bombers who had lost all their papers and belongings. Then, armed with emergency ration cards, they set off on a trek southwest, eager to get away from the place where they were known.

These Dresdeners were part of the exodus that the Allies hoped to catch again on Wednesday, thus ruthlessly sowing further chaos on the supply routes to the eastern front. The target now was Chemnitz, a short journey by road or rail from Dresden. Or such was the Allies' calculation.

 

DURING THE DAYLIGHT HOURS
of February 14, the Eighth Army Air Force had sent its First Division to Dresden for the midday raid, but its Third Division to Chemnitz. The First had been intended to follow up the big British night raid, the Third to prepare the as yet little-damaged smaller city for a British night raid to come. Meanwhile, the British aircrew who made it back to their bases from the Dresden
attack—as all but a handful did—had gone straight to bed. They were roused in the afternoon, to be briefed for their next long foray into Saxony.

The planned raid was another “double punch,” very similar in conception and almost equivalent in strength to the previous night's devastating blow against Dresden. Chemnitz, their new target, was a city of around four hundred thousand inhabitants (about two-thirds of the population of Dresden), forty miles southwest of the Saxon capital. It was known as the “Manchester of Saxony.” Before the Nazis came to power, Chemnitz was a major center for textiles—more than 43 percent of its workforce worked in that industry—and for the manufacture of machinery and vehicles (13.5 percent). By 1944–45 the textile industry had declined somewhat. Chemnitz was now best known, not least to the Allies, for making military vehicles, and especially tanks, which made it a key target.

More than seven hundred British aircraft were earmarked for the night raid planned for February 14–15, 1945, against Chemnitz, made up of roughly two-thirds Lancasters and one-third Halifaxes of 1,3,4, 6 and 8 (Pathfinder) Groups. As for 5 Group, which had set the Dresden firestorm near enough single-handed the previous night, it was sent as a unit to attack the oil refineries at Rositz, south of Leipzig.

It was going to be another crowded night over Saxony.

The configuration was different, and the numbers of attacking aircraft more evenly split between the two attacks, but this was another big raid, planned to produce a similarly destructive outcome to that of the attack on Dresden. If it succeeded, the raid would complete not just the annihilation of two important cities, but it would wipe out the entire industrial, transport and communications system of eastern Saxony just as the Soviets were approaching. The defending Germans would have their backs to a wasteland, and reinforcement would be almost impossible. Or such was the RAF planners' hope.

To most aircrew it was “just another target.” At the briefing early that evening Miles Tripp listened, he said, “without any qualms” to the fact that Chemnitz was crammed with refugees, many of who had escaped from Dresden. The payoff, as far as he and other aircrew were concerned, was that if this attack succeeded they were promised no more long-haul visits to the Russian front. Only later did he feel uneasy:

The raid by the American Third Air Division had not gone well. Only two-thirds of the 441 B-17s that had taken off for Chemnitz by day actually found the target. They bombed by radar through thick cloud and did little damage. The other aircraft missed the city altogether. They bombed targets that became visible through the cloud, including the town of Bamberg in Northern Bavaria and the Eger air base in what is now the Czech Republic.

The RAF's first wave arrived over Chemnitz a few minutes before 9
P.M
. that night. Conditions were much poorer than they had been over Dresden the previous night. The pathfinder Lancasters of 8 Group had to confine themselves to “sky marking” with parachute flares, at which the aircraft aimed rather than at markers on the ground. As it turned out, the truly distinctive thing about the Chemnitz raid was that, although carefully planned and accompanied by similar elaborate diversion and deception operations as the attack on Dresden, it was an almost complete failure.

The first wave's efforts were not reckoned a success. By twenty past midnight, when the 350-strong second wave arrived, instead of finding a raging inferno spread out beneath them (as had the second wave at Dresden the previous night), they were faced with conditions of 10/10 cloud. Zero visibility. “Bombing under the circumstance appeared scattered,” as the official record put it euphemistically. Despite the poor weather, some crews reported being able to still see the glow of fires burning at Dresden.

Miles Tripp reported the near fiasco:

Chemnitz, instead of suffering of a crushing hammer blow similar to that inflicted on Dresden, had, by a combination of chance and poor design, escaped almost without a scratch. Imposing as the Chemnitz effort was—717 aircraft involved and more than thirteen hundred tons of bombs dropped—it went almost for nothing.

Much was and is made of the fiendishly efficient planning of the RAF war machine, but that machine could be all too fallible, and the conditions in which it operated all too unpredictable.

 

THE ONE IMPORTANT LANDMARK
of old Dresden that seemed to have withstood both the high-explosive bombing and the firestorm was its most iconic and magnificent: the three-hundred-foot high, domed structure of the eighteenth-century Frauenkirche, the Lutheran cathedral Church of Our Lady.

So safe had the authorities thought the cellars and crypts beneath the Frauenkirche to be that many valuable artifacts and statues from other churches and public buildings in Dresden were stored there during the war years. A great deal of highly inflammable archive film material had also been brought from bomb-endangered Berlin by Göring's Reich Air Ministry and deposited in the crypts beneath the Frauenkirche for safekeeping. Moreover, after the first wave of the British raid on the night of February 13–14, 1945, around three hundred Dresdeners had taken refuge in the adjoining catacombs, attracted by the sturdiness of the building and, perhaps, the hope that God would protect His own.