Dresden (45 page)

Hitler heard the news of the destruction of Dresden's center with a face of stone, his fists clenched with suppressed emotion. Goebbels, reportedly shaking with rage, suggested to the Führer that they order the execution of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war, one for each civilian killed in Dresden.

On trial at Nuremburg, Albert Speer suggested that the Nazi leadership, especially Goebbels and the head of the Labor Front, Reichsleiter Robert Ley, wished to seize this opportunity of abandoning the Geneva Convention, in part so that Germans in the west would fight with the same bitter determination as they did in the east, where they already knew they could expect little mercy from the vengeful Soviets.

Whether Speer told the truth or not, there can be no doubt that Goebbels and Ley belonged to the
ultra
group among the Nazi leadership, who pressed for victory whatever the cost—moral, architectural, military, human. A short while after the bombing of Dresden, Ley wrote a ranting article under the title “Without Baggage,” in which he bizarrely celebrated the destruction of Dresden as liberating Germany from the “burden” of its architectural heritage, and by implication its freethinking, humanist past. This was duly noted by the anti-Nazi Dresden-born author Erich Kästner, now living uneasily in Berlin and daily expecting a knock on his apartment door from the Gestapo. Appalled, Kästner copied Ley's words into his diary:

In these convictions Ley was not alone. Several Gauleiters wanted to rebuild their historic cities in a way that would reflect Nazi ideology and attitudes rather than the “weak” Christian-humanist past; such men saw the destruction of those cities as just such an opportunity.

Bomb-damaged historic buildings considered reflective of the wrong kind of history had already been quietly neglected until they fell down or became irreparable.

In the meantime, however, Goebbels knew how to use what he had from the Anglo-American attacks on Dresden. Within a short while, wild and terrifying estimates of the numbers of dead were in circulation. Neutral newspapers, especially in Switzerland and Sweden, were fed by German diplomats with details of the raid, including a photograph of a child from Dresden bearing terrible “phosphor” burns.

The Germany Foreign Ministry's propaganda operation in the later phase of the war had constantly emphasized the “terror” aspects of the Anglo-American raids, listing architectural and cultural treasures destroyed—and giving energetic publicity to statements by public figures in the Allied camp who were opposed to the bombing of German cities (especially the tiny but vocal London-based “Bombing Restrictions Committee”). The day before the British attack on Dresden, another Foreign Ministry document, “Against the Arch-Enemy of Europe” had arrived at the Berne Embassy. It devoted five closely typed pages entirely to a polemic against Sir Arthur Harris as the chief engineer of cultural destruction, not just in Germany but in Europe:

When the firestorm raid on Dresden occurred, the German propaganda machine in the neutral countries was primed for attack, and probably all the more effective for the fact that its servants' shock and outrage must have been quite genuine.

On February 16, the Goebbels-controlled German News Bureau (DNB) issued a press release covering the Allied raids on Dresden and Chemnitz. No casualty figures were given, but the case was quickly set out that would form the basis of the German propaganda offensive: Dresden was proclaimed as a city without war industries, a peaceful center of culture, clinics, and hospitals, and scorn was poured on the
Allied claim to be attacking Dresden as a transport center, since the goods stations were “on the periphery of the city.” The press release pointed out that before the war the British educated classes had lived, studied, and undergone cures in Dresden, although this had not stayed the RAF's hand:

The accusation was all the more telling for having a core of truth. For years the German propaganda machine had characterized all British and American raids on German towns or cities as “terror attacks,” until the phrase had all but lost its meaning. This time, however, the use of the word “terror” had real resonance. It suddenly hit home. Most educated Europeans had heard of Dresden, many had visited the city, and most thought of it exactly as the Goebbels-inspired press release described. By February 19, instructions had also been issued for German missions abroad to produce illustrated leaflets, to be entitled “Dresden, Victim of the Air War,” using plates and text to be supplied by the Foreign Ministry.

It was almost three weeks before all the material arrived, including two photographs of horribly injured children. A secret telegram to Berne suggested a new title for a leaflet—“Dresden—Massacre of Refugees”—and also indicated an official interview with the Swedish newspaper
Svenska Dagbladet
(February 25) where the headline said: “Rather 200,000 than 100,000 Victims.”

The numbers game had begun.

These figures being quoted were not based on official estimates. These had been published neither in Germany nor abroad, though by the beginning of March—as was clear from the Dresden Police and SS “Final Report”—the authorities were beginning to get an idea of the probable actual casualties: around twenty-five thousand, though no estimates had yet been made public.

All the figures bandied about in the foreign press were therefore a
mixture of feverish guesswork, hearsay, and probable manipulation by Goebbels's ministry. On February 17 the Stockholm
Svenska Morgonbladet
, for instance, cited highly inflated figures “privately from Berlin.” It said “2.5 million people,” had been in Dresden at the time of the raids—four times the city's actual population, implying the presence of almost two million refugees. The deaths and injuries “must run into the hundreds of thousands…since all the cinemas, inns and churches were overflowing with refugees, who had not been able to gain access to air raid shelters.” The article's fantastic claims reek of manipulation by the Ministry of Propaganda's “spin doctors.” Columns of fleeing vehicles had been strafed with such fiendish accuracy that the wrecks of farm carts and military vehicles “blocked the streets,” another neutral journalist claimed, making it impossible for aid from other towns and cities to reach Dresden. This dramatic account, it turned out, was based on the testimony of one eyewitness who had reached Berlin some days after the raid.

The initially fantastic estimates of refugee numbers dropped to a more realistic level over the next days, as clearer news from Dresden filtered through to the Berlin, where the journalists were based. Nevertheless, the figure of one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand dead stubbornly continued to appear in the Swedish press. This was noted by the Foreign Ministry and duly used for propaganda purposes. Clearly, such rumors were encouraged—and may even have originated in briefings from the Propaganda Ministry officials who liased with the neutral press and steered the foreign journalists in approved directions.

There is also good reason to believe that later in March, copies of—or at least extracts from—a supplementary Dresden Police and SS “Order of the Day 47” (
Tagesbefehl Nr 47
) which had been circulated a week after the “Final Report”—were leaked to the neutral press by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry. In this document, however, the revised estimate of dead already recovered in Dresden during the past four weeks (just over 20,204) was doctored with an extra zero to make 202,040. The police's continuing prediction of a total death toll of around twenty-five thousand was also multiplied by ten to give a quarter of a million anticipated dead. Even the number of corpses incinerated in the Altmarkt—6,856—was given an extra zero, taking it up to 68,650.

The German people remained in ignorance. Naturally, rumors
abounded and may have been spread, like those that informed the foreign press, by official sources. The endangered Nazi elite was eager to draw a picture of the evil fate that would await Germany if enemies as cruel as those who had bombed Dresden were to emerge victorious. If the German people could no longer be persuaded to fight for final victory, let them fight out of despair and terror.

“Enjoy the war,” went the double-edged graffiti found on ruined walls all over the Reich, “for the peace will be terrible.”

In Dresden it must have seemed as if the dead were legion, and legion upon legion. Who would not believe that, between the piles of corpses in the streets and the parks, and the unknown thousands surely burned to ash or melted to viscous puddles in the city's cellars, the Allied raids must have cost the lives of not just tens, but hundreds of thousands? Fritz Kuhn, then a prisoner of war in Russia, remembers his father, who survived the bombs, writing from Dresden of “150,000 dead.”

The slot into which Goebbels chose to insert his first nationally published, official statement about the bombing of Dresden was
Das Reich
, the weekly newspaper that he had personally founded, and in which he made many of his most important (or ominous) pronouncements. On March 4, an unusually lengthy article appeared entitled “The Death of Dresden, a Beacon of Resistance.” It was powerfully crafted and, for an official regime statement, remarkable in its frank portrayal of what the enemy air forces could do to a German city:

There was no corresponding talk of factories and slave laborers and garrisons and troop trains, or of the secretly declared “defensive area” of Dresden—only of cultural treasures and innocent artistic pleasures, all now lost forever. The article ended with an appeal that exploited the city's dead with a kind of passionate shamelessness:

According to testimony at Nuremberg by the chief of the Propaganda Ministry's press division, Hans Fritzsche, Goebbels had already made his own private estimate of about forty thousand dead at Dresden. He informed his underlings of this during the same ministerial conference at which he also announced the soon-abandoned plan to execute equal numbers of Allied prisoners of war in revenge. Goebbels would have known, after almost three years' experience as guiding hand of the Reich Committee for Air Raid Damage, that final casualty figures usually came out at a fraction of the initial estimates. Such wild calculations were often made—and committed to paper—under the direct influence of the shock and horror of the attack, not to mention the observers' understandable dismay at the scale of damage to buildings.

Nevertheless, it was in the interests of the regime to have apocalyptic estimates of casualties at Dresden in circulation. These would modify the attitude of the neutral press in Germany's favor, and perhaps even at this late stage could mold neutral public opinion. As Richard Stokes's speech in the House of Commons showed—partly based on the material put out by Goebbels's own German Press Agency—the British Parliament could also be influenced and even the British prime minister.

The destruction of Dresden was bound to exercise an independent power of its own, one that could not but affect the Allies' claims to absolute moral superiority. However, the extent of the wide, long-lasting ripple of international outrage that followed the Dresden bombing represents, at least in part, Goebbels's final, dark masterpiece.

DRESDEN WAS
by no means the last of the major attacks launched by the RAF against German towns and cities in the first months of 1945. In the course of March 1945 Bomber Command dropped more than sixty-seven thousand tons of bombs on Germany. This represented not just the greatest tonnage of any single month between 1939 and 1945, but was only slightly less than
the entire tonnage dropped during the first three years of the war
.

Not all these attacks in 1945 were on urban areas. The transport and oil campaigns continued unabated—and it is now clear from Sir Arthur Harris's dispatches that, reluctant though he may have been, he devoted more effort in these directions during the last months of the war than either his often tactless remarks indicated or public opinion believed. It is, however, undeniable that during this period many of the city raids, like that against Dresden, were especially devastating. The RAF might still experience “cock-ups” and failures, but these were—unfortunately for the Reich's urban population—fewer now, especially as the weather improved and Luftwaffe fighters appeared only sporadically in the skies over Germany. Not that the campaign had become entirely risk-free from the aircrews' point of view—more than four hundred British bombers were lost between February 13, 1945 and the end of the war.

Ten days after Dresden, Bomber Command achieved another “perfect raid” against the town of Pforzheim in southwestern Germany. On that night of February 23–24 1945, with no flak over the town and the aircraft able to mark and bomb from only eight thousand feet, it is estimated that 83 percent of Pforzheim's built-up area was
destroyed and 17,600 of the town's inhabitants died—one in four of its population (compared with roughly one in twenty in Dresden). In terms of percentage of the population killed, it was by far the most lethal attack of the war. The town, known as the “Gateway to the Black Forest,” made precision instruments for the Wehrmacht, and had some importance as a transport center for the western front.

The same could not be said for Würzburg, which was bombed by the RAF exactly one week later. More than eleven hundred tons of bombs, mostly incendiaries, fell on the compact old city within seventeen minutes. The ancient cathedral and university city on the river Main in northwestern Bavaria seems genuinely to have harbored very little industry. What it did boast, however, was a great many beautiful medieval and rococo buildings, and some unique libraries. Ninety percent of its city area was destroyed, and some 4,000 of its 107,000 inhabitants died. As in Dresden, the public and the emergency services were inexperienced in matters of air warfare, and proper air raid shelters were nonexistent. Victims died in gas-filled cellars or were burned as they tried to reach the river Main.

Würzburg fell to the American Seventh Army less than three weeks later, following six days of fierce fighting amid the city's ruins, which—like the jagged crater landscapes of Stalingrad and Aachen—favored the desperate defenders.

It was not all great slaughter for little gain. Bomber Command completed its unfinished business with Chemnitz and demolished the factories there as planned, wrecking a third of the built-up area in the process. The Ruhr, Germany's last remaining great industrial area, continued its torment, with boys from Dresden manning their flak guns there to the end. Of the Ruhr cities, Essen was devastated for the last time in the second week of March. Dortmund also suffered terribly. Eleven hundred Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Mosquitoes visited the city on March 12, delivering almost five thousand tons of bombs in this single raid. Bomber Command inflicted damage at Dortmund that by postwar British estimates “stopped production so effectively that it would have been many months before any substantial recovery could have occurred.”

The air offensive continued to its terrible climax, but in the five or six weeks since the bombing of Dresden, the overall political and strategic situation had changed dramatically.

In mid-February the western Allies were still to some extent recovering from the shock of the Ardennes offensive. They also remained firmly stuck west of the Rhine, as they had been since the previous November. The Russians had begun their offensive into eastern Germany early at the West's request, to reduce the pressure on the Anglo-American forces. In response to this “favor,” the western Allies' use of their air power to shatter the German cities behind the Russian front—including Dresden—had been intended to provide demonstrable practical recompense.

Crossings over the Rhine had begun on March 7, and on the twenty-fourth a massed amphibious assault, combined with a parachute drop to secure the key town of Wesel (which had been all but obliterated by Allied air attacks), meant that Allied troops were soon present on the east bank in irresistible numbers.

On March 27 the Germans' final great hope failed. On the evening of that day, at 7:21
P.M
., the last V-2 rocket fell on London. Launched from a mobile platform near The Hague, the missile hit a block of flats, Hughes Mansions, in Whitechapel, East London, and killed 134 of the residents. All the victims, give or take a few servicemen on leave, were civilians—and the great majority, as it happened, Jewish. To avoid being overrun by Allied troops, the German rocket launch unit,
Gruppe Nord
, then began withdrawing into Germany with its remaining “miracle weapons.” These were never used again, or at least not by representatives of the Third Reich.

The next day, March 28, 1945, Sir Winston Churchill unleashed a thunderbolt in the corridors of Whitehall that, unlike the crossing of the Rhine, remained secret until many years after the end of the war, but was no less telling for that. It came in the form of a memorandum to General Ismay, his chief of staff (Churchill also held the post of minister of defense), which read:

The document caused consternation and confusion among the General Staff—especially in view of Churchill's four years of support for the strategic bombing campaign and, just two months earlier, his personal involvement with, indeed insistence on, the bombing of the eastern German cities including Dresden.

“This was, perhaps,” as the official historians of Bomber Command commented with exemplary restraint, “among the least felicitous of the Prime Minister's long series of war-time minutes.”

The mention of Dresden shows how, even just a few weeks later, the raid was no longer seen just as an uncommonly effective operation, but had instead come to signify something uncommon of an entirely different and less desirable sort. Perhaps Stokes's barbs in the House of Commons three weeks earlier had penetrated and festered beneath the prime ministerial skin. The mention of the foreign secretary's intervention seems to indicate that the German propaganda campaign on the Dresden issue had met with an uncomfortable degree of success in the neutral countries.

Whether Churchill's concern arose from the horrifying consequences of the Dresden raid alone seems doubtful, but Dresden had already come to symbolize something. As he went over the air war in his mind, it would not have been unnatural for Churchill to have questioned the current bombing policy. With the Allies' situation dramatically improved in the past month, and the defeat of Germany now clearly only weeks away—what was the point of continuing to area-bomb cities? It frankly no longer really mattered how much or how little the Germans could produce in their factories, or how more or less
well their telephones worked. They could not, in any case, move their newly produced armaments and equipment to where they needed to be. And as the British and American land forces moved to encircle the Ruhr, a huge chunk of the enemy's productive facilities would soon come under the control of the occupiers—who would also then be obliged to house and feed the newly conquered population.

The logic of the prime minister's intervention was quite clear. It was his way of expressing himself, and the terms of reference he used, that were shocking.

To speak, even in a secret memorandum, of “bombing…simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts,” when the public stance of the government had always been to deny any such policy, broke all the rules of discretion. It was like a confidential version of the disastrous dispatch by the journalist Howard Cowan, which had caused such dismay back in February. The chiefs of staff, to whom the memorandum was circulated that night, reacted accordingly.

At the Chiefs of Staff Committee the next morning, the counterattack began. This being Whitehall, the first step was a holding action. A “detailed study” would be necessary, it was declared, before the issues raised by Churchill's memorandum could be properly considered. And Sir Arthur Harris would have to be consulted.

Having been shown the memorandum even before the morning meeting, Deputy Chief of Air Staff Bottomley had written to Harris, requesting his opinion. Bottomley did not simply hand over the text of the memorandum. He tactfully paraphrased its contents rather than quoting them directly. The response he received was swift and characteristically aggressive.

Harris said that he considered the allegations of terror bombing an insult both to the Air Ministry's policy and to Bomber Command's methods of pursuing this policy. He insisted that the destruction of the Germans' industrial cities had fatally weakened the enemy's war effort and opened the way for the rapid advances that the Allied land forces were now making. Why should such attacks be abandoned now unless it could be demonstrated that they would neither shorten the war nor preserve the lives of Allied soldiers? Harris consciously echoed the famous words of the nineteenth-century German chancellor Bismarck—who had said he did not consider the Balkans “worth
the bones of one Pomeranian grenadier”—saying that he did not consider the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as “worth the bones of one British grenadier.”

Heedless of diplomacy, the AOC Bomber Command crashed on. Harris and Churchill resembled lone rhinoceroses rampaging around neighboring parts of the Whitehall jungle, while others fled for cover: Harris continued scathingly:

There was some justice in Harris's observations about Dresden's contribution to the German war effort. In its origins the attack on Dresden was in any case not a pure “terror” raid but an amalgam of military horse trading between the eastern and western Allies and intelligence-led wishful thinking. All the same, the tone of this raw, hasty reply to Bottomley's query was ill chosen—at least if Harris was looking for friends in the government or among the chiefs of staff. Nor did it answer the Churchill memorandum's reasonable questions regarding the final point and consequences of such raids at this stage of the war, or whether attacking in such force and with such a lethal lack of discrimination was any longer a supportable policy. Perhaps Harris's reply could not, given its author's continuing attachment to that policy.

Meanwhile there followed a flurry of meetings of the chiefs of staff—four in twenty-four hours. One of these, at 5:15
P.M
. on March 29, was attended by Churchill, who took the chair, a fairly rare event. The topic was coordination of military strategy with the Soviets during the coming offensive, but it is not out of the question that discussions were also had about the bombing memorandum. When the chiefs of staff met again at 11
A.M
. the next morning (with chief of Imperial General Staff General Sir Alan Brooke once more in the chair), they noted that “the Prime Minister has instructed that his minute on bombing policy should be withdrawn…”

The crisis had been averted. The mercurial Churchill had been
coaxed back into line. Perhaps the original memorandum was hypocritical. It was certainly outrageously revealing of the moral conflicts at the heart of British bombing policy. But then what could be expected from a statesman notoriously prone to self-contradiction; who would at one moment call for more bombers, more attacks on German cities, and then—as happened in the summer of 1943 when he was shown film of the appalling destruction in the Ruhr—weep and plaintively ask his colleagues: “Are we beasts that we should do such things? Are we taking this too far?”

Churchill's memorandum also, perhaps, showed a certain instinctual politician's feeling for subliminal changes in the country's mood. Possibly he sensed that, from being war-weary and vengeful, the British people had become—though still eager to see an end to the war—concerned about the things that were being done in their name to gain the final victory. And perhaps he also foresaw that Dresden, whatever the true circumstances surrounding its destruction, would in the future symbolize that change of heart. A “raid too far,” as the saying would go.