Dresden (49 page)

Perhaps the content of the more thorough briefings given to key figures such as Smith and de Wesselow was closer to that outlined in the document unearthed by Hastings. They were close enough to the top to receive tidbits of gossip (Smith does mention hearing that the “operation was of special interest to Churchill”). As far as ordinary aircrew are concerned, though some express concern about being sent in to bomb cities containing refugees, none recalled to this author any hint that the raid on Dresden might have the purpose of “impressing” the Russians in the sense of intimidating them (which is the only way in which Groehler's assertion makes sense). At this stage in the war, leftist feeling was widespread (1945 was to see the election of a Labor
government with a huge majority). For many in the armed forces as well as the civilian population Soviet Russia was still a much-admired ally and Stalin viewed in the guise of avuncular, pipe-smoking “Uncle Joe.” Any insertion even of an oblique anti-Russian element into a routine attack briefing might have created angry bewilderment rather than additional motivation.

Groehler also does not confine the accusation to the Dresden raid alone. Read carefully, what he says is that such a putative demonstration of power involved “the reduction to ashes of Dresden
and other cities
.” Here he becomes vaguer and at the same time more plausible. Dresden was a big raid, but no bigger than a considerable number of others at that time directed against the urban areas of Germany. It is not impossible to believe that the crescendo of bombing over the period around Yalta might have had a dual purpose—hastening Germany's end while at the same time quietly hoping to deter the Soviets from continuing their advance to the west once the war was won. In general, this is not an impossible mix of motives.

It is, however, in this case a mystery why Churchill should get cold feet about the same “terror bombing” in his notorious memorandum at the end of March 1945, when one would have though that the potential Soviet threat (which it was allegedly intended to deter) had in the meantime increased rather than diminished. The material so far available is open to differing interpretations and is in any case circumstantial. Even a clear hint in an official document of the time would help, but none seems to have come to light.

Whatever the truth—and without that clear evidence an open verdict still seems the most plausible—Herr Groehler's assertions certainly fit the anti-Western line in the German Democratic Republic. It was during the regime's final years that Herr Groehler wrote his otherwise brilliant book (though it was published a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall).

In any case, the escalation of bombing was not confined to the big cities. Other appalling massacres seem scarcely to be noticed in the general historical record (even Pforzheim merits mention by the official history of Bomber Command only as a footnote, and then merely as one of a list of targets). And then, for instance, there is the daylight attack mounted on March 12 by the American air force against the
German port of Swinemünde on the Baltic coast. This again occurred at the request of the Russians, who had advanced to within fifteen to twenty miles of the town. Conditions were poor, so H2X (radar bombing) was used. Many German naval craft and port installations were thought to have been destroyed, but the raid—if local German accounts are to be believed—also killed up to 23,000 refugees from the East who were waiting in mile-long lines for boats to take them across the bay to the western shore. The actual casualties were almost certainly lower, but according to a modern German writer still ran into five figures. “It brought,” as the official American history comments, “an exciting variation from the normal routine.” The official USAAF report classified Swinemünde as a “transportation target.”

Ultimately, Dresden must be placed alongside the other terrible raids carried out on Germany in the last two years of the Second World War, and especially in the last months, and regarded in that light: as, largely accidentally, the most devastating and horrifying. When moral questions are asked, however, it seems hard to justify seeing Dresden as a special case that exists in a dimension of its own. Dresden had beautiful buildings. So did many other German towns and cities. Jörg Friedrich's book contains a solemn inventory of the churches, palaces, historic houses, libraries, and museums consigned to the flames by the Allied bombers, from Goethe's house in Frankfurt to the bones of Charlemagne from Aachen cathedral; from the irreplaceable contents of the four-hundred-year-old State Library in Munich to the rococo glories of the archiepiscopal seat of Würzburg, a city that was its own work of art.

Bombing did not (could not) distinguish between the two countries that were Germany—the proud, ancient, humanist Germany that had rooted itself and flourished over the centuries, despite all the worst efforts of its overambitious rulers and greedy neighbors; and the violent, aggressive Germany that the Nazi hijackers of those traditions had ruthlessly created after 1933.

Martin Mutschmann deserted his capital, Dresden, at some time during the twenty-four hours preceding VE-Day. He fled to the still-unoccupied Erzgebirge, to the house of an acquaintance, where he was arrested either by local Communists or by Soviet troops on May 10. The fallen Gauleiter was later subjected to intensive questioning:

The mix of motives, the moral obtuseness, and the ragbag of excuses express perfectly the mentality of the philistine functionary, taking refuge in an artistic heritage he neither understood nor knew how to preserve. This is the authentic voice of the regime, taking responsibility for nothing, fleeing into a strident ignorance when taxed with his part in the destruction of a city and a country that deserved so much better than he and his like were willing to provide. Dresden would have been saved for all humanity in the centuries to come but for the brutal dreams of conquest, enslavement, and genocide that Mutschmann and his like harbored almost to the end.

Mutschmann's precise final fate is unknown. He is variously described as dying of maltreatment in Dresden in 1948 (when he would have been nearly seventy years old) or being shot in the Moscow Lubyanka by the Russian secret police sometime before 1950.

When the first Soviet troops pushed across the German border
into East Prussia toward the end of 1944, looting and raping and burning as they advanced, they were, as Anthony Beevor records, “disgusted by the plenty” they found everywhere, in town and country alike. The neat houses, the evidence of comfort and material well-being at every turn, served only to enrage them further. A Red Army sapper said to his superior:

This is perhaps the great, still-unanswered question about Germany and the German people between 1933 and 1945. With the vast material and spiritual riches of places like Dresden at your disposal, why place all that at risk by launching a ruthless, in large part genocidal attack on the rest of Europe? Whatever the Nazi ideologues might say, Germany did not lack
Lebensraum
. Did anyone really expect the world to fight back while wearing kid gloves, in order not to damage Germany's artistic treasures or kill German civilians?

Those who concentrate on the war in western Europe miss the sheer massive scale of the mass slaughter inflicted on the civilian population in European Russia by the invading Germans. The vastness of such a mosaic of violence makes it hard to grasp: Because of this we seek instinctively for the personal, the particular, the apparently clear-cut case. It is rarely mentioned that almost exactly the same number of Soviet citizens died as a result of bombing during the Second World War as Germans: around half a million. Why are there no shelves of books emotively recalling the fate of the forty thousand human beings—many of them women and children and refugees—who died in the Luftwaffe's systematic bombing of Stalingrad, which began with a thousand-bomber raid and lasted over four days in August 1942, even before the siege had begun? Or in the bombing of Minsk, which included the central hospital? Was it morally right for eight hundred thousand Russians, again mostly civilians, to die by bombing, shelling, and starvation in the German siege of Leningrad? The conventions of war allow almost any tactic of destruction against a defended fortress town and the people within it once it has refused to
surrender. But is such a thing, on such a scale, more or less
moral
compared with the bombing of Dresden?

By the time Dresden was destroyed, Hitler—who would order the blinds lowered in his railway car when passing through a bomb-devastated city—was blindingly, nihilistically clear in his judgment about the imminent fate of the Nazi project and what it would mean for the German nation. In mid-March 1945, the rapidly ailing Führer told Speer:

Hitler spoke with crude, Darwinian contempt of a German nation whose majority had trusted him to restore order and prosperity, had later followed him into a world war, then finally given their all to him at the front, in the bombed cities and in the factories. Misguided, perhaps, but brave and industrious beyond question. Even the Allied bombers had not totally crushed the Germans' will. Weakened, exhausted, most of them perhaps secretly hoping for the end—any end—to the war, they had kept working and fighting almost to the final day.

Nonetheless, after Dresden the end came relatively quickly, sooner than the Joint Intelligence Committee's forecasts predicted. Günter Jäckel had felt a new sense of chaos, of panic, as he was being evacuated into the mountains after surviving the bombing of Dresden, and was clear that the raid on his hometown was responsible for this shift in mood. The horrors of the bombing, and Goebbels's propaganda, may have raised anti-Allied feeling to new heights, but at the same time there was an unignorable sense of disappearing possibility. Germany could not fight back, or defend itself anymore. The end of the Third Reich would certainly come. The only question was, would it come without too many more horrors, or only after the fate of Dresden had been visited on other cities again and again by the huge fleets of Allied aircraft that could now bomb Germany at will?

Götz Bergander is skeptical that the destruction of Dresden shortened the war by much, but nevertheless:

It became fashionable among writers in the postwar period to dismiss city bombing, not only as immoral but also as essentially useless. There seems, however, little doubt that the strategic bombing campaign played a major role in the defeat of Germany (if not perhaps the “knockout” one that Sir Arthur Harris and his supporters dreamed of), and growing evidence that it may even have proved decisive. Early postwar surveys made the mistake of confining cost-benefit analysis to a kind of simple accounting of notionally lost German production. Especially when Speer took over the government's war industries portfolio and introduced long-overdue efficiency measures (aided by the growing political trend toward a “total war” ideology among more radical Nazi leaders such as Goebbels and Ley), German armaments production continued to increase. This trend continued until the end of 1944, and it was therefore assumed that Allied bombing had been almost entirely ineffective.

More recent studies, especially those of Professor Richard Overy, have taken a broader view and also included the massive financial and material costs involved for the Reich in creating a complex and sophisticated aircraft tracking and air defense system, in rebuilding and relocating industrial and military installations, and in feeding, housing, and caring for victims of the escalating Allied bombing. This not only took weapons and equipment from the frontline land troops, but also vastly reduced the number of offensive aircraft available on all fronts, especially in Russia. Moreover, while the ever-aggressive Hitler demanded more bombers, the constant need for night and day fighters to keep the Anglo-American bomber fleets away from German cities and factories meant that fighters were always given priority over a new
generation of long-distance bombers, which might have enabled the Luftwaffe to take the fight to the enemy. From 1943 Germany was always, as the sporting metaphor goes, “on the back foot” as a result of the strategic bombing campaign.