Dresden (7 page)

Gertraud Freundel's father was one among tens of thousands of bankrupt and unemployed men who threw in their lot with the extremes of left or right.

Gertraud's father joined the Nazi Party—and got work. His was not an untypical case.

With the left and center unable to unite against the right, a cabinet of “unpolitical” conservative civil servants ran Saxony for the next three years. The Communists could have combined with the Social Democrats to form an anti-Nazi bulwark but refused, claiming that the Social Democrats were, in effect, the real fascists (one of the main Communist taunts was to call them “social fascists”). The Nazis, on the other hand, were simply a symptom of the decline of the wretched petty bourgeoisie. Therefore the important thing for loyal Communists was to oppose the Social Democrats—not the Nazis, who were doomed in any case, along with the class they represented.

This bizarre and fatal stalemate continued until Hitler came to power. Saxony remained the most depressed area in the Reich. Even
as slight improvements in the national economy started to become apparent elsewhere, in the autumn of 1932 Saxony was still flat-lining.

In the Reichstag elections of July 1932 the Nazi Party won 37.7 percent of the overall vote in Dresden, becoming the largest party by a big margin. Of the thirty-nine cities in Germany with populations over a hundred thousand, Dresden was in sixteenth place, but of the seven metropolitan cities with between four hundred thousand and six hundred thousand enfranchised inhabitants (the others being Cologne, Leipzig, Munich, Breslau, Essen, and Frankfurt), the Nazi vote in Dresden came second only behind Breslau, a city on the Polish frontier and long a refuge of the far right.

Dresden was a Nazi stronghold even before Hitler took power. Certainly it harbored a large proportion of Hitlerite activists. Less than four years after its founding, the local Nazi Party newspaper,
Der Freiheitskampf
(
The Struggle for Freedom
), had achieved the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the city, overtaking the liberal
Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten
. Gauleiter Mutschmann's mouthpiece,
Der Freiheitskampf
was packed with violent political polemic. It routinely featured rabid headlines such as “Red Plague Is Ruthlessly Stamped Out” (the Reichstag fire) or (on election day) “Defeat the Jews' Machinations!” Even so, by the beginning of 1933 it had more than a hundred thousand regular subscribers in the city and its immediate surroundings.

In the city council elections of November 13, 1932, the Nazis gained a slight edge in percentage of the popular vote over the Social Democrats, who had hitherto formed by far the largest single group. In terms of seats, the result was a dead heat (twenty-two each) out of seventy-five between the two big parties, with the Communists also booking a large increase (to thirteen), but the middle-class parties that had formerly supported democracy voted for a Nazi chairman.

On January 25, 1933, Communists in the industrial inner suburb of Dresden-Friedrichstadt called a meeting at a pub cozily named Keglerheim (Home of the Bowler). Bands of Nazi storm troopers had gathered threateningly outside, with a line of police standing between them and the building. The Reds assumed that the police were there to protect their perfectly legal meeting. But when fights predictably started, the police fired not at the Nazis out in the street but into the
crowded assembly room of the inn. There hundreds of Communists, including women and children, were still gathered, thinking themselves safe. Nine were killed, dozens injured. It was an indication of how far the Nazis had infiltrated the sources of power even before their formal call to government.

By the turn of the year 1933, one thing had become clear: the real struggle for power in Saxony's cities, including Dresden, was between the Communists and the Nazis.

And in that contest, the Nazis were already emerging as the winners.

ON MAY
23, 1933,
in the sandstone Landtag (State Parliament) Building by the river Elbe, the Saxon people's freely elected representatives voted themselves out of existence. All but a handful of the deputies gathered there gave assent to an Enabling Law for Saxony. This mirrored one already passed by the Berlin Reichstag, giving absolute power to a central government dominated by Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party. Landtag deputies from the Social Democratic Party cast the only dissenting votes. Once the mighty overthrower of emperors and harbinger of the German welfare state, the SPD was now reduced to a brave but pathetic rump of six members.

The tragic farce of the May 23 sitting had long been a foregone conclusion. In March the last freely elected government of Saxony had been dissolved by decree and replaced by a Nazi “Reich commissar.” In April the distribution of seats in the Landtag had been rearranged on the lines of the recent Reichstag results to give the National Socialists and their allies an absolute majority. The Communists, who even in the Nazi-controlled national elections of March 1933 had gained 17.4 percent of the vote, had quickly been banned and their leaders arrested.

Of the Social Democrats “permitted” to remain in the Saxon parliament, ten were already under arrest, two undergoing medical treatment for injuries inflicted by Nazi thugs, and another five had fled over the border into Czechoslovakia. Otto Neubrig, on behalf of the remaining handful, gave a courageously defiant speech, opposing the dictatorial powers claimed by the Nazis and calling on the remaining representatives of the middle-class parties to join him in voting against
them. In vain. The constitution was abolished and the principle of parliamentary government in Saxony abandoned. Within days the Social Democratic Party had been banned. The nonsocialist parties dissolved themselves. That was how quickly democracy could be dismantled.

The man who now became the chief—soon the only—power in the land was unprepossessing in both appearance and style. Martin Mutschmann, appointed by Hitler as
Reichsstatthalter
(Reich governor) of Saxony on May 5, 1933, was also the long-serving Gauleiter (provincial leader) of the National Socialist Party. A brutal-looking man with staring eyes, he was not popular even among fellow Nazis. It was never suggested even by those who kept him in his job that he was an especially competent administrator. But he was a fanatic—which appealed to Hitler and his entourage. Mutschmann was also a man who knew how to accrue and handle power, to such a single-minded extent that within two years of the Nazi “revolution,” he ruled Saxony in an absolute way unheard of in other areas of Nazi Germany—which is why the fate of Dresden was inextricably linked with the character of its Gauleiter, and why Mutschmann's personality loomed uncomfortably large in Dresden's story before and after February 1945.

Mutschmann was born on March 9, 1879, and educated in the west Saxon textile center of Plauen, making him fifty-four in 1933—ten years older than Hitler, and the best part of a generation senior to most of the other leading Nazis such as Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring. He left school at the age of fourteen, undertaking a commercial apprenticeship that saw him enter the textiles business as a foreman/manager. He took various management positions in lace and underwear companies before starting up his own factory at the age of twenty-eight. This factory stayed in business, through various vicissitudes, including its owner's war service between 1914 and 1916, until 1930, when it finally closed down owing to the economic crisis (or, as Mutschmann's supporters claimed, the dastardly machinations of Jewish competitors). By then, as a leading member of the National Socialist Party—joined 1922, assigned the high-ranking membership number 35 in the reorganization of 1925—Gauleiter and Nazi member of the Reichstag, Mutschmann could make a living solely from politics.

In the years before 1933 the Saxon Nazi Party under Mutschmann had not been an especially united organization. Repeatedly,
Mutschmann's brutal personal style—and the lack of transparency in the party's financial dealings under his leadership—caused major upsets in the party. There was a drip-drip of important defectors who loudly proclaimed their disapproval of his arrogance and vanity. In July 1932 Arno Franke, the editor in chief of the main Nazi newspaper in Saxony,
Der Freiheitskampf
, left the Nazi Party and published a searing critique of its “quite incredible mismanagement,” which he blamed on the party bosses' untrammelled power: “In no other party do so many dishonest elements make it to the top as in the NSDAP…”

This came from a man who knew Mutschmann better than almost anyone else. As Goebbels, also an old acquaintance, would later confide to his diary: “Mutschmann will allow no gods other than himself. In this way he loses a lot of prestige.” Nevertheless, his being liked or not seemed to make little difference to Mutschmann's inexorable rise.

Mutschmann's main rival was the radical SA (Brownshirt) leader Manfred von Killinger. On March 8, 1933, with a non-Nazi government still technically in power in Dresden, von Killinger was appointed Reich commissar for the Saxon police, essentially placing him as the Nazi government's controller within the Ministry of the Interior. The effect was immediate and terrible. All over Saxony, from the back streets of the cities to the smallest village, local Nazi Party and SA groups took swift, sometimes bloody revenge on their democratic and communist opponents.

Dresden too was turned into a playground for SA thugs. In the square opposite the school of music, the Nazis made a huge bonfire of the books they disapproved of. That same week the internationally famous German conductor and director of the Dresden Opera, Fritz Busch (1890–1951), had been prevented from conducting
Rigoletto
by hordes of rioting SA men. His crime was to object to the dismissal of fourteen Jewish musicians. The reasons given included “private intercourse with Jews” and the hiring of Jewish and foreign musicians. Busch immigrated to America and became director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He refused to work in Germany ever again. Not just Otto Dix, but other modern or left-wing artists were dismissed from their teaching posts. Others hastily made plans to leave. The much-respected liberal high burgomaster of Dresden, Dr. Wilhelm Külz, was “sent on leave.” Later in the summer he was quietly dismissed.

So wrote Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor at the Dresden Technical University, in his diary entry for March 10, 1933. With control of the police, and a thousands-strong paramilitary organization under his command in the shape of the Saxon SA, von Killinger seemed to be the man in charge. Mutschmann, however, had the ear of Hitler, and soon, as governor, a brief to “cleanse” the state's government of unreliable elements. This he exploited to the full. The conflict had already begun that would not be resolved until the so-called Night of the Long Knives. The national head of the SA, Ernst Roehm, the second most powerful man in Germany after Hitler, was keen to carry through a “National Socialist revolution” with the aid of his Brownshirts, who would shadow government agencies and act as “guarantors” of Nazi purity. By mid-1934 the government in Berlin was squaring up for a showdown with the SA and Roehm. Whatever the contradictions in Mutschmann's behavior, he was a fanatic, unquestionably loyal to the Führer, and he seemed to be delivering the goods. Von Killinger, as an SA leader, was doomed.

When the moment of reckoning came, Von Killinger was, in a way, lucky. On June 30, 1934, on the pretext of suppressing an attempted coup, Hitler personally organized the slaughter of Roehm and his acolytes in the SA. Several of Dresden's SA leaders were also taken out onto the Heller, an area of heath land on the northern outskirts of the city, and shot during the night of June 30–July 1 by a squad of SS killers brought in from Chemnitz specifically for the purpose.

Von Killinger escaped the fate of so many of his SA comrades. He was arrested, spent four days in a cell at Hohnstein, but was then released. The former Reich commissar never regained his exalted position, despite desperate petitions to Hitler. He continued to serve the Nazi Party, however, acting as a confidential emissary to General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, then being appointed German consul-general in San Francisco—a posting that reeked of espionage. In 1939 he was transferred to “special duties in the Foreign Ministry,” first becoming German representative in Bratislava, capital of the puppet state of
Slovakia, and then in Romania, one of Germany's most important allies in the war against the Soviet Union.

By the end of 1934 Mutschmann was not just Gauleiter and Reich governor but also prime minister of Saxony. At the outbreak of war he also acquired for himself the post of Reich defense commissar for Saxony (Defense District IV), putting him in charge of matters such as air raid measures and general defense coordination. Mutschmann became and remained for more than ten years a kind of bonsai-sized dictator of Saxony.

The populace secretly referred to him as “the Saxon Mussolini” (he had a similar strutting manner to the Italian dictator, and the same bullet-shaped head), or as “King Mu.”

 

THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES
on June 30, 1934, in which the regime had dealt with the radicals in its own ranks, also represented an opportunity to settle accounts with its non-Nazi opponents.

Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony, a conservative democrat and third son of the last king of Saxony, had always loathed the Nazis. He had joined those who tried at the last moment to influence the circle around President Hindenburg not to hand over power to Hitler. “Only the most stupid calves choose their own butcher,” as he maintained, but even though his royal status guaranteed the ear of senior advisers, he failed. Once Hitler came to power, Ernst Heinrich was soon to learn that even royal blood did not guarantee his safety.

June 30, 1934, was a sunny, warm summer's day. The prince's car emerged from a royal hunting lodge on the outskirts of the town of Moritzburg, which had remained in his family's hands. Suddenly a car containing two SS officers cut across in front of him. It was followed by a troop carrier manned by thirty SS soldiers in steel helmets and carrying rifles. The senior SS officer was the equivalent of a major general, in honor of the prince's status, but his request was not notably polite: “By order of the Gestapo, you are under arrest,” said the
Gruppenführer
.

“Why?”

“That is none of your concern. You will find out later.”

At police headquarters in Dresden the prince was led before the president of police, an old acquaintance, and heard of the supposed
“revolt” by the SA. Ernst Heinrich assumed there had been a mistake, since he had no relationship whatever with the Brownshirts, but he was wrong. The prince stayed in custody, though he was allowed to send to Moritzburg for his things and make a phone call to a sympathetic minister in the Saxon government. Then the Gestapo arrived and things turned bleak.

Ernst Heinrich spent the next hours in a tiny cell. During that time he heard a muffled shot—a fellow prisoner had been murdered out of hand. Toward dawn he was roused and dragged into the yard with other bleary-eyed prisoners. They were loaded onto an open truck, warned they would be shot if they made any untoward movement. The prince described their drive through the still-dark streets of Dresden:

Hohnstein was a forbidding sixteenth-century fortress set high in the rocky heights of the “Saxon Switzerland,” upstream from Dresden. It had long served as a prison for captured enemy soldiers and troublesome subjects of the Saxon monarch. In the early days after the Nazi seizure of power, the castle had been turned into a prison-cum-torture chamber by the SA, and then taken over by the Gestapo as an official concentration camp. The prince and his fellow prisoners arrived there at first light, to be greeted by an armed SS squad.

The squad were ordered to release the safety catches on their rifles and take a bead on the new arrivals as they lined up in the entrance courtyard. Then the SS commander called out: “The prisoners will turn around!” Immediately one of the prisoners, an arrested Dresden SA leader, shouted out: “Shoot us from the front, we won't turn around!” It was a warning to his fellow captives. As a Nazi bruiser, he knew the system: You made the prisoners turn around so that wounds in their backs would show that they were killed “while trying to escape.” There was a minute-long standoff. Then the SS officer turned away and bellowed for the prisoners to be escorted into the fortress.

Over the next three days, the SA leaders were tortured by their SS former “comrades.” Ernst Heinrich and another two civilians, both civil servants, were merely subjected to threats. Then, without explanation, the prince was suddenly released. As he left the fortress, some SS sentries turned their backs on him, while the rest presented arms like royal honor guards of old. A perfect expression of the contradiction between the two irreconcilable elements with the Nazi movement—the yen to build a terrible new world, held back by nostalgia for the old.

Within the day Ernst Heinrich was back at Moritzburg with his wife and children. He later discovered that out of lingering class solidarity, an aristocratic Gestapo commander had removed the prince's name from the list of the condemned. The fate of the disgraced SA men is unknown. Judging from other, less privileged accounts of what happened in Hohnstein during those days of horror, they were unlikely to have been spared much. Otto Griebel, Communist and painter, described in his autobiography the shock of meeting someone who had survived Hohnstein: