Dresden (8 page)

The Social Democrat politician Hermann Liebmann, once minister of the interior in Saxony and for years chairman of the party's faction in the state parliament, was arrested in Dresden in April 1933. Mutschmann had a special fate in mind for a man who had spent a considerable part of his political career attempting to stem the Nazi tide. On May 20, 1933, after a meeting of the Nazi district and local leaders in nearby Bad Schandau, Mutschmann drove with an entourage of these worthies to Hohnstein, where Liebmann was imprisoned. Liebmann was led in front of the gauleiter and his cronies and handed a manuscript containing anti-Nazi speeches he had made in the Saxon parliament. He was forced to read aloud from the text
amid uproarious laughter. He was then beaten up so badly that he died of his injuries, apparently on the same day.

Another prominent Dresden social-democrat politician and writer, Dr. Max Sachs, was murdered in Sachsenburg, the purpose-built concentration camp established by Mutschmann southwest of the city. A fellow prisoner described the horror of Sachs's final hours:

Both these men were singled out as Jews. Those Dresden Social Democrat leaders who were not arrested in the first days of the Nazi regime managed to flee over the border into Czechoslovakia. The surviving activists distributed smuggled anti-Nazi material into Dresden, often using the resulting income to support the families of comrades held by the Gestapo. In October 1933 they opened a tobacconist's shop, which they planned to use as a camouflaged meeting place for the resistance.

The Social Democrats were betrayed from within their own ranks. Weeks later the Gestapo rounded up the entire three hundred–strong underground structure of the party in Dresden. Many were sentenced to long terms of prison and hard labor. The Nazis had moved ruthlessly against the Communists even before taking full power, arresting many of the party's leaders before they could disappear abroad or underground. Later the Gestapo succeeded in infiltrating most of the Communist cells that remained. Again, there were show trials and heavy sentences “to encourage the others.”

The secret police in Dresden possessed only two hundred salaried employees but was able to rely on an army of informers and its indispensable helpers in the regular police. By the middle of 1935 it had all but extinguished organized opposition in the city. In April 1937, adding the former political section of the old police force to its strength, the Gestapo moved into the former Hotel Continental in the Bismarckstrasse, which extended along the southern rim of the main station, the Hauptbahnhof. The new headquarters' notorious warren
of interview rooms and detention cellars were to become part of the nightmares of Dresden's Jewish citizens, as well as any other political and racial undesirables.

Otto Griebel bears witness in his autobiography to the growing sense of helplessness in the face of the new regime's ruthless efficiency and—it has to be said—widespread popularity. For Griebel, as an avant-garde artist, the setbacks were also not purely political.

As early as September 1933 the Nazi-appointed Commissar for the arts in Saxony, Walter Gasch (himself a painter) and the head of the Dresden Academy, Richard Müller, staged a show of modern art at the city hall, under the title “Reflections of Decay in Art.” The show contained works in the possession of the Dresden City Museum. There were paintings by Otto Dix (which included his horrific panoramas of the trench warfare he had witnessed as a soldier in the First World War), Schwitters, Georg Grosz, Kokoschka, and many other well-known artists of the time, including Griebel himself. The Dresden show attracted Goebbels's approving attention. It was later expanded, moved to Munich, and then sent out on a national tour as the infamous “Exhibition of Degenerate Art” (
Ausstellung der Entarteten Kunst
).

Otto Griebel's life was meanwhile punctuated by financial problems and worries for his family. The regime controlled public purchases and support of the arts, vetted the appointment of teaching staff in cultural institutions, and had infiltrated the clubs and associations that were such a lifeline to individual artists. Artists they disapproved of found it hard to make a living. A fair proportion of Dresden's artists had, in any case, always looked to the right. But now many of Griebel's friends had either withdrawn from politics or, with a frequency that surprised and disgusted him, hurried to curry favor with the Nazi enemy.

In common with all who try to survive under totalitarian regimes, Griebel learned to compartmentalize his life. He remained under occasional surveillance by the Gestapo. The woman who ran the fruit stall opposite his family's apartment building would tell him of men who sidled up to her and asked if the artist Griebel had a lot of visitors, and if so what kind of visitors. All the same, he kept a circle of trusted artist friends—they called themselves “the Seven Just Men”—and with them he could relax. They would walk in the country, set up
their easels and paint together in the open, and only then talk freely about art and politics. This routine made survival tolerable, at least until world war came and sucked the Just Men into its maw along with tens of millions of others—just and unjust alike—throughout Europe.

By the mid-1930s in Dresden, active opposition to Hitler had been all but crushed. In July 1935 the largest single group of political offenders imprisoned in Saxony was made up not of organized resistance workers but of private individuals arrested for “utterances hostile to the State”—anti-Nazi political jokes, or the spreading of (accurate) rumors that the party leadership around Mutschmann in Dresden was corrupt and lived in luxury at the people's expense.

Gauleiter Mutschmann's Dresden had by now become one of the great regional capitals of Nazi Germany. Politically it belonged among the regime's strongholds. It remained so until the terrible consequences of that regime were brought terribly close to home, this time not just for a few hundred unfortunate dissidents but for hundreds of thousands of “normal” citizens.

ON MAY
30, 1934,
Hitler declared to a huge and enthusiastic crowd: “Dresden is a pearl, and National Socialism will give it a new setting.”

The Führer was in Dresden to open the “Reich Theater Festival Week.” It was his first visit since the Nazi seizure of power. The last time, in July 1932, he had spoken to an audience of a hundred thousand cheering supporters during his campaign for the Reich presidency. The theater week two years later, with the Nazis now in power, was a triumph for Mutschmann, proud to host not just the Führer but also Propaganda Minister Goebbels and a selection of other major chieftains of the new Third Reich. The city was bedecked with swastika flags and banners. In the Führer's honor, the city's major architectural monuments were floodlit at night for the first time.

The atmosphere of the time was, for many, euphoric. Every day, seven-year-old Günter Jäckel and his schoolmates had to recite a special prayer before starting classes:

The brash new regime, with its harsh yet colorful theater, appealed to a child's sense of order, of joyous repetition. As Jäckel recalls:

On the long-awaited day when the Führer showed himself in Dresden, Jäckel was present with his mother. They had walked from their basement apartment south of the main station all the way to the city center. Once there, they weaved among the vast crowds controlled by SA and SS marshals, searching for a place that would give a view of the Führer. They found one near the city theater, the Schauspielhaus (for was this not a theater festival?) and waited. Alas, the excited little boy had not listened to his mother's advice about going to the bathroom before leaving for the demanding excursion. For a while he was stoical enough. Then the pressure became too much. After some frantic darting around, checking of ornamental bushes by the side of the avenue—rejected as not providing sufficient cover—they pushed their way out into the Theaterstrasse. Since everyone was in the crowd awaiting Hitler's motorcade, the usually busy street stood empty.

Just as little Günter was finding relief against a shady wall of the theater building, a band struck up, the shouts of the crowd shaped themselves into hoarse cries of “Heil Hitler,” and the Führer roared by in his convertible, to stop moments later at the luxury Hotel Bellevue, opposite the opera house. “So, I never got to set eyes on the beloved Führer. But we would all be able to trace his trail for many, many years to come.”

One thing was clear. Within a fairly short time of Hitler's accession to power, most of Dresden was definitely on his side.

There were good reasons for this, and they were not just political ones. Unemployment declined swiftly after 1933. The Nazis had discovered deficit spending, and the masses felt at least some of the benefits. A modern airport was constructed at Klotzsche, just north of the city. Both the tram network and the rail and bus links were improved, allowing easy access to and from the surrounding country. By 1936 the new
Autobahn
network had reached Dresden, sucking in unemployed labor like a peacetime war. Works included a massive road bridge over the Elbe that was one of the wonders of the age.

Tourism recovered. The economic upswing also boosted demand for the leisure-oriented consumer goods in which Dresden specialized. The first 35mm single reflex camera (the Kine Exakta) began
production in 1936 at Ihagee's factory in the Schandauer Strasse. The design would later be produced all over the world, so widely that few would be aware of its Dresden origins. All this, by the mid-1930s, brought cheer to the burghers of Dresden and moved them to acclaim the Führer as he inspected their theaters and made sweet speeches about their city and its future. They were not to know that the price of this was more than just the loss of political freedom. Hitler's government was running up debts that could be repaid only by the fruits of conquest, and that almost certainly meant war.

Almost from the first, the new government had started to favor industries relevant to rearmament. This was a planned, conscious direction throughout the Reich, and Dresden was no exception. There were no smokestack industries here; unlike in the Ruhr district, home of Krupp, or the coal and steel hells of Silesia. No guns, ships, tanks, or trucks were made in Dresden. Dresden's specialty was what the Germans call
Feinarbeit
—precision work. There was Zeiss-Ikon (cameras and lenses), Radio-Mende (radios, fuses, communications equipment), Sachsenwerk (electrical products), Seidel and Naumann and Clemens (sewing machines and typewriters), along with famous cigarette manufacturers whose brands were known throughout Germany and central Europe.

Germany before World War II had become the largest and most advanced producer of machine tools in Europe, its output far exceeding that of Britain. This meant that switching machines from harmless consumer goods to war equipment—and thereby changing the nature of entire factories and firms—was relatively easy. Cigarette machines could (and would) be adapted to produce bullets. Radio assembly lines could be adapted to produce communications equipment and electrically operated fuses for the Wehrmacht. And nowhere were the skills of the lensmaker more useful than in guaranteeing the deadly accuracy of a bombsight. These Dresden factories, along with their machines and workers, could with relative ease be turned around and equipped to produce, in many cases, the “cutting-edge” apparatus of modern war, 1940s style. On sea, on land, and in the air.

The location in Dresden of such resources, with the workers whose skills were required to exploit them most efficiently, was not the city's only advantage. Geography was crucial. Saxony lay in the eastern part of Germany, and Dresden was located in the eastern extremity
of Saxony—even farther beyond the then-practical range of British or French bombers.

Finally, Dresden, as a cultural and architectural monument of great renown, might be spared major destruction. After all, the British still loved Dresden, did they not?

 

THE LARGE ALBERTSTADT
military and industrial complex was named after King Albert of Saxony, who had ordered its construction in the 1870s. It sprawled on either side of the Königsbrücker Strasse, just to the north of the Neustadt.

With its barracks, training grounds, ordnance factories, and warehouses, Albertstadt had fulfilled an important role in the First World War. Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty that ended the war, most of the factories and warehouse buildings were compulsorily privatized and let on commercial leases to local businesses. Facilities deemed ineligible for civilian conversion (including all but a few of the rail sidings and loading ramps) were to be destroyed. The victorious Allies' International Military Control Commission was set up to monitor this process here and throughout Germany's other military-industrial centers. It made regular inspections of the Albertstadt and repeatedly requested action on this issue.

Despite years of wrangling, almost none of the buildings or facilities was demolished. Three ammunition-filling facilities, for instance, were a constant bone of contention. After the final visit by an IMCC inspection team led by the British general C. Walch, the Allies grudgingly accepted that the planned letting of the buildings to a sugar company represented a change to civilian use. On October 25, 1925, the director of the complex's administering company wrote with a hint of triumph:

So the military-industrial area escaped with reversible changes of use but without significant loss. Its reclamation and expansion became a priority again as soon as the Nazis took power. Dresden already
housed the largest garrison in Germany in 1933, with five thousand troops stationed there, amounting to 5 percent of the entire postwar army. The total strength of the Dresden command would quadruple to twenty thousand before war broke out again. By then the second largest permanent concentration of troops in the entire Reich outside Berlin, it included a Luftwaffe training battalion and a company of SS engineers. These forces, for years held in reserve like a powerful chess piece within easy reach of both Czechoslovakia and Poland, played a major role in the incorporation of the nearby Sudetenland into Germany in October 1938, and then the forcible occupation of the remaining Czech lands as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia just a few months later.

As the decade advanced, the ancillary industrial area was slowly remilitarized. The administering company remained technically independent until 1941, when it was formally taken over by the army. However, long before that the main private companies leasing manufacturing and warehousing space there had been integrated into the rearmament program, and their freedom of activity accordingly limited.

 

A “PEARL”
Dresden may have been, but the city had never been simply a collection of pretty buildings. Nor were all those buildings sacrosanct. Strict planning laws had kept large-scale industrial development to a minimum in the old center, the Altstadt, but even before 1933 historic areas had been redeveloped or demolished to accommodate the needs of a fast-growing city. To build the grandiose New Town Hall in the early 1900s, an extensive area of eighteenth-century dwellings had been cleared, and the expansion of the Alsberg department store complex in the late 1920s had also meant the demolition of a number of historic buildings in the Altstadt.

It is ironic that these new commercial buildings, though built in a consciously “fitting” style, were steel-framed in the manner developed in America around the turn of the century, and therefore survived the bombing of Dresden in far better condition than the surrounding area. In the early Nazi years, before all civilian construction was postponed due to the war, several high-density, decaying districts were redeveloped, with entire blocks of picturesque but unsanitary houses being pulled down to provide more air and light and allow for street widen
ing. Among the historic areas subjected to total demolition was the Frohngasse, which fronted a tumbledown network of dark yards and alleys notorious through the centuries as the haunts of prostitutes.

Other observers—not just the city's sex workers—were less than delighted at Hitler's promise to reset their “pearl.” Several “garden suburbs” were built on the outskirts of the historic city, designed in the steep-roofed, traditional “Germanic” style favored by the Nazis. Like the new buildings, their tenants were politically sound—large families, many of whose breadwinners were employees of the National Socialist Party and affiliated organizations.

Among the genuinely alarming elements of the “improvements” Hitler had promised was the building of a gigantic new Nazi Party conference hall and headquarters, the Gauforum. This was to be constructed in the overbearing style developed by Albert Speer—inflicting a disparity of scale with the surrounding city that Dresden's adroit planners had spent centuries determined to avoid. The planned building would have meant demolishing hundreds of dwellings in the eastern part of the city center, and hacking off a great chunk of the Bürgerwiese, the carefully sculpted municipal park created in the middle of the nineteenth century by the landscaping genius Paul Joseph Lenné. What remained of this precious area of greenery would have been demoted to little more than a decorative access area for the Nazi Party's enormous congress building. Only the coming of war prevented this act of vandalism.

There was also much thought of how Dresden, like Germany's other historic cities, would cope with the increased motor traffic that the Reich's new prosperity and dynamism would inevitably bring. In the Altstadt alone, it was planned that twenty-six hundred dwelling units would have to disappear to “open up” Dresden to cars and trucks. In 1937 Dresden, along with Hamburg, Augsburg, Bayreuth, Breslau, Graz, and Würzburg, was declared one of the so-called Führer cities singled out for direct intervention by Hitler and Speer. From now on, the fuddy-duddy conservationists who had hitherto prevented widespread changes in the face of the city were rendered powerless.

On September 1, 1939, Gauleiter Mutschmann officially established the Durchführungsstelle für die Neugestaltung der Stadt Dresden (Implementation Office for the Reshaping of the City of
Dresden). The man named to head it was Professor Hermann Martin Hammitzsch. By a happy coincidence, Hammitzsch was not only an architect, but a few year earlier had also married Adolf Hitler's elder sister and former housekeeper, Angela.

In an altogether grimmer constellation of circumstance, Hammitzsch's appointment occurred on the day that Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began.