Dresden (11 page)

The dynamiting of what remained of the famous Dresden synagogue was attended by a camera crew and the resulting footage used as an instructional film. Which, of course it was, though in ways those responsible could never have dreamed of.

By the middle of 1939 the Jewish population of Dresden was down to a little more than a quarter of the 1932 figure. Even after war broke out, some managed to escape. Among them were Günter Jäckel's Jewish neighbors in the Sedanstrasse, the Mattersdorfs, whose sons had been his playmates, and who for all their wealth had never discriminated against him as a tram driver's son. Herr Mattersdorf had
been a banker, and until 1934—when forced to resign—president of the Dresden branch of the Goethe Society (as was Günter Jäckel himself, thirty years later). The Mattersdorfs found their way out through Italy and from there at great risk through Vichy-controlled French North Africa. Though it cost them what little of the family's wealth remained, they made it to America. There an immigration official looked at the Mattersdorf boys—both blond-haired, like Henny Brenner, despite their Jewish blood—and said, “Oh, you're a pair of fine Nazis!”

In 1945 Herr Mattersdorf, the former banker, was making a living in America as a humble bookkeeper. When he learned the fate of Dresden, no longer his home but an enemy city three thousand miles away, he wept.

But perhaps the last word should go to a grizzled Dresden street character named Franz Hackel. Acquainted with Hackel from their weekly encounters at the unemployment office, the artist Otto Griebel fondly called him “the Dresden Diogenes” for his habit of taking his ease on the bank of the Elbe and following the doings of the city's people with wry, philosophical interest. On November 9, 1938, Hackel spotted Griebel gazing in silent horror at the still-smoking ruins of the Dresden synagogue. He approached the painter, his tone conspiratorial, eyes blazing, and muttered: “This fire will return! It will make a long curve and then come back to us!”

And with that the old man melted into the crowd.

ON SEPTEMBER
27, 1939,
the Polish capital, Warsaw, surrendered to the German army. The city had been under siege for more than two weeks, pounded by artillery and subject to repeated raids by bombers of the German Luftwaffe. On September 24 a thousand German planes devastated the city, the next day 420. By the end of that second day, ten thousand civilians lay dead within “Fortress Warsaw.”

It is true that Warsaw had been declared a fortress by its defenders. It is also true that those defenders had been called on to surrender, and its civilian population to leave. The law of war, such as it is, stipulates that under those circumstances such attacks are legitimate. But that law, laid down in the Hague Convention of 1907 (just four years after the Wright Brothers' first flight) could not begin to imagine the devastation a sophisticated air force could wreak. The laws of siege remained, essentially, those established in the Middle Ages: Those within the walled city, if they refused to leave or surrender, could be attacked with whatever weapons the besiegers could wheel up to the walls and let loose.

The Luftwaffe's role in the Polish campaign was overwhelmingly tactical—designed to facilitate the army's advance rather than to damage the enemy's military and industrial infrastructure. In the early days of the war, attacks had been aimed against airfields and railway stations—in the first case to destroy the Polish air force on the ground, especially at airfields in the vicinity of Warsaw, in the latter case to hinder mobilization of the country's large conscript army. But there is no denying that civilian casualties were high; right from the beginning there was a whiff of total war and of willful lack of discrimination in target selection.

In the Luftwaffe's attack on Warsaw on September 13, Operation Coast (Wasserkante), a mix of half-and-half high-explosive and incendiary bombs, clearly indicated an attempt to destroy built-up areas by fire. The attack created “a sea of flame, so that accurate assessment of results was impossible.” Heavy raids of this kind had originally been planned for September 1—the day Germany attacked Poland without declaration of war—but had to be postponed because of bad weather. With the capital surrounded and about to surrender, September 25 saw the crews of German Junkers 52s literally shoveling incendiary bombs out of their cargo doors onto the city below. Ten percent of Warsaw's buildings were destroyed, 40 percent damaged. Terrible destruction was inflicted on the Stare Miasto, the historic city center of Warsaw.

There was also widespread strafing and bombing of road traffic, intended to create maximum chaos and impede Polish troop movements, but also killing civilians and sowing terror among the endless columns of desperate refugees, Even the American ambassador to Poland, fleeing Warsaw in his embassy car, found himself under attack on the roads of southeastern Poland, far from the front. At a press conference after his escape, Ambassador Biddle told the world that the Luftwaffe's planes were everywhere. He had been repeatedly bombed and machine-gunned and finally forced to take refuge in a roadside ditch. His car had carried the Stars-and-Stripes flag fixed to the roof, but this proved no deterrent—rather to the contrary—and so the identification was hastily removed.

Meanwhile Dresden's last summer of peace was mellowing into the first autumn of war. The final, noblest grapes were being harvested from the south-facing slopes of the Elbe valley so that the winemakers of Pillnitz and Meissen could begin the process of creating a new vintage, just as they had done for eight hundred years. Of course, two hundred years earlier, the Warsaw that now lay in ruins had been the king of Saxony's refuge. This had been his twin capital, the safe place where he could wait out Frederick the Great's fury and the Prussian destruction of Dresden. Now troops and aircrew from that same Dresden were among those raining destruction on Poland's capital.

On September 24 German forces carried out the first mass murder of eight hundred Polish intellectuals and members of the local elite in the western Polish city of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg). The massacre
was at least an act of revenge—in the first days of the war, members of the ethnic German minority had been executed as fifth columnists—but worse, much worse, was to come. Within days of the fall of Warsaw, the Germans began rounding up potential resistance members, political and social leaders, and—above all—Jews.

Sixty-year-old Victor Klemperer, expelled from his university post five years earlier because he was a Jew, wrote on September 10 that the atmosphere in Dresden was unnatural and strained.

On the day the Second World War broke out, Günter Jäckel, now thirteen, had found himself staring up at the crowded heavens in adolescent fascination. Swarms of Junkers 52s, Heinkels, Messerschmitt 109s, and, of course, Junkers 87s—the “Stuka” dive-bombers that would be the scourge of the Polish roads and railway stations—filled the sky over Dresden as they headed eastward to Poland. “They were flying low,” he remarked, “probably as a show of power.” But the next day reality—if of a somewhat Chaplinesque kind—struck. He found himself pressed into service by the painter and decorator from upstairs, whom he refers to as “Hans U,” a keen, uniform-wearing member of the SA and a Hitler supporter. This man began to requisition potato sacks and fill them with earth.

DROPPING LETHAL OBJECTS
onto enemies from a great height has been practiced as a military technique for thousands of years, whether from the battlements of castles onto the massed besiegers, or from the heights of mountain passes on unwelcome transient armies. There had been intimations of something more ambitious when, as Napoleon advanced on Moscow, some enterprising Russian patriots attempted to halt him with the aid of a balloon laden with explosives. Any deterrent effect on the French emperor has not found its way into the historical record. Balloons were occasionally used for rather eccentric localized bombing raids by, among others, the Austrians while putting down the Venetian rebellion of 1848–49. Nevertheless, until the twentieth century war remained essentially a two-dimensional affair. It could be fought on land or sea; with the aid of projectiles, certainly, but demanding that the enemy be somewhere reasonably close by on the earth's surface. Then in 1903 the Wright Brothers undertook the first manned powered flight in the Kill Devil Hills of North Carolina, and that event changed everything.

Just as Alfred Nobel had hoped that his invention of dynamite would make war inconceivable, so Orville Wright proclaimed many years after that first, dramatic trip through the air: “When my brother and I built the first man-carrying flying machine we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible.”

Not everyone shared their optimism. The British writer of futuristic fiction H. G. Wells took less than five years to produce a novel,
The War in the Air
(1908), that envisaged battles between massive airborne fleets. Within a handful of years the brothers were proved wrong in the real world also. In 1911–12, when Italy fought the Turks for possession of what is now Libya, bombs were tossed from the cockpits of biplanes onto recalcitrant Muslim tribesmen, the pilots having first pulled the pins with their teeth. It was the First World War, however, that really saw the beginning of aerial warfare directed against the enemy—and not just the enemy's soldiers but its citizens too.

Modern air warfare—one developed, militarized industrial state sowing destruction on another's population from the air—originated with the planners of the kaiser's Germany. At first aircraft were used
mainly for the vital task of reconnaissance, obviating the need for telescope-wielding staff officers to seek out hillocks and church towers from which to get a glimpse of the enemy. Now everything an army did was spread out and visible to the soaring airplane, a fact that changed ground warfare forever.

Other changes were quick to make themselves apparent. Not only was the enemy's army naked, so was his country and the people in it. From 1915, with the western front in bloody stalemate, German Zeppelin airships crossed the English Channel to attack targets in England. There was panic among British civilians, but the slow-moving, massive, hydrogen-filled craft proved vulnerable to both the rapidly assembled ground artillery shield and the agile biplanes of the Royal Flying Corps, which were soon being produced in numbers by companies such as Sopwith. In November 1916, after suffering horrendous casualties, Zeppelins disappeared from the skies over England.

The real danger—and the real antecedents of later intruders—were the sturdy, powerful Gotha airplanes—the first purpose-built, powered-flight bombers, which the Germans developed midway through World War I. These began regular sorties against English targets in May 1917. On the twenty-fifth of that month, twenty-one Gothas bombed Folkestone (one of the major embarkation points for British troops reinforcing the western front), killing 95 people and injuring 195. In this case it could at least be argued that most victims were soldiers. On June 15 a force of eighteen German aircraft attacked London. A direct hit was scored on the busy commuter hub of Liverpool Street Station. Altogether 162 people were killed in the neighborhood, including 46 schoolchildren. Only eleven of the fatalities were service personnel. The German planes all returned safely to their bases in France.

In July another force of twenty German bombers approached London from the east, skirted north of the capital, then flew across central London at ten thousand feet while shoppers in the streets below incredulously watched. “The hostile air fleet,” said a Press Association account, “presented an unbelievable spectacle as in stately procession it moved slowly, almost symmetrically spaced…daringly low.” Fifty-seven dead and 193 injured were the result of the raid, in which only one Gotha was lost. There were anti-German riots,
with Lord Northcliffe's jingoistic
Daily Mail
comparing the incident to the humiliating Dutch naval incursion into the Thames estuary in 1667.

For a while an atmosphere of near panic infected the highest circles of British government. Both the rulers and the ruled recovered their nerve, but in January 1918 the Germans resumed night raids against London, using a larger variant of the Gotha, known as the Giant. At the same time they began to shell Paris with the huge long-range artillery pieces known by the collective name Big Bertha. The will was there to attack civilian targets, the technology was available, and whatever qualms the British harbored in the early years of the war rapidly disappeared. As
Flight
magazine commented in a tirade against the German High Command: “The psychological effect of ‘frightfulness' on civilian populations is regarded by them as a weighty factor…We shall have to perpetrate quite a lot more frightfulness yet to bring them to a better frame of mind.”

After a spring of bizarre political and strategic confusion in the newly established British Air Ministry, an independent British air force, to be known as the Royal Air Force, came into being in June 1918. Its commanding officer was the tough, aggressive Hugh Trenchard. The RAF's immediate task was to assist the Allied ground forces, still reeling from the German breakthrough of March 1918, which had brought Ludendorff and Hindenburg's resurgent armies within reach of Paris. Trenchard had no doubt that bombing was one of the answers.

Trenchard directed a new, intense campaign of coordinated strategic attacks in which the British, French, and newly arrived American air forces would all be involved. The aim was to disrupt enemy communications and industry, and not least enemy morale. “If I were you,” the new air minister, Sir William Weir, suggested in September, “I would not be too exacting as regards accuracy in bombing railway stations in the middle of towns. The German is susceptible to bloodiness and I would not mind a few accidents due to inaccuracy.” He added, “I would very much like if you could start up a really big fire in one of the German towns.”

As regards the level of destruction that was possible with the existing technology, it may have appeared awesome to a population that had grown up under the peaceful norms of the “long nineteenth cen
tury,” but compared with what was to come, the results of the bombing offensive were meager. Communiqués trumpeted Allied attacks on Bonn, Cologne, Koblenz, Frankfurt, Mainz, Saarbrücken, and Stuttgart, but the official British war history would reveal that in a total of 675 strategic raids mounted during the conflict by Allied air units, 746 German soldiers and civilians had died and a total of 1.2 million pounds' worth of damage had been inflicted. The new British air force had lost 352 aircraft, and 264 aircrew killed or missing. One dead airman for three dead Germans. Just over one dead German per air raid. The lost aircraft cost between 1,400 and 6,000 pounds each—very large sums at the time.

After the sudden collapse of the German army in November 1918, there was much discussion in victorious but impoverished Britain of whether air warfare represented value for money. The general view was that, while actual damage to enemy war production had been minimal, it forced the Germans to divert considerable resources to dealing with the physical and psychological effects of air attack. In the words of Weir after a postwar tour of inspection: “bombing has the immediate effect of causing the German to dig like the devil…this means a vast expenditure of man power.”