Dresden (22 page)

Almost all the various stations and yards in Dresden were within a few hundred meters of the river Elbe. The magnificent main station, or Hauptbahnhof, was completed in 1898 and ambitiously refurbished and extended in the mid-1930s. It lay on the southern edge of the city center, the long nineteenth-century shopping street of the Prager Strasse linking it with the Altstadt to the northeast.

Adjacent to the Hauptbahnhof on the Wiener Strasse, another splendid building from the time of the kaiser housed the railway directorate itself. From here the traffic between eastern Saxony, parts of the Sudetenland and Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), and on east into Silesia and Poland, was managed, regulated and timetabled. On the left hand, as the tracks ran northwest toward the Elbe, lay the directorate's huge repair sheds. Then came the vital Friedrichstadt marshaling yards, which served an old-established industrial area and also acted as transfer facility for the barge and river traffic that moved in and out of the nearby Alberthafen (Albert Harbor). From there the tracks ran across the river to Dresden-Neustadt, passing first the goods station (where the Hellerberg Jews had begun their journey to Auschwitz) and continuing to the main Neustadt station, at which most passenger trains stopped on their way to and from Dresden Hauptbahnhof.

This was the heart of the railway system in Dresden. It was important to the city, to the region, and to the war in the east.

For the Polish campaign in August-September 1939, the Dresden directorate laid on fifteen thousand extra trains. This meant drastic reductions in normal passenger and commercial usage, but the traffic for the first battles of the war ran for the most part smoothly and on time.

By the last year of the war, with Dresden's industries running at full capacity the railways had become a key factor in the city's importance. Over the past few years, special tracks and platforms had been installed to expedite supplies to and from the major armaments and war-related factories in the city. Germany's—and Dresden's—war-industrial production tripled between 1940 and 1944. The Dresden Chamber for Industry and Trade declared at the end of 1941, “the work rhythm of Dresden is determined by the needs of our army.”

The most serious problem the railways faced in 1943–44 was that a great many younger members of the trained staff were conscripted to the Wehrmacht. Remaining skilled railwaymen were often moved around to keep trains running in other parts of the Nazi empire, or to help repair the increasing numbers of railway installations and tracks destroyed or damaged by Allied air raids. Much of the basic work was now done by women, foreign labor, or prisoners of war, who were extensively used in track repair gangs and for loading and unloading freight.

By the end of 1943 about 12,500 foreign workers lived in camps in and around Dresden, working exclusively for the railway directorate. Their managers were exhorted to “get as much out of them as possible,” though they were to be “correctly and humanely treated.” The same stipulation was less emphasized in the rules regarding prisoners of war. It was missing altogether from the conditions of the five hundred men from the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, near Weiden in northeastern Bavaria, who were employed as forced labor at the repair shops from September 1944 onward. Even the railway's established German employees worked a sixty-hour week, with no increase in wages since 1939.

The deportations of Dresden's Jews began on the morning of January 21, 1942, with the freighting of 224 human beings into unheated boxcars. They traveled as third-class single-journey passengers, with a group discount. Only the guards had return tickets. All journeys to the concentration camps were classified as “special trains” because of the group bookings, but were otherwise treated as normal passenger journeys.

And it was not only Jews from Dresden who passed through the station. This was an important junction. A great many deportation trains, heading for the extermination camps at Belzec or Auschwitz, and to the ghetto at Theresienstadt, passed through Dresden:

If there were technical problems, such trains could remain at Dresden and changes might be necessary. A prisoner en route from Dachau, near Munich, to Auschwitz, described an enforced stop and change of trains at Dresden:

With the conquest of vast areas of Eastern Europe and Russia after 1941, Dresden became part of a huge, overstretched rail network.

The importance of Dresden as a transit point for military traffic can be seen from the figures for October 1944, when the western Allies' advance from Normandy was starting to slow down, but the fronts in the east and southeast were coming perilously close, and east-west movements of forces were heavy. A total of twenty-eight military trains, altogether carrying almost twenty thousand officers and men, were in transit through Dresden-Neustadt
each day.

There is no reason to believe that three months later, in the first weeks of 1945, with Russian offensives on the Oder and in the region of Budapest, and the Ardennes offensive against the Anglo-Americans going into reverse, the frantic yo-yoing movement between eastern and western fronts would have decreased substantially from the level in October of the previous year. That was part of the Allies' calculation when they started to place Dresden in their sights. After the war, an American former prisoner of war wrote:

Both the railway directorate and the Dresden authorities were also aware that the Hauptbahnhof and its surrounding area, to the south and northwest lined with industrial sites and warehousing, would be obvious targets for any Anglo-American bombing attack on the city. One railway official noted that “by their location and size they represented a good target.” The target maps in the possession of the Allies showed this configuration clearly.

There was toward the end of the war some consideration by the local authorities of how to provide shelter of a kind for any military personnel or civilians using the station in case of air raid. Unfortunately, as generally happened in such matters in Dresden (unless dedicated to the protection of the authorities), the preparations that were actually made lacked either thoroughness or urgency. At the end of 1944 an inspection of the air raid shelter arrangements at the Dresden stations, including the Hauptbahnhof, showed serious failings. At the Hauptbahnhof, they had mostly converted existing underground storage cellars.

The teenage Götz Bergander was downright dismissive:

His view of the authorities in Dresden was even more withering:

All this time, the eastern front was moving relentlessly closer. Although Dresden kept the deceptive appearance of peace, beneath the surface it was working harder than ever for the victory the Führer had promised in those sunlit days of parades and jubilation, back in 1940–41.

But now the eyes of the enemy were finally fixed upon the city.

AS CHRISTMAS
1944
turned to New Year 1945, only a fool or a fanatic could have believed that Germany would now emerge triumphant from this war. The imponderable factor was, how long would it take for the Reich to be defeated? And at what continuing cost to the Allied forces and the still-captive peoples of Europe? These were the hard questions that planners in the British and American camps were asking themselves during these weeks. And their mood was in many ways far from optimistic.

After the “breakout” from the Normandy beachhead in late July 1944, quickly followed by Anglo-American landings in the South of France, the western Allies had appeared to sweep all before them. They took Paris on August 24 and Brussels on September 3, pushing on toward the Dutch and German borders, in a blitzkrieg comparable to the German triumph of 1940. Then came the disastrous failure of British forces to seize the Rhine crossings in a bold combined land and airborne operation known as Market Garden. The Allies had advanced too quickly for their supply lines. The only major French port in their hands, Cherbourg, provided too limited a conduit for the food and supplies needed by an expeditionary force now totaling around two million men.

The vital Belgian port of Antwerp had been captured on September 4. However, it took almost three months in total to clear the nearby Scheldt estuary of enemy forces and the harbor approaches of German-laid mines. Meanwhile, every day the German V-1 launch sites in Holland sent flying bombs not just against London and southern England but against Antwerp. More than six thousand of Antwerp's citi
zens were to die under this rain of V-1s and then V-2s—twice the number of Londoners killed by these German “wonder weapons”—as the western Allies struggled to exploit fully their possession of the Belgian port. The Anglo-American advance ground to an almost complete halt short of the westernmost German city, Aachen, which was taken only after costly house-to-house fighting amid the ruins of the historic city.

Meanwhile, with their supply lines much shorter than the Allies', the Wehrmacht's forces in the west were able to regroup. They had their backs to the natural barrier of the Rhine and the man-made defenses of the German fortified line known as the Westwall, and they now started to put up a much fiercer resistance. The Hürtgenwald, southeast of Aachen, formed a dense, twenty-square-kilometer triangle of forest between the west Rhenish towns of Eschweiler and Düren and the village of Schmidt. This area—impassable for armored vehicles—proved nightmarishly difficult for General Courtney H. Hodges's U. S. Seventh Corps to wrest from its stubborn, skilled German defenders, and until it was taken, no secure progress could be made across the Rur River (not to be confused with the Ruhr, farther east) and toward the western bank of the Rhine. This small area would cost the Americans ninety days of close-contact fighting between mid-September and mid-December 1944, resulting in twenty-four thousand men killed, wounded, or captured.

In the eastern French province of Lorraine, Patton's army's advance was snaillike. The flamboyant hero of Sicily and Avranches took Metz at the end of November at the cost of 2,190 soldiers' lives. In three months, his Third Army had advanced a little over twenty miles, and was still some miles short of the Westwall. Since landing in Normandy Patton had lost forty-seven thousand men.

In the German homeland, the screw of total war was, in the meantime, being turned even tighter. From October 1944 the draft age had been lowered to sixteen and raised to fifty, putting an additional three-quarters of a million male Germans under arms. The new Home Guard, the Volkssturm, was sworn in, boys and old men tossed together and paraded in town squares all over Germany. Short of weapons and uniforms alike, they were a symbol of insane defiance, of the Nazi elite's determination to resist to the end, whatever the cost to the German people.

Any hopes that Hitler would concentrate his defensive efforts
against the hated Russian enemy in the east, or that the Wehrmacht would somehow “prefer” to give in to the Anglo-Americans, had been shown to be vain. Moreover, the Führer was planning a great counteroffensive—not against the Soviets, who had now paused just east of Warsaw, but against the Americans in the Ardennes.

In the early hours of December 16, 1944, Operation Autumn Mist was launched. A massive force of two hundred thousand German troops, with six hundred tanks, attacked the eighty thousand Americans holding this hilly part of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. The object was to smash their way through and recapture Antwerp, some 120 miles distant.

Despite having long since lost control of the air, the Germans were protected from Allied aircraft by a spell of cloudy, overcast weather—a situation that was to persist for just over a week. The northern part of the offensive, led by Sepp Dietrich's SS Panzer Division, made slow progress, but Field Marshal Mantueffel's Fifth Panzer Division managed to advance sixty-five miles and encircle the transport center of Bastogne, just south of the river Meuse. Here, after demanding the American forces' surrender, the Germans received from the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, General Anthony C. McAuliffe, the famous one-word refusal: “Nuts!”

Bastogne was about as far as the Germans got. Already short of fuel for their tanks and other vehicles (they had been told to supply themselves from captured Allied fuel dumps), and forced to advance along narrow, twisting roads over vulnerable bridges, the Germans found their offensive grinding to a halt. On December 24, the weather lifted and thousands of Allied aircraft took to the skies. German supply routes, airfields, and forces were now subjected to all-day bombing and strafing. Men and materiel could be moved only at night along frozen roads. On December 26 Patton broke through and relieved the American First Airborne Division in Bastogne. The game was over. Hitler's desperate last gamble had failed.

All the same, the Allies—and public opinion back in Britain and America and the Dominions—had been given a serious shock. Part of the Allied front had caved in. The Germans had fought fiercely for every inch of the contested ground. The V-1s and V-2s continued to fall on Antwerp and London. There might be no chance of further German advances, but the fighting in the Ardennes was to drag on for
almost six weeks. The Americans suffered eighty-one thousand casualties of all kinds, including a shocking nineteen thousand killed (most in the first three days after the German surprise attack), and the British fourteen hundred (two hundred dead). German casualties totalled almost one hundred thousand, and these were men Hitler definitely could not afford to lose. The Ardennes offensive would be reckoned a catastrophe in the longer term for Germany, but in the meantime morale had been bolstered and the invincibility of the western Allies cast into question.

This was the difficult, ambivalent, and fast-changing situation in which the purpose of the Anglo-American bombing campaign was being reconsidered during the particularly hard winter of 1944–45. One thing was certain: Anyone bold enough to say that the war was all but over would have received pretty short shrift from soldiers and public alike.

 

THE SPRING OF
1944
had seen Bomber Command's rapidly growing strength given over mostly to preparations for the Allied landings on the continent planned for late May or early June. French factories, railways, and bridges had been bombed relentlessly in a precision campaign that contrasted with the “area bombing” visited on German towns and cities during the previous two years.

Understandably, there was reluctance to cause more casualties among the French population than strictly necessary, and in most cases the targets were quite specific, selected to prevent the Germans from deploying their forces efficiently once the Anglo-American invasion started.

The bombing in support of the D-Day landings was successful, though, despite all the preinvasion qualms, quite costly in terms of French dead. The Allied air forces continued in support of the ground troops as they first consolidated their position in Normandy and then engaged in vicious, costly fighting to expand it. Only after the “breakout” at the end of July (in which precision bombing again played a key role) could the highest echelons of Allied military power turn to consideration of what they might now do with Bomber Command and the USAAF.

In the case of Bomber Command, there ensued a drawn-out struggle between Sir Charles Portal, the RAF chief of staff, and his long
time subordinate, Sir Arthur Harris. It was to prove crucial for the fate of Dresden. Harris had put his force at the behest of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in the spring of 1944 with reluctance, but there can be no doubt that Bomber Command did its job. The problem came in the early autumn when Harris wished to return to what he had seen since 1942 as his chief mission in life: destroying Germany's cities.

On December 7, 1943, three days after the British incendiary attack on Leipzig, Sir Arthur Harris had submitted a lengthy analysis to the British Air Ministry, assessing his view of the destruction caused so far in Germany. He wanted a great expansion of the Lancaster bomber fleet, improved countermeasures, and radio aids. If he got those, he argued, Bomber Command could force Germany to surrender by April 1, 1944.

This plea was, for the moment, Harris's last attempt to pursue the “bomber dream.” It soon became clear that nothing of the kind would be granted him, and that Bomber Command's role in the New Year would be subordinate to the needs of Overlord, the cross-Channel invasion of Europe. Harris, since the end of December 1943 in discussions with Air Chief Marshal Leigh-Mallory, commander of AEAF (Allied Expeditionary Air Force), knuckled under. However, he also warned in his inimitable blunt style that if his forces were made to concentrate on tactical support for too long, the German homeland, which Bomber Command had been battering so assiduously for the past two years—with, he considered, increasingly devastating results—would be given an invaluable respite:

Harris would also have been grimly aware of the role of Germany's fighter force and its capacity to regroup and recover if given the opportunity. His last great project before he placed Bomber Command directly at
SHAEF's disposal—and probably his greatest single failure—was the sustained campaign against Berlin in the winter of 1943–44. Much had been expected, perhaps even the dreamed-of “knockout” blow. But the distant capital of the Reich, vast, spread-out, with few clear topographical distinguishing features (and many of those easily concealable through camouflage measures), subject to extreme cold and filthy weather conditions, had proved an extraordinarily tough nut to crack. Berlin's flak defenses became legendary, including the two massive concrete “flak towers” in the Tiergarten, whose lower stories also doubled as secure air raid shelters for thousands of Berliners.

The lengthy flights without fighter escort exposed the British bombers in merciless fashion to the depredations of the well-organized German fighter defenses. Aircrew spoke of missions against “the big city” with mingled pride and apprehension. As spring 1944 approached, Harris abandoned the attacks on Berlin. More than ten thousand Germans had been killed in the city itself. On the British side, 2,690 bomber aircrew died and almost a thousand were captured. Losses over Berlin between August 1943 and March 1944 averaged 5.8 percent, a total of 625 aircraft. In Martin Middlebrook's words, “The Luftwaffe hurt Bomber Command more than Bomber Command hurt Berlin.” This painful fact was, perhaps, to influence later decisions about where decisive blows might be delivered against Germany at relatively low cost.

In the autumn of 1944 Harris was eager to return to the “city-busting” fray. On September 30, 1944, Harris wrote to Churchill, who had passed on some ULTRA information about Germany's current prospects, agreeing that “the Boche would fight his damnedest when driven back to his own frontiers.” The Germans were clearly, Harris said, attempting to regain the initiative in the air, aided by the respite in attacks on their aircraft factories. Full advantage must now be taken of the vast Allied air superiority to “knock Germany finally flat.”

Churchill replied quickly:

Bomber Command formations began to go back into Germany during the first part of August, on what at first glance have seemed like little more than harassment raids, often using Mosquitoes to attack from a much higher, and therefore safer, altitude than Lancasters. From mid-August, however, there were more serious attacks. Stettin was hit with 461 aircraft on August 16–17, Rüsselsheim on August 25–26 (targeting the Opel auto factory), and the port of Kiel was attacked the next night with nearly five hundred Lancasters, followed by similar assaults on Königsberg in East Prussia (twice)—a very long flight. On September 11–12, 1944, some 262 British aircraft of 5 Group started a firestorm in the middling city of Darmstadt, killing between eight thousand and twelve thousand of its inhabitants—roughly 10 percent of the total population—and proving that Bomber Command did not need massive quantities of planes to wreak ultimate mayhem.

A few days later Harris was formally released from the direct command of SHAEF. If that was what he had been able to do in August-September, what could he do now, free to choose his targets and with the longer winter nights providing a safer operational environment for his bombers?