Dresden (25 page)

Portal replied on February 6, agreeing that a new directive should be issued to enshrine the new priorities. So why issue a new directive, when Harris already had his orders to attack Dresden when the conditions were right?

First, because (if Major Lunghi's memory serves him well) the bombing of Dresden, as a specific target, was now a direct matter of high policy, decided among all three great power representatives, political and military.

The idea of bombing eastern Germany to help the Russians had originally come from London. A new, joint Allied directive would broaden responsibility and give the planned attacks on Dresden and
the other cities behind the Russian front a coalition, rather than a predominantly British, stamp.

According to the historian David Irving, Harris and his deputy, Saundby, were surprised by the selection of Dresden as an individual target for the first time in the war. Bomber Command's Intelligence Staff likewise. Irving's information states that Harris was so displeased that he drove to London to query the order. Yet Harris had specifically mentioned Dresden as a possible, in fact desirable, target in his correspondence with Portal as far back as November 1, 1944, and had further requested its inclusion on the target list when told of the JIC's proposals to bomb Berlin and the eastern front. If the information is accurate, then his behavior was highly uncharacteristic.

In the end, no new directive was handed down, but a new target list was definitely adopted at the Targets Committee meeting on the afternoon of February 7 at the Air Ministry in Whitehall. The next day, Thursday, February 8, copies were formally sent to SHAEF, Bomber Command, and the U. S. Strategic Air Force Command. It declared: “The following targets have been selected for their importance in relation to the movements of Evacuees from, and of military forces to, the Eastern Front.”

Berlin was in first place, Dresden second, with Chemnitz third.

From now on, the attack on Dresden was simply a matter of weather and timing.

DESPITE THE ATTACK
on Freital in August, in which a few stray bombs fell on the city's southern suburbs, most Germans (including the civilian population of Dresden) still saw Dresden as a “virgin” city that had somehow remained safe from harm, and would continue to do so.

Not so the professionals in charge of Dresden's air raid measures. On September 21, 1944, the city's police chief presided over a day of meetings and technical rehearsals aimed at sharpening the preparedness of the emergency services. The men at the meeting were clear about two things: first, that sooner or later Dresden would be subjected to a serious air raid; and second, that given the population density in the center of the city, the inadequate air defenses, and the continuing (because of wartime shortages, now irreparable) lack of properly constructed air raid shelters, the consequences would be grave.

The police chief grimly summarized the conclusions. They would need to designate more than two cemeteries for the dead, “since we shall have to reckon on huge losses.”

Since the citizens of Dresden could not be adequately protected, the authorities could only hope to minimize the destruction. They organized skeleton service staffs to be housed in safe shelters, prepared alternative offices for key staff members (mostly in the thinly settled outer suburbs) in case of major destruction of inner city areas, provided for emergency communications via a network of preselected messengers, and made plans to restore basic utilities and services as quickly as possible after any attack. These provisions were based on observation of the measures taken in the previously “air raid–endan
gered areas” of western Germany. From the middle of 1942, vital documents from various city departments were filmed and/or transported to safe sites outside the city.

It was easier and cheaper to generate paper and assign jobs to civil servants than to undertake the vast planning and construction task involved in actually providing the necessary air raid shelters for the people of Dresden, on a scale that might have given them the same degree of protection as the inhabitants of Berlin and the Ruhr.

 

ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER
7, 1944,
in pursuance of the ongoing assault on Germany's supplies of synthetic fuels, the Eighth Army Air Force planned a mighty raid, using its entire available bomber fleet against the still-productive oil processing plants in central and eastern Germany. Of 1,422 four-engined aircraft, accompanied by more than seven hundred escort fighters, 1,311 reached their target.

The First Bomber Division was given the longest-range missions. It was divided into two independently operating groups for its attacks against oil plants in far eastern Germany. In the event, it turned out to be a messy and somewhat costly day for the Eighth Air Force. More than fifty bombers and fifteen fighters were lost, half of those to ground flak emplacements, which were numerous and accurate around the crucial oil plants. Many aircraft could not find their targets, which were relatively small and in some cases geographically isolated, or considered conditions too difficult for meaningful attack. Under such circumstances they tried, where possible, to attack the secondary targets allocated in their field orders. In the case of the First Division, this meant easier-to-hit urban targets, either Zwickau or Dresden, depending on weather conditions.

Lieutenant Colonel Walter K. Shayler, commander of 303rd Group—nicknamed “Hell's Angels”—decided on Dresden. Shayler led his thirty B-17s toward the city, where they were to attack “military installations”—the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards and nearby facilities. Unlike most of the other units that day, they had no trouble finding the city. Prepared to undertake “radar bombing,” the three squadrons of Flying Fortresses found surprisingly light cloud over the city and very little industrial haze.

At the Ufa cinema on the Postplatz, a few hundred yards to the
east of the Friedrichstadt rail complex, the second showing of that weekend's main feature had just ended when the sirens were heard. This was the 111th alarm of the war, and
none
so far had seen bombs fall on the city proper. Now, for the first time, the trek down into the shelter was not to be in vain.

On Shayler's orders, the B-17s flew northeast across the city and dropped almost three hundred five-hundred-pound general purpose bombs, a task in which “moderate to intensive and accurate flak” greeted them. One of the B-17s dropped its bombs short of the target. When the aircraft got back to base at Molesworth in Norfolk, ten had suffered substantial damage from antiaircraft fire. Hell's Angels was the first unit to bomb Dresden accurately and with intent.

It was all over in a few minutes, the bombs being dropped between 12:35 and 12:40
P.M
. The surviving U. S. Air Force photographs show target markers still descending and bombs exploding on the southern perimeter of the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards. Some of the bombs intended for the yards strayed northward onto the neighboring Seidel and Naumann factory, where once typewriters, sewing machines, and bicycles had been made, but where production was now devoted to armaments.

Bombs also hit the Wettinschule district school, near the Wettiner Bahnhof station, demolishing part of the building, tearing doors and windows from their fixings, and one even exploding in the emergency toilets next to the school's air raid shelter. Fortunately, only a scratch air raid crew of teachers and older pupils was on duty there—it being a weekend—plus some civilians from the neighborhood, who preferred the custom-built shelter to the inadequate basements of their buildings. No one was killed, though there were some serious injuries. Less lucky was the Municipal Business School, a few hundred yards to the northwest, where a bomb careened down a light shaft and exploded in the cellar, killing a similar air raid team and some residents.

There were numerous detonations in the heavily built-up blocks between the two school buildings. A total of fifty buildings were totally destroyed, twenty badly damaged, twenty-five subjected to medium damage, and several hundred to light damage. A municipal office block not far from the historic Zwinger pleasure gardens was destroyed, and the former freemasons' lodge (now a craft and trade museum) in the Ostra-Allee directly opposite the Zwinger was seri
ously damaged. A few bombs a little farther along the street, and one of Dresden's most-loved historic landmarks might also have suffered destruction.

Victor Klemperer reported how he and the other Jews in the community house (Jew house) at No. 1 Zeughausstrasse went down into the cellar when the warning siren sounded at noon.

The impression of “bombs falling a short distance away” was deceptive. It seems the nearest exploded around half a mile west of the Jew house—a foretaste of how violent a raid can feel, even from a distance. The Americans' goal had been to concentrate the bombs in the triangular complex of tracks and platforms bordered by the Friedrichstadt goods station, the Hauptbahnhof, and the Wettiner station, but this was only partially achieved. As so often, military and industrial targets had been hit, but a lot of “spillage” (in the official phrase of the time, roughly equivalent to “collateral damage”) had also inevitably occurred.

Dresden had been through its baptism of fire. Around 270 victims were claimed by the wandering trail of destruction that the 303rd laid across the face of the city that day.

From the authorities' point of view, the “crisis management” experience of the raid was a success. Most of Dresden's preorganized systems had been shown to work in satisfactory fashion, though not quite as perfectly as the reports to Gauleiter Mutschmann implied. It helped that most of the six hundred coffins stored for the eventuality of air raid deaths were kept in the basement of the company Guhr & Stein, No. 8 Kleine Zwingerstrasse, close to the main areas affected by the raid.

The strange thing was this: The political authorities and Nazi Party behaved as if the raid had never happened. In the October days after the bombs had fallen, not a single word about it was to be found in the two remaining Dresden daily newspapers, the
Dresdner Zeitung
and
Der Freiheitskampf
.

Officially, no bombs had fallen on Dresden.

Every day between then and the beginning of November, a small number of the civilian dead from October 7, 1944, were permitted to have their death notices printed, until all had been dealt with in a way that would not cause unnecessary alarm among the public. The words “air raid” or “terror raid,” the latter almost obligatory in official propaganda, were not used in the notices. No cause of death was given. The victims died of “tragic fate” or “a hard blow of fate.” On October 12 the
Dresdner Zeitung
announced that a “communal burial ceremony” could take place, tickets obtainable from the Nazi Party office by the Zwinger. Still no open acknowledgment of the cause of death, only general platitudes about “our dear fallen” and “sacrifices for Germany.”

But in the speech by Gauleiter Mutschmann that followed, there was a hint, which no one with a grip on reality could ignore. He proclaimed, “No one should live in the illusion that the place where he lives, his town, will not be attacked…There are no islands of peace in Germany.”

On serious consideration, the experience of October should have caused real concern. Fewer than thirty American bombers, diverted from other targets, had in an improvised attack killed 270 people in Dresden during those few minutes on Saturday, October 7, 1944.

Dresden's vulnerability was beyond dispute. In London in 1940, at the height of the Blitz, where the entire might of the Luftwaffe was thrown against the British capital, the daily death toll averaged 250. Yet Dresden—and Germany—wilfully ignored this telling prelude.

 

FOR DAYS AFTER
the October 7 raid, sightseers came from Dresden and the surrounding country to examine the damage. There was a certain novelty to it. Pastor Hoch was one of the sightseers. “Dresden had never seen a ruin until then,” he recalled. “It said in the paper would Dresdeners please not go running over there to take a look. Of course, we could not help ourselves.”

Most Dresdeners still thought the raid an anomaly, and considered themselves safe. Not so the few remaining Jews in the city. No one wanted to die under the bombs, but for Jews the attacks—however terrifying—heralded and encouraged the breakdown of the system that would one day certainly murder them and those they loved.

Klemperer's neighbors in the Jew house confided in him a few days later:

The bomber war had crept eastward. The Ruhr and the western German cities were still important targets, but the Allies knew that German industry was being dispersed into Saxony and Thuringia, and knew also that the fighting in the east might decide the war. With the expanded numbers of aircraft now at the Allies' disposal (almost four thousand bombers by the winter of 1944–45), they could now divide up their fleets and still send hundreds over any one of several selected targets. The Americans especially were hitting Berlin, and the central and eastern German armaments-producing areas, and the synthetic oil plants in Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt (above all the Leuna Works). More ominously, both the British and the Americans were now attacking the oil plants in the Sudetenland and eastern Saxony, which regularly brought them over Dresden. Such long flights—almost unheard of before the end of 1943—were now becoming relatively routine.

All the newly important targets were within around thirty minutes' flying time from Dresden, which was turning into an obvious transport and communications center behind the front. Klemperer, reflecting the talk he heard in the streets and shops, noted on October 17, 1944:

But there were no more air raids on Dresden that autumn. The winter came, and with it especially bitter weather, which kept the Allied aircraft away from eastern Germany on many nights when they might otherwise have ventured there.

As Christmas approached, Gauleiter Mutschmann, addressing his underlings at a meeting of Ortsgruppenleiter, could declare, “This Christmas will be beautified for us by the fact that we can see our people back on the offensive.”

Mutschmann was referring to the Battle of the Ardennes at a time when the German advance was clearly on the ebb. Nevertheless, police reports confirmed that the temporary successes had caused “the bad public mood to disappear at a stroke. People are greeting each other again with a free and open gaze.” Most Dresdeners were by now employed on war work or in armaments factories, where a sixty-hour week was standard. Many of the city's schools, including the Vitzthum-Gymnasium in the city center, had been turned over to military hospitals, and the boys and girls likewise put into war work as flak helpers or other kinds of welfare work. Nevertheless, the city seemed eager to enjoy the sixth Christmas of the war as much as it was able. Families were encouraged, as in all belligerent countries, to take young soldiers and walking wounded into their homes at Christmas. And they made the best of it.