Dresden (26 page)

The famous boys' choir of the Kreuzschule, the city's oldest educational institution, sang and played the story of the Christ Child under the high dome of the Frauenkirche in utterly traditional fashion, as it had done for many, many years before Hitler or Mutschmann had troubled the world, but elsewhere there was strong control of content. At the opera house, closed for months now to regular performances, the Hitler Youth staged their “Christmas concert.” The curtains parted to reveal a stage dominated by a large iron cross, in memory of the war dead.

“Reich German children” (and those children only) were allowed 125 grams of sweets. Children, teenagers, and pregnant or nursing mothers also received half a kilogram of apples. And there was an extra ration of 250 grams of meat. All had to be ordered in advance through special coupons attached to the seasonal issue of ration cards.

Victor Klemperer and his wife had no such prospect:

Writing some months later, after all their worst fears had been realized, a mother wrote to her married daughter about that final Christmas in old Dresden:

BY THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY
1945
the Christmas and New Year celebrations were indeed just a memory, as were any lingering hopes for the success of Hitler's counterattack in the Ardennes. In the east, a new Russian offensive had begun on January 12. The Red Army quickly achieved massive advances along a front that stretched hundreds of miles, from Hungary in the south to East Prussia in the north.

In Dresden itself, scarcely a day had gone by in which its people had not been subjected to an air raid warning. Then, suddenly, came the real thing.

January 16 was a Tuesday. A cold snap had brought temperatures of minus 7 degrees Celsius and thick snow. At 11:20
A.M
. a general warning was sounded—indicating enemy bombers heading for central Germany—but at 11:50 the steadier howl of the full alert—
Fliegeralarm!
—rose over the wintry city. Those who could scrambled into cellars and air raid shelters—mostly unheated—and shivered and
crouched and waited. Then came the roar of engines, the shudder of bombs, and the explosions.

Like the October 7 raid, it lasted only a few minutes and was concentrated on the west-central part of Dresden. When the explosions stopped, the drone of the B-24 Liberators began to recede into the distance, and the all-clear was broadcast, Dresdeners emerged into the midday chastened.

There was no escaping the conclusion: One raid might be an accident, but two started to look like planning.

Once more Dresden had been designated as a secondary target—to be attacked if the more urgent targets were too difficult to bomb accurately. The lead group of the USAAF's Second Bomber Division was the Forty-fourth (“The Flying Eightballs”), under Colonel Snavely. The Forty-fourth had been directed against the Ruhland oil plant as well as the fighter airfield and repair hangars at Alt-Lönnewitz, near Leipzig. Visibility was poor over the fighter base, and the flak—perhaps radar-guided—fierce and surprisingly accurate. There were similar problems at Ruhland. Codeword for the alternative attack: “tough times.” Operations code for Dresden: GH 584.

Snavely led his group, and the others raggedly followed, some homing in from Ruhland to the north-northeast and some from Alt-Lönnewitz to the northwest: the 491st Bomber Group, the 392nd, the 93rd and the 446th, the 448th, the 466th, and the 467th (the last named the “Rackheath Aggies” after their base, which was on the land of a Norfolk gentleman farmer). These aircraft represented around a fifth of the bomber force that had taken off from England to attack targets in central and eastern Germany. Almost half had the luck to be assigned Dessau: They just bombed the aircraft factories and went home.

Altogether, 127 Liberators came at Dresden from various directions, this last factor dictated by the poor weather, which had made it hard for them to keep together. From between twenty-two thousand and twenty-six thousand feet, they dropped a mix of high-explosive and incendiary bombs.

The January raid was a much heavier attack than the one three months earlier, though less concentrated, in fact a little messy. This was reflected in the distribution of the damage. The actual dropping area from north to south was spread over more than almost four miles;
east to west, two and a half miles. The bombing reached a level that could be called “concentrated” around the actual aiming point—once more the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards—and the “Hecht Quarter,” north of the Dresden-Neustadt railway station and just south of one of the main concentration of military barracks in the city. Stray clusters and individual bombs landed at the Altstadt goods station and just by the Hauptbahnhof too. Some of the heaviest damage was to the Inner Neustadt Cemetery.

There was no mention of the Second Division's raid in the Wehrmacht High Command's report the next day, but the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production briefly mentioned damage to rail facilities.

The Americans' own photographic evaluation of the raid led them to the conclusion that the following military targets had been hit: railway viaducts, central section of the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards, rolling stock, industrial facilities, densely built-up area, a fuel storage container, railway junctions. This was pretty accurate.

The official toll for that day reached 376, making almost 650 dead in the two air raids on Dresden so far—secondary raids that were not even thought important enough to be mentioned in the German High Command's daily report. This time there was no attempt to hide the fact of the raid. Death notices in the local papers were permitted to describe the deaths of the victims as due to “air raid” or “terror bombing.” The mourning ceremony for the victims was fully reported—the city orchestra playing Beethoven, the Kreuzschule choir in full song. Dresden's
Kreisleiter
(district leader) told the mourners that “Life is granted to us only so that we may give it to Germany.”

And to soften the blow for the newly embattled population of Dresden, the paper carried a (literally) fantastic article about the horrendous destruction being wrought on London by the new German “wonder weapons.” Reporting an alleged speech by the “Mayor of Manchester” about the effects of the V-1s and V-2s, the
Dresdner Zeitung
told its readers that the “revenge weapons continue unceasingly to hammer” the British capital:

Again, the damaged buildings in Dresden—this time spread much more widely through the western and west-central areas of the city—attracted sightseers. “You think, something has happened in town, and you want to see it,” said Nora Lang. “It was something that hadn't happened before, you want to see it.” Anita Kurz thought each shattered building looked “like a doll's house…you could look into every room.”

 

There was another difference between the Eighth Army Air Force's January raid and the October attack. In October there had been resistance from antiaircraft guns stationed in Dresden. By the middle of January, when the Americans struck again, most of those guns had been removed and sent to areas where they were more urgently needed. When the Liberators offloaded their bombs onto the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards, guns and equipment from the last flak battery in Dresden were packed into wagons there, waiting to be transported away from the city.

At the end of April 1944 Dresden's flak had fired its first salvos at an enemy aircraft over the city—a damaged B-17 from an American raid on Berlin. The antiaircraft defenses consisted of seven 88mm heavy antiaircraft batteries (each with seven guns) and five units of so-called Russian flak (five to six guns per battery), made up of captured Soviet guns rebored from 85mm to 88mm to fit German specifications. The summer of 1944 saw Dresden's antiaircraft defenses at their strongest, with an extra battery of German 88mm guns and some more light batteries. The big oil raids on central and eastern German targets were now well under way, and Dresden's guns saw use against American and British formations heading for Ruhland, Brüx, and the other synthetic fuel plants in the vicinity.

By this time most of the work on these antiaircraft batteries was done by boys. In the words of the Führer-Order of September 20, 1942 it was “a flak militia made up of juveniles.” The aim had been to release 120,000 adult Luftwaffe personnel for the eastern front.
Fifteen-and sixteen-year-old schoolboys were now conscripted to “man” the flak. Except for the battery commander and, for the heavy guns, the loaders, most of the other functions were taken over by these teenagers. A skeleton course of lessons was kept up, with teachers in many cases coming to the emplacements to do their job.

Much of the air battle in the last two years of the war consisted of fifteen-and sixteen-year-olds on the ground, their ranks stiffened by a scattering of experienced veterans, aiming and firing guns that were trying to bring down the eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds of the Eighth Air Force and Bomber Command. Götz Bergander, born in 1927, was one of those so-called Luftwaffe helpers (
Luftwaffenhelfer
). So was his boyhood friend Steffen Cüppers. Bergander was to leave the flak before it left Dresden, but Cüppers stayed with his own flak battery until the bitter end.

Cüppers was fifteen when he and others from his class at the prestigious Vitzthum High School in central Dresden were conscripted. Young Steffen was a “K-3” gunner, responsible for loading the twenty-shell magazines into the machine gun as it fired, and every hundred shots changing the hot barrel, which came on and off in a rapid bayonet action. He was transferred to an 88mm battery just in time to be involved opposing the October 7 American raid, the “first small attack on Dresden,” though they were still in training and did not do any actual shooting.

By this time the Dresden flak was already depleted. Between then and the next American raid in January 1945, the evacuation process accelerated. Steffen was hospitalized shortly after with scarlet fever, so he knew little of the transfer order and the organizational maelstrom that resulted, though he rejoined his battery in the west when he recovered.

Much of the artillery, with its teenage crews, was turned over to ground use—in Silesia, in Vienna, eventually in the battle for Berlin. Many Luftwaffe helpers from Dresden, scarcely old enough to serve at the front, died far from home, overrun by American and Soviet infantry or vaporized in ground-guided air attacks. Many of those guns that kept their antiaircraft functions were transferred to oil and artificial fuel plants, which retained a high priority: Brüx, Zeitz, and others.

At the same time that Dresden was being stripped of its last anti-aircraft defenses, in January 1945, the big hydrogenation plant at Brüx was still guarded by 166 guns—down from a peak of 260, but a formi
dable “flak zone” for the Allied fliers to reckon with. Others ended up in the Ruhr and central Germany, trying to ward off the final, devastating assaults.

And so it was that the American crews on January 16 reported “non-existent to weak and extremely inaccurate” flak. Given the chaotic circumstances of the raids, the height at which the planes operated, and the speed with which an aircraft could pass into another flak zone, it is common to find recollections of flak over specific targets where there was verifiably none.

Dresden is often spoken of as “defenseless,” which was largely true by February 1945, but the Allied air forces planning to attack the city could not know this. Nor, indeed, could they know for certain that the Luftwaffe would not send up fighters to harass the Allied bombers by day or night.

It is also said that the withdrawal of flak indicated the low status of Dresden as a military or industrial center. Not necessarily so. No one would deny the industrial status of the city of Chemnitz, to the southwest of Dresden, a place just over half the Saxon capital's size but known as an industrial center, especially for tank production. Yet Chemnitz too lost its antiaircraft batteries in November-December 1944 and became equally “defenseless.” The Third Reich, bereft of labor and fighting men, had become desperate. Towns that should have continued to be defended were not. Dresden and Chemnitz ended up among those places. Their flak units were redistributed according to harsh new priorities, along with manpower and other vital, rapidly diminishing resources.

 

THERE WAS ANOTHER
general warning on the evening of January 16, 1945, which once again sent Dresdeners scurrying wearily for their basements. The fear was that the British might be coming by night, to track Dresden by the still-glowing fires from the American raid and bomb it again. It was a technique that had become familiar over the past few months.