Dresden (29 page)

When they got out to their aircraft—about 6
P.M
.—the pilot started the engines and left them to warm up. Then, as commander of the aircraft, he had formally to sign for the 90,000 pounds' worth of taxpayer-funded machinery (1945 prices—multiply at least by twenty for a modern equivalent) and thereby take full responsibility for it. The procedure, on the chilly, overcast February evening in question, then went like this:

Leslie Hay took off at 6:18
P.M
. According to squadron records, that put him and the rest of the crew of “U for Uncle” almost exactly in the middle of the squadron (the first left the ground at 6:10
P.M
., the last at 6:25). And when they got to five hundred feet, then turned to
port, they met thick cloud. It made the trip down to Reading, though less than an hour, a little nerve-wracking.

The large town of Reading, situated on the Thames thirty miles west of London, was a regular assembly point (or “meet-up” as the Americans called it) for RAF bombers bound for Germany. The assembly was due to be completed at 7:13
P.M
., by Hay's records. Despite the conditions, he and rest of his squadron made it on time. They maneuvered into position at their allotted heights and speeds. Then they took off two degrees east, on a course that would take 242 remaining Lancasters across Beachy Head and over the English Channel.

A few minutes before 8
P.M
. they breasted the French coast, halfway between Boulogne and Le Havre, and the real game began: the deadly game with the German air defenses and their controllers—one that became more lethal, and more complicated, the further the British were due to penetrate German airspace. For five nerve-wracking hours they would be over enemy territory and so, even at this late stage in the war, exposed to the German flak and the enemy's night-fighters.

The complex system of feints, bluffs, and “spoofs” that the Allied air forces had developed over the years would be fully engaged tonight. In all, more than fourteen hundred aircraft would be in operation over Germany, almost half of them chiefly for the purpose of confusing the enemy. To provide convincing cover for the Dresden attack, Bomber Command was putting on another big raid, one that the German defenders could not possibly ignore.

A force of 368 aircraft would hit Böhlen, the hydrogenation plant north of Leipzig, which turned brown coal into engine fuel. The force, taken from parts of 4, 6 (Royal Canadian Air Force), and 8 Groups (the rest of which would go in the second wave to Dresden) was scheduled to be over the Böhlen at 10
P.M
., fifteen minutes before 5 Group was due to start bombing Dresden. This would give the enemy air defense controllers a lot of different things happening at once in much the same area of the country, and therefore a great deal to think about. To complete the picture, seventy-one Mosquitoes would bomb Magdeburg in two waves, sixteen would visit Bonn, and smaller groups of Mosquitoes would also attack Misburg, Nuremberg, and Dortmund. Plus there would be sixty-five RCM sorties and fifty-nine Mosquito patrols. Tonight there would be more British aircraft of all kinds in operation over Germany than since the night of October
14–15, 1944, when devastating raids had been launched against the Ruhr town of Duisburg and the city of Braunschweig.

The actual route plan for 5 Group, heading ultimately to Dresden, was a carefully constructed minor masterpiece of deception. Once the aircraft reached the continent, at a point southeast of Boulogne, they would fly due east to Belgium, and from there, northeast to an area just short of the Ruhr. Then suddenly they would turn and flatten out to a direction just north of east, continuing for a couple of hundred miles on a trajectory that took them just north of Kassel. From here—this was the point—you could still be heading for any number of places: Berlin, Leipzig, Chemnitz, or one of the big, well defended oil plants in Saxony or the Sudetenland.

The whole scheme was about keeping the German defenses guessing until the last moment. That was why the bombers needed so much fuel. They would hardly ever be flying direct. They would always be involved in feints and decoy schemes, which stretched a twelve-hundred-mile trip into one of seventeen hundred miles.

Even the craftiest German air defense controller could not be sure of 5 Group's destination. Such practiced deception, which the British
learned when the German night-fighter force was in its prime, remained routine. Only occasionally during this winter of 1944–45 did the Germans manage to get their defenders up into the air—but when they did, appearing among a bomber stream when least expected, they could still ensure that a lot of young men never made it back to Lincolnshire for their bomber's breakfasts.

Tonight, as 5 Group passed near heavily defended areas like the Ruhr, or Frankfurt, or Hanover, they were to a great extent protected from the equally lethal flak by the very cloud that made flying to the target in formation, next to their invisible comrades, such a matter of skill and anxiety. German antiaircraft gunners at this stage in the war did not like to waste their ammunition. They preferred not to shoot at things they could not see. So every circumstance has its good side and its bad. In the end no German fighters appeared at any time on the way out, to the relief of the British aircrew:

They are still navigating by instruments.

Meanwhile, at Böhlen, just a few minutes' flying time to the northwest, the Halifaxes of the diversionary attack are making their bombing run on the well-defended oil plant. For them there are no fortu
itous holes in the cover. The target is, according to the operational reports, covered by 10/10 stratocumulus cloud, allowing only a few of the initial green TI (target indicator) markers dropped by the Pathfinders to be seen.

The master bomber of the Böhlen force decided it was pointless to drop any more markers, given the very poor view of the ground. He ordered his remaining marking aircraft to save their flares. He instructed the attacking force to “bomb near the edge of the green TIs…then towards the center.”

Rashes of dummy flares were dimly discernible on the ground, lit by the defenders in an unsuccessful attempt to confuse the intruders. “One big dull orange explosion” lit up the target for several minutes, and fires were started, but crews considered the attack to be “scattered.”

But then the Böhlen raid had been designed almost entirely as a decoy move. Attacking a relatively small, precision industrial target like this in such weather would never normally be considered.

Böhlen was lucky. And Dresden, forty miles or so to the south, correspondingly unlucky.

ON JANUARY
1, 1945,
unknown to the people of Dresden, their city had been secretly classified as a military strongpoint, a “defensive area” (
Verteidigungsbereich
).

The order for this had been issued by no less a person than Colonel General Heinz Guderian, chief of the Army General Staff. The difference between a “fortress” and a “defensive area,” as defined over the next few weeks by a trickle of secret communications from the OKH (Army General Staff) and the OKW (Wehrmacht General Staff), was a question of practicality rather than principle. Fundamentally, a fortress was a town or city with permanent fortifications, while a “defensive area” was a town provided with defenses that, however formidable, were of a temporary nature. Both had senior officers specifically assigned to them, whose function was that of a fortress commander and whose orders took precedence over those of the ordinary civil authorities. Both were intended, in late-Hitlerite Götterdämmerung fashion, to be defended to the bitter end.

Dresdeners continued in the illusion that their city still enjoyed “special” status because of its cultural distinction. They did not know that Berlin had appointed a certain General Adolf Strauss as “commander in chief of the eastern fortifications” and that he had been ordered to create an “Elbe line,” running from Prague (via its tributary, the Vltava) through Dresden and on to the mighty river's mouth at Hamburg. Chief among Strauss's tasks was to strengthen the “defensive areas of Magdeburg, Dresden and Prague,” where the blood of countless Red Army soldiers would supposedly be spilled in costly house-to-house fighting amid warrens of streets—just as it had been in the already established “fortresses” of Breslau, Königsberg, and Posen.

So from the first day of 1945, “Florence on the Elbe” was designated a candidate for the fate that Breslau and Königsberg were already suffering—besieged, starved, shelled, and bombed to ruins—should the Soviets reach the Elbe line. It was just that the authorities had decided not to tell Dresden's inhabitants. For their own good.

The existing city commandant of Dresden, General Karl Mienert, was in his sixties and had seen no frontline action since the First World War. Mienert was temporarily left in charge of the Dresden defensive area, with power over the city authorities and police, while Berlin sought a more appropriate replacement. He still had not arrived on February 13. Building of antitank ditches started, and a special staff was set up in the basement of the extravagantly rococo Taschenberg Palace, next to the old royal
Schloss.

Meanwhile the authorities tried, without giving too much away, to spread martial feeling. They were going to have to inject a touch of steel into the daily life of Dresdeners if the de facto defensive area was to be “sold” to a population still floating happily under the illusion that their city was too beautiful and too famous to suffer as other population centers of the Reich had suffered.

Accordingly, the women's section of
Der Freiheitskampf
carried an article that took the form of a dialogue between a war-experienced woman from Cologne and her cosseted Dresden counterpart:

The date on this edition of the party newspaper was February 14, 1945. It had been printed on the evening of February 13, 1945, and was awaiting distribution when the first British aircraft appeared over the city.

 

MUCH MORE IMPORTANT
to the vast majority of Dresdeners, who knew nothing of the enhanced military status of their city, was the visible, tangible evidence that the Soviets were nearing Saxony.

This proof was amply provided by masses of refugees from the east. In late January the Russians had invaded the neighboring province of Silesia. Almost the entire German population of the province had begun to flee westward, bringing what few possessions they could carry. When the Silesians, and others expelled from the recently “Germanized” parts of occupied Poland, arrived in Dresden, the beautiful, all but undamaged city must indeed have seemed an “island of peace.”

A great
Völkerwanderung
(movement of peoples) was under way, marked by expropriation, rape, and murder—what the late twentieth century would call “ethnic cleansing.” Millions of Germans, whose ancestors had lived in these areas since the Middle Ages, were fleeing the Russian advance—and the revenge of their other Slavic neighbors. Two hundred thousand civilians remained encircled in Breslau when the Soviet trap closed in the first week of February. Those who had escaped had no choice but to head west, which in practice meant either Berlin or Saxony.

For the Nazi Party, the acceptance of “racial comrades” from the east was an essential duty. Of course, for propaganda reasons it had to be implied that the presence of such folk was a purely temporary phenomenon, until the inexplicably mislaid provinces were recovered. The official Nazi organ for Saxony,
Der Freiheitskampf
, urged citizens to offer temporary accommodation.

Dresden had been accepting refugees from the devastated cities of the Ruhr, and from Hamburg and Berlin, ever since Bomber Command's bombing campaign began in earnest. By late 1943 the
city was in fact already overstretched and finding it hard to absorb more outsiders. Now, in the sixth winter of the war, the pressure was coming from the opposite direction—the east—and the human beings affected were numbered no longer in thousands but in millions.

Many offices and organizations existed to aid and find quarters for the refugees from the east. The NSV (National Socialist People's Welfare) and the women's and youth organizations were especially involved in caring for new arrivals. These organizations worked tirelessly and well to provide temporary accommodation, soup kitchens, and basic medical treatment.

There remained, however, limits on the city's capacity to take in outsiders. Dresden had always suffered a shortage of housing, even in normal times, and by the end of 1944 the situation had reached saturation point. The air raids in October and January had further diminished the stock of accommodation. The Saxon capital naturally acted as a magnet for refugees, but the local authorities—patriotic appeals in the party-controlled press apart—didn't actually want them. At least for more than a day or two. Soon notices to that effect went up all around Dresden.

On February 8 the Red Army crossed the river Oder, on the tenth capturing the ancient west Silesian town of Liegnitz. Here in the thirteenth century the flower of the Polish aristocracy had fallen in the attempt to keep the Mongols from Europe. Before the Russian offensive began, Liegnitz had been declared one of the safe assembly points for westbound refugees. It had been assumed that, if worse came to worst, the Soviets would halt at the Oder, but the unstoppable pace of the Russian advance—from Warsaw to the edge of Saxony in just over three weeks—proved overwhelming. Thousands of refugees ended up trapped in Liegnitz at the mercy of the Soviets. Nowhere seemed safe. And increasingly, no one believed the authorities' assurances.

The human tide of misery could only swell, fed further by reports of brutal orgies of murder and rape in the German territories now at the mercy of the Soviets. The stream of dispossessed German civilians from the east had become a flood. The numbers of people on the move probably exceeded even the most extreme projections that the planners on the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Bomber Command staff had conjured up the previous month when they first discussed possible attacks against eastern Germany.

 

IT WAS NOT EASY,
late in the war, to become a Dresden resident. In December the city had been declared
Zuzugssperrgebiet
(zone forbidden to new residents). The authorities enforced these restrictions by means of the ration card system. While for existing residents the cards were distributed, as usual, through the local Nazi Party organs, new arrivals had to seek out ration card offices. They would receive cards valid for Dresden only if granted permission by the local housing office or the municipal police to live in the city. This in turn depended strictly on their showing a specific reason for moving to Dresden (say, a job) and proof of a place to live.

Fleeing the Russians was not a valid justification for seeking residence. In the latter case, the regulations told the authorities to “direct the persons concerned immediately to the NSV railway station service, who will arrange their passage to other appropriate places or districts…” This prompt expulsion to the west was the fate of the vast majority of refugees. On February 6, the regulations were tightened even further. Individuals who had no permit to reside in Dresden must be given only sufficient food to sustain them until transport out of the city was provided, and under no circumstances should ration cards be distributed to such individuals.

It was, in general, the aim of policy to have refugees on their way to the west within twenty-four hours. In the meantime they might be accommodated with local families who had answered the patriotic call, in schools and other suitable public buildings, or—especially if they had arrived by train—overnight on station platforms. In the case of the Hauptbahnhof, the storage cellars had also been crudely converted into a warren of by no means state-of-the-art air raid shelters.

Dresden historian Matthias Neutzner calculated the number of refugees and displaced persons in Dresden during the turn of the year 1944–45 at “maximally in the order of several tens of thousands of persons.” While the numbers must have increased as a result of the increased flow of refugees during the weeks that followed, some of these, at least, would have found accommodation in private homes. Most of the rest would probably have been quickly on their way. Tellingly, there is no indication of compulsory billeting of refugees, or of the provision of camps for their long-term use.

One of the actual carers at the Hauptbahnhof, who during this time spent long days and nights working with the refugees there and at the Neustadt station, was Götz Bergander. He had turned eighteen on February 11. Released from service with the flak auxiliary in October 1944, and awaiting induction into the Wehrmacht, Bergander spent time on fire-watching duties and on refugee relief work. He described the situation in and around the city's main station at 9
P.M
. on February 13, 1945, just as he was finishing his shift:

The horse-drawn vehicles were there because the station had water, which the refugees could use to drink and to bathe their children. And they could use the station lavatories. The notion that the streets and squares and parks were teeming with thousands upon thousands of anonymous peasant families and their horses and carts Bergander dismissed as “complete fantasy.”

Another eyewitness told a similar story:

Bergander estimates that around a hundred thousand might have been provided for in this way—mostly arriving on trains, but also including thousands of “trekkers” arriving by horse-drawn means or on foot with handcarts. But they were not all, by any means, within the area later affected by the air raids. Accommodations were available not only in central Dresden. On the contrary, they were spread around the city in districts that had not been bombed and never would be. Typical was the spacious outer suburb of Loschwitz, where Pastor Hoch's prosperous family had several refugees staying with them in their large villa at the time of the air raid. Another high school student gave an account of escorting a Silesian farmer, his family, and their cart some miles out to a distant waterside suburb.