Dresden (37 page)
Authors: Frederick Taylor
The provision of these “breakthroughs” (
Durchbrüche
) was one of the peculiarities of Dresden's response to the bombing danger. It was
a function of its densely populated center, the lack of large public shelters with proper air-filtration systems, sealed doors, and firewalls. The idea of knocking crawl-through holes in the walls of all the cellars in a given streetâand sometimes a whole districtâwas that if you had a problem getting out of your particular building's basementâif rubble had blocked the exits, or the upstairs was on fireâyou could find your way out of your unventilated basement and through to some other building from which escape might be possible.
Like almost everything else in Gauleiter Mutschmann's capital (except his own private bunker), this system had been designed to deal with a “normal” air raid, in which there would be damage to individual buildings and some fires, but nothing apocalyptic except for those unlucky people who suffered direct hits. The system was cheap, easy to arrange, and seemed logical. In the northern part of the Altstadt, there had been some extra tunneling work. This provided an extensive supplementary network, which moreover emerged via purpose-built concrete exit shafts close to the banks of the Elbe at the Neumarkt (by the Frauenkirche), the Postplatz (the Altstadt's main tram terminal), and the Adolf-HitlerPlatz.
Even where fairly sophisticated in construction, the system proved totally unsuitable for dealing with a lengthy, heavy raid or series of raids. In the case of a firestorm it was actually counterproductive. The policy of creating “breakthroughs” turned each arrangement of connected tunnels into a potential death trapâa trap with a multitude of chambers.
Instead of being limited to sucking the oxygen out of one basement at a time, the firestorm could suck it out of the entire network. And smoke and flame could likewise spread through the underground labyrinth with rapid abandon.
Margret Freyer, then a young woman in her twenties, was one of the few who did escape from the Altstadt after the second raid. She found herself that night with a female friend, Cenci, in the local shelter on the residential Struvestrasse, extending east from the elegant shops of the Prager Strasse:
Three women went up the stairs in front of us, only to come rushing down again, wringing their hands. “We can't get out of here! Everything outside is burning!” they cried. Cenci and I went up to make sure. It was true.
Then we tried the “break-through,” which had been installed in each cellar, so people could exit from one basement to the other. But here we met only thick smoke, which made it impossible to breathe.
So we went upstairs. The back doorâ¦was completely on fire. It would have been madness to touch it. And at the front entrance, flames a metre and a half high came licking at short intervals into the hall.
In spite of this, it was clear that we could not stay in the building unless we wanted to suffocate. So we went downstairs again and picked up our suitcases. I put two handfuls of handkerchiefs into a water tub and stuffed them soaking wet into my coat pocket. They probably saved my life later on.
But as we went up the stairs out of the cellar, Cenci's husband came up and said: “Cenci, please stay here, you must help my sister. She's ill.”
I made a last attempt to convince everyone in the cellar to leave, because they would suffocate if they did not; but they didn't want to. Most died down there, but three women were found outside the door, among them Cenci.
The center of Dresden in the small hours of Wednesday, February 14, was a tragic arena of human suffering. In that terrible confusion, unspeakable consequences could spring from a moment of carelessness or miscalculation; not to mention a judgment arrived at amid the burning fog of smoke and sparks and hot air that stripped and burst the lungs. Destiny could be determined by such an apparently trivial matter as choice of clothing.
Margret Freyer, for instance, ascribed her survival once she had left the doomed cellar on the Struvestrasseâthe streets were already like ovensâto the fact that she had chosen to wear knee-boots when she went out that winter night to visit her friend. In the heat, the tar on the streets melted. Others who tried to flee through this viscous quagmire rapidly lost their slip-on shoes, even their lace-ups, which stuck in the tar. Their bare feet were quickly burned so badly that they could no longer move. They died. Margret Freyer's snug boots stayed stubbornly on, and she lived.
One man who lost everything and everyone he cared about that night wrote a letter of condolence a few months later to a woman whose parents' deaths he had witnessed. They had all lived in the
same block on the Marienstrasse, on the edge of the Altstadt. Hans Schröter's letter conveys the roles of chance and courage in survival with a kind of still, desperate vividness:
We had got through both raids and thought that we would now survive. This unfortunately was not to be the case. The door of the basement of No. 38 was buried under rubble, so the only option was the emergency exit to No. 40 and 42. When we got through to No. 40, flames were already pouring down the steps, so that to save our lives we had to act with the utmost haste. Everyone behaved very calmly. The electric light had gone, we had electric torches and oil lamps with us. To push through the exit required enormous courage, and many could not summon itâincluding, perhaps, your beloved parents. They may have thought, we'll be all right in the basement, but they had not reckoned with oxygen shortage. As I emerged, I saw my wife and son standing by the security post on the
parterre
of No. 42. They looked so helpless, but since I had an elderly aunt from Liegnitz staying and I wanted to get her out, I said to my wife, I'll be back in two minutes. When we got back after this time, however, my loved ones had disappeared. I checked every shelter and basement on the street. Nowhere were they to be seen, everything wreathed in flame, no entry possible. Unable to find my family, I summoned my last instincts for survival, got as far as the Bismarck Memorial. I stood for an hour by the little building there, until its roof also began to burn. I walked thirty meters further along the Ringstrasse and stayed there until it got light.
As the new day dawned over Dresden, Schröter started to pick his way back through the shattered streets to what had been his home.
The sight that greeted my eyes was appallingâ¦Everywhere charred corpses. I quickly headed home, hoping to find my loved ones alive, but unfortunately this was not so. They lay on the street in front of No. 38, as peacefully as if they were asleep. What I went through at that point you can easily imagine. Now I had to find out if my parents-in-law or other friends could be rescued from our basement alive. For this I summoned two men from the Wehrmachtâ¦As we opened up the emergency exit from No. 38, the heat that came out was so intense that we could not go down there. So we
had to remove the boot-scraper from the entrance of No. 40 so that we could get into the bathroom, and through there into the basement of 40 and 42. The basement of No. 42 was full of bodies. I counted about fifty. Eulitz was among them. I could not see your parents, as everyone was piled on top of each otherâ¦
IN THE WINTER OF
1944
prisoners of war had been drafted in to sink concrete-lined reservoirs into open spaces in Dresden. The object was to ensure that fire-fighting teams had reliable and plentiful sources of water other than the mains and the river. The largest of these tanks was dug on the wide expanses of the Altmarkt, where the victorious troops had paraded in those far-off days of 1940. Two others, on the Sidonienstrasse, near the Hauptbahnhof, and the Seidnitzer Platz, just north of the Grosser Garten, were more modest, but nevertheless held large quantities of potentially life-saving water. There were smaller upright tanks in other areas of the city. Like the “breakthroughs,” in the near-apocalyptic conditions of February 13â14, their dangers turned out to exceed their usefulness.
At the height of the firestorm, Dresdeners fleeing the blazing Altstadt made for the massive water reservoir in the Altmarkt. This container-cum-lake, 130 feet long, 65 feet across, and some 10 feet deep, was surrounded by a concrete safety wall that rose two feet or so above ground level. It dominated the old city square in the last months of the war, the subject of constant comment and discussion. Anyone
in extremis
around the center of Dresden would have known it was there.
That night the water reservoir had been of little use to the fire-fighting teams. By the time the second raid was over, most routes to it were blocked to vehicles by collapsed buildings, or made impassable by deep bomb craters. In any case, most of the surrounding Baroque apartment houses and public buildings were already beyond saving. The vast tank now had only one possible use, and that was the protection its depths provided from water's traditional enemy, fire.
Hundreds of desperate human beings, some already on fire, found their way through the burning streets to the Altmarkt. They plunged gratefully into the apparent safety of the cool, plentiful water. As the night wore on, however, the searing air from the surrounding conflagrations and the accumulated effect of all the burning human beings who had
crowded into the reservoir began to have an effect. The heat within became intolerable, the air unbreathable. In the tank, hosts of survivors, many injured, many poor or nonswimmers, tried to clamber out again, only to find out that the Altmarkt emergency water reservoir tank had not been built as a swimming pool. There were no bars or handles, no ladders. On the contrary, the sides of the reservoir were smooth cement, on which it proved almost impossible to obtain a purchase.
The weak scrabbled hopelessly until they drowned. In many cases they seized hold of the strong swimmers and dragged them down to the bottom with them. A very few of the strongest swimmers and nimblest climbers managed to get back out. The great reservoir in the Altmarkt was both a terrible place of struggle that night and, with bitter irony amid a city on fire, a watery graveyard for hundreds of unlucky souls who lost that struggle.
The next day, when rescue gangs cleared their way through to the square, half the huge quantity of water had evaporated. All the people left in the great reservoir were dead. A macabre ring of charred corpses surrounded the walls of the reservoir; these were the bodies of those who had not quite made it to the water before they burned to death, or were overcome by fumes. In the Seidnitzer Platz tank, which was about fifty feet square, would-be survivors had crowded into the water up to the rimâit was shallow enough to stand uprightâuntil it could take no more. The next day, they were still there, most still packed next to one another in an orderly fashion. All dead of asphyxiation.
In smaller tanks, the water became so hot that the people who had taken refuge in them were literally cooked. Only in one case did an officer observe two men clambering out of a water container, having sat out the first wave of the attack successfully. This was, admittedly, quite early in the night, before the air became truly toxic.
Margret Freyer passed some tanks the next day, as she searched for her fiancé in the smoking ruins of the city:
From some of the debris poked arms, heads, legs, and shattered skulls. The static water-tanks were filled up to the top with dead human beings, with large pieces of masonry lying on top of that again. Most people looked as if they had been inflated, with large yellow and brown stains on their bodies. People whose clothes were still glowingâ¦
Most firefighters caught in the city that night died. An exception was the commander of the Third Company of the Ninth Unit of the Dresden “Fire Police,” drafted into the city center from Neustadt. He survived to write a report for his superiors. There were heroes that night, irrespective of politics or war.
The commander and his team had taken refuge from the second British attack in an official shelter near the New Town Hall, which was subjected to a direct hit by a high-explosive bomb. The commander's report laconically expresses his agony of frustration that he could do so little:
I immediately made my way out of the cellar with my men through the emergency exit on Kreuzstrasse 4. Since a large-scale conflagration had meanwhile developed, it was impossible to get through with our vehicles. Hundreds of people were on the Town Hall Square, with further streams of people coming from all directions and moving across the Georgplatz, heading for the Elbe. To save lives, I tried to create a way through with our hoses, using supplies of water still available from the tank there. My intention was to open an escape route through the Ringstrasse in the direction of the Elbe. My Fire Truck 8 had been destroyed by enemy aircraft fire. My fire truck 15 had been knocked out by a bomb. The pump store had been hit. The hose truck could not be used, which meant that I had to abandon the intention of creating an escape route. I was forced to restrict my plans to saving my own men. While, the firestorm in the Town Hall Square had reached such an intensity that it was hurling people to the ground and annihilating them. I gave my men a final order. They were to follow me, and rush through the wall of fire to the Elbe a hundred meters away. I went ahead and cleared the way. I brought all my squad to safety, except two men. The two firemen Rietsche and Kaufmann do not seem to have followed me. I myself and six of our men received second degree burns, but survivedâ¦I personally reported the withdrawal of my squad to Hauptmann Thieme in the Kaiser Wilhelmplatz at 4:15
A.M
. on 14 February.
SOME DRESDENERS
who escaped from the inner city survived, like Hans Schröter, by finding islands of spaceâair pockets. For most, though, unless they managed to get out of the city altogether, there were only
two sure refuges: the green spaces of the Grosser Garten and, north of this, the terraces and water meadows beside the Elbe.