Dresden (44 page)

DRESDEN,
it was already clear some weeks after the Anglo-American raids, represented, in absolute terms, the most catastrophic air assault on a German city since “operation Gomorrah” had devastated Hamburg in July 1943. Six-figure numbers for the dead at Dresden would be encouraged by the Nazi propagandists and are still quoted more than half a century later—though mostly by right-wing extremists attempting to gain converts to their cause by promoting the idea of
a “German holocaust” worse than Auschwitz.
*
However, the accepted death toll both then and now remains between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand.

Of course, terrible as these numbers of dead were, they seemed, naturally enough, inadequate to those who had undergone the firestorm and seen the thousands of corpses littering the streets and parks. It is not unusual for figures to be drastically reduced from the initial estimate after a big air raid. A death toll of one hundred thousand or even two hundred thousand was widely believed after the British bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. The figure of twenty-five thousand victims of the Berlin raid of February 3, 1945—eight times what now appears to be the real number—still finds currency more than half a century later. Nor do bombed-out populations, awed by what seem like scenes of apocalyptic destruction and appalled at what has happened to their familiar districts, their friends and families, necessarily believe official figures. Almost always, they seem to think them too low and often continue to do so in the face of documentary evidence. In the case of Coventry, for instance, even thirty years after the German raid many still believed that “thousands” had actually been killed in the raid, but the government had “hushed up” the true number of victims to avoid damage to the morale of the British public.

The historic center of Dresden itself had come to resemble an uninhabited wasteland, empty—so it seemed—except for the rescue teams, the “corpse miners,” and—while the mass burnings of the dead continued in the Altmarkt—the workers operating the grisly, improvised outdoor crematorium there.

Some weeks later, the establishment of a proper ration cards system allowed a reasonable estimate of the population of an area where, before the firestorm, many tens of thousands of people had been resident. It turned out that, astonishingly, there were living beings still to be found dwelling in the ruins of the Altstadt. They numbered around four thousand, mostly leading a troglodyte existence in cellars and other holes in the ground. Where once there had been shops, theaters, churches, and elegant apartment blocks, there were only blackened facades and rubble.

Entire areas had been cordoned off, especially where blocked streets and half-collapsed buildings created danger to civilians. The list of streets read like a tourist guide to old Dresden.

In the jargon of the clearing squads, they were known as “dead areas.” This would later lead to rumors that in these districts the cellars had been sealed forever, with their many thousands of corpses still inside. The thirty-five thousand registered as “missing” would also figure large in the legend building.

 

THE OFFICIAL REACTION
to the raid, as elsewhere in bomb-shattered Germany, was not concerned just with providing food and shelter for the survivors, and recovering and burying the dead. This was war—total war—and Berlin was concerned to restore as much of Dresden's usefulness to the war effort as soon and as completely as was humanly possible.

Among the first officials to reach Dresden from outside was a hard-headed military man whose orders had nothing to do with recovering the dead or saving the living. General Erich Hampe was the “Plenipotentiary for the Restoration of Railway Connections,” head of a huge technical organization whose dedicated specialty was the repair of railway lines and facilities damaged by air raids. It was his pride that he could get the trains moving again more quickly than the enemy could ever have imagined.

Hampe and an aide appeared from Berlin within hours of the British raid. The general was appalled by the slaughter at the Hauptbahnhof and the chaos at the railway directorate. Even to him, who had seen so much destruction, this was a “special case.” Hampe fetched a senior German railways executive from Berlin to restore order. Meanwhile, labor squads began to extract the hundreds of dead from the station area and the underground cellars—these were the corpses Götz Bergander saw piled up outside the Hauptbahnhof on the afternoon of February 15, ready to be piled into carts and trucks.

That same day, Hampe's repair gangs—mainly Allied prisoners of war, augmented with some forced laborers—began working round the clock on replacing track. The general had to bring in his own equipment and communications, since the administrative apparatus of the railways in Dresden was almost completely destroyed. The vital north-south line connecting the Neustadt station and Hauptbahnhof
via the railway bridge was completely wrecked. The Neustadt goods yards were all but destroyed and the Friedrichstadt Marshaling yards were very badly hit. Eight hundred coaches and wagons had burned out as a result of the RAF raids alone. The American raid on February 14 knocked out the Friedrichstadt passenger station completely, and demolished another forty-five tracks in the Friedrichstadt Marshaling yards. To an inexpert eye, the damage must have seemed irreparable.

It was nevertheless true that the restoration of railway tracks counted among the least difficult repair tasks facing the authorities after major air raids. Once craters have been filled in and the surface made reasonably level, tracks can be relaid very quickly—especially if, as in Dresden, the main railway bridge had suffered relatively limited damage. Within days a slow, single-track connection between the Hauptbahnhof, and the Neustadt station across the river, and the goods stations between, had been established. Two weeks later the service was back to a reasonable level, though in the case of Hauptbahnhof-Neustadt route only two out of four tracks were usable. For trains traveling southeast along the Elbe, access was available only from a platform in an outlying part of the Hauptbahnhof.

This was not quite “back to normal.” Moreover, for weeks after the raid, the Dresden railway directorate still had no functioning telephone system. This made control of work rosters, direction of traffic, and of coach and wagon utilization, problematical. All these were vital to the efficient operation of a complex rail system, and that system continued to suffer. The availability of qualified staff was much reduced. Many employees had been killed, seriously injured, or made homeless. Some remained simply “missing.”

 

POINTING OUT
that the entire Altstadt of Dresden, plus the inner eastern suburbs, had been “a single area of fire,” the police declared almost twelve thousand dwellings, including residential barracks, had been totally destroyed. The list continued:

The military targets noted as damaged were relatively unimportant except one: the Wehrmacht's main command post in the Tauschenberg Palace in the old part of Dresden. This was totally annihilated during the firestorm, and all the officers and men perished. Otherwise, military targets destroyed included the Wehrmacht library and the veterinary testing center for Military District IV, and many military hospitals. The barracks in which most of the sizable Dresden garrison lived lay a little less than two miles north of the Elbe, around the old arsenal area, and this district remained all but untouched by bombs. Since most of the soldiers—technically serving in a war zone now that the Russians had advanced west of Breslau—were at the time confined to barracks, there were remarkably few out and about in the city on the night of the British raid. This helps account for the low death toll among the military (around a hundred).

The barracks' survival caused disappointment among those who had hoped that at least some good would come from the raid. Pastor Hoch recalls that, although only fifteen, he had been ordered to report for military service later that month. As they huddled in the shelter during the British raids, his mother had expressed the hope that his call-up—and with it the prospect of a premature “hero's death”—would now be postponed. But the bombers spared the barracks in the Neustadt. Two weeks later, young Karl-Ludwig Hoch and others from the fifteen-sixteen age groups duly reported for their medical examinations.

Industry was more seriously affected. Almost two hundred factories in Dresden suffered damage between February 13 and February
15. In 136 cases the damage was reckoned “serious,” in 28 “medium-serious,” in 35 “light.”

Forty-one damaged or destroyed factories were mentioned by name as important for military production, with descriptions of level of damage and the probability of a resumption in production. Street addresses were provided, which allows their locations to be fixed. Twenty were in the eastern suburbs of Johannstadt and Striesen (including a few that trickled down toward the outer suburbs of Tollkewitz and Leuben); twelve were in the southern suburbs (Südvorstadt to Plauen); nine were in the Neustadt/Leipziger Vorstadt industrial area, across on the right bank of the Elbe. In the case of twenty-one factories, hundred percent stoppages of work are said to have resulted from the bombing. Estimates of when work could be resumed range from “not in foreseeable time” to a matter of weeks (often partial). In some cases it is indicated that the work will be resumed on alternative premises.

The industry worst affected by the bombing was the optical/precision engineering sector, in which the Zeiss-Ikon factories dominated. Zeiss-Ikon was by far Dresden's largest and most well known company. Of its almost fourteen thousand employees in Dresden, considerably more than half were, on average, absent throughout February 1945. Many had died in the bombing; other absentees would have been busy salvaging and clearing their homes.

Among Zeiss-Ikon's plants, the worst affected were the Delta-Works (100 percent destroyed), the Ica-Works (home of the company's research and development department), and the Mü-Works, all of which lay in the Johannstadt/Striesen area, plus the Petzold & Aulhorn plant in the southern suburb of Dresden-Plauen, which included Zeiss-Ikon's Alfa-Works (also 100 percent destroyed). Both the Delta-Works and Petzold & Arnhold were reported a hundred percent destroyed.

The large, modern Goehle-Werke factory in the Grossenhainer Strasse, where the Hellerberg Jews had been used as forced labor, was constructed in the 1930s to be bombproof and lay in any case away from the areas mainly affected by British bombing. However, even that factory, which before February 13, 1945, employed over four thousand workers, still reported only about half that number reporting for work two weeks later. In the case of the Ica-Works, a total workforce of
around twenty-eight hundred workers was still reduced to less than five hundred at the end of February. For Zeiss-Ernemann, a total of two and a half thousand had become five hundred. The effect on armaments production must have been enormous. Disruption did not arise from damage to the factory buildings alone. Deaths of workers, damage to their homes and to essential infrastructure, including transport links, also played a vital part in drastic reductions in productivity.

Dresden companies were famous before the war for their cameras, which were exported all over the world. By the last years of the Second World War, the output of all these companies was devoted to war work. Balda, the next largest company, employed nine hundred workers, having before the war produced a highly successful cheap “box” camera. By 1945 it made mostly gauges for Luftwaffe aircraft. Their factory “suffered seriously” in the bombing. The Ihagee camera factory in the Schandauer Strasse, which employed (1943) more than 550 workers, also exclusively producing equipment for the Wehrmacht, was completely destroyed.

Things did not necessarily improve with time. H. Grossmann, a manufacturer of specialist machines and devices, and also a supplier to the Wehrmacht, had likewise been badly affected by the bombing at its factory in Chemnitzer Strasse, south of the city center. It claimed in April to have spent almost thirty-four thousand marks on clearance works between February 14 and February 28, with no income to balance this expenditure. Works were still continuing. Two months after the British raids, “a part” of the factory was now said to be suitable once more for war production.

The degree of destruction and disruption of industry in Dresden was major, but less than would have been the case if the British had systematically bombed the industrial suburbs.

Instead they bombed mostly the heart of the city, and that is what the world heard about over the following weeks. Josef Goebbels made sure of it.

ON FEBRUARY
14,
during the regular afternoon press briefing held at SHAEF headquarters in Paris, a British wing commander of the public relations division had given an upbeat summary of recent air assaults:

He expanded a little on the situation on the eastern front, especially in Silesia, where, as he breezily pointed out, “it appears that the main line of supplies to that front is almost bound to go through Dresden.”

The next day the London press printed stories that emphasized the power of the blow delivered against Dresden. The mass-circulation
Daily Sketch
printed a still photograph taken from the RAF film of the raid, headed “Dresden Ablaze in First RAF Raid.” The authoritative
Manchester Guardian
announced, “Blows by Over 3,600 RAF and US 'Planes Ahead of the Red Army.”

So far, so good. The message about Dresden twenty-four to forty-eight hours later seemed clear and positive. A highly successful raid, one of a series designed to help the Russians. In Germany, public announcements were quite guarded. Goebbels didn't quite know how
to approach this one, at least for internal consumption. To admit to the German people huge casualties in a city as symbolic as Dresden would be to risk seriously undermining what remained of the nation's morale. Instead, therefore, the Propaganda Ministry concentrated on the foreign press. Discrediting the Allies' bombing policy in the neutral countries might be relatively futile at this late stage in the battle, but it was at least harmless.

What Goebbels did not expect was that the Allied powers' own propaganda machine would come to his assistance, but that was what happened. The first inkling of a problem for the Allies came with a meeting in Paris on February 16, where Air Commodore Grierson of the RAF's press office gave reporters a briefing on developments in Allied air strategy. He was asked to discuss the reasoning behind the Dresden raid and similar attacks and said:

Another journalist then asked Grierson, as a follow-up, whether “the principal aim of such bombing of Dresden would be to cause confusion among the refugees or to blast communications carrying military supplies.”

“Primarily communications,” Grierson affirmed. “To prevent them moving military supplies. To stop movement in all directions if possible—movement is everything.” He then added a fairly offhand remark about also trying to destroy “what was left of German morale.”

The next afternoon, at around 5:30
P.M
., an Associated Press correspondent, Howard Cowan, submitted a report for the approval of the censors at their headquarters in the Hotel Scribe, near the Paris Opera. The draft cable read:

At first Lieutenant Colonel Merrick, the senior censor responsible, decided to stop the piece. Then Cowan returned, and he wouldn't take no for an answer. Merrick explained later:

It was one of the great propaganda mistakes of the war. The journalist Cowan's report on the post-Dresden press conference was immediately taken up in the American press and broadcast on Radio Paris, though not in Britain.

Nonetheless, it was received in the offices of the London newspaper offices, and caused alarm. How could a newspaperman, subject to official censorship, have been allowed to use the taboo phrase “terror bombing” to refer to Anglo-American air raids? Did this really represent a change in government policy?

Cecil King, a senior executive at the
London Daily Mirror
, added: “This is entirely horrifying…it gives official proof for everything Goebbels ever said on the subject…”

King was right about the propaganda gift that Howard Cowan's dispatch represented for the Germans. He was, however, wrong to see it as accurately reflecting SHAEF's official view. No one at the press conference had used the word “terror” or anything remotely like it.

Cowan's dispatch essentially interpreted Air Commodore Grierson's slightly woolly remarks at the press briefing in such a way as to draw radical and therefore newsworthy implications. The astonishing thing was not that he wrote the article, but that the censors
allowed it. The Allied authorities quickly realized their mistake. Within hours officials had contacted AP to query the story. Back in Paris, a Reuters correspondent was primed to write a denial on SHAEF's behalf, and a wire went out to London just before midnight on February 17.

“The Dresden raid was…designed to cripple communications and prevent shuttling troops from eastern to western front and vice versa,” the new dispatch declared. “The fact that the city was crowded with refugees at the time of the attack was coincidental and took the form of a bonus.”

By February 19, Eisenhower's chief of staff and hatchet man, General Walter Bedell-Smith, had become involved regarding “the misinformation on bombing policy which appeared in yesterday's press.” Plans were under way to reorganize the entire press department. The implication that “air chiefs”—as Cowan put it—decided policy also carried the unwelcome implication that they determined such matters independent of their political masters.

On March 6, in the British House of Commons, a Labor back-bencher launched a strong attack on the coalition government of which his party had been a pillar for almost five years. Richard Rapier Stokes, MP for Ipswich, was a devout Catholic and a decorated First World War hero. No pacifist, since 1942 he had nevertheless belonged to a small group of public figures who opposed what they saw as the indiscriminate bombing of German cities. The occasion was the first debate on the air war since February 1944, when the likewise antibombing bishop of Chichester had spoken in the House of Lords on the subject. Stokes got to his feet at 2:43
P.M
. As he did so, the air minister, Sinclair—the man responsible for the policy under debate—pointedly left the chamber.

Stokes asked why Britain's Russian allies had never felt the need to indulge in “blanket bombing,” while enjoying great military successes (he did not suggest that this might be because the Anglo-Americans were doing it for them). He read a report from the
Manchester Guardian
, based—he said—on a German telegraphic dispatch, which spoke of tens of thousands of people buried in the Dresden ruins, so badly burned as to make identification impossible.

“What happened on that evening of 13 February?” the newspaper asked. “There were a million people in Dresden, including six hundred thousand bombed out evacuees and refugees from the east. The
raging fires which spread irresistibly in the narrow streets killed a great many for lack of oxygen.”

Stokes then also read the entire text of Cowan's dispatch, thus placing it on the public record in Britain, and asked if its claims represented official policy. If so, he said, then why had the journalists' words, widely reproduced in America, broadcast on the radio, and even reported in Germany, been suppressed in Britain? Could it be that the British people were “the only ones who may not know what is done in their names?”

Later in the debate—five hours later, to be precise—an undersecretary from the Air Ministry replied on behalf of the government. He smoothly pointed out that Cowan's interpretation of the SHAEF briefing was technically incorrect and had been denied almost immediately. He also reasserted that indiscriminate bombing was never government policy.

Stokes continued to insist on the accuracy of his information, but the debate ended in anticlimax. There would be no further formal discussion of the bombing question before the war ended.

This was not to say that the leveling of Dresden, and the attention that its catastrophic fate attracted, passed everyone by. For the British elite, “Florence on the Elbe” was significant in a way that plain German cities such as Dortmund or Chemnitz or Wuppertal could never be. Many had visited Dresden as tourists, or even lived there, perhaps as students. It was said that after hearing of the raid, Violet Bonham-Carter, daughter of the First World War Liberal prime minister Asquith, marched to 10 Downing Street and demanded to speak to Churchill, who had served as a cabinet minister under her father. This formidable grande dame of British politics then soundly berated the most powerful man in Britain for bombing Dresden. She had attended a finishing school there in the city's golden days before the First World War.

Even the knights of the British shires could find themselves stirred. Sir Cuthbert Headlam, a former minister and stalwart of the Conservative Party in the north of England, wrote morosely in his diary on February 16, 1945:

The disquiet rumbled on. Perhaps because of geographical distance, perhaps because most of the damage in Dresden had been inflicted by the RAF, the raid as such attracted less attention in the United States. Nonetheless, with the U. S. Army Air Force's strict adherence to “precision bombing” still an article of faith, among informed circles the unease was widespread—even at the highest level—and the raid's potential for undermining the Allies' crucial claims to moral superiority clearly understood.

On the same day as Richard Stokes's speech in the House of Commons, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, General Marshall, was forced to give a personal reassurance to Henry L. Stimson, secretary of war in Roosevelt's cabinet, that the Dresden attack accorded with previous practice and had been requested by the Russians.

Stimson seemed satisfied, but perhaps this was deceptive. A few weeks later he heard that a list had been drawn up of Japanese cities being considered as targets for the atomic bomb, if and when it was finally used. General Groves, the army man in charge of the Manhattan Project, had the list brought from his own office on the other side of Washington for Stimson's perusal. At the head of the list, as Groves's strongly preferred first choice, was the ancient imperial city of Kyoto, which, like Dresden, was a cultural center and also, like Dresden, contained a large industrial area. Groves described Secretary Stimson's reaction:

Stimson went even further. To Groves's embarrassment, the secretary of war called in General Marshall, whose office was next door, and without reference to Groves repeated his insistence to the chairman of the chiefs of staff: “I don't like it. I don't like the use of Kyoto.”

Counterarguments were futile. Japan's most famous cultural center was taken off the target list for the A-bomb, and stayed off.

 

THE HISTORIC HEART
of one of Europe's finest cities had been obliterated, along with most of the human beings who lived there. It represented to most Germans, and many other neutrals, an outrage, the apogee of terror.

On the day following the destruction of his home city, Günter Jäckel and the other wounded were evacuated from Dresden and traveled by truck and train into the rural fastnesses of the Erzgebirge. For the past two months he had been a wounded soldier, institutionalized and under medical supervision, sheltered (however unwillingly) from the reality of the wider war. He was shocked by a new, heightened atmosphere of fear and despair among the refugees: “Suddenly I was out there, right in the midst of the stream of refugees. Desperate people, ruthless people, women with baggage and children…loud and noisy and ruthless…there was already a feeling of collapse…”

The reaction of the Reich's elite was more complicated. To them the bombing of Dresden represented not just the destruction of a beautiful city but a final humiliation. Once Göring had promised that Allied bombers would never be permitted to do to German cities what the Luftwaffe had done to Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London. The Allies had proved him a liar, time after time. Just ten days earlier, on February 3, 1945, the Eighth U. S. Army Air Force had devastated the entire administrative center of Berlin in a daylight raid against which the Luftwaffe could offer no effective resistance. The Reich Chancellery and Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry had suffered severe damage. Allied power to inflict harm was now to all intents unlimited.
Nowhere and no one in Germany was safe. For a regime that based itself on brute strength—and viewed failure as proof of inferiority—this was an absolutely intolerable situation.