Dresden (46 page)

On April 1 the chiefs of staff formally accepted a more anodyne formulation of the memorandum. It no longer mentioned terror, or Dresden, though it made essentially the same points. “We must see to it,” the note now said, “that our attacks do not do more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the enemy's immediate war effort.”

On April 4, the chiefs of staff produced a reply, which agreed “at this advanced stage of the war no great or immediate additional advantage can be expected from the attack of the remaining industrial centers of Germany.” Nevertheless, it did not agree to abandon the principle of area bombing altogether. It might be necessary against towns or troop concentrations behind the enemy front, if resistance stiffened once more. If the Nazi leaders established new centers of power, or there was evidence of concentration of U-boats and their facilities in, say, Kiel, area attacks might be resorted to.

As a communications and transport center behind the enemy front, Dresden would probably have qualified as a target for area bombing, even under the new conditions.

The order was duly issued to Harris on April 6 and permission given for it to be published (which showed a certain keenness to assuage public opinion). Harris, however, insisted that to issue such a
declaration would make the enemy's task easier, and might enable him to concentrate his air defenses in areas where tactical attacks were still likely, thus unnecessarily endangering the lives of bomber crews. He may have been right in this, but he probably didn't want to publish it anyway.

On the night of April 14–15, 1945, Bomber Command carried out its last city raid—against Potsdam, the still largely undamaged seat of the Prussian kings. It was actually the first time that Bomber Command's heavy bombers (as opposed to Mosquito raiders) had entered the Berlin Defense Zone since March 1944. The aiming point was the center of Potsdam, specifically the Prussian Guards barracks and the railway facilities, so it was not technically an area raid, though it could be thought to look like one. The bombing destroyed a great deal of the old city, as in Dresden, and, also as in Dresden, caused disproportionate casualties. Five thousand citizens of Potsdam—probably not all civilians, given the nature of the town—died just days before the Russians arrived. Like the inhabitants of the Saxon Residence, the citizens of Frederick the Great's chosen royal seat had grown so used to many alarms for nearby Berlin—but never any bombs—that they failed to take proper precautions.

Two days later American aircraft launched a final, devastating raid on Dresden. By mid-April the line through the city, no matter how imperfect in its operation, was the sole surviving north-south connection in the rapidly shrinking German Reich. The Eighth Army Air Force was given orders to break that link, thus effectively dividing the rump of Nazi power into two.

The April 17 raid was a big one, the largest of the American attacks and the largest single assault on the city if the two British attacks on the night of the firestorm are reckoned separately. Almost six hundred aircraft took part. Flying Fortresses of the First and Third Air Divisions dropped around fifteen hundred tons of bombs on Dresden. The force took its time; the attack was spread over a period of almost an hour and a half. This was a true precision operation, aiming specifically at railway targets. There was some natural drift, and corresponding damage throughout the largely ruined city, but the rail yards were mostly where the bombs fell—to devastating effect.

Clearly aimed at transport targets used by the German military, this was perhaps, the most straightforwardly justifiable of all the Allied
air raids on the city. Something between four hundred and five hundred civilian victims (including foreigners) also paid with their lives, more than died in any other attack except that of February 13–14, 1945. The American aircraft were crammed with up to three tons of bombs; with no need for diversions and spoofs at this late stage in the war, space that had once been needed for extra fuel could now store extra destructive power.

From that day until the end of the war and beyond, Dresden remained completely out of action as a major railway junction. At last, just days before the end, the Eighth Army Air Force had succeeded in its long-held aim.

The ruins of Dresden fell to the Russians on VE-Day, May 8. For some time now, Saxony's capital had been the only major German city still under Nazi control.

As the last day of the war faded into the first morning of peace, Dresden slipped seamlessly from the hands of one set of totalitarians into the grasp of another.

THE RUMBLE
of Russian guns had been audible in the city for days.

The Red Army had advanced rapidly to within a few hours' drive of Dresden as early as February. It had then halted, perhaps concerned about overextended supply lines. In March it became clear that the coming final Soviet offensive across the Oder would be directed principally at Berlin. It was left to the Americans and their British allies to push into Thuringia and Saxony, even though these areas had been confirmed at Yalta as part of the Soviet Zone in the great partition exercise that would follow the German surrender. Add to this the fact that one of the few successful German counteroffensivess of the war's final phase drove the Soviets back near Bautzen, east of Dresden—involving, among other Dresden-based units, four machine-gun battalions motorized in converted buses from the city's transport pool—and you have reason enough why Gauleiter Mutschmann remained in control and his devastated capital under National Socialist rule to the very end.

On April 16 Dresden had finally been officially promoted from “defensive area” to “fortress”—a propaganda device rather than a practical difference. It was announced that anyone hanging white flags from windows or preaching defeatism would be punished by death.

Two days later, the Americans entered Saxony's second city, Leipzig.

Many Dresdeners hoped in vain that the U. S. Army would also take their city before the end of the war. Schörner, the fanatical Nazi general now in charge of the remnants of Army Group Center, had meanwhile abandoned plans to defend Dresden to the death like
Breslau or Berlin. He withdrew his troops south through the city and into the Bohemian redoubt. Nevertheless, there was some fighting around the city as the Soviets finally approached. As late as the afternoon of May 7, a unit led by a certain Major Köhler claimed seven Soviet tanks destroyed at Wilsdruff, just west of the city. That same day eight Wehrmacht soldiers were executed by a battlefield court-martial for downing their weapons and declaring their unwillingness to fight on.

In Dresden itself, the situation had become grotesque—almost comical, except for the judicial murders. When the news of Hitler's death reached the city a week earlier, Mutschmann had issued a typically defiant declaration and ordered an indefinite period of full public mourning for the late Führer. Pastor Hoch, then fifteen, remembers the bizarre atmosphere of those days:

On May 8 things got trickier still. The language of flags was both dangerous and easily expressible:

The day before the Russians arrived, an SS unit was assigned to blow up the Loschwitz Bridge over the Elbe (along with the main bridges in the city), but two courageous citizens of Dresden decided to prevent it. They sneaked out during the night to cut the detonator
wires on the bridge. In the morning when the sappers tried to blow the charges, nothing happened. So the striking structure from the 1890s, nicknamed by the locals the “Blue Wonder” because of its color, was saved. That same day, May 8, 1945, the Red Army finally marched across it into the devastated Saxon capital.

The Soviets met opposition only from a few diehards. In the heart of Dresden, Professor Rainer Fetscher, a distinguished eugenicist, physician, expert in sexual hygiene, and self-proclaimed “bourgeois democrat,” hoped to negotiate a peaceful handover of the city. Accompanied by a representative of the Communist underground, he advanced under a white flag toward the Soviet lines but was shot dead while still in no-man's-land. A well-known and respected figure in Dresden whose private practice (after the Nazis dismissed him from the Technical University) had become a meeting point for anti-Nazis of all stripes, Fetscher became a postwar martyr. There is still controversy over whether he was murdered by fanatical SS-men or a trigger-happy Red Army soldier.

Dresden was now at the Soviets' mercy.

On the day after the city's surrender, one woman recalled:

Punishment for such crimes seems to have been severe, but enforcement highly sporadic. Where an officer chose to enforce military law, soldiers would be shot on the spot, but all too often he did not, or there was no one in authority around to intervene. Soviet soldiers would operate in bands, seizing women—often in the street—and taking turns raping them, while armed comrades kept watch. These incidents went on for some months, and they were not few in number.

A letter from a Herr G. to the Soviet-installed high burgomaster of the city at the end of May 1945 detailed how his wife and daughter had both been raped by drunken Russian soldiers in their own home—the daughter so many times that she needed hospital treatment.

Statistics are impossible to confirm. The Red Army seems to have kept no records, at least ones that are accessible, and—as Anthony Beevor discovered when he wrote out about the mass rapes in Berlin—many Russians vehemently deny that such things ever happened. One postwar figure put the number of women raped in the entire Soviet Zone of Occupation at half a million—around one woman in thirteen of the population. On a local level, the estimates are usually based on anecdote, though in Pirna near Dresden the municipal medical officer examined just over eight hundred women who had been sexually assaulted by Soviet soldiers, mostly in May 1945. More than one third had been infected with gonorrhea.

The Russian authorities showed some genuine concern for the welfare of the German population. On May 16, 1945, the Red Army released thirty thousand tons of potatoes, ninety-five hundred tons of wheat, and eleven hundred tons of meat and other provisions to cover the Dresdeners' emergency needs. By May 20, hundreds of food stores and bakeries had reopened for business, and a rationing system was initiated to avoid outright starvation. Food and housing problems were, initially at least, no worse for the average German civilian in the east than in the west.

What the inhabitants of Saxony, including Dresden, did
not
get from their Soviet “liberators” was political freedom. The German Communists to whom the Soviets quickly handed day-to-day control in the towns and cities—and soon in the provincial governments of the Soviet Zone—also refused to acknowledge that the comrades of the Red Army could have indulged in any atrocities.

Max Seydewitz was Communist premier of Saxony in the immediate postwar period, later director of Dresden's art collections, and author of a book on the city's destruction. His attitude was typical of the German apparatchiks who ruled what became Russia's western-
most and most rigidly loyal satellite, the “German Democratic Republic.” His version of the Soviet conquest of the city tells the story that he and his colleagues wanted the people of Germany to believe, in denial of their own experiences:

This fairy tale of the Red Army as Dresden's wholly benign liberator and savior was one small but vital part of a rapidly growing tissue of myths, obfuscations, and suppressions, which was soon to make east Germany very different from the west. In the Western-occupied zones, which rapidly progressed to real self-government, there were still restrictions, but at least problems could be talked about, complaints could be made, and grievances could be expressed. In the east, including Dresden, there were soon a host of things that could not be acknowledged or discussed—unless the Communists specifically permitted them—and that situation was to continue until 1989. By that year the people of Dresden had been accustomed to holding their tongues for fifty-six years.

To talk about the atrocities committed by the Red Army during those early months became taboo. To talk about the western Allies' bombing of Dresden was, however, soon be permitted—though when and how would, like everything else, be decided by the Communist authorities.

 

ON VE-DAY
mutual congratulations were exchanged between the various victorious British commanders, including Air Marshal Harris and his superiors. On May 10, in a Special Order of the Day, Harris also sent a heartfelt message to the men of Bomber Command. He allowed himself a few Churchillian flourishes and even a rare touch of sentimentality:

This was nobly thought and said, but distinctly ignoble thoughts were rapidly forming in Harris's mind regarding the status of himself and his command in the new postwar world. On May 13 Churchill's VE-Day speech was broadcast on the radio. Harris, who listened to it that afternoon in the company of the American air force commander, General Ira Eaker, was astonished and appalled that in the prime minister's long litany of courage and victory, and his listing of the major campaigns—the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the work of the Royal and Merchant Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic, the Desert and Mediterranean Wars, and so on—Bomber Command's great, four-year-long battle over the skies of Germany was not directly mentioned, bar an oblique reference to the damage done to Berlin.

This amounted to the prime minister's first public expression of the distancing process that had begun with his memorandum on bombing of March 28, in which Dresden initially featured so prominently. Churchill was already deeply distrustful of Stalin's motives and anxious at the possibility of a continued Soviet advance into western Europe. He may also have been reluctant to say anything to offend the newly conquered German population. It was on its support, and possibly on a rearming of the German military, that any hope of halting such an advance would in part rest.

Following the same train of logic, however, the other major hope for beating back Soviet aggression would have been the power of Bomber Command. If the devastating British raids toward the end of the war—and most especially that against Dresden—were part of just such a strategy of preemptive intimidation against Russia, why such a downbeat attitude toward Bomber Command in victory? With such a thing in mind, would the prime minister and his advisers not instead
play up
the bombers' achievements?

For some months it had also been clear that, while Bomber Command aircrews would be entitled to the service medals of the the
aters in which they had participated, the command as a whole was unlikely to get its own campaign medal, despite having clearly played such a major part in the defeat of Germany. Since the ground crew, administrative staff, and even senior staff officers had carried out their duties in the United Kingdom, it was argued in official circles that they were entitled only to the Defense Medal, awarded to all those who had served on the home front. At the end of May Harris wrote a letter to Sinclair, the outgoing minister for air, copying it to his own immediate superior, Portal, and (for information) to Lord Trenchard, the veteran interwar RAF commander with whom Harris regularly corresponded:

To his letter to Trenchard, Harris added a personal postscript: “I started this war as an Air Vice-Marshal. That is my substantive rank now. With that and the ‘Defence' medal I shall now leave the Service as soon as I can and return to my country—South Africa. I'm off.”

In the royal Birthday Honors, Harris had been coopted as a Grand Commander of the Bath, a more prestigious award than the plain knighthood he had been awarded some years earlier. Harris could not reasonably refuse the honor—it being a gift of the king rather than the government—but wrote to Portal to express his embarrassment and ask that he be spared any repetition. Even the high honor he had been awarded was “dust and ashes to me” because of the perceived slur on the men he had commanded. It now seems likely that Harris's personal feelings were also associated with the often-quoted “mystery” of why—unlike most other senior British commanders—he was never awarded a peerage.