Dresden (50 page)

At the beginning of January 1945 Albert Speer and other leading officials met and summarized the effect of relentless Allied bombing on production during 1944. Germany, they calculated, had produced 35 percent fewer tanks, 31 percent fewer aircraft, and 42 percent fewer trucks than planned. All this was due to intensive Allied bombing of the Reich's industrial centers—which even in cases defined as “precision” would have caused “spillage” (the World War II American euphemism equivalent to the modern “collateral damage”) and in others would have been a by-product of area bombing, where civilian casualties were ruthlessly factored in.

On the last day of January 1945 (coincidentally the twelfth anniversary of the Führer's accession to power), Speer sat down and wrote a memorandum to Hitler in which the armaments minister frankly admitted defeat in the struggle to continue supplying German armed forces. “Realistically,” he wrote later, “I declared that the war was over in this area of heavy industry and armaments…”

Overy continues:

Significantly, Overy highlights the “high tech” aspect of production shortages, especially the optical and electrical/communications
industries. This was precisely Dresden's specialty. During 1944 and early 1945 production was actually stepped up, and plants and labor forces (especially slave workers) moved to Saxony in general and Dresden in particular. According to figures supplied by armaments inspectorates all over the Reich, in the autumn of 1944 the Dresden Military District was the most popular destination for such industrial dispersals, presumably because of its distance from either front and its perceived relative safety from air attack. With Upper Silesia falling into Russian hands, and the Ruhr under constant and withering bombardment, at the beginning of February Saxony was one of the few areas where production remained relatively unhindered and even increased.

There is still an enormous amount of detailed research to be done on the more obscure aspects of the German war effort, which one suspects could be immensely revealing. An interesting footnote from around the time of the heavy Allied bombing of Dresden sheds a little light. Five days before the raid, on February 8, 1945, Radio-Mende of Dresden wrote to the local energy board. The letter requested priority in the provision of electricity for a new factory, since the company had transferred some of its production to a surprising secret location in the vicinity:

By this stage in the war, some far from romantic items were being produced under high security at the historic porcelain factory. “Dresden” china, later much cited as evidence of the peaceful nature of the city's industry even in wartime, actually came from Meissen, twelve miles downstream, though there were porcelain-painting studios in Dresden. But now even in Meissen, in the workshops where once shepherdess figurines had been crafted, they were making key items of modern communications equipment—telex terminals
(
Fernschreiber
) for the Wehrmacht. The letter from Radio-Mende, uncovered by a sharp-eyed local historian, shows not just how efficiently the dispersal of vital war industries was continuing, but how cunningly, or cynically, it was pursued. Had the Allies (legitimately) bombed the former Royal Manufactory, and inevitably along with it the picturesque and ancient town of Meissen, it is not hard to imagine the outcry that would have erupted—as the German industrial bureaucrats were perfectly well aware.

Allied air planners (and the reader) could be forgiven for thinking that, since German armament factories could be found anywhere, why should they not bomb everything?

 

THE FACT
that one of Europe's finest cities was almost entirely destroyed—while much, though by no means all, of what made it a legitimate target for bombing survived—can be criticized and condemned. The extent and manner of the loss of human life, most of it by normal standards classifiable as innocent even if the city itself was not, still wrenches at the heart six decades later. And it is impossible, even as one shrinks at the crassness of a man such as Mutschmann weeping crocodile tears for the “valuables” lost, not to wish the beautiful buildings and the artistic treasures of Dresden back to life.

This does not mean that the Allied bombing of Dresden cannot be justified. Dresden was not an “open city,” but a functioning enemy administrative, industrial, and communications center that by February 1945 lay close to the front line. RAF Bomber Command struck at Dresden in the way it had been attacking German cities for years, which sometimes caused great destruction and sometimes did not. In the case of Dresden—because of unseasonably good weather exactly over the city, an unexpected absence of opposition, a lack of the usual “cock-ups,” the inexperience of the city's people, and the local Nazi leadership's appalling neglect of air raid protection—it wrought something terrible and apocalyptic. This was the “raid which went horribly right,” the consequences of which have haunted successive postwar generations and will continue to do so.

It is true that much of what has been thought and said about Dresden since its destruction owes a great deal to the efforts of first Nazi and then Communist propagandists. Nevertheless, once the war
was over and we started to look around for symbols to understand it by, the popular instinct rightly picked out, and continues to pick out, what happened on February 13–14, 1945 as a warning of excess. Dresden remains a terrible illustration of what apparently civilized human beings are capable of under extreme circumstances, when all the normal brakes on human behavior have been eroded by years of total war. The bombing of Dresden was not irrational, or pointless—or at least not to those who ordered and carried it out, who were immersed deep in a war that had already cost tens of millions of lives, might still cost millions more, and who could not read the future. Whether it was wrong—morally wrong—is another question. When we think of Dresden, we wrestle with the limits of what is permissible, even in the best of causes.

Götz Bergander, son of Dresden, eyewitness to its suffering, and the first objective historian of its destruction, summed up succinctly but tellingly:

Or, as the painter Goya—also no stranger to horror—expressed it with even more economy: “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.”

THE STALL SELLING FLOWERS
and wreaths by the wrought-iron entrance gate is doing excellent business. In the parking lot of the huge Heidefriedhof cemetery, amid the heath land beyond the edge of Dresden, solid citizens step from their Mercedes and BMWs and begin a dignified procession down the long avenue to the memorial site.

Nearby, battered Volkswagens and East German Trabants cough to a halt and disgorge young men with shaved heads, cut-off jeans, and heavy boots. But even they are on their best behavior today. They carry wreaths in the old imperial colors of black-red-white, coded symbol of neo-Nazis in a state where public display of the swastika is illegal.

I get off at the cemetery stop, having taken a tram out to the Wilder Mann terminus of line no. 3 and traveled the last couple of miles or so by bus.

Access-privileged vehicles glide past us as we walk between the neatly cared-for graves. There are the Dresden city officials, including the high burgomaster. There are the buses carrying survivors of the firestorm, who are permitted to travel right as far as the monument—both as a due honor and a sign of respect for age, for most of them are in their late seventies and upward now. Finally the smallest but in some ways most conspicuous group arrives: the representative from the British embassy in Berlin, in his chauffeur-driven car, and the man from the American consulate in Leipzig, hidden behind the tinted windows of a spanking-new white Jeep until he too emerges into the February daylight.

The two emissaries of the western Allied powers greet each other, and then begin to work the small huddle of German VIPs. It is a mild
day, slightly overcast but dry—not unlike February 13, 1945, except that more than five and a half decades have passed and this is the third February 13 of the twenty-first century. The skinheads disappear into the trees until it is time for the annual ceremony; though some of the older, less aggressive-seeming rightists lurk with vague distaste on the fringe of the respectable political crowd.

The 2002 wreath-laying ceremony takes place at 11 A. M. It lasts about fifteen minutes, and is carried out with dignity by mainstream mourners and neo-Nazis alike. The rightists' wreaths refer to “terror bombing.” On the square stone memorial where the wreaths and flowers are laid is a plaque:

I see the faces of several Dresdeners whom I have interviewed or met. Their faces are drawn, concentrated, their gazes inward. They go to the same funeral every year—for the ones they knew and loved, for their remembered city, and perhaps also for the bits of their selves that they also lost that night in February 1945.

Afterward, the Anglo-American representatives leave fairly quickly. For the rest of us, the walk back to the entrance is slow and quiet.

February 13, 1945, has become symbolic not just for Dresdeners, and as such ceremonies go, it is the largest and most-reported in Germany. There are marches, meetings, and concerts. All have a theme of mourning, reconciliation, and peace. Except in the case of the far right and (though in smaller numbers) the extreme left.

The rightists march in the evening of February 13 to the statue of the “rubble woman” by the New Town Hall, because they are not allowed to march right through the center of town. Some skinheads have started to wear the
kaffiyeh
, the Palestinian scarf, adding to the complexity of the signs they give out. Their overall message, however, is clear. Hundreds of thousands of Germans definitely died at Dresden, the “bomb holocaust” was directed against Germans, and in the Second World War the Allies, not the Germans, were the true war criminals. The numbers who attend these marches increase steadily,
year by year. Those of their fellow countrymen who have tired of always being labeled the villains, or never thought they were in the first place, are drawn to such events.

Provocatively, or rather perversely, their long-haired leftist opponents claim to welcome the bombing of Dresden, to praise Bomber Command. Two shriek some incoherent adolescent version of this to the mainstream crowd assembled in the darkness of the Neumarkt by the Frauenkirche, which is finally being rebuilt by international subscription (a chief mover in this was Pastor Hoch, in the early years after the fall of East Germany). Most of the citizens look bemused or mildly outraged, which is presumably precisely the kind of attention the kids want. They retreat into the darkness, hurling a few parting insults in the direction of the “bourgeoisie.”

It is a dignified affair in the center of town. The scene in front of the Frauenkirche—which later merges into a prayer vigil in the now-renovated crypt of the church—is middle-class, calm, but with a deep undertow of emotion. Candles have been placed in their hundreds by the perimeter of the building site that will one day soon be the city's old Protestant cathedral reborn. People appear at microphones and tell their stories. They are simple but unbearable. Unbearable, perhaps, precisely because of their simplicity. Films are shown, including one of Coventry, which has become Dresden's sister town in the intervening years. There is another memorial meeting for the victims of the Dresden raid around the remembrance stone in the Altmarkt, where almost seven thousand bodies were incinerated in the weeks following the slaughter. This is livelier, more political, with singers and speeches about the evils of Nazism as well as the horrors of the firestorm.

 

DRESDEN IS NOW
part of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1989 its citizens played their role in the fall of the Communist dictatorship by first besieging a train from Prague—filled with East Germans who had sought refuge in the West German embassy there and had been allowed to exit by a panicked East German government—and then, when the Communist authorities tried to disperse them, undertaking a massive peaceful protest that stretched all the way up to Prager Strasse from the rebuilt Hauptbahnhof. The decisive moment came when the beleaguered colonel commanding the “People's Police”
unit, faced with a choice between allowing the demonstrators to stay or breaking up the crowd by force, chose to let them stay. The message went out to other parts of the moribund German Democratic Republic: No one was shot in Dresden—no Tiananmen Square in the GDR—and mass demonstrations began in Leipzig, Berlin, and elsewhere. Within days, old the post-Stalinist leadership was gone, and within a year Germany was reunited. The police colonel remains a popular man in modern Dresden, and is apparently big in real estate.

In 1990 came the first free expressions of feeling about the bombing of Dresden. On that anniversary David Irving came, trailing clouds of glory and a considerable entourage, to be applauded as the man who “told the world” about Dresden's destruction. Two years later, two events centered attention on the newly free Dresden. The first was the unveiling of a statue of Sir Arthur Harris outside St. Clement Danes Church in London (a church with strong RAF connections) by the queen mother. German politicians, including the high burgomaster of Dresden, registered their objections, questioning why such a provocative act was considered necessary so long after the war. During the ceremony itself protesters in the crowd shouted accusations of mass murder.

In October of that same year Queen Elizabeth II visited the “new” provinces of Germany (as the former GDR areas are known) and included Dresden in her itinerary. The feeling among many in the city was cool, even sullen. She was booed by elements of the crowd at the Kreuzkirche after she failed to apologize formally for the 1945 raid on Dresden. The matter did not die now that the naturally varied feelings about this could be discussed in the city. There are hopeful signs. In 2000 the foundation for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche was presented with a duplicate golden cross to replace the one destroyed in 1945. It was funded by the British counterpart of the foundation, the Dresden Trust, led by the indefatigable British friend of the city, Alan Russell. It was sculpted by the son of a Bomber Command pilot, and formal handover was made by the duke of Kent in fluent German. There were no catcalls.

Dresden at the time of writing (2003) has financial difficulties as Germany struggles with industrial and financial problems. The supply of subsidies from West Germany has inevitably started to dry up, and new tax income in East Germany is still not enough to make good the deficit. The center looks beautiful, with the restaurants and cafés full
and the opera house, theaters, and other venues prospering, it seems. Soon work on both the
Schloss
and the Frauenkirche will be completed, and Dresden will have back the main components of its prewar skyline.

Massive investment by the German government since 1989 has given the Altstadt and the Neustadt alike a fresh, attractive look. In the latter, areas that suffered lighter damage in the bombing are home to ethnic restaurants and funky clubs, many of which thrive on the spending power of Dresden's large student population. On the other hand, the permanent population continues to decline. It is under half a million now. Tourism—or at least international tourism—has not yet really recovered. Despite such showpieces as the gleaming new high-tech Volkswagen plant just north of the Grosser Garten, and a plethora of service and catering industries, unemployment is high. The old Communist-built apartment houses may have been improved by generous coats of paint, but in the neat open spaces between them you see young people sitting idly during the day, and some of those young men and women bear a close resemblance to the ones who flock to the far-right demonstrations.

More than one of my interviewees, grandmothers and grandfathers as they are now, drew my attention to the “youth” problem. Ironically, it is these children of communism who offer the greatest real threat to the new Germany, and with it to the new Europe my generation has inherited, where wars are unthinkable and national rivalries are a matter for the soccer pitch and the Eurovision Song Contest rather than the Panzer attack or the bombing raid.

With the new freedoms have come also the beginnings of proper and systematic research about Dresden's contentious history. The archives are open, and academics and private enthusiasts are hard at work laboring over a mountain of neglected material. It is now that something close to an objective study of the city's history under the Nazis and its final fate can start to be made—although no such comprehensive book has yet been written. Sadly, many of these new historians find themselves relatively unhonored in their own city. Such scholars will smile and tell you that people in Dresden do not believe there was industry here, or soldiers, or terrible things, none of the things you found elsewhere in Nazi Germany. People believe that Dresden was a city strictly, not to say exclusively, devoted to the arts
and culture. An innocent city. This is why the British bombing was an outrage.

The politics of remembrance in Dresden are complex, as complex as memory itself. There is a strong pacifist element in the city, perhaps stronger than most places in Germany, which is itself the most antiwar of all the large European nations. It is a genuine conviction, stubbornly held and based on terrible experience, that Americans especially have found hard to understand in the turmoil that has accompanied the opening years of the twenty-first century. Now in his mid-seventies, Christoph Adam still will not do or say anything that might glorify war or militarism. Under the Communists he suffered because he would not be conscripted into the “People's Army.” He is clear that this aversion to war arises from his experiences on the firestorm night. In varying degrees this is true of the overwhelming majority of those who survived the experience.

The far right, neo-Nazis of various stripes, of course do not oppose war—only wars against Germany. Being in some cases cunning, they use pacifist language to heighten the suffering of their own people during the Second World War, with Dresden at that suffering's apogee. Dresden was innocent. Germany was innocent. In practical terms, it is difficult to know what they want from this. A rematch? More likely, to the far rightists the bombing of Dresden is a useful tool for attracting wider support. After all, it is the one thing in World War II that most reasonable Germans agree was terrible and undeserved.

The rightist slogans repeat themselves, building on the foundation of the Dresden firestorm.
Why do we always hear about the Jews?
the argument goes.
We Germans suffered just as much, if not more. Ours was the true holocaust. The Anglo-Americans set out to destroy German culture. That is why they made war on Germany, and that is why they destroyed Dresden
. For them there will always be hundreds of thousands of dead, boiling lakes of phosphor, deliberate, brutal Allied tactics of cultural annihilation and mass murder. There has to be. Their political success depends on it.

The danger is that the far right also says a lot with which plenty of solid Dresden citizens—for all their decency and peaceableness—would find it hard to disagree. The Anglo-American attack on Dresden, a city innocent and untouchable in the view of many, even in the era of Mutschmann, was
sinnlos
(senseless) and a crime. This was
the line for more than four decades under the Communists, backed up by official propaganda, and it is still widespread dogma, not just among neo-Nazis. Other places deserved to be bombed, maybe, but not Dresden. There was nothing bad here. No industry, nothing to do with the war.
There was no industry in Dresden. There was no reason to bomb Dresden
. These and other claims are fervently maintained, even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. They have become, for many, part of their communal identity.

The bombing, and the differences in its historical interpretation even among Dresdeners themselves, are extremely, even worryingly political in Dresden. Dr. Helmut Schnatz, who wrote about the problems presented by reports of the American strafing of civilians on February 14, 1945, was subjected to a hail of invective when he attended a panel discussion in Dresden in the spring of 2000. Rational discussion was all but impossible. Known far-rightists—including one later imprisoned for his activities—heckled him from carefully chosen positions around the floor, quoting Nazi propaganda, and were enthusiastically applauded by the respectable mass of the audience. There is an unofficial boycott of Dr. Schnatz's book. It is nowhere on display in the city's bookshops, though if you ask them most will order it for you.