Dresden (51 page)

Like the man who lived through the bombing of Guernica and passionately recounted the verifiably untrue story of his experiences, the survivors' stories in their own way are true, because that is
their
experience. To quote one final time from Götz Bergander, born Dresdener and witness and chronicler of the air raids:

The truth is far messier. In a genocidal war between great nations, the “German Florence” fell to the most destructive new weapon of that war, the bomber. Slaughter from the skies—in a three-year-long air battle over Germany, where almost every day there was fighting—inevitably became bureaucratic, routine, inflexible, locked onto squares in a grid and often fueled by political rage. The British, especially, went to war reluctantly and had moral force on their side, but that did not make their leaders or their generals kind or humane, and perhaps it could not be expected to do so. The Germans, on the other hand, despite their high cultural achievements—exemplified by Dresden—were felt to have excluded themselves from the community of civilized nations by their behavior in the East and in the occupied countries.

On both sides, the only thing that mattered was winning the war. And once that overriding aim was decided, so was the fate of a city such as Dresden. Many of those in authority there during the war years realized this far more acutely than the general population.

Dresden contained plenty of things worth bombing, but it also contained even more things that in a better world would have been somehow preserved, even if that meant sparing the entire city, armaments factories, marshaling yards, and all. Think of the German commander who ignored Hitler's order to burn Paris, or the American artillery colonel who refused to shell the ancient university town of Heidelberg. But by 1945, in the air war, individual choice—except perhaps for the occasional bomb aimer who deliberately over-or undershot the target—was all but irrelevant. All that mattered was the things worth bombing, and everything other was hardly considered.

Then the war ended, the fighting ceased, and the world awoke from its terrible dream. The defeated had only survival to think of, but among the victorious nations this was when people started to turn to one another in shamed amazement and ask:
Did we really do that?

 

A FEW MINUTES BEFORE
10 o'clock, I leave the crowd waiting in front of the Frauenkirche. Soon the time will come when the first Lancasters swept down along the Elbe toward the Altstadt on the night of February 13, 1945. I walk down the Münzgasse, once again filled with bustling cafés and restaurants, and up the steps to the Brühl Terrace.
The river is the color of antique pewter in the gray half-light. There is almost no one about.

I look to the northwest, the bombers' approach route. Just then a clock begins to strike the hour. After it finally falls silent, there is a moment's pause. Then the church bells start to peal solemnly in churches all over Dresden, the same way they have done every year since the firestorm, marking the day and the hour when Bomber Command's fleet swept down toward its helpless target.

And as it first learned to do on this night almost sixty years ago, a whole city holds its breath.

The “Massacre on the Elbe Meadows”

UNDER THE RUBRIC
“Enemy Air Opposition,” the Eighth Army Air Force's Intops summary for February 14, 1945 says:

Alden Rigby was not part of any of the groups that encountered German aircraft. He comments:

By contrast, here is a postwar German report, describing the fighter escort's alleged activities at Dresden at around the time Al Rigby described:

The above extract is from an alleged “factual report in eyewitness accounts,” first originated in 1952 by a writer named Axel Rodenberger for a series in a popular German magazine,
Das Grüne Blatt
. It was printed in book form the next year to considerable success, the most recent edition being issued in 1995 by a well-known German publisher (though with an explanatory introduction admitting its limitations as an accurate historical account). Rodenberger's book is, however, still accepted in some surprisingly serious quarters as “history.”

Every alleged fact in the extract is wrong. The American raid was not directed at the suburbs (though due to considerable disorganization, bombs did indeed fall in the outlying areas). Most of the Flying Fortresses attempted to bomb somewhere in the region of the Friedrichstadt or Altstadt marshaling yards, quite legitimate targets close to the heart of the city and still largely undamaged. There were also no fighter-bombers on the February 14 Dresden raid. These misleading statements could arguably have been due to the ignorance of the author and have not influenced later historical analysis. The shocking part of the quoted piece, however, is the vivid and apparently detailed description of American planes chasing innocent civilians down country roads, of escort fighters—piloted by men like Al Rigby—engaged in the systematic, frenzied slaughter of German civilians escaping the burning city.

Parts of Rodenberger's book were translated and published in America, though they aroused no great attention. Also in 1952, General Hans Rumpf—the former head of the firefighting forces—published a book (
Der Hochrote Hahn
) in German about the air war. In this, he claimed that both during the night and the next day at noon, the British and the Americans had descended to low level and strafed and machine-gunned civilians even as they were also being
blasted by bombs. To claim that British aircraft did so is to claim an impossibility given the circumstances, the discipline of the British units, the temperatures at ground level, and the types of aircraft involved. No one now takes it seriously. The accusation against the Americans is, however, more plausible, and this is the one that stuck.

A few years later, a work published by a powerful apparatchik of Communist East Germany, Max Seydewitz—the first Communist prime minister of Saxony in the years after the war and a member of the party's Central Committee for many years—further stoked the fires. Seydewitz described the alleged atrocity:

Seydewitz mysteriously transferred Rodenberger's country roads to the city, but the accusation was the same. Both the British and the Americans were again accused of strafing the city, with the USAAF concentrating on machine-gunning civilians in the Elbe meadows and the Grosser Garten as well as in other parts of the city, including the Johannstadt hospital. Seydewitz's book was half a serious attempt at history, half an anti-Western rant. Its aim was to prove that the Anglo-Americans were as bad as the Nazis and the bombing of Dresden a deliberate war crime. Seydewitz's account is tailored to that Cold War priority.

But the big “breakthrough” of the strafing story came in 1963 with the publication of David Irving's international best-seller,
The Destruction of Dresden
. Irving did not give credence to the stories of the British machine-gunning civilians from low altitude during the Dresden firestorm. However, he not only supported the American strafing story; he filled in all manner of extra details unmentioned by Seydewitz. Irving reported that Mustangs appeared without warning low above the streets, shooting anything that moved, people and vehicles alike. One group of American fighters roared down and attacked the river meadows, which were crowded with survivors of the night's mayhem, while another strafed the
Grosser Garten
and its environs. According to Irving, this deadly procedure was in pursuance of instructions to “cause confusion in the civilian evacuation from the east.” He further describes how a
woman and some companions were forced, as the aircraft swooped down, to take shelter beneath some wooden benches to save themselves from the merciless hail of bullets. A woman nearby was hit in the stomach and screamed in pain. This was in Lennéstrasse, hard by the
Grosser Garten.
Further victims of the alleged low-level Mustang attack were, it was claimed, members of the Kreuzkirche's, famous juvenile choir, known before the war for its tours in Germany and abroad. The boys had also attempted to take shelter in a leafy street next to the great park. The Choir Inspector, Irving stated, was said to have been wounded in the attack and one of the choirboys killed.

“Stirring by machine guns was observed during all the raids,” as Mr. Irving correctly quotes from the Dresden Police Chief 's official report. But were these innocent casualties victims of the American fighters that accompanied the daylight attack?

Well, there was indeed there a choirboy killed by Allied air power, and a wounded inspector found in the Tiergartenstrasse, but they had not been killed by American machine guns. Their injuries had been inflicted by British bombs as they fled the school the previous night. This is perfectly clear if one reads the original, acknowledged source of Irving's information: Seydewitz's book. This was based in turn on the account by the cantor of the Kreuzschule choir, Professor Mauersberger. Mauersberger found the injured inspector and the dead choirboy after the second British raid, in the small hours of the morning, before a single American P-51 had warmed up its engines for the long trip ahead.

As for the Dresden police chief's assertion that strafing by machine guns was observed during
all
the raids, since no one takes seriously the accusation that British planes carried out such attacks, quoting such a statement is not, in itself, worth much. The police chief was simply reporting what he had been told. Had large numbers of innocent civilians been massacred by the river, as was later claimed, it would have been recognized as a major infraction of the laws of war. It is very hard to see that the cautious, neutral phrase “strafing was observed” would apply.

Even in the most recently revised edition of his book Mr. Irving continues to describe these alleged attacks as being carried out by the Twentieth Fighter Group. Mr. Irving tells us that the role of this Group in the attack could stand for the generality of the Mustangs' involve
ment. Simultaneous with the conclusion of the Americans' bombing of the city (at 12.23 pm), he adds, 20th Fighter Group's thirty-seven P-51 Mustangs began their low-level attack against ground targets. The problem with this characteristically vivid description is that the Twentieth Fighter Group was, as we know, at the time more than eighty miles away escorting the attack not against Dresden but against Prague. The latter did indeed end at 12:23. The Dresden raid ended at 12:31.

Götz Bergander pointed out this inconsistency in 1974, having checked the records in the National Archives in Washington, D. C. Mr. Irving's corroborating evidence also suffers from comparison with the official record. Other Mustangs strafed road traffic on routes out of the city, including throngs of desperate refugees. He cites a description of how one aircraft of 55
^th
Fighter Squadron [part of 20
^th
Group] swooped down so perilously close to the ground that it collided with a wagon and dissolved in a ball of fire. It is quite true that a Mustang of Twentieth Group was lost in this way. We even know that the aircraft in question was flown by Lieutenant Jack D. Leon. So why doesn't this decisively prove that strafing occurred at Dresden? Because, again, the problem is that the place where the pilot met his fate was near Donauwörth in western Bavaria—170 miles west of Prague, whence he was returning (and approximately 210 miles from Dresden).

The occasion of the low-level attack that went wrong was not some massacre of the choirboys in the Tiergartenstrasse in Dresden, but an attack on a vehicle carrying a Wehrmacht colonel, commander of a local repair facility. He was killed in his exploding truck. Leon either hit the vehicle or was perhaps knocked out of the sky by the explosion. No other pilot of the sixty-seven aircraft that made up the Twentieth Group's contingent that day was lost during operations. No pilot from any of the escort groups died or was lost over Dresden itself.

Irving does not refer to any other documentary evidence for the activities by fighter aircraft from groups that were (unlike the Twentieth) actually at Dresden. He simply includes them in his account of the alleged massacre, saying that along with the (in fact absent) Twentieth, “the ‘A' groups of the other three fighter groups operating over Dresden” also “hurtled low across the city.”

This is a difficult subject. Many survivors of the raid on Dresden
vehemently and with patent sincerity insist that they (or people they knew) were indeed attacked by low-flying aircraft after the noon American raid, and will provide vivid descriptions of the horrors that ensued. These are people who suffered terribly, and who are tormented by their experiences to this day, and it is hard to deny them their vision of what happened. There are, however, also many survivors who say they saw and heard nothing of the kind—despite being likewise in the affected area, or nearby, at the time or soon after.

Günther Kannegiesser, for instance, walked past the alleged massacre scene a short time after it was supposed to have occurred. He had delivered the women and their children to the relatives in Laubegast, and had been sitting down to a midday snack when the American bombers arrived. On his return later that afternoon, his route took him along the Elbe meadows. There were horribly wounded bodies and signs of bomb damage from both the night and midday raids, but no heaps of corpses belonging to machine-gunned victims of fighter attacks. A friend of his from the neighborhood, Fritz Gieseler, was actually in the Grosser Garten (where survivors were also alleged to have suffered strafing attacks) during the American raid:

A policeman, Werner Ehrlich, was also in the same area at the time, and told Götz Bergander forty years after the event:

The tale of the strafing attacks against civilians rests totally on often contradictory personal statements recorded years after the event, which seem to become wilder as the distance between the raid and the recollection grows.

There is no documentary confirmation whatsoever. In neither the American Army Air Force documents available, nor—perhaps more significantly—in German accounts originating at the time are such daylight strafing attacks mentioned. It is claimed that perhaps the American pilots, ashamed in retrospect of having slaughtered civilians, “covered up” their actions, and hence the lack of reports. In the case of German records, however, this cannot be the case. On the contrary, accusations of Allied massacres of civilians in such low-level swoops were a favorite theme of Goebbels's propaganda machine, and significant strafing by fighters, where it occurred, was invariably noted in official accounts of air raids, usually described by some such formula as “terrorizing the civilian population.”

One would expect a major Allied atrocity against helpless, bombed-out civilians in broad daylight to have been given great prominence in official reports. The actual bombing of Dresden is reported promptly, in grim detail, the day after it occurred. But neither on February 15 nor on February 16 (the days on which any such strafing attacks on Dresden would also have been mentioned) does the Wehrmacht High Command's report see fit to mention any strafing or low-level fighter activity. On the seventeenth there are accounts of strafing. However, they refer to attacks in the southern and western parts of the Reich. As for the reaction of Goebbels's ministry, that is another matter. One thing can be affirmed: Not a word was said by the propaganda maestro or any of his underlings about daylight strafing of civilians at Dresden between the day of the raid and the end of the war.