Dresden (52 page)

According to Mr. Irving, the “B” group fighters were to remain within sight of the bomber boxes at all times. However, the accompanying pilots of “A” group had been briefed quite differently. Immediately after the bombers had finished their work over Dresden, these Mustangs were to dive “to rooftop level” and turn their guns, in the jargon of the USAAF, against “targets of opportunity.” These strafing targets were to include enemy troop movements in and out of the devastated city, motor vehicles, and railway traffic, including locomotives and other
transportation targets, against which rockets would also be used. Both “A” and “B” groups were finally to leave the bombers at 2:25 p.m. near Frankfurt-on-Main, close to the safety of Allied—occupied territory, where they would hand over their escort task to P-47 Thunderbolts.

No documentary reference is given for this “briefing,” which clearly amounted to an order to strafe ground targets (inevitably involving civilian casualties) immediately after the raid. As it happens, the written orders for the First Air Division's attack on Dresden that day are available at the National Archives in Washington. They contradict everything in Irving's description—except, perhaps, the mundane final point regarding replacement of the escort detail by P-47s at Frankfurt.

The folder is titled:

It stipulates fighter escorts for all thirteen hundred or so American bombers in daylight action that day and issues special instructions for their modus operandi.

Point X in the order for February 14 contains two important provisions:

This is no command for hell-for-leather attacks on ground targets but a call for extreme caution on particularly long, potentially difficult
trips during which efficient, close fighter escort could be crucial. The specific orders issued to the Twentieth are also available, as is the text of the briefing. They include the above instructions and also add that ground targets, specifically to be sought on the return trip, should especially include “transport facilities.”

As Götz Bergander sums up:

It is sometimes hard to interpret contemporary documents. Working through the folder in which the field order is contained, the reader comes across a teletype short summary of the fighters' involvement in the day's raids. In this document, there is to be found the following paragraph:

This looked, on the face of, as if it could describe exactly what the proponents of the “massacre” claim—the “A” groups flying low and strafing after the bombers had left Dresden. Except that, on careful reading, it is clear that the document is referring to
all
of the fighter groups that went out that day, not just those that accompanied the First Air Division. It is simply stating that they obeyed orders, in that “A” groups went down to low level and strafed “on withdrawal.” And in the context of the report, “on withdrawal” does not mean “after the bombers had finished their bomb runs” but
once the fighters had withdrawn from their escort duties.
As Alden Rigby said, the escort fighters' job was
“keeping up in the air and getting them off the target.” Withdrawal (often shorted to “w/d”) might therefore happen a half-hour later or two hours later (this is usually indicated in the records), depending on the perceived level of continuing risk. Until then, unless encountering enemy aircraft, fighters were under orders to stay with the bombers.

In all the records in the National Archives in Washington, there is not a single reference to low-level attacks or strafing runs on targets in or near Dresden. But there are detailed accounts, including real-time “flash reports” received during the actual raid, by all the fighter groups (to some extent dovetailing with reports by the bomber groups), which account for the exact movements—times and locations given—of all the groups involved in the admittedly somewhat confused operations of the First Air Division in the middle hours of February 14, 1945. Among these were frank accounts of strafing activities on the return trip (as instructed), including trains, trucks, and other communications targets. A mistake was admitted after a pilot fired on a hospital train, failing to make out the red cross on the roofs of the cars. All incidents occurred more than one hundred miles west of Dresden.

Plus there
was
at least one hostile encounter over Dresden between American and German fighters. Small change for all but those involved, but perhaps more important than it seems.

As the First Air Division's Headquarters Report said, enemy air opposition to the February 14 raid was “strikingly weak and almost entirely ineffective.” The 352nd Fighter Group, responsible for covering the rear groups of the bomber stream, reported: “Uneventful escort to target, Dresden,” and this is fairly typical.

The 356th Fighter Group had an encounter near Chemnitz (in which the 364th may also have been involved), during which P-51s claimed one enemy aircraft shot down from a pack of twelve FW-190s. The rest of the Germans quickly disappeared into high cloud and did not reemerge. According to reports immediately after the raid, however, the 356th once more spotted enemy fighters:

There was obviously a brief, but possibly intense dogfight around Dresden a few minutes after the last bombers had dropped their bombs and turned for home. The teletype report to HQ First Division by the commander of the 306th Bombardment Division (who had at first overshot the target and were forced to make another run) confirms that some bombers on a second run at the target were attacked by three German fighters (FW-190s) and a brief battle ensued in the air. As the fighters maneuvered for a second attack, the report says that “they were immediately bounced by P-51 escort,” which pursued them.

This incident is important because, alongside the reports of strafing in Dresden that day, there were also several accounts of a battle between American and German fighters taking place over the city. The Americans were chasing the enemy, and there were times when the planes went low (quite common when one fighter was trying to shake off another) along the valley of the Elbe and then the city.

Dr. Helmut Schnatz is a retired high school history teacher from the Rhineland. As a boy, he witnessed the devastating bombing of his native city of Koblenz and also observed strafing and aerial combat over his home. He went on to become official chronicler of the air war in his part of Germany and to write numerous authoritative articles on the subject, including one on British low-level attacks on targets around the western German city of Trier. He had become fascinated, along with other historians, by the often quite glaring contradictions to be found in accounts of air attacks (and, by association, other extremely traumatic events). In particular, he was and remains interested in the differences between various individuals' eyewitness versions of the same event, the descriptions found in official records (which may also be various and contradictory), and clearly established facts (such as the weather, topography, the capabilities of different machines).

Having read Götz Bergander's work, Dr. Schnatz decided in the mid-1980s to undertake a thorough investigation of the Dresden “strafing” phenomenon.

In his book,
Tiefflieger über Dresden? Legenden und Wirklichkeit
(
Low-Flying Aircraft over Dresden? Legends and Reality
), Dr. Schnatz examines all aspects of the events with the sharp eye of a man who has been studying every element of the air war—military, political, and
technical—since he was a boy. He examines reports of British low-level raids during the night, confirming that they were physically impossible—possibly arising from observations of the relatively low-flying (but unarmed) marker planes, and the ease with which showers of rapidly falling incendiary sticks might be mistaken for cannon or tracer shells. But his main interest is the alleged American attacks, since these are the most plausible and, if they happened, the most horrifying.

Dr. Schnatz comes to unmistakable and convincing conclusions. For his research—which took ten years—he consulted former fighter pilots, bomber pilots, other air war experts, archives, and even psychologists, and collected dozens of accounts by and interviews with survivors of the destruction of Dresden. The last include many convincing and level-headed accounts, but also some that are clearly exaggerated and inaccurate (though nevertheless published in German and other newspapers and magazines without challenge).

There are, for instance the two tales published in the same special edition of a German weekly periodical. In one, a woman claims to have survived on an
ice floe
in the frozen river Elbe for some hours at a temperature of “minus 20º Celsius” and while thus engaged to have witnessed repeated daytime strafing attacks. In the same edition, another woman says that “the waters of the Elbe were ablaze with phosphor.” The newspaper makes no comment on this apparent contradiction, or on the fact (as many witnesses confirm) that even before the firestorm it was quite a mild winter's night—Günter Jäckel, for instance, spent the night outside in a meadow in his bedclothes without suffering ill effects.

Dr. Schnatz's conclusions are:

• There were no orders for the fighters to launch low-level strafing of Dresden.
  
• Even had this been so, documents regarding the precise course and duration of the operation indicate that no time could have been taken out for strafing over the target.
  
• The swift declaration of the all-clear by the air raid authorities in Dresden (less than fifteen minutes after the last bomb was dropped at 12:31 P. M.) indicates that there could have been no additional air attack once the bombers had gone.
  
• The P-51s at Dresden were operating close to the limit of their fuel capacity and could not have undertaken extensive low-level strafing so far from base without endangering their own safety.
  
• They did strafe, but only far to the west of Dresden, mainly against railway targets, when their escort duties were over and running out of fuel was no longer a problem.
  
• Given the agreement between German as well as American accounts of the raid on Dresden, there can be no question of American records' being falsified or sanitized after the event.
  

As to what actually happened, Götz Bergander originally suggested that 356 Fighter Group's dogfight near and over Dresden spilled down into the Elbe valley and, briefly, over the city itself. The timing is right. Schnatz shares this view, and has done extra work with eyewitnesses and also with technical experts, which to his mind confirm this. The suggestion is that at least three fighter aircraft—possibly more—were involved in a howling, low-level chase over the city in which wing-mounted guns may have been fired. (And certainly civilians might have been hit, injured, and killed.)

The traumatized, bewildered Dresdeners, still stunned from the new bombing attack a matter of minutes earlier, and inexperienced in air raid matters, thought it was a murderous, low-level strafing attack of the kind they had been warned to expect, and about which they had heard such extravagantly violent stories.

Both Götz Bergander and Helmut Schnatz believe that this would be sufficient to account for many of the legends that have arisen since about the machine-gunning of (in some accounts “thousands of”) women and children in the Grosser Garten and the Elbe meadows that noontime of Ash Wednesday, 1945. Many did indeed die there, but from bombs not bullets.

There is not a single expert German historian who will pronounce the incident as fact in any work written now. Tellingly, even the 1982 updated edition of Max Seydewitz's book about Dresden (celebrating his ninetieth birthday), which on its first publication in 1955 had played a key role in spreading and legitimizing the strafing story, suddenly contained not a word about the alleged American machine-gun massacre by the river, or the less probable British equivalents during
the night. All references to these (as well as to American strafing attacks on the Johannstadt hospital) had been quietly expunged. Recent research among the records of Seydewitz's East German publisher indicate that this was due chiefly to Götz Bergander's conclusions in his book, which had been published in West Germany a few years previously (though it had remained banned on the eastern side of the Wall).

None of this means, however, that no one believes in the low-flying fighters anymore. On the contrary. Historians who deny it are accused by many survivors of “mocking” the dead and the maimed, and even of falling for an Anglo-American “conspiracy” to hide the truth.

THE YEAR
1952
had seen the appearance in German of Axel Rodenberger's memoir
Der Tod von Dresden
(
The Death of Dresden
). The book gained best-seller status in West Germany, where the author now lived after fleeing Communist rule in East Germany. It is a feverish collection of rumor, hearsay, and personal observation—occasional sensational stories, such as those of crippled soldiers leading blind comrades from a blazing military hospital, are taken straight from the notorious article in Goebbels's
Das Reich
of March 4, 1945. Rodenberg's passion was understandable; he had witnessed the horrors of the firestorm. The book is nevertheless almost entirely without value as history, although this doesn't seem to have stopped its being cited even by would-be serious writers. The book also includes overly inflated estimates of the death toll at Dresden. Rodenberger names a figure of 350,000 to 400,000 dead in Dresden allegedly recorded by a local official of the Propaganda Ministry in a report to Berlin. Although Rodenberger describes this man as sitting down and dictating to his secretary, and claims to quote this report “word for word” (
wörtlich
), no such document has never been discovered, and it is unclear how Rodenberger could have gained access to it in the first place.

In 1955 the Communist politician Max Seydewitz's
The Unconquerable City
(
Die unbesiegbare Stadt
) was published, with the East German government's full weight behind it. Seydewitz quoted the official figure of 35,000 dead, while allowing that it might have been a few thousand more.

Soon, however, figures on the level of Rodenberger's were once more in circulation. In 1963 came the publication of the internation
ally best-known work on the bombing, David Irving's
The Destruction of Dresden
. A university dropout in his mid-twenties who had worked in the German steel industry, learning fluent German, Irving said he became interested in the bombing of Dresden as a result of conversations with a coworker who came from there. Irving gained access to the limited original sources available at the time, conducted invaluable interviews with many surviving senior RAF officers, including Harris, Saundby, Bottomley and others, and managed to gain some access to documents and lower-echelon figures in Dresden itself. Strikingly, he produced a figure of at least 135,000 dead for the raid.

This figure came from a man named Hanns Voigt, by then resident in West Germany, who had been in charge of the missing persons center in Dresden in the weeks after the raid. Although the “street books” kept by the searchers clearing the cellars, shelters and other places where the dead were to be found only went up to between thirty thousand and forty thousand, Voigt insisted that this was a minimum figure. Irving accepted Voigt's higher personal estimate—an informed guess based also on separate accountings of personal belongings, garments, jewelry and so on, plus the numbers of missing unaccounted for by the end of the war—that at least 135,000 must have died. Vividly told, well written, and based on what seemed like exhaustive, thoroughly checked research, Irving's book became an international best-seller and launched him on a brilliant, controversial career.

In 1963, with East Germany all but closed to outside researchers, there was as yet no firm evidence that contradicted Herr Voigt's estimate. The “Final Report”—referred to in the text—is a convincingly thorough summary, but twenty years after the bombing of Dresden it was still not available. In the postwar confusion, it seems, all copies of this key report went missing. They were still unavailable in 1963, when the appearance of David Irving's book on Dresden, with its dramatic casualty estimates, conditioned the English-speaking world's view of the city's destruction for an entire generation.

In fact, the only new estimate to come to light in the Sixties seemed to drive the death figures even higher. Shortly after the first publication of his book on the destruction of Dresden, Irving was given a supposed copy of
Tagesbefehl No. 47
(TB47—see chapter 26) that cited figures of 202,400 dead already registered and 250,000 anticipated. These figures had been in circulation for many years—Irving had dubbed them fake in
his book's first edition—but on seeing apparent authentication, he publicized the new, even more horrifying figure widely.

In 1965, Walter Weidauer, Communist high burgomaster of Dresden and would-be historian, published his book on the bombing—
Inferno Dresden
—in East Germany. It also did not refer to the “Final Report,” but a short while later, after he gave a lecture in the town of Bad Schandau, Weidauer was approached by a woman named Frau Jurk. She handed over a closely typed, eleven-page document, which came from among the papers left by her late father-in-law, a former colonel in the Order Police in Dresden. It was the “Final Report.” Colonel Jurk had actually written the report at the behest of the Dresden commander of the Order Police and signed it on his behalf. Weidauer reproduced the entire report in an appendix to the second edition of his book, causing a considerable stir.

Confirmation (and some extra information regarding damage to private homes) was provided by the almost simultaneous discovery in the West German Federal Archive in Koblenz of a long-lost copy of the situation report for air attacks on Germany issued by the Reich commander of the Order Police (nr 1404) of March 22, 1945. This presented Berlin's summary of the information coming in from Dresden a little over a month after the firestorm raid—in condensed but essentially unaltered form.

The definite figures in those documents (the Final Report and Situation Report) were between 18,000 and 22,000, estimates of final numbers around 25,000, so how could numbers of (exactly) ten times that level be cited in a document circulating at around the same time? Moreover, the text of T847 also included the explanation that the figures were being issued as an exceptional measure in order to scotch rumors of gigantic casualty rates: “Since the rumors far exceed the reality, open use can be made of the actual figures.”

If the “actual figures” were up to 250,000, as the supporters of the fake TB47 had insisted, of what could the “rumors” possibly have whispered?
Millions
of dead? Clearly exceptional permission had been granted, in view of the widespread panic and fear aroused by wildly inflated casualty rates in Dresden, for the real (if temporary) numbers of dead to be cited by those in authority. And the real numbers were 20,240 and 25,000 respectively,

There was indeed only one explanation. A zero had been added to
these figures for propaganda purposes. Irving duly wrote a letter to
The Times
of London in which he admitted that the two six-figure estimates quoted in the so-called “TB47” were “probably” a Nazi fake.

The macabre argument over the death toll at Dresden still continues. Evidence comes and goes, but there is a basic divide between those who agree that the figures were between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand, and those—still including Irving—who insist in the face of the documentary evidence that the deaths went into six figures, in some cases into several hundreds of thousands. Ironically, it is the British writers on the subject of the Dresden bombing—David Irving and Alexander McKee—who set the numbers higher (though not as high as do the neo-Nazi websites and pamphlets that seek to equate the destruction of the city with the Holocaust).

David Irving has never let go of the Voigt figures altogether, however, and his estimates have crept up again since the 1980s, finally settling in the latest edition of his book (self-published/online edition of 1995) at “up to 100,000.” This is based, it seems, on taking the twenty-five thousand established dead, adding the thirty-five thousand reported missing as of March 1945, and then some.

Alexander McKee, writing almost twenty years after Irving's book was first published, at one point cites without comment a diary entry claiming that the authorities had counted “256,000” dead. He ends up taking the thirty-five thousand figure and then remarking that—given the poor air raid provision and the numbers of anonymous refugees in the city (which like most writers of the time he vastly over-estimates)—it “might easily be doubled to 70,000 without much fear of exaggeration. But no one will ever know for certain.” In other words, McKee simply decided to double the number because he didn't think it sounded like enough. A lower figure, it must be said, would not have enabled his book to be published under the impressive title
The German Hiroshima
(
Das Deutsche Hiroshima
) in Germany.

Götz Bergander's cool and objective account,
Dresden im Luftkrieg
(
Dresden in the Air War
), first published in 1977 and reprinted and revised in 1994, arrived at a death toll of around forty thousand. Bergander accepted the rough viability of twenty-five thousand to thirty-five thousand dead, but then added some thousands because of his own conviction (based not on a whim but on his own observations at the time) that a somewhat higher toll was likely. Bergander also performed a
service by finally finding an authentic example of the TB47 directive in the keeping of a former reservist, Werner Ehrlich, who had made just such a copy as part of his duties. (Irving's source, citing the figures with faked extra zeroes, had been a carbon of a typed copy of a copy of unknown provenance). However, the most important single discovery came after the end of Communism and the fall of the East German regime.

Earlier writers, including Irving, had perforce accepted figures provided by Herr Zeppenfeld, the head gardener of the Heidefriedhof, the huge cemetery on the heath outside the city limits. There, by general agreement, the vast majority of the dead from the air raid were buried in mass graves. Zeppenfeld, who had commanded one of eight teams charged with the recovery and burial of bodies, was quoted by Seydewitz in his 1955 book as saying that they had counted all the bodies buried there, plus the ashes of the “nine thousand” incinerated on the Altmarkt between the third week of February and the second week of March 1945 (though, as we know, this number was almost certainly too high if we accept the total of 6,865 corpses noted in the genuine version of TB47). The total had come to 28,746. Adding the numbers of dead buried elsewhere in graveyards gave a rough reckoning of thirty-five thousand dead altogether from the raid, though Seydewitz also thought that “the number of dead is certainly greater than the 35,000 established at the time of burial.”

In 1993, however, four years after the collapse of communism, documents from the municipal cemetery office were found in the Dresden City Archive. These provided, for the first time, a detailed official breakdown of how many bodies had been buried by the Dresden authorities after the raid, and where. The burials had been undertaken with great thoroughness (like almost everything else associated with the aftermath of the Dresden raid), and totals reported regularly to the city authorities. The total buried in the Heidefriedhof between February and the end of April 1945 turned out to have been 17,295, including the ashes of the incinerated victims from the Altmarkt. An additional 3,462 were buried in the Johannisfriedhof, 514 in the Neue Annenfriedhof. The total of registered burials was 21,271—more than 7,000 fewer than head gardener Zeppenfeld's deceptively exact estimate for the Heidefriedhof alone, which was undocumented and confessedly based on ad hoc counting methods.
Herr Friedrich Reichert of the Dresden City Museum thinks that around two thousand were buried in various other cemeteries around the city.

Reichert estimates that around twenty-five thousand people died in the bombing of Dresden. It is a figure that tallies with the total cited by the Soviet-supported authorities in the city shortly after the war, but is lower even than that suggested by knowledgeable and level-headed observers such as Götz Bergander. The fairest estimate seems, therefore, to lie between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand. This makes the loss of life in the city less than the total for Hamburg (although Hamburg possessed at least twice Dresden's population), and as a proportion of the total population, less than that for towns such as Pforzheim or Darmstadt.

As for the assertion that, even after VE-Day, in Dresden “thousands of victims were still being recovered each week from the ruins,” this must be an overstatement. The official figures are quite clear. According to Walter Weidauer, high burgomaster of Dresden in the postwar period, between May 8, 1945 (when Irving claims that “thousands” of bodies were still being found each week), and
1966
—a period of more than twenty years—a total of only
1,858
bodies were recovered from the ruins of the city. Weidauer also states that there is no substance to the reports that tens of thousands of victims were so thoroughly incinerated that no individual traces could be found. Not all were identified, but—especially as most victims died of asphyxiation or physical injuries—the overwhelming majority of individuals' bodies could at least be distinguished as such. Since 1989—even with the extensive excavation and rebuilding that followed the fall of communism in Dresden—no bodies have been recovered at all, even though careful archaeological investigations have accompanied the redevelopment.

None of this is to minimize the appalling reality of such a vast number of dead, so horribly snatched from this life within the space of a few hours, or to forget that most of them were women, children, and the elderly. Wild guesstimates—especially those exploited for political gain—neither dignify nor do justice to what must count, by any standards, as one of the most terrible single actions of the Second World War.