Dresden (53 page)

Legends of the Fall

AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR,
two enterprising German brothers, Heinz and Karl Spanknöbel, immigrated first to Switzerland and from there, in 1922, to the United States. Heinz was political, an early Nazi enthusiast who for a while was “Land Leader of the NSDAP in the USA.” Later he returned to Germany, where he established a factory. Karl Spanknöbel stayed in America, took U. S. citizenship, and changed his name to Charles Adolf Noble. A former Adventist minister and health-food retailer, he ended up owning a photographic processing business in Detroit that became one of the largest in the country. His son John Noble later claimed that constant exposure to the harmful chemicals used in the film-developing process at that time gradually affected his father's health. By 1937 Charles Noble was looking to change businesses—and countries.

In 1938 Noble acquired a modest but profitable camera factory in Dresden, employing around one hundred workers, from a Herr Thorsch. Thorsch had Swiss nationality but was half Jewish, so did not feel confident that he would be left unmolested by the regime. In fact, the deal agreed with Charles Noble a.k.a. Spanknöbel was not so much a sale as an exchange—Thorsch got Noble's unwanted business in the United States, and Noble got a viable manufacturing business in the country he hadn't seen for nearly twenty years. There are some mysteries: In 1943 Noble was accused of taking a disproportionate profit from the “de-judification” transaction, though if we are to believe the Noble family's story, they were already being persecuted by the authorities for having assumed American nationality. Moreover, this accusation comes from Max Seydewitz, who had a variety of other urgent political motives for blackening Noble's name. According to
John Noble, it was a fair, even generous agreement where each side got what he wanted.

Anyway, the “Camera Workshops Charles A. Noble,” as it was soon renamed, prospered under his management. He developed a small-format single lens reflex camera. This camera, the Praktica, and its successor, the Praktiflex, were very successful. The Nobles took up residence in a spectacular mansion called the Villa San Remo, which had been built in the 1890s for Crown Princess Luise of Saxony. Set in its own grounds on the Bergbahnstrasse, in the exclusive spa suburb of Weisser Hirsch high above the city, the palatial residence boasted a superb view of Dresden and the Elbe valley, especially from its mock-Renaissance tower.

Even after the United States entered the war on the Allied side, the Noble factory was permitted to continue in business under Charles and his son John, although soon the making and selling of mass-market cameras gave way, as in the rest of Dresden's consumer manufacturing sector, to production for the war effort. The Noble factory produced filters for aircraft engines and parts for aiming devices. Herbert Blumtritt, historian of the Dresden camera industry, expresses suspicion: “that in the Second World War a company which remained in the family possession of a U. S. citizen was not placed under German administration…or its owner interned—in fact continued to produce for the armaments industry—must remain forever beyond comprehension, or has deeper causes.”

Noble was, of course, German-born, and his brother Heinz at one point a prominent American Nazi. He also seemed to be managing his factory perfectly to the government's satisfaction. However, Max Seydewitz supplied a story that combines political conspiracy with romantic betrayal. According to Seydewitz, Noble acted as a mediator between the Nazi regime and the Americans, a two-way channel supplying intelligence to Washington and also allowing the German leadership to pursue a hope of a separate peace or at the very least favorable treatment from the western Allies. Seydewitz continued:

The plot thickens further. According to Seydewitz, all the information that Sir Arthur Harris and the commander of the Eighth Army Air Force, General Spaatz, had about Dresden came from Noble. From Noble the western Allies knew that the city was overflowing with refugees and the wounded, and more:

Seydewitz makes the extraordinary claim that the Nobles, father and son, had “given the order for the destruction of Dresden.” Mutschmann had been forewarned—although, to his chagrin, given only twenty-four hours' notice instead of the three days he had allegedly been promised. Even Goebbels knew, Seydewitz claims, pointing to transcripts of telephone conversations that were “still available after the end of the war” but, mysteriously, no longer at the time of writing (1955).

This hysterical Stalinist rumor-mongering had a profound effect on the Dresden population, isolated as it was and unable to access other points of view or cross-check the “facts” stated by their Communist rulers. Apart from the story of Mutschmann's being warned, there is also the rumor that the Allied bomber fleets were guided to Dresden by lights in the tower window of the Villa San Remo. These myths are
as common in the bomber war as were the folk stories of lanterns tied to the tails of donkeys to lure ships onto the rocks when smugglers ruled, or in earlier wars of traitors inside besieged cities who placed lights to let the enemy know that the stronghold could be entered. The notion that the RAF and the USAAF could only find a city of almost three-quarters of a million inhabitants with the aid of a lamp in the window of the tower, or that they had no idea where the densely populated parts of the city were, or where its great buildings and monuments were located (information available in any prewar tourist guide), bespeaks a staggering, almost bizarre naivete.

Seydewitz's account eventually reached a truly, dementedly, fantastic climax. He had Noble gleefully watching the bombing of Dresden from his palatial villa overlooking the city, like the villain in a James Bond film gloating over his evil handiwork. All that was missing was the white Persian cat purring on his lap:

What seems to have actually happened was that the Nobles, who in many ways had been seriously disadvantaged during the war, losing control of their business in all but name and being subjected to various restrictions, remained at liberty for less than two months after VE-Day. They flew the American flag, thinking it some kind of guarantee, and extended hospitality to American officers who visited Dresden during the immediate postwar honeymoon. In July 1945 Charles and John were arrested by the Russian secret police. The Soviet authorities seized their factory and used it to produce Praktica cameras for the Red Army. As for the Nobles, they spent more than a year at the Münchner Platz jail and some months in Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, which the Soviets rapidly reopened for the imprisonment of their own enemies. Finally, after being held without charge for five years, they were tried separately and convicted on charges of spying for the Americans.

Sentenced to fifteen years, young John was sent to a Siberian gulag. Charles A. Noble was released from an East German prison in 1952. He spent the following years back in America, campaigning for his son's release. John was released in 1955 after a personal intervention by President Eisenhower. Seydewitz's story was a propaganda broadside, without material evidence, intended to justify the imprisonment of the two men and inspire yet more anti-Western feeling in the captive GDR.

Curiously, the story was specifically denied by Walter Weidauer, the former Communist high burgomaster of Dresden, in his book
Inferno Dresden
(1965). Exotic spy-novel accounts of meetings between Noble and the Nazi leadership, not to mention the camera manufacturer's clandestine radio contact with Wall Street, are also conspicuous by their absence (though the Nobles' arrest by the Russians was justified because of “war crimes”). Nevertheless, the entire Noble conspiracy saga appeared again in the 1982 edition of Seydewitz's book, published (as all books in the GDR had to be) only after government approval—even though the previously equally definite story of the American strafing of civilians had been entirely cut.

Some Dresdeners still believe the tale of the traitor in the Villa San Remo. A recent book of personal narratives about Dresden contains an account by a man who experienced the firestorm as a child. He describes his family seeking refuge afterward at an uncle's flat out in Weisser Hirsch—an area he casually describes as having been spared because an American spy lived there, at the Villa San Remo. “Allegedly,” he adds, “but I'm sure that's how it was [
es wird schon so gewesen sein
].”

For the son of a heartless American spy, John Noble certainly evinced a surprising commitment to the city he had supposedly “betrayed.” In 1992 he returned to Dresden, with his younger brother George, and claimed back the factory and the house that had been confiscated by the Communists after 1945. For five years they tried to rebuild the factory, producing a 180-degree panoramic camera of revolutionary design, but the business had to be sold in 1997, along with the villa. The camera, however, is still in production. Mr. Noble, a deeply religious man who found God in the gulag, maintains that, far from being “spared” by the Allied bombers, the Villa San Remo suffered partial damage to its roof, and the family struggled to put out
fires that could have destroyed the entire building. Charles and John Noble were recently celebrated in a local Dresden press survey as belonging among the “100 Dresdeners of the Century.”

If Weidauer's account of this legend, for all its politically conditioned limitations, restores an element of reality, the former high burgomaster was also capable of spreading rumors of his own. Among these is the story of how the Soviet army saved Dresden from the atomic bomb.

In October 1963 the editor of the German scientific magazine
Physikalische Blätter
was granted an interview with Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize–winning nuclear physicist and head of the Reich's abortive attempt to build an atomic bomb. In the course of the talk, Heisenberg allegedly told the journalist that in July 1944 he was visited by an adjutant to Reich Marshal Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe. This emissary informed him that the Americans had issued a threat, via German diplomatic channels in neutral Lisbon: If the Germans did not agree to make peace within the next few weeks, an atom bomb would be dropped on Dresden. The adjutant wanted to know, on the Reich marshal's behalf, if Heisenberg thought that this was a plausible scenario—to which the scientist, well aware that whatever answer he gave could have grave consequences, replied that he considered it improbable but not completely impossible. He immediately qualified this already ambivalent advice further by pointing out that the development of such a weapon to the point of use would demand an enormous industrial effort, which he did not think the Americans were yet in a position to make.

Nothing came of the alleged conversation. Göring, it seems, didn't really believe that the Americans had the atom bomb either. Certainly Germany did not surrender, then or for almost a year to come. So, if this bizarre threat was actually made, what was the significance? Was it a real threat? Or were the Americans testing the Germans' nerve?

The Heisenberg story would be irrelevant if Weidauer didn't then press on, massing circumstantial evidence, to assert that, in fact, the apocalyptic Thunderclap discussions of that summer were conducted by the same committee that was responsible for the atomic bomb, ergo the two were plausibly connected. Not only that, but the atomic bomb had, by agreement, to be tested on an undamaged city. And another thing: After the war, General Groves, who was in charge of the military side of the development of the atomic bomb, stated that at the end of December 1944 President Roosevelt had told him that “he wished for
us to be prepared to drop the bomb on Germany, if we had the first bombs before the end of the war in Europe.” Ergo, Dresden would have been the perfect target. Ergo, Dresden must have been the planned target. Lurching quickly toward the conclusion of his alarmingly unstable tightrope of reasoning, Weidauer then asserts that the city was saved only by the gallantry of the Red Army, which in January 1945 advanced so quickly that Dresden was suddenly too close to the front to be atom-bombed without harming Soviet forces. Thus the city was preserved from the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The follow-through punch comes, of course, with the assertion that, when it became impossible to use the atomic bomb on the deliberately preserved “experimental” city of Dresden, in order to spite and frighten the advancing Russians, a massive conventional attack was substituted at the last moment. Ergo, the Dresden firestorm.