Dresden (33 page)

It was also crucial to the attackers that the density and force of their bombing kept the population pinned down in shelters instead of in their homes, fighting the fires that had started in the roof spaces and attics. Most incendiary bombs were easily extinguished if immersed in sand, which by law had to be kept ready in the familiar sacks distributed around houses and apartment buildings. In some cases, venture-some householders would even pick up the burning four-pound bombs (usually with a shovel or a pair of tongs) and toss them out of the window. There they would splutter their way pointlessly into extinction outside on the street, along with the host of other incendiaries that had failed to land inside a building.

In the case of the RAF's incendiary attack on Leipzig just over a year earlier, the surprisingly low casualty rate had been largely due to
the
disobedience
of the city's population. Instead of staying in their shelters until the official all-clear, the Leipzigers quickly emerged and took an active part in extinguishing fires before these could spread and become unmanageable. The Dresden population was more passive and more obedient, perhaps more trusting of the authorities. It would pay dearly for this.

For years Dresdeners had been fed mixed messages. In the press, concerned citizens could read advice from the regional air protection leader, a retired general named Schroeder, about the measures they could take in case of a serious air raid, in which incendiary bombs were used:

But less than two months before the big air raids on Dresden, an article in the party newspaper, chirpily entitled “Air Raid Shelter the Best Protection,” had provided its readers with frankly contradictory counsel:

It is not hard to imagine that, given the confusing choice between summoning “as much courage as the warrior at the front” and racing upstairs in the middle of an air raid to check on their homes, or remain
ing in the shelter that is allegedly “the best protection,” the inmates of the average wartime Dresden household (mostly women and children, with a sprinkling of older men) would tend to settle for the latter option. And this is what they did on the night of February 13, 1945.

More than half an hour after the end of the first attack on Dresden, many civilians had still not emerged from the deceptive security of their shelters.

At around 11
P.M
., fireman Alfred Birke found himself on the Altstadt's eastern periphery—which was also the edge of 5 Group's bombing sector. He had driven, in a commandeered vehicle, from a fire brigade command center quartered in the refreshment room of the zoo in the Grosser Garten. He was looking to report to the authorities in their deep bunker at the Albertinum, and his news was not good. Much of the equipment and many of the fire-fighting vehicles parked a short way from the command center had been destroyed by the British bombs. He reached the western edge of the park, then searched desperately for a safe way through the burning Altstadt to the river. In his report of that night he describes this eerie journey:

The empty streets held an ominous message. The inhabitants of this densely populated area were still underground, perhaps planning to stay there until morning. Which meant that in many—probably most—cases, they were already doomed.

 

OTTO GRIEBEL
tells of his reactions as the bombs stopped falling and the drone of the British bombers faded away and finally disappeared.

The Bauer box factory, although Griebel probably knew nothing of it, was among those burning buildings. It was the great good fortune of Henny Wolf and her fellow Jews that Bauer had shut down the night shift a few weeks before. They would have been working inside when the bombs hit. The only employee who was there that night—his company secretary—died in the blaze.

The pub in which Griebel had been drinking had survived, almost as miraculously as Herr Bauer's Jews. The relieved landlady opened a rare bottle of old schnapps to celebrate. Griebel downed a glass to give himself courage, but he was really concerned only for the wife and children he had left at home. He bade farewell to his friends—in many cases, though he could not know it, for the last time—and set off homewards in the company of a woman friend.

They found their way down to the Brühl Terrace and the river. Everything was ablaze. The confusion and the panic were unspeakable. Griebel saw that strange-colored flames were rising from the nearby Carolabrücke, and realized that the gas pipe that carried the mains over the river was on fire. Then he remembered that a couple of days earlier sappers had been working on the bridge, possibly setting explosive charges on its pillars. It was time to leave the area. Griebel took a long, last look along the river in the direction of the Altstadt, all
the buildings he had known all his life burning to destruction, including the Academy of Arts where he had studied, and the galleries around the Albertinum. The familiar skyline was starting to disappear in a monstrous pillar of smoke and flame. Across the river, much of the Neustadt—although not included in the RAF's original sector bombing plan—was also ablaze.

Griebel's eyewitness account was but one among many indicating that the fatal Dresden firestorm had begun to take hold shortly after the first wave of bombing finished. For the Altstadt and its historic core of treasured buildings, annihilation was already a near certainty within a few minutes of the last bomb's being dropped. No sirens informed the public of the end of the air raid. Since they were all electrically operated, they stayed silent for the rest of the night—another reason that so many Dresdeners stayed in their shelters.

The city's communications had cut out in the first minute of the attack. The well-equipped emergency headquarters in the bombproof bunker deep beneath the Albertinum, where many of the city's most senior Nazis had also taken refuge, had all but lost contact with the surface world—except for one phone line that inexplicably still functioned and allowed a dribble of information to and from Berlin. Otherwise, information came in randomly to the Albertinum from those who, like Birke, struggled through to report. How could they gain more than a fragmented picture of what was happening in the city? After parking his vehicle and hurrying down to the control bunker, fireman Birke faced a bad-tempered interrogation about his movements and motives, as if his very appearance there represented some dereliction of duty. They had no idea what it was like out there, he told the high-ups in their secure bunker. They told him to wait in the other room.

To some extent, the ignorance of the crisis staff under the Albertinum was understandable. The raid had, after all, lasted only fifteen minutes. How could so much irretrievable damage be wrought in such a short time? The system had mastered the two previous raids, in October and January. Perhaps the officials directing it now believed that this was a similar situation. Just a bit bigger.

At around the same time, Georg Feydt, director of the city's repair service (
Instandsetzungsdienst
) was also traveling through the inner city, casting an expert eye over the deteriorating situation:

The near-apocalyptic nature of 5 Group's attack and its continuing consequences were certainly apparent to Otto Griebel, as he paused grimly just outside the building under which the central control bunker lay. He had no choice but to head eastward, through the Grosser Garten, away from the roaring core of the growing inferno.

Despite the danger of more blazing buildings, despite the uprooted trees and the scatterings of maimed corpses—at this stage mostly unlucky people caught in the open by high-explosive bombs—that was the way home. If home still existed.

 

HENNY WOLF
and her parents sat out the first attack in the cellar of their building. Most of the people sheltering with them were women and children. There were small windows, and the full impact of the exploding bombs could be felt.

Once the noise stopped, and it was clear that the raid was over, the Wolfs hastened up the stairs and into the yard of the building. It was on fire. Flames licked through the blasted windows of their apartment.

Herr Wolf did not hesitate. Ignoring the pleas of his wife and daughter, he rushed inside. Minutes passed. The fire burgeoned, until it threatened to consume the building. Just as it seemed to the anxious women out in the street as if the fire had swallowed him, Herr Wolf staggered out of the flames, carrying some money, important correspondence, and documents—including those relating to the cinema and the other property the Nazis had taken from him as punishment for staying married to a Jew. He also brought the deportation order that had been delivered earlier that fatal day.

Everything was secured in a knapsack. Mouths masked against the smoke, air raid helmets firmly in place, the Wolfs prepared to leave the street they had lived in for many years. But first the women tore the hated yellow stars from their coats. The badges joined the rest of the papers in the family rucksack. The Wolfs were orderly people. Only now did they set off through the burning city.

Even before the raid, their hopes had depended on leaving everything they knew and loved behind them. Now, in contrast to all but a few of the threatened human beings in Dresden that night, for the Wolfs safety lay in chaos, their only chance of survival in the destruction of their home city.

The Wolfs first tried to find a way southwest, toward the Hauptbahnhof. They were possessed by a strong desire to see for themselves that the Gestapo headquarters in the Hotel Continental, just behind the station, had been destroyed—along with all its records and files. The fires south of the Grosser Garten were now too intense, but they were encouraged by reports from other air raid victims that the entire area around the Hotel Continental was fully ablaze. Gestapo headquarters and the Nazi Party offices in the Altstadt had both been struck in the RAF's attack.

 

MANY FAMILIAR SYMBOLS
of the regime's power were being razed to the ground.

All the same, it was still quite clear, even at this terrible, bewildering time, who ruled in Dresden. At 11
P.M
. on the night of February 13, a squad of firefighters operating in the historic area around the Adolf-Hitler Platz (Theaterplatz), close to the opera house and the Hofkirche, was ordered to another location: the Reich governor's residence.

The governor himself, sixty-five-year-old Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann, was nowhere to be seen. According to postwar accounts, he escaped the effects of the first attack by taking to the controversial, state-of-the-art bunker beneath his palatial villa in the Comeniusstrasse, just north of the Grosser Garten. Wherever Mutschmann might actually have been that night, the account in the Nazi press shows breathtaking insolence in its attempt to paint him—against all the odds—as the hero of the hour: