Dresden (43 page)

Then came the second wave, hitting the area of the Neuer Markt, on which the Frauenkirche stood, much harder than the first, and with a preponderance of incendiary bombs. By the end of the attack, most of the buildings in the square surrounding the cathedral were on fire, and the searing, predatory, man-made winds of the firestorm continued to seek out combustible prey among the nearby maze of streets and alleys.

It seems as if no incendiaries or high-explosive bombs succeeded in penetrating the cupola or any weak points in the cathedral's structure during the actual attacks. Just as the Prussian cannonballs had bounced off the copper dome in 1760, so now the British air ordnance was defeated by architecture. All through Ash Wednesday and into the
early hours of Thursday, though clearly damaged and with smoke leaking from its dome, the church remained standing

Early on the morning of February 15, Hannelore Kuhn gazed out from the southern heights where her family had found refuge after the American midday raid destroyed their home in the Bamberger Strasse. “Everything lay swathed in smoke, and there were fires still burning. But I saw the Frauenkirche. It still stood out, the dome. And I came back to my parents and I said, the Frauenkirche is still standing.”

She must have been one of the last people to see it. The Frauenkirche disintegrated at around 10:45
A.M
.

As a precaution against air raids, most of the host of glass windows in the early eighteenth-century structure had been bricked up from the outside, but for some reason a few windows on the north side—facing toward the Elbe—had not been sealed. During the night of February 13–14, the firestorm in its wrath had filled the streets of the Altstadt with burning brands, and it seems probable that some of these found their way into the Frauenkirche through these windows and started fires. But the actual collapse of the Frauenkirche was caused by the cooling that slowly followed when the fires finally ran out of fuel and died.

The intense heat inside had led to all manner of distortions, but the crucial factor was the bending of the girders that surrounded the pulpit. As they started to contract once more, due to the drop in temperature after the firestorm had subsided, they no longer properly fitted their supports. As a result, there was lateral pressure on the huge pillars that held up the cupola. One of these, to the southeastern side of the church, collapsed. The cupola momentarily settled, but then slowly began to subside to the southeast, where the pillar was missing. The weight was too much for the remaining supports. The comparatively soft local sandstone fabric of the walls, meanwhile, had been severely weakened by the high temperatures—sandstone loses its integrity at around 700 degrees Celsius.

The great dome began to collapse, pushing out some of the high walls, then crushing everything below itself. The shockwave as it slowly toppled onto the square of the Neumarkt caused the other, also fire-damaged, towers and stairways to crumble. The large, heavy cross, falling from three hundred feet up, crashed down on the disintegrating cupola. The vast weight of metal and stone of this high building, its
towers and pillars fell to ground level, penetrating through the vaulted ceilings of the cellars and catacombs. All this took a matter of moments, but once it had happened, the dominating, iconic, seemingly eternal cathedral was no more than a gargantuan heap of rubble.

And as if to follow agony with insult, a short while later the Eighth U. S. Army Air Force returned once more to Dresden.

 

A LARGE FORMATION
of Flying Fortresses of the First Air Division had set off that morning, February 15, 1945, from their bases in eastern England. Terrible weather—thick fog and ground mist—caused several bombers to be lost on takeoff and reduced the number of bombers that actually got air bound for the day's primary target—the Böhlen hydrogenation plant near Leipzig—from a planned 360 to 210. The cloud stayed thick beneath the bomber stream all the way across the continent. It was 10/10 cover at Böhlen, which made bombing impossible. This left the secondary target, where 7/10 to 10/10 was expected. Dresden.

This was the least successful of all the American attacks on Dresden. The squadron leader of one of the low units from the 401st Bombardment Group accidentally set off a set of marker flares four minutes early, resulting in almost two hundred high-explosive bombs descending in the Meissen area. A radar operator from the 401st's lead squadron admitted afterward that display problems on his system's screen may have led to bombs being dropped later than they should. Since there was damage in the southeastern suburbs and as far out as the town of Pirna—where forty-seven people died when bombs hit the Hermann Göring Housing Development, this seems likely.

The rest got to Dresden sometime before noon. During the ten minutes of the actual raid, no bombs fell on the designated target, the Dresden (that is, Friedrichstadt) “marshaling yards.” The worst area of damage was actually the Südvorstadt—to be more precise the prison attached to the Justice Building in the Münchner Platz, whose structure had already been weakened by stray explosions on the fourteenth. Now, in this least effective of the Allied raids on the city, a big air mine scored a direct hit on the north wall of the prison building, killing thirty inmates but allowing many more to escape through the resultant blast hole. A number of political prisoners—mostly
Communists rounded up in Leipzig and many under sentence of death—were able to escape, as were quite a lot of captured Czech resistance workers who also, in some cases, faced an appointment with the notorious electrically operated guillotine in the bleak central courtyard of the prison—which was also destroyed by an American bomb that morning.

Thus was an extra platoon of Communist activists preserved for the postwar period. Most of the Czechs were less lucky. Still dressed in their conspicuous death row uniform of coarse black trousers and black short jacket, and identifiable as foreigners the moment they opened their mouths, most were picked up by police and army patrols. Among the few who did make it clean away were those who managed to rifle through abandoned luggage still strewn around the Hauptbahnhof underpass and thus provide themselves with German civilian clothes.

 

TWO DAYS AFTER THE GREAT RAIDS,
despite the brief alarum caused by the latest American attack, people were starting to move around the city a little more. On February 15, eighteen-year-old Götz Bergander had already been out alone. The streets were mostly still blocked with rubble. The only way through was to clamber along the shattered, twisted railway tracks. In this way he got as far as the Hauptbahnhof. There he saw mounds of bodies piled up ready for collection. Already prisoners of war, watched by elderly Volkssturm (Home Guard) members, were starting to heave them onto carts. All the victims, mostly from the station's underground cellar complex, had suffocated. Bergander had been planning to look for a close school friend who lived in the vicinity, but felt too nauseated to go on. On young Götz's return home, his father gave him, for the first time in his life, a full glass of brandy.

The next day he and his younger brother ventured into what remained of the city and did a ten-mile circuit on foot. This time they ventured to the Elbe meadows. Less than three days after the British attacks, most of the corpses had been cleared from there, and work had already begun on recovering bodies from any streets that were accessible. The great shock was to realize that the Frauenkirche was no more.

A woman sent a postcard to her absent daughter. It read simply: “
All three of us still alive, city gone
.”

By then the writer, her mother, and her child had trekked out of Dresden and were living in a temporary camp. This was the fate of thousands who had no relatives in undamaged areas.

It was obvious there must be tens of thousands of dead in the city. Perhaps more. Rumors were rife. As Nora Lang and her little brother, having stayed in a reception center on the night of February 14–15, continued their trek to Winschdorf and their grandfather's smallholding, they passed the sign marking the city limits and then the huge municipal cemetery that lay in the heath land just beyond: the Heidefriedhof, or Heath Cemetery. They were to experience their own happy ending later that same day when they found their parents waiting for them at their destination, but first the two children had to witness the first of the city's dead being evacuated to their mass graves. “We stood by the road and watched as transporters came carrying bodies. Piles of bodies on them. We just stared.”

AS EARLY AS
the morning of February 14, 1945, the chief of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) in Dresden sent a desperate message from his bunker on the outskirts of the city to his superiors in Berlin. He received an near-instant response from the Reichsführer-SS and head of the German police, Heinrich Himmler:

That morning, aid teams were already on their way from the outside world. Troops from the large barracks on the edge of the Neustadt, which had been largely undamaged by the air raids, were officially allowed to cross onto the left bank only in the afternoon—under Wehrmacht regulations, anywhere east of the Elbe (including the main barracks) counted as part of the “rear frontline area.” To leave such an area, even simply to cross the river from one part of Dresden to another, Berlin's explicit permission had to be sought.

The next basic service was rescue and clearance. Up to two thousand Wehrmacht troops and a thousand prisoners of war were immediately put to work, plus repair teams from Leipzig, Chemnitz, Zwickau, and Halle, and units of tunneling specialists from the mining towns of Freiberg and Sadisdorf. SS units were also seen in the city.

Exactly who was in charge remained at first unclear. All central
administrative buildings had been destroyed or disabled. Himmler had sent down senior police people—the only major administrative organ still functioning was the Higher SS and Police Authority, in its bunker on the Weisser Hirsch—but the main organizer of practical help seems to have been Theodor Ellgering, chief executive of the Inter-Ministerial Air War Damage Committee based in Berlin. Ellgering took his orders from Goebbels, who had been given special powers in this area of the war by Hitler at the end of 1942. Ellgering visited Dresden on February 14, viewed the immediate aftermath, and then reported back to Berlin that evening. On the fifteenth he returned to Dresden armed with full powers from Goebbels, and quickly got to work, setting up a command post in a fruit fermentation plant on the edge of the city, briefing action teams and establishing his own communications system.

Despite the undoubted energy of the outsiders, it was at least two days before major improvements started to show on the ground for the population of Dresden. There was always a bowl of warm soup, right from the start, but within seventy-two hours of Dresden's destruction, the authorities were distributing six hundred thousand hot meals a day. On February 17, the party newspaper boasted that no one was going hungry in Dresden. At the same time, martial law was declared, which included the death penalty for looting and “rumor-mongering.” Seventy-nine people would be found guilty of looting. The great majority were immediately executed.

And there was other necessary work, of the most terrible kind

Slowly, blocked streets and were being opened up and the grim work of emptying the cellars and shelters of their dead was beginning.

An important part in this work was played by Allied prisoners of war. There were several thousand in and around the city. The British were in various subcamps of Stalag IVB, the Americans in various places including—as we know from Kurt Vonnegut's famous semi-autobiographical novel,
Slaughterhouse-Five
—under the old abattoir area in the Ostragehege, not far from the Berganders' home.

“Corpse mining,” Vonnegut called it—a darkly jocular description for a horrifying activity that would become one of Dresden's largest and most labor-intensive industries over the following days and weeks. In
Slaughterhouse-Five
, Vonnegut described his hero, Billy Pilgrim, being put to work. The time portrayed is two days after the raids:

In Vonnegut's novel, his Maori comrade died “of the dry heaves, after having been ordered to go down into that stink and work.” In real life, others decided that they wouldn't take that risk. A British prisoner and his comrade actually went on the run rather than face more days digging in the corpse-filled cellars of Dresden or fishing body parts out of trees.

One British prisoner of war, Alec White, held in a camp outside the city, described being marched fifteen miles every day into the center, starting at 5
A.M
., then laboring in burned-out factories or in the streets, where bodies were often piled up for collection after basements had been emptied of their dead.

The POWs, like the few remaining Jews, had been detailed to fetch bodies and clear rubble after previous raids, but the scale and the
horror of the work to be done after the firestorm of February 13–14, 1945, was, like the experiences of those who survived the destruction of central Dresden, almost impossible to describe with any hope of authenticity.

All the city's fleet of mortuary wagons had been destroyed in the bombing. Nevertheless, within ten days, according to Ellgering, ten thousand bodies had been recovered, registered and where possible identified, and buried. Most had been carried several miles to the Dresden heath on the edge of the city and placed in mass graves (these were the transports Nora Lang and her little brother had stopped to gaze at on February 15 as they tramped to Winschdorf). But even this rate of disposal was not fast enough, as Ellgering admitted:

After the idea of burying them instead in the city parks was abandoned for public health reasons, a drastic but effective solution was found. Instead of carting and trucking corpses out to the cemetery, the dead from the streets and cellars of the Altstadt were transported to the great expanse of the Altmarkt, where flower markets had once been a famous feature, and less than five years earlier bands had played and vast crowds had cheered Dresden's Fourth Infantry Regiment as it returned from the war against the French, apparently victorious. A more terrible contrast than the scenes that commenced on February 21 could not be imagined.

The great water tank built the previous winter in the Altmarkt to supply the fire service had itself filled with the drowned and boiled bodies of those who had mistakenly sought refuge there. Once those were cleared, and rubble swept, the square was sealed off. Then began the work. Corpses were shipped in and laid out ready for registration and, if possible, identification. Searching for ways of keeping them off the ground—and allowing a draft under the planned mass funeral pyres—workers found a solution in the wreck of a nearby department store, where massive girders had survived the bombing. They carried
them from the ruins and set them down on the ground, making, as a contemporary grimly expressed it, “huge grill racks.”

Large amounts of gasoline were trucked into the sealed city center. Teams poured petrol over the bodies as they lay piled on the shutters. Then the dead were burned at the rate of one pyre per day, with around five hundred corpses per pyre. The task was efficiently done—to reduce that number of human remains to fine ash without access to a purpose-built crematorium is a technically problematic process—under the supervision of outside SS experts. They were said to be former staff from the notorious extermination camp at Treblinka.

Between February 21 and March 5, when the last pyre was lit, 6,865 bodies were burned on the Altmarkt. Afterward, when the fire cooled down, it was estimated that between eight and ten cubic meters of ash covered the cobbled surface of the medieval square. The SS-Brigadeführer in charge of the burning had intended to transport the ashes out to the Heath Cemetery in boxes and sacks and bury them containers and all, but municipal parsimony triumphed. In the end the ashes were simply emptied out of their containers and into the prepared pits, thus enabling the valuable boxes and sacks to be reused.

That same week the police chief's office started to put together a lengthy, meticulous (if inevitably temporary) report on the air attack on Dresden and the damage and the death it had caused. The secret “Final Report of the Higher Police and SS-Führer for the Elbe” originated within in the first two weeks of March and was submitted to the Reich commander of Order Police in Berlin on March 15, 1945. Parts of it were absorbed into other documents of the time circulating at the Order Police headquarters, including the nationwide “situation report” regularly sent out to regional police chiefs.

The “Final Report” contained the first official estimate of the death toll from the Anglo-American, but predominantly the British, raids on Dresden four weeks previously. Under “Injury to Persons” it stated:

The death statistics were not based on rough estimates. The process of registering and counting the dead—and their possessions—was meticulous in the extreme. Page after page of lists, organized street by street, record an extraordinary amount of detail about those who perished. A female Silesian refugee is found dead in the ruins of a hotel in the Neustadt. The large sum of money she has on her is carefully counted, her husband is sought for confirmation (he had been elsewhere when the raid hit, and survived). Many entries contain a name and the description “refugee.” In remarkably few cases is there no indication of identity whatsoever. Cause of death is also generally stated. Many are classified as dying from “asphyxiation.” Others are burned, often unrecognizably so. Then there are those crushed or struck by falling masonry or collapsing buildings. Here “struck dead” (
erschlagen
) is noted. Among these death rolls, there is usually at least one per page of the smallest but in a way saddest category of death: suicide. Perhaps burn wounds were too agonizing to bear, slow suffocation too awful a prospect, or life simply seemed insupportable with all loved ones lost. One story tells of a busy restaurant that suffered a direct hit. In the restaurant's shelter, days later, were found a large group of well-dressed diners, all of whom had been buried alive by the building's collapse. There were indications that life had gone on for some time after they were trapped. When the rescuers broke into the airless cellar, however, they found all the diners dead from neat gunshot wounds. A number of uniformed Wehrmacht officers lay nearby, each with his service revolver pressed to his shattered temples. Perhaps as the result of a pact, the soldiers had dispatched the civilians one by one before turning their pistols on themselves.

Nor did the state of the body when finally recovered necessarily express the cause of death, though it explained certain apparent anomalies. After the disappearance of his mother, sister, and brother during the firestorm night, Günther Kannegiesser had never been able to trace their bodies, despite persistent inquiries and searches of cemetery lists. Then, in 1997, after fifty years, he was interviewed by a Dresden newspaper about his continuing search, which had been given further stimulus by the opening up of public records in eastern
Germany after the fall of communism. A short while later, as a result of the article, he received a touching note from a man, now also in his late sixties, who as a boy had been a neighbor of the young Günther.

The long-lost childhood friend enclosed a letter written in the spring of 1945 by his own father to a brother-in-law, who at the time was a prisoner of war. On March 2, 1945, it transpired, the father had managed, using one of the “breakthroughs,” to enter the basement area of No. 9 Zöllnerstrasse (the building where young Günther's family lived). He tells the story of his discoveries there with gentle precision: