The Second World War (139 page)

Harris was also keen to attack Dresden simply because it remained one of the few major cities which had not yet been flattened. The Eighth Air Force had bombed its marshalling yards in October, but it could not be included in his blue books. The fact that this baroque jewel on the Elbe was one of the great architectural and artistic treasures of Europe did not concern him for a moment. His failure to have achieved Germany’s collapse with his heavy bombers, as he had claimed he would, only seemed to spur him on. On 1 February, Portal, Spaatz and Tedder agreed a new directive which placed ‘
Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden
on the target priority list just below oil’.

Harris did not believe in the oil plan, as he made abundantly clear to Portal, the chief of the air staff, in correspondence during the winter. A directive from the combined chiefs of staff on 1 November 1944 should have forced him to concentrate first on oil targets and secondly on communications. Even though Ultra intercepts showed that Spaatz’s emphasis on oil targets was proving most effective, Harris did not wanted to be diverted from his personal goal. ‘
Are we now to abandon
this vast task… just as it nears completion?’ he demanded. Harris was obliged to react to Portal’s pressure, but he used the genuine problem of bad visibility in winter as an excuse to continue on his own course of bombing cities. Harris even offered his resignation in January as the dispute continued, but Portal felt that he could not sack him. Harris, even though he had been proved wrong on almost every single one of his fixed ideas, had too many supporters in the popular press and among the public at large.

For most of the RAF crews, ‘
Dresden was just another
target, though a long, long way away.’ They were told it was to disrupt the German war effort and to help the Red Army. Their briefings did not mention that one
objective was to cause a flood of refugees to impede Wehrmacht traffic–a tactic for which the British had condemned the Luftwaffe in 1940.

The American bombers were to attack first on 13 February, but due to bad weather their contribution was postponed for twenty-four hours. As a result, the onslaught
on Dresden
began on the night of 13 February, with 796 RAF Lancasters in two waves. The first wave, dropping the usual mixture of high explosive and incendiaries, began the fires, especially in the more flammable old city. The second, larger wave could see a bright glow on the horizon when still 150 kilometres from their target. The fires were beginning to coalesce into a huge inferno, which would soon drag in hurrican-force winds at ground level like a titanic forge.

By the time the American Fortresses arrived next day, which happened to be Ash Wednesday, the smoke from the city had risen to 15,000 feet. On the ground, the conditions were as horrifying as in the other firestorm cities–Hamburg, Heilbronn, Darmstadt–with shrunken carbonized bodies, most of them killed by carbon-monoxide inhalation, molten lead pouring from roofs and the melted tar on the roads trapping people like fly-paper. Dresden’s important rail links and military traffic were a legitimate target, but Harris’s obsessive desire for total extinction again prevailed. Pforzheim was next ten days later. The firestorm there brought Harris’s score up to sixty-three destroyed cities. The beautiful town of Würzburg, which had even less military significance, was burned to the ground in the middle of March. To the end of his days, Harris maintained that his strategy saved the lives of untold numbers of Allied soldiers.

After the destruction of Dresden questions were raised, both in Britain and the United States. There were allegations that the Allied air forces had adopted a policy of ‘terror bombing’. Churchill, who had urged the attack on Dresden and other communications centres in eastern Germany, began to have cold feet about the ‘fury’ of the strategic bombing campaign. He sent a minute to the British chiefs of staff, stating that ‘
the destruction of Dresden remains
a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing’. Portal found this deeply hypocritical and demanded that he withdraw it.

Despite his disagreements with Harris, Portal was determined to defend the sacrifice of Bomber Command. Altogether 55,573 aircrew had died out of the 125,000 who served in it. The
US Eighth Air Force
suffered 26,000 killed, more than the whole of the US Marine Corps. Some 350 Allied air-crew are estimated to have been lynched or murdered when shot down. Estimates of the number of German civilians killed vary, but it was around half a million people. The Luftwaffe had killed many more, including an estimated half a million civilians in the Soviet Union alone, but that is still no excuse for Harris’s utterly wrong-headed conviction that Bomber Command could win the war on its own simply by smashing cities.

Goebbels apparently shook with rage when he heard of Dresden’s destruction. He claimed that a quarter of a million people had died, and demanded that as many Allied prisoners of war be executed as the number of civilians killed. (A commission of historians in Germany recently reduced the estimate to ‘
around 18,000 and definitely
less than 25,000’.) The idea of shooting Allied prisoners of war appealed to Hitler. Such a tearing-up of the Geneva Convention would force his troops to fight to the end. But calmer voices, including those of Keitel, Jodl, Dönitz and Ribbentrop, talked him out of it.

The promises of a glorious future for Germany during the early war years had now been replaced by the terror propaganda of ‘
Kraft durch Furcht
’, strength through fear. Goebbels, implicitly and explicitly, evoked the consequences of defeat, with the annihilation of Germany and a Soviet conquest with rape and deportation for forced labour. ‘
Victory or Siber ia
’ provided a powerful Manichaean idea. ‘
The misery that would follow
if the war was lost would be unthinkable,’ wrote a young officer. Yet although the Nazi regime was totally opposed to negotiation, it allowed, even tacitly encouraged, its population to believe in some sort of deal with the western Allies so that they would have some hope even if they had no more faith in ‘final victory’. Now that the majority of the population had lost all trust in the official media, they relied on the exchange of rumours and hearsay in bomb shelters and air-raid cellars.

The most frightening stories came from refugees who had escaped from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Nearly 300,000 troops and civilians were still trapped in Königsberg and the Samland Peninsula behind it. Their only hope still lay with the Kriegsmarine. Civilians in Pomerania were soon cut off as well. Zhukov, having been told by Stalin from Yalta to deal with the ‘Baltic balcony’ on his northern flank, redeployed several of his armies.

On 16 February these German forces were ordered to attack south in the area of Stargard in an operation to which staff officers gave the codename Husarenritt (Hussar Ride), but Himmler’s SS insisted that it be called Sonnenwende (Solstice). More than 1,200 tanks had been allocated to the offensive, but many never reached the start-line. A sudden thaw, turning the ground into deep mud, added to a shortage of fuel and ammunition, turned Sonnenwende into a disaster. It had to be abandoned after two days.

Zhukov, having redeployed his forces, ordered the 1st and 2nd Guards Tank Armies and the 3rd Shock Army to push up east of Stettin to the coast. This followed Rokossovsky’s advance west of the Vistula with four armies towards Danzig. Leading tank brigades smashed through weak
defences. In towns supposedly far behind the lines, German civilians stared in stupefied horror on seeing T-34 tanks charging down their main street, smashing any obstacle under their tracks. One seaside town was captured by cavalry sweeping in. Wehrmacht units cut off by the advance tried to make their way west, trudging in groups through silent, snowbound forests. The thousand-odd men left from the French SS Charlemagne Division managed to escape in this way from Belgard.

Once again, the Nazi Party had refused to allow the civilian population to leave in good time. Hurriedly assembled treks set out through the snow in farm-carts with improvised canopies to keep out the freezing wind. The route of the German retreat was marked by ‘gallows alleys’, where the SS and Feldgendarmerie had hanged deserters, with cards around their necks proclaiming their guilt. Whether the refugees headed east towards Danzig and Gotenhafen (Gdynia) or west towards Stettin, the Red Army was ahead of them and they had to turn back. Landowning families knew that they would be the first to be shot when the Soviets arrived. A number decided to commit suicide first.

Danzig, soon surrounded by the Red Army, became an inferno of flames and black smoke. Its population had swollen to 1.5 million with all the refugees, while the wounded were dumped on the quayside to await evacuation. The Kriegsmarine, using any craft available, shuttled them to the port of Hela, on the peninsula to the north, where other ships would take them back to ports west of the Oder estuary or to Copenhagen. Only the heavy guns of the
Prinz Eugen
and the old battleship
Schlesien
kept the Soviet troops out of the town until 22 March. German sailors continued to rescue civilians, despite coming under fire from tanks on the shore.

The sack of Gdynia was terrible when Soviet troops broke in. Even the Soviet military authorities were shaken. ‘
The number of extraordinary
events is growing, as well as immoral phenomena and military crimes,’ the political department reported using its usual tortuous euphemisms. ‘Among our troops there are disgraceful and politically harmful phenomena, when under the slogan of revenge some officers and soldiers commit outrages and looting instead of honestly and selflessly fulfilling their duty to the Motherland.’ German civilians left behind in Danzig later suffered a similar fate.

Revenge was no doubt inevitable, especially as the Soviets uncovered so many traces of atrocities.
Stutthof concentration camp
, where 16,000 prisoners had died from typhoid in six weeks, was destroyed in an attempt to hide the evidence. German soldiers and Volkssturm had taken part in the execution of the remaining Red Army prisoners, Poles and Jews held there. But a far worse discovery was made in the Danzig Anatomical Medical Institute, where Professor Spanner and Assistant Professor Volman
had since 1943 been conducting experiments on corpses from the camp at Stutthof, to turn them into leather and soap.

‘The examination of the premises
of the Anatomical Institute’, stated the official Soviet report, ‘revealed 148 human corpses which were stored for the production of soap… The executed people people whose corpses were used for making soap were of different nationalities, but mostly Poles, Russians and Uzbeks.’ Spanner’s work had evidently received approval at a high level, because his institute had been ‘visited by the Minister of Education Rust and Minister of Health Care Konti. Gauleiter of Danzig Albert Förster visited the institute in 1944, when soap was being produced.’ It is surprising that the Nazi authorities had not disposed of such grisly evidence before the arrival of the Red Army. Even more astonishing was the fact that Spanner and his associates never faced trial, because the processing of corpses was not a legal crime.

Looting became both a game and a matter of pride, especially in the punishment companies. ‘
The
shtrafroty
positioned
next to ours’, recorded a young officer, ‘was commanded by a Jew, Lyovka Korsunskii, who had the manner typical of someone from Odessa. He came to visit us during a lull in a beautiful captured carriage pulled by magnificent stallions. He took a great Swiss watch off his left wrist and threw it to somebody, then he took another from his right wrist and threw it to somebody else. Watches were an object of constant desire and often served as a reward. Our soldiers who didn’t speak a word of German quickly learned to say: “
Wieviel ist die Uhr?
” and the unsuspecting German civilian took out his pocket watch and the watch immediately moved to the pocket of the warrior-victor.’

East Prussia remained the main focus for revenge. ‘
I’ve only been at war
for a year,’ another young officer wrote home, ‘so how do people feel after four years at the front? Their hearts are now like stone. If sometimes you say to them: “Soldier, you shouldn’t finish off this Hans. Let him build again what he has destroyed,” he would look at you from under his eyebrows and say: “They took away my wife and daughter.” And he fires his gun. He is right.’

The sandbar on the Baltic along the Frisches Haff had been the only route left open for escape from East Prussia. Thousands of civilians had fled across the ice to it, although many fell through where it had been weakened by shellfire and thaw. ‘
When we reached the shore
of the Frisches Haff,’ wrote Rabichev, ‘the entire beach was littered with German helmets, sub-machine guns, unused grenades, tins of food and packets of cigar ettes. Along the shore stood cottages. Wounded Fritzes were lying in beds or on the floors of these cottages. They looked at us in silence. There was neither fear nor hatred in their faces, just numb indifference, although they knew
that each of us had only to raise a sub-machine gun and shoot them.’

The troops in the Heiligenbeil encirclement, with their backs to the sea, had held off the Soviet forces around them thanks only to the gunnery of the pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer
and the
Lützow
. On 13 March, however, the Red Army attacked in force.

Troops in another smaller pocket at
the port of Rosenberg
were refused permission by Hitler to evacuate by sea. They were destroyed in an assault on 28 March. ‘The port of Rosenberg was looking like a
kasha
of metal, dirt and flesh,’ wrote a Red Army lieutenant to his mother. ‘Corpses of Fritzes covered the ground. What was here dwarfs the events on the Minsk highway in 1944. One walks on corpses, sits down to rest on corpses, one has one’s meals on corpses. For about ten kilometres there are two corpses of Fritzes on each square metre… PoWs are being driven in battalions, with their commanders in front. I can’t understand why we bother to take them prisoners. We’ve got so many already, and here is another fifty thousand. They walk without any guards like sheep.’