Armageddon (68 page)

On 28 February 1945, two Spitfires hit by flak crash-landed almost beside each other north of the village of Bohmte. The pilots, Flight-Lieutenant Taylor and Sergeant Cuthbertson, were uninjured. They were taken under guard to the local inn. Soon afterwards Norbert Mueller and Fritz Buchning, two Nazi SA officials, arrived. They demanded to see the prisoners. Buchning delivered a raving harangue about “murderers of innocent women and children.” The fliers were then marched into a nearby wood and shot. The SA said they were acting in obedience to an order issued on 26 February by the local kreisleiter, that all pilots of strafing aircraft were to be executed. Interrogated later, one of the firing squad said: “I was of the opinion that the Orstgruppenleiter was acting correctly, because I knew of the order.” Many other such incidents are recorded in war-crimes investigations files. Aircrew who found themselves confined in prison camps may have suffered privations, but in the hysterical atmosphere of Germany under bombardment in early 1945 they could think themselves fortunate to survive.

It was ironic, of course, that in the last stage of the war many PoWs themselves died in air attacks. Large numbers of Polish prisoners were killed during an RAF raid on Lübeck. Next morning, those who survived found themselves the objects of intense local bitterness: “An angry crowd of civilians gathered outside the camp shouting abuse at us,” wrote Piotr Tareczynski, a Polish gunner officer in captivity since 5 September 1939. “Rightly or wrongly, they blamed us for their misfortunes. Some of the crowd carried staves. That was the only time we were glad to have barbed wire around us.” Cloud obscured Coblenz during a raid against the city on the night of 22 December 1944. The RAF’s markers drifted towards Stalag XIIA, twenty-five miles eastwards. Several PoW medical personnel were killed by stray bombs, along with civilians in the neighbouring village of Diez. Bud Lindsey, a nineteen-year-old Texan, was disgusted to find himself strafed by a U.S. Thunderbolt as he was led to the rear after being captured in the Vosges Mountains in November 1944. He had stumbled into the German lines while collecting platoon reports days after he joined the 100th Infantry Division, without ever having fired a shot in anger. The American fighter caught his group of prisoners a few hundred yards behind the front, bullet strikes throwing sparks from a nearby house: “I don’t know why the pilot suddenly decided to fire on a small group of men of which five were American PoWs,” wrote Lindsey bitterly. “. . . Perhaps it had been a dull day for him.”

In the aftermath of a big raid, prisoners of war and slave labourers could often be seen in the cities manning rescue equipment, pumping air into ruins where survivors were believed to be trapped in rubble. Every city-dwelling German became accustomed to walking to work through streets on which glass from uncountable shattered windows scrunched underfoot at every step. Ruined buildings bore chalked inscriptions, guiding friends and relations to the new abodes of survivors. Half of Europe, in those days, seemed to be searching for lost loved ones. Some were only temporarily mislaid. Others were gone for ever. And there was worse, far worse, to come.

After a USAAF raid on Berlin on 3 February 1945 local rumour alleged that 15,000 people had died, though the real total was much smaller. Paul von Stemann wrote: “That everything was dissolving in confusion became clear to me as I walked unchallenged through the battered buildings of the Foreign Office. They had been hit by a big stick of bombs, and all the doors were open, so that I could stroll freely through the offices. Documents, papers, books lay about the floor covered with chalk, rubble, broken glass and ink running from shattered bottles. Among the crowd was von Ribbentrop himself, spruce as a cadet in his fine uniform, but with bewilderment in his face.” For some weeks, the winter snows had rendered Berlin’s miles of ruins wonderfully picturesque. Now, instead, amid the February thaw they looked grey and wretched. People tramped through streets thick with mud created by rain falling upon ubiquitous dust and rubble.

Von Stemann sometimes drove the 120 miles from Berlin to Dresden, to experience the blissful tranquillity of that city after the relentless air raids in the capital. Installed at Dresden’s Bellevue Hotel, “all around us was the manmade beauty we were starving for,” he wrote, “August the Strong’s castle, the Zwinger, the baroque Hofkirch, the museums with their huge collections of china, ivory, sculpture and paintings, and further behind the Alt Stadt with its winding streets and many antique shops well stocked and eager to make a sale.”

Gotz Bergander, a young Dresdener, had been twelve when the war began. In the early years, his father returned laden with luxuries from duty with a Luftwaffe flak unit in France. The boy quizzed him eagerly about how many British planes he had shot down. In 1941, Gotz was surprised to see his mother burst into tears when the invasion of Russia was announced on the radio, yet his favourite pastime remained the depiction of lurid battle scenes in his sketchbook. At school, he and his classmates regarded air-raid drill as a game. They lit balls of paper to simulate falling incendiaries, and practised extinguishing them. They gazed at pictures of bombed cities. Until 1945, however, Dresden was a distant and low-priority target for Allied aircraft. “I had a lot of imagination, but not enough to conceive what air attack might mean for us.” When Bergander himself was drafted to join a local flak-gun crew, his romantic illusions about war were swiftly shattered. The work was hard, the routine relentlessly boring. A few mis-aimed bombs occasionally fell on Dresden, but the guns seldom fired. One cold, clear night, they saw the distant glow of Leipzig burning. But local opinion held that Dresden’s great cultural heritage rendered it immune from Allied devastation. As the front came closer, and defeat loomed, another rumour held that their city was designated for preservation, to serve as the Allied occupation capital.

Bergander’s father Emil had been released from his flak unit to run the well-known Bramsch company, manufacturing yeast and schnapps at a distillery close to their home. When the teenager was sketching in his room and heard a radio warning of an air raid, he would hang a towel out of the window, as a signal to his father to halt production in the works. They preferred to do this at the last possible moment, because the yeast spoilt if the plant was shut down. In the late afternoon of 13 February 1945, the boy spent some time with his mother at Dresden station, watching the great throng of soldiers, travellers and refugees. They took the streetcar home at 9 p.m. Soon after they reached their house, which stood in the inner suburbs, there was an alarm. The building was owned by his father’s company, which had its offices on the ground floor. The managing director had ordered the cellar specially strengthened as a shelter with steel shutters, rubber seals and a telephone line. The family descended into its safety, and sat there through the storm of concussions which followed. Only twenty-five minutes after the raid began, the planes departed. The Berganders emerged into the darkness to find that no bombs had fallen near by, but a great pink glow suffused the sky above the city. Gotz climbed on to the factory roof, and used sand to extinguish a few incendiaries which had fallen there. The largest local landmark was a big cigarette factory, domed like a mosque, and surmounted by minarets. Everything upon the horizon as far as its gates was burning. Gotz marvelled at the beauty of the flames, reflected in the yellow glass of the dome. He was awed, and afraid. This first attack had been carried out by 244 Lancasters of the RAF’s 5 Group, which had dropped more than 800 tons of bombs.

Even at a safe distance from the vast conflagration engulfing the city, the teenager felt its heat. He descended again to the street, and saw the first trickle of terrified fugitives approaching. “Everything is burning!” they cried. Their coats were covered with ash, and many were coughing violently from smoke inhalation. Some carried bags laden with a few possessions. A small, stunned crowd gathered in front of the Bergander house, discussing the nightmare. Suddenly somebody shouted: “Alarm again!” They looked at each other in disbelief. “Impossible!” said a man. The teenager shouted fiercely at the sky: “Criminals!” It seemed so utterly unjust. They retired to their cellar again, listening in terror to explosions which seemed much heavier and closer than during the earlier wave of bombing. So they were. Five hundred and twenty-nine RAF Lancasters delivered more than 1,800 tons of bombs with deadly accuracy. Just six were lost. The impact upon Dresden was catastrophic.

After forty minutes, the attack stopped. The Berganders emerged from the shelter to find that their own house and factory were almost the only buildings in the area which survived undamaged. When the boy went back on to the roof, he descended to tell his parents that he could see only a white wall of flame. Sporadic explosions persisted, from delayed-action bombs. The lower part of their own street was burning. The crowd of fugitives was swelling constantly. At last, Gotz Bergander tired of the awful spectacle, and sank exhausted into sleep.

Next morning, the residents of Dresden stumbled out into the streets, to behold the utter devastation of their city. Victor Klemperer, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish academic, yearned as much as any man in Europe for the defeat of the Nazis, yet he was appalled by what he now saw before him:

We walked slowly, for I was now carrying both bags, and my limbs hurt . . . Above us, building after building was a burnt-out ruin. Down here by the river, where many people were moving along or resting on the ground, masses of the empty, rectangular cases of the stick incendiary bombs stuck out of the churned-up earth. Fires were still burning in many of the buildings . . . At times, small and no more than a bundle of clothes, the dead were scattered across our path. The skull of one had been torn away, the top of the head was a dark red bowl. Once an arm lay there with a pale, quite fine hand, like a model made of wax such as one sees in barber’s shop windows. Some people . . . pushed handcarts with bedding and the like, or sat on boxes and bundles. Crowds streamed unceasingly between these islands, past the corpses and smashed vehicles, up and down the Elbe, a silent, agitated procession.

Another Jewish family in Dresden made a special pilgrimage that terrible day: to satisfy themselves that the Gestapo headquarters had gone. “It was terrible, the bodies, the city burning,” said Henni Brenner; “. . . but from a distance we saw that it [too] was burning. Well, then, we felt some satisfaction.” Klemperer’s own home was destroyed. He and his wife cut the yellow stars from their clothes, because they knew that only as Aryans did they have any chance of securing food, shelter, mercy. When they heard the distant sound of aircraft once more, and threw themselves to the ground amid renewed explosions and rubble dust trickling over their heads, Klemperer thought fervently: “Just don’t get killed now!”

As Gotz Bergander ventured down to the street, he met a throng of people from the city begging for water—the factory had its own supply. Bizarrely, a worker arrived on his bicycle. “Why have you come?” asked the boy. “I wanted to see if the old place was still standing,” said the man, one of their most conscientious workers, in his strong Saxon accent. They were all emotionally exhausted: “We could not grasp what had happened to us. I felt no hatred for the airmen, but a great anger. I felt they were cowards. Why didn’t they face us man to man?”

When the sirens sounded again, they looked blankly at each other. Somebody said: “But there’s nothing left to bomb.” Almost a hundred people, most of them hysterical, crowded into their shelter at the same time as Victor Klemperer lay hugging his fear in the street. Three hundred and eleven USAAF Fortresses had come to complete what the RAF’s Lancasters had begun, delivering a further 771 tons of bombs on Dresden. The Berganders heard the first sticks falling, very close. It felt as if they were standing under a railway bridge as a train thundered overhead. All the lights went out. Torches revealed a thick cloud of white dust choking the air of the cellar. A sudden shock of blast drove the breath from their lungs for a moment. They were too stunned even to cry out. The Bergander family threw themselves on the floor. They were exceptionally fortunate in the strength of their shelter. A stick of 500-pound bombs had landed within yards of the house. Somehow, both the building itself and the neighbouring factory survived almost unscathed, save for the loss of every pane of glass and most of the roof tiles.

They came out to find the strong west wind fanning flames through almost every surrounding building. The Berganders ran among the buildings, dousing with wet blankets burning fragments of debris that had drifted through the air before falling to the ground. They thanked their good fortune, in having saved not only their lives and possessions but also a store of potatoes which alone fed them through the days that followed. They began carrying water to the neighbouring hospital, which had none. They laboured to restore power to the factory, while giving such help as they could to the tide of refugees. Gotz Bergander possessed a camera. He photographed everything that he could see, for posterity. His father was furious: “Why waste your time? Besides, it’s forbidden!” In the weeks that followed, they had little time to talk to each other or even think about what had happened. They were simply engaged in a struggle for survival. His mother suffered a heart attack. She was just forty-four.

In a single night and day, Dresden had suffered devastation more comprehensive than any other great urban centre of Germany save Hamburg and Berlin. At least 35,000 of its people had died. By a characteristic irony, the city’s railway links, pretext for the Allied bombardment, were relatively unscathed. Trains were again running through the city within a few days. “The bombing of Dresden was an extravagance,” observed Bergander almost sixty years later, with the detachment of an historian, most unusual among Germans of his generation.

Even in war, the ends must relate to the means. Here, the means seemed wildly out of proportion to the ends. I will not say that Dresden should not have been bombed—it was a rail centre, and thus an important target. I will not say Dresden was an exceptional case as compared to other German cities. But I do not understand why it had to be done on such a huge scale. The only answer, I suppose, is that the Allied policy of bombing had developed a dynamic of its own.