In the thin cold wind of winter, this was – by tradition – a day of the brightest colour: green wool, purple and pink silk ribbons, gingham and rich embroidery, scarlet devil horns, huge yellow bows. In the eyes of the adults, the costumes for Fasching – the festival that marked Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent – were both aesthetically cheering and also evoked the warmth of memories of celebrations in previous years. By contrast, the youngsters who wore this rich array of fancy dress treated it with full gravity and seriousness. In the chilly damp of 13 February 1945, with Dresden and its buildings and gardens and trees a uniform grey and smudged brown, and its adults and elderly people looking tired and drawn with anxiety, the city’s children were insisting on dressing-up boxes and trunks being hauled out of attics and sheds and basements. Their mothers were happy to oblige.
For young Georg Frank, this indulgence was widespread in his street: the children ‘fooling around in colourful carnival costumes’ and adults, looking on, ‘forgetting their worries about the increasingly serious state of the war’.1 This little boy was very excited about his own costume: ‘a colourful clown’s bow’ and a ‘wide white collar’.2 Elsewhere, the grave teenager Winfried Bielss noted approvingly ‘the costumed and painted children’; he observed that, while ‘total war had stifled almost all public amusements’, there was still ‘this glint in the calendar’.3 Even the older citizens were temporarily diverted: Georg Erler and his wife Marielein remembered how previous Fasching festivals had coincided with ‘the most grim cold’, but this day, by contrast, was blessed with some ‘serene sunshine and mild weather’.4 They saw children out in the terraced streets of Neustadt, perhaps not as boisterous as in other years, but cheerfully playing in their fancy dress none the less. In the Altstadt on the other side of the river, seven-year-old Dieter Elsner, whose father was verger of the Frauenkirche, had been most insistent on being allowed to wear his prized American cowboy costume, complete with a tomahawk – presumably and imaginatively a trophy of battle on the plains. Despite Germany having declared war on America in 1941, Wild West iconography was remarkably persistent. The hugely popular cowboy novels written by German author Karl May were still read by Dresdeners.
Fasching was and is marked across the whole of Germany, but in subtly different ways. In the more westerly cities it grew out of medieval traditions invoking the spirit of misrule and for a long time had a distinctly pagan flavour: costumes evoking the Green Man or the masked personifications of the winter season as a desiccated, cackling old woman. In Saxony, the celebrations had more of an element of the world turned upside down, clownish fools elevated to the high halls of power. But there were still the evocations of darker forces: people dressed as imps and demons, manifestations of the forests. Linked to this were the ceremonies on hills that culminated in vast fires, symbolizing the defeat of the cold and the advent of spring. A sophisticated and intellectual city such as Dresden could never quite abandon itself freely to such rituals: here instead simply was a festival before the days of abstinence that preceded Easter. Tuesday 13 February 1945 was a day of drinking and socializing, and it was the children in their costumes – including miniature devils – who provided that sense of occasion.
That occasion was to come a little later though; this was, after all, still a school day for those pupils whose schools had not been requisitioned by the military or to shelter refugees. Thirteen-year-old Helmut Voigt, who lived in the well-to-do south-western Dresden suburb of Plauen, was set a task by his teacher near the beginning of his day. The school authorities had noticed that some doors were insecure and needed new locks and bolts. Helmut was given some money and asked to find and buy some; this was a simple-sounding task, but in a time of chronic material shortage, such items were elusive. The local ironmongers had none. The idea that Helmut eventually hit upon, necessitating a visit to the Altstadt, would shape the trajectory of both his day and his life.5
The city’s schools had been assiduous in teaching their pupils about emergency measures in the event of an attack; young Dieter Haufe and his classmates had been instructed on how to smother burning phosphorus with sand.6 Elsewhere, at Müller Gelinek school, the teachers were quick to issue bombing alerts to their pupils. The building had had a very near miss in the American raid on the railway marshalling yards of Saturday 16 January, an occasion described to them as ‘a terrorist attack on Dresden’. Ursula Skrbek recalled that at her own school, the authorities sent children home early almost every day in this lethal time.7 Other pupils were drilled in trooping down to improvised basement shelters.
By now Dresden’s children regarded the city’s improvised shelters as part of the texture of everyday life. Georg Frank, who lived with his family in an apartment block, recalled the steep staircase that led down beneath it, and a brick-lined main cellar corridor, off which were smaller cells, each with its own wooden door. The Frank family had enhanced their little space with a table and one or two wooden chairs; other seats were made very simply from wooden boards. Georg remembered that the old brickwork was crumbling in places, with gaps in the mortar.
Dieter Haufe’s family had been forced out of their previous accommodation by bomb damage. The shelter in their new apartment in Pieschen – a suburb to the north of the Elbe on a hill overlooking the Altstadt – was actually a converted workshop. This semi-basement had narrow, horizontal windows high up on the walls through which the sky could be seen.
Other shelters were rather more sturdily appointed; the basement of the Taschenberg Palace, opposite the Zwingergarten and the Catholic cathedral, featured concrete flooring and steel doors. The palace was being used by Wehrmacht officials and municipal and police figures; this was not a refuge intended for the general public. Yet just a few streets away lay an underground space which was open to anyone who might have considered it; the mighty edifice of the Frauenkirche, standing in the open square of the Neumarkt, had a crypt. This was a low-ceilinged labyrinth of arches and ancient tombstones. The Frauenkirche crypt was not actually consecrated for burials; the old headstones set into the thick walls had been placed there centuries earlier following the destruction of another church nearby.
The Frauenkirche was surrounded with a busy mix of cafes and small shops in tall nineteenth-century buildings that contained innumerable apartments above ground and warrens of equally venerable cellars below. The one concession that Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann had made towards providing the city’s population with practical, viable shelters was to allow work to be carried out underground. Instead of remaining as separate cells, brick walls were knocked through so that all the cellars along a street were connected. The end result was a tight subterranean labyrinth, cellars running beneath one street linking up with the passageways beneath others. As well as having access points from the private premises the cellars serviced, the tunnels emerged at two open-air destinations: the stone embankment of the River Elbe was in one direction, while the other took a route that once more saw the light at the Great Garden park in the city centre.
Some families, conscientiously following official advice, had taken the precaution of prepacking suitcases with necessities, including gas masks and blankets. Ten-year-old Gisela Reichelt, whose family lived in an apartment block just two streets away from the bustling main railway station, had been through the drill many times and had become quite used to the musty darkness of the building’s basement.8 Lying as it did on the south side of both the railway tracks and the Altstadt, this was a rather more modern cellar that connected with no others. The apartment building was at the foot of the gentle incline that led up towards the southern suburbs. In this district, there were wider avenues, and tree-filled courtyards. Gisela recalled that that afternoon, she and her friends had played out in the crisp cold air. Their shouts and laughs would have bounced and echoed off the tall walls.
A little to the west of the city, sitting in a small rocky valley, was a business concern that had its own, pre-built shelters. The owners of the Felsenkeller brewery, a construction dating back to the late nineteenth century, had been innovative about using the landscape around it, and tunnels had been bored deep into the rocks adjacent to the main buildings. Now, like most other factories in Dresden, Felsenkeller had been turned over to intricate and technical war work; the lighting company Osram now occupied a large part of it, producing instruments in tungsten. Seventeen-year-old Margot Hille, who had started working at the brewery the year previously immediately after leaving school, was on the morning of 13 February preparing for another day of a job that she occasionally considered wearisome.9
That February, one recurring annoyance had involved Fräulein Hille’s working hours. She started very early, just after dawn, and was supposed to finish at 4.30 p.m. But the director of her department ‘often came in just before closing time and started dictating letters to the secretary’. As a result, Fräulein Hille had to wait around as the secretary then typed the letters up, had the finished copies approved by the director and then placed them in envelopes for Fraulein Hille to take to the large post office a mile or so away in Plauen. The result, she remembered, was that she ‘often did not get home until after 6 p.m.’.10 On the morning of 13 February, Margot was tired; she had had a run of restless, sleep-broken nights.
There were workers all over the city who, themselves facing drearily long hours, somehow managed to not quite see the forced labourers around them. Dieter Haufe’s fifty-three-year-old father had been engaged in local construction projects, including the digging of tank pits. Now he was, as Haufe observed, compelled to take on duties at the enormous Goehle-Werk plant just to the north-west of the Altstadt, up in the green hilly suburbs.11 Here was one of Dresden’s centres of slave labour: in this complex dedicated to the manufacture of instrumentation for aircraft and submarines worked Jewish women selected from concentration camps for whom the factory had become their world: intense hours, insufficient sleep in crowded dormitories, then the return under artificial light to complicated assembly lines. Dieter Haufe’s middle-aged father might himself have been tired, but his life was still largely his own.
In addition to all those factories that ringed the city, there were also, on that February morning, hundreds of people engaged in the wide variety of civic duties that kept the city’s blood pulsing through its veins. As well as the extensive tram network – the rails and wires criss-crossing at busy road junctions – there were public buses, a few of which were, remarkably, being driven by prisoners of war. Dieter Patz recalled that his school bus was driven by ‘a young man with a dark complexion and black hair’.12 The passengers, with perfect civility, greeted him as ‘Alex’; he was a French soldier captured long ago.
Early on that Shrove Tuesday morning the city’s railways were already a tightly packed mass of humanity. The central station was receiving innumerable men, women and children disembarking from trains that had come from the east. The rails and the platforms were elevated; beneath lay the station concourse and below that were subways and cellars. Extraordinarily, despite the chaos, there was still a wide range of facilities on offer at the station. For soldiers who were passing through there was a small laundry at which they could drop off their kit bags to have their uniforms cleaned as they spent a couple of hours in the town.
The station also had a number of city policemen on duty; not for fear of disorder but rather to forestall confusion among the countless refugees that might have gridlocked the entire place. The railway workers, too, needed their wits about them to cope with the many platform and timetable changes as they informed tired and sometimes traumatized families which trains they should take when and from where. Even for experienced railway workers such as Georg Thiel, the semblance of order in the station dissolved with each arrival.
And outside, in the streets leading north, that fragile sense of trying to maintain cohesion in the face of teeming chaos persisted; here were refugees on foot, pushing north towards the Altstadt, the river, the new town and the leafy suburbs and countryside beyond. Dresden’s tram routes were becoming increasingly congested and awkward, horses and carts dolefully moving across the rails, pedestrians crowding one another off the pavements. The streets around Prager Strasse had always been busy in peacetime; now there was an edge of incipient anarchy to the sometimes directionless throng.
Just a quarter of a mile away, close to the bulk of the grey stone municipal offices, the even more severe stone of the Kreuzkirche held out the prospect of calm. On that day before Lent, in the sombre dark of the great church, the choir were preparing for the following day’s services. The people outside, pushing and dodging their way through the human tide of winter coats, will have heard the occasional crystalline notes of sopranos and altos pierce the air. Such disconnected snatches of familiar devotional hymns can have the effect of stopping time; a moment of dislocation. But reality could never be held back for long.
Also struggling through traffic and crowds throughout that day was the philology professor Victor Klemperer. That morning, before 8 a.m., he had left his lodgings in one of the Judenhäuser facing the empty site of the old synagogue – the cramped, cold accommodation that he and his wife had been forced into, along with so many others, near the Frauenkirche. His instructions for the day from the municipal authorities were to deliver swiftly a circular letter to seventy of the city’s remaining two hundred-odd Jews, in addresses scattered around the city. All those who received it were required for ‘out-of-doors-work duties’.13 The letter instructed them to pack clothes and emergency provisions to last three days. They were to report the next morning to an address near the municipal offices. Clearly, they were being taken somewhere.
Professor Klemperer was informed that he and his wife Eva would not be required to report for such duties. Instantly, he told his diary, he felt the distance open up between him and those he was handing the letter to.14 Unusually, to complete his task, the authorities permitted him to travel by tram: a mode of transport forbidden to Jews. The order to report for ‘outdoor work’ duties seemed to take no account of age or, indeed, ability to work. Klemperer was in no doubt what the letter meant to the recipients: a train journey, the silence of a railway siding, death. In hushed evening discussions in the Judenhäuser, rumour and dark speculation had been shared. The dread was all the worse for being so rational.
Professor Klemperer was convinced that his own apparent reprieve was extremely temporary, and that he and his wife would be facing the same prospect within a week. He dutifully made his tour of the Judenhäuser scattered around the city, delivering the summons to addressees ranging from ten-year-old girls to women in their seventies to mothers with small children. The mothers seemed stoical, but as soon as their doors closed Klemperer could hear them weeping uncontrollably.
The professor had seen so many years of accumulated cruelties, large and small, but even with so much experience of so much viciousness, the pain never diminished, and nor was it ever blunted. He and Dresden’s other Jews had endured both the sadism of the Gestapo and the blank indifference of their fellow citizens. But now – at a point where he and so many others had spent the evenings speculating about the rate of the advance of the Red Army, and about the state of the German defences – this seemed like a final effort to rid the city of every last individual Jew just as it seemed that the world was about to be transformed once more.
And because their community had been ruthlessly forced into its separate state, so Professor Klemperer and his Jewish associates looked at the fears of their fellow citizens with an almost dispassionate curiosity: whereas, as he wrote, Jews feared most of all the Gestapo, gentile Dresdeners were terrified of the Soviets.15 There were, he noted, rumours circulating that Soviets dropped in by parachute were infiltrating the city, pretending to be German. There were also rumours that Gauleiter Mutschmann was preparing to flee Dresden. A friend of the professor told him that he had seen German soldiers attaching explosives to the Carolabrücke, the main bridge over the Elbe, presumably in preparation for delaying the ineluctable advance of the Red Army.
The story was corroborated elsewhere by sixty-seven-year-old Georg Erler and his wife Marielein. On that day, they too had been in a state of some anxiety, which found its outward expression in elaborate schemes to protect all the beautiful heirlooms that they had accumulated across the years. Herr and Frau Erler lived to the east of the city, in a smart apartment with a large garden, in a street full of grand villas. Alongside their paintings and porcelain, they owned a quantity of silverware; the previous day, 12 February, they had put as much as they could of it into an improvised strongbox, placed it in their car and driven some twenty miles south to an acquaintance in Dippoldiswalde. Herr Erler felt that in the event of the Red Army marauding through the district, there was a chance at least in this more rural corner that their treasure might be missed.
But on 13 February neither he nor his wife had been able to shake off the prickling sense of anxious insecurity. Their son and daughter lived in the northern city of Lüneburg, so they had no vulnerable dependants in Dresden, but their elegant apartment seemed more than just a home; everything they valued about life seemed contained within those walls. Georg Erler recalled with sensual vividness the beauty of their Biedermeier mahogany table, covered with green silk; the armchairs and sofas; the oil paintings depicting distant members of Marielein’s family, including one eye-catching portrait in which Friedrich Cappel and his wife Louise were depicted in costume, he in the hunting clothes of the forest and she in more sumptuous finery. In addition to this was a no less striking fantasy study in oil of Aphrodite rising from the waves, by an artist called Boyen, whom Erler noted had succumbed to ‘mental annihilation’.16 Some of their paintings had, like the silver, been packed up. A few were in the coal cellar; others had been sent to their daughter in Lüneburg. There was also a ‘sonorous’ piano, which Marielein played; Herr Erler had bought sheet music ‘for some of Beethoven’s sonatas’ in the hope that some of their cultured guests might care to try it, but few had.
Herr Erler was especially protective of their extensive collection of beautiful Meissen porcelain. There were Copenhagen vases, decorated with cyclamen and dandelions;17 gold-rimmed vases; a coffee service, also rimmed with gold leaf; there were bowls and plates daintily decorated with cornflowers and coffee cups that were souvenirs unique to the Erler family, adorned with specially commissioned silhouettes of long-dead relatives.
‘There were always fresh flowers from the garden in vases,’ recalled Herr Erler, proud that the apartment spoke of refinement and taste.18 There were modern accoutrements too, from the white-tiled fireplace to the standing electric lamps to the gramophone player kept within its own cabinet. There was a strong sense, from Herr Erler’s recollections, of a domestic world that was perhaps unusually self-contained and unusually aesthetically pleasing. On the early afternoon of the 13th, the couple decided to go out for a walk; for both had heard the rumour about the Carolabrücke being primed with explosives. The twin itches of curiosity and unease were too strong to ignore.
Marielein Erler had believed that the city would be safe quite simply because of its renowned beauty, but doubt must have crept in as she and her husband crossed the bridge heading north, towards the Neustadt, and saw the soldiers at work. ‘We wanted to see if it was really like that,’ remembered Frau Erler. ‘We had heard that dynamite was being prepared to blow up the bridge. Yes, it was like that! Soldiers kept watch at several places on the bridge. We asked them if it was true about the dynamite. “It’s true!” they answered.’19 As they reached the opposite side, they turned back to look at the Altstadt. ‘We looked into the Elbe,’ recalled Frau Erler, ‘and gazed at the beautiful panorama of Dresden.’20 Georg Erler was the air-raid ‘block warden’ for their street. He was to be on duty that night.
Someone else who had spent a lot of time speculating about the Soviet advance – and about the terrible firepower that the Red Army would bring to the city – was also moving through the streets that day, near the functionalist buildings of the university. Mischka Danos was planning a party for that evening in his bedroom back in the large old guesthouse he was living in. He was hoping to serve his guests a Russian delicacy called Kissel, a form of sour jelly mixed with berries, although there were certain ingredients that he still needed to procure. Other than that, the Latvian’s day had been filled with work for Professor Barkhausen in his electrical research laboratory. Given the general circumstances of the war, Danos had had the most remarkably relaxed few weeks: he had only recently returned from a winter vacation, spent partly at Innsbruck.21 It was as though the young physicist was moving in some parallel dimension to all other civilians; a life where pleasant travel and buoyantly intellectual conversation were still perfectly possible. The very idea of serving his guests a Russian recipe that coming evening was itself remarkably insouciant, given the thunderous proximity of the invading Soviet armies.
Almost a thousand miles away, under a sky that was clear and chilly, Miles Tripp had left his RAF base that afternoon on his motorbike.22 He knew that he and his crewmates would not be receiving their briefing until the late afternoon, so had taken the opportunity to roar through the country lanes that bisected small green fields and clumps of woodland on his way to Bury St Edmunds; the motorbike had an irksome fuel leak that he wanted mending.
Tripp and his crewmates had recently received the news that their tour of duty was being extended; they were now required to fly forty missions over Germany before they would be released from bombing duties. As Tripp saw it, this was the crossing of the border into another realm, a moment of transformation when profound fear became something more metallic. He and his crewmates were all very well aware of the mortality rates, yet there were still sparks of hope in their souls, expressed tangentially in a reluctant belief in the supernatural. Tripp and his fellows were easily spooked: their crewmate Harry, a Jamaican airman, had developed an uncanny ability to predict – hours before they were told – exactly which city in Germany they would be targeting next. Was he getting privileged inside information or was there something else, a form of preternatural premonition, going on? Harry had told Miles a while back that he had had a dream: he had been friends with another airman in Canada who had died in a crash. Harry told Miles that his friend had visited him in that dream, holding his hand out in greeting. ‘I don’t like that sort of dream,’ Harry had told Miles.23 Miles could not have agreed more.
But on that afternoon of 13 February Miles Tripp was seeking out dull normality in Bury St Edmunds, the busy little timber-housed town under the sky of pale blue and white, leaving the motorcycle with a mechanic and then, on some impulse, making a visit to the local library. Tripp sat and watched the sun shafting through the great windows before selecting several volumes of poetry from the shelves, with which he returned to his desk. The poetry, he later recalled, ‘was an unconscious effort to establish a connection with an earlier, safer existence, because I was reading the poems that I enjoyed at school’.24 Yet the works brought no ease. Instead, Tripp, sitting at that library desk, found himself feeling increasingly nervous. It was time to pick up the repaired motorcycle; and as Tripp returned to base, the sun was low over the western horizon.
In Dresden, by the late afternoon, the crowds in the streets of the Altstadt had grown denser; the railway station and the roads had brought in uncountable numbers of new arrivals. There was an urban rumour that had spread with some speed: that among these thousands of milling refugees were furtive army deserters, doing their best to avoid official attention. It was understood that the authorities would show no mercy to any who were caught, and it was estimated that in Dresden on that day there were at least a few hundred, possibly a little under a thousand such men, dodging through the shuffling families gazing at the elegance of the Prager Strasse shops.
Also moving among them, from different directions and with different purposes, were two schoolboys. Winfried Bielss had gone home from school and changed into his Hitler Youth uniform ready for his evening duties. The clothes spoke of hyper-aggressive authority (the brown shirt with swastika armband, the shoulder straps, the imperial coat of arms in the form of the eagle, and the motto ‘Blood and Honour’),25 but this boy’s mind could not have been further from war. He had instead been thinking of the fine collection of Erzgebirge toys – richly painted wooden folk-art dolls and marionettes – that he had recently seen in the study of his uncle. More particularly, he had been daydreaming about his uncle’s stamp collection. Bielss too had a deep enthusiasm for philately. Even in the depths of war there were dedicated stamp dealers in Dresden, including a shop called Engelmann that stocked collectibles. Bielss found himself wandering there to stare at the window display. One other shop lay on his route: Bohnert. This had a more unusual display: rare stamps that had been charred and burned at the edges. This, thought Bielss, ‘was an indication that in the event of an air raid, even a vault is not protection enough for them’.26
At around the same time of day, teenager Helmut Voigt was in the large square of the Altmarkt. A few months beforehand, much of the space in the middle of this cobbled square had been requisitioned and dug out for the construction of a large reservoir, the size of a swimming pool but deeper, with smooth concrete sides; this was intended for emergency use by the fire service in the event of an air raid rather than to augment the town’s supply of drinking water. Helmut – together with his cousin Roland – was on his quest for bolts for his school. Travelling in to the city centre from the suburb of Plauen on an unusually busy tram, Helmut was certain that the still-functioning department store Renner would surely have something approximate to his needs.
The cousins had noted the unusually crowded streets, their tram stopping and starting, progress halting, with innumerable human obstacles. The department store itself, though, was relatively calm. The young Voigt approached an elderly salesman in the household-goods department; he went to check the stocks at the back, but without success.27 The pair left the fancy store empty-handed and once more traversed the busy square and its reservoir.
The afternoon was giving way to twilight. Voigt boarded a bus pointing homewards, but the crowds made the journey fraught. As well as the endless slow-moving mass in Prager Strasse there was drama too; at one point, a pedestrian collapsed; the bus conductor had to help get him out of the road to safety.
Voigt’s path was crossed by Lothar Rolf Luhm, a young soldier on leave following convalescence from an injury. Luhm had managed to meet up with a soldier friend called Günther Tschernik. He had originally planned to spend a few days in Schneidemühl, a town in occupied Poland (now called Piła), but it was by then ‘a fortress’.28 Luhm had been wounded during the Ardennes offensive in late 1944. He had then been sent to spend some weeks in a sanatorium in a snowy Silesian town then called Schreiberhau. He was in Dresden pretty much by chance; Luhm was simply making his way back to his unit. Now, awaiting transport connections, he and his friend Günther had a little time to explore this unfamiliar city.
Also unfamiliar with Dresden – but extremely pleased to be there – was Norbert Bürgel, a boy refugee who had left Silesia with his family in order to join relatives in a suburb to the north-west of the city, on the hills looking down over the Altstadt. (In this respect he was unusual; the majority of displaced people were passing through on a journey further west.) By 13 February, Bürgel had been in Dresden for a week, staying with his uncle Günther.29 The idea that Shrove Tuesday should feature festivities had not been forgotten, and the Bürgels were set on enjoying dinner at a restaurant at the far end of the tram line in the suburb of Gohlis, a smart enclave where the city touched the countryside.
Back in England, in the deep twilight green of Suffolk, Miles Tripp and his crewmates – among whom were the skipper ‘Dig’, the navigator Les and the sharply intuitive Harry – were now on base, in the canteen eating their preflight meal.30 They still did not know what target had been fixed upon for that night; they would find out very shortly. But this was one occasion when Harry’s strange powers of insight failed him. He had, he told his crewmates, ‘no hunches’ about this one.
When the curtain was drawn back on the map pinned up in the briefing room that evening, as they sat at tightly arranged tables with the other crews in their squadron, all eyes were drawn to the red ribbon marking out the route across the Channel. The ribbon’s line stretched across France, past Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Mannheim, further and further east. Tripp recalled that ‘nobody had ever heard of Dresden being raided before’.31 Indeed, it seems his own immediate thought was not about the immense distance, or the huge amount of time their plane would be vulnerable to German fire – some nine hours in the air; it was that the city would not have the ‘black belt’ of defence that encircled Berlin and the industrial cities of the Ruhr. Miles Tripp already knew that Dresden was, as Victor Klemperer later described it, ‘a jewel box’. In fact, there was a defence force; although the city’s anti-aircraft guns had been moved in January, sent further east, there was a small squadron of Messerschmitt fighters stationed at the Klotzsche airfield, built in 1935 as an airport befitting a sophisticated destination and which stood on a northern plain above the town, some five miles from the centre.
The USAAF had been due to fly a raid over Dresden that day, but this had been postponed owing to adverse weather. In terms of coordination, the shared targets were by now routine; lists of cities and industrial plants were agreed at the Combined Strategic Targets Committee. It was General Ira Eaker who, eighteen months beforehand, had outlined to Churchill the proposition of ‘round the clock bombing’ – the Americans aiming (in theory) for industrial targets in daylight, the British then swooping over at night. Unusually, on this occasion, the RAF was to be the first to attack. The tables before the pilots and their crews in that briefing room were covered with maps, and the airmen, many smoking, with the rich haze of tobacco building in the room, studied them intently. The advance of the Red Army – Tripp and all his fellow airmen in that room were told – had created chaotic conditions in Dresden, with so many thousands fleeing before them. The aim was not explicitly to bomb civilians, but instead to create an atmosphere of panic. The effect of this would be a general paralysis of communications, railways and roads, to strike at the efforts of the German military to mount an effective defence in the east.
Tripp later confessed that the briefing disturbed him;32 the plan clearly involved igniting alarm among displaced people and he remembered from 1940 the distressing newsreels of French rural refugees desperately seeking to escape the Nazi invasion of their landscape, and of the open sadism of the Luftwaffe in swooping down on these helpless people and firing machine-gun bullets into them.
And so the bomb aimer left the smoky briefing room and went to stand outside in the sharp evening air. He recalled that the sky was ‘tangled with stars’. Tripp at this point started to think about the duration and distance of the mission, and his anxiety became more straightforward. That night 796 Lancasters and Mosquitos would be carrying some 5,500 airmen to bomb Dresden in two huge waves. Tripp’s plane was to be part of the second wave, hitting the city as it was still absorbing the shock of the first attack. Tripp was joined by his crewmates, who seemed similarly apprehensive. The Australian pilot ‘Dig’ had been given the crew’s regular sweet rations for the mission – chewing gum, barley sugar and chocolate. The chocolate, it was noted, was the milk variety: a rare treat. One of the crew members nobly forwent his portion of chocolate, insisting that it be put aside for his crewmate’s much younger brother, a child who in those severely rationed days lived for such elusive delights.
Small tokens of generosity had still been evident in everyday flashes throughout the civilian populace of Dresden too. Victor Klemperer, although crushed into a state of exhausted, depressive dread by his day spent making those terrible deliveries, recalled how just a week or so previously, when the assistant in a grocery shop had been reluctant to serve the rations he was entitled to, a woman in the queue behind had offered to help him out with her own allowance. She had seen the yellow star; she knew what she was doing. For the past few years, interspersing the creeping fear, the random outbreaks of official violence, Klemperer had always noted the fleeting but significant kindnesses; the neighbours and passers-by who told him that they thought what the authorities were doing was awful.33 He was not the only figure to be surprised by surreptitious warmth and sympathy.
Near the wide-flowing Elbe, the waters high with the melted winter snows, in the west of the city stood an enormous abattoir complex. In the section that had formerly held pigs in pens waiting to be butchered and cold stores in which to keep their carcases, a group of prisoners of war were being held, their closely guarded dormitory a few feet underground. Among them was the American novelist-to-be Kurt Vonnegut. Captured some weeks previously, he had seen the more bestial elements of the German military – his guards were sadistic and fanatical, always twitching for the opportunity to slam rifle butts hard into stomachs or cracking across heads.34 Yet during the days, when the prisoners were marched along the street to the malt-syrup factory, Vonnegut caught shafts of light.
The syrup was derived from barley; thick and brown. Vonnegut and his fellows, who were existing on ever-thinner broths with specks of meat, tough black bread and ersatz coffee, were driven almost mad with temptation by the fat vats: the promise of filling sweetness. Also working at the plant were numbers of local women; Vonnegut recalled piercingly when – unable to resist any longer – he waited for the guards to look away and plunged his fingers deep into the forbidden sticky warmth of the syrup, and then brought it back up to his lips. As he swallowed the syrup, he caught the eye of one of the women workers who had seen him; and instead of denouncing him angrily, she smiled.
Vonnegut had a sense that he was in what his narrator Billy Pilgrim would later describe as ‘the most beautiful city in the world’35 but he could only ever see the most tantalizingly small fragments of it. The same, it seemed, applied to the humanity in those around him. Apart from those hours in the syrup factory, he and his fellow prisoners were simply locked away in the abattoir bunker. Work started early and finished in the late afternoon; then the men would be marched back to the slaughterhouse for another inadequate meal of broth.
Elsewhere, the authorities had lost none of their implacable vengefulness: in the police headquarters not far from the Frauenkirche was another disparate group of prisoners of war, all under arrest. One of these was Victor Gregg, the young Englishman who had just a couple of days previously been sentenced to death for sabotaging the machinery of a soap works. With his execution due to take place the following morning, on 14 February, Gregg had no choice but to await his fate in the middle of that crowd of condemned men, in a room used as a temporary cell with a high ceiling and glass cupola, its lavatory comprising two buckets in a corner. Gregg’s co-accused Harry was still blithely insisting that something would turn up.36
And as he and the other men stared at the walls, just a few hundred yards away, the children in the nearby residential district of Johannstadt, with its tall apartment buildings, neat little squares and proximity to the Great Garden park, were continuing to run around in their Fasching costumes. Ursel Schumann was ‘dressed as a little gentleman in a suit and a hat’.37 It clearly gave mothers and grandparents some comfort to see the children free of anxiety; and perhaps the extra comfort of seeing the old tradition that they too had enjoyed persisting even in these most desperate days.
At around 6 p.m. in England the first wave of Lancasters were ready to fly, sitting on airfields in Lincolnshire and Suffolk in the winter darkness, awaiting the green signals from control vans. The airmen, in their electrically heated suits, had a carefully calculated extra item: a piece of cloth with the Union Flag and stitched with the words ‘I am an Englishman’ spelled out in Russian.38 In the event of being shot down, they needed a means of establishing their identities instantly in the face of Soviet troops, because the Red Army was known to operate with violent impulsiveness.
Dresden was not the only target that night; there were to be feints elsewhere, raids on Magdeburg and Nuremberg and Bonn. The idea was to sow confusion in the Luftwaffe control centre, to deny them a focus for their defence. There was also a scheduled raid on a hydrogenation plant that lay north of Leipzig, not very far from Dresden. This was to involve over 350 planes. In total, the RAF was sending around 1,400 planes over Germany that night. This was to be the most extraordinarily choreographed aerial ballet: meticulous timings, smooth order. Other crewmen, such as pilot Leslie Hay, had received similar close briefings on the nature of the target and the reason for it. Industry, he recalled, was hardly mentioned, although the intelligence maps, colour-coded, did show the various manufacturing works that ringed the Altstadt. And again, there was a regretful reference to refugees; and the need to spark fear and chaos among them on the roads in order to bring German materiel transport to an effective halt.
By the time the first of the Lancasters was airborne, a little after 6 p.m., the sky in the east was black. The planes flying down south from Lincolnshire were joined, fifty miles west of London at Reading, by more squadrons; the coordination required to keep so many hundreds of aircraft in an orderly formation was extraordinary. The bombers, their crews attending to their tasks of navigation, of preparing to scatter ‘Window’ into the night skies to confuse the enemy’s radar, of defending the craft with machine guns against the predations of German fighters, approached the Channel, which under the stars had the faintest lustre, then swung down across the French coast before setting their courses for their multiple missions. The flight to Dresden would be roughly four and a half hours.
And in Dresden itself, the sun was long gone; the early evening winter sky, intermittently cloudy, touched for a time with sapphire. The River Elbe darkened; above it, in the wide sky of that valley, tiny stars materialized. The middle-aged men who had spent the day working in what their small sons assumed were ‘scissor-making’ factories and the like were not quite free to return home at the end of their shift; yet to come were compulsory meetings of the Volkssturm. Many among them simply wanted a decent supper – fried potatoes were often cited as a craving – and beer.
All the while under the darkening sky there were no city lights to be seen in the strictly enforced blackout. And so the refugees who had just arrived by train, or by wagon, were now faced with the prospect of navigating a strange city in utter darkness. By now, the children in their cowboy and devil costumes had been rounded up by their mothers; time for supper, time to get ready for bed. But the older children, in the shape of the Hitler Youth, their regulation neckerchiefs tied in triangular fashion, were very much out on the streets: not to bark orders, or to menace, but to guide refugees to temporary accommodation for the night in requisitioned public buildings. Even in that murk, the organization of the city was meticulous.