The noise had an industrial quality; an urgency but also a practicality. Unlike the air-raid sirens in England – the high pitch of which was faintly other-worldly, a banshee cry in the dark – the Fliegeralarme in Germany were set at a lower octave. They rose and fell as did all sirens, but it was like an alert or even an end-of-shift signal one might hear in a factory compound: workmanlike, as if to say that everyone should move sensibly, and there was no prompt for panic. Across Dresden the sirens were set on rooftops and walls, and by February 1945 their notes would have been regarded by many as simply dreary: night after night of false alarms had drained them of their original potency. At 9.40 p.m. on the 13th the city’s sirens were activated once more, and as the drone filled and echoed down the narrow streets of tall blocks, and pierced the air of the wider avenues and the wealthier suburban streets, many citizens were already resigned to making their way to the shelters yet again, for there had also been an update on the radio: the presenter interrupting the programming to tell listeners that a line of enemy planes had been detected flying towards the city.
Dr Albert Fromme was still with the small band of friends celebrating Frau Schrell’s birthday. The urgent alarm came without warning.1 As they listened to the throaty wail outside the window, one of the party turned the radio on, to find out whether there was anything to worry about. ‘I immediately felt that something significant was going on,’ wrote Dr Fromme later.2 The announcement on the radio was that bombers were indeed on the approach to Dresden. The party was swiftly concluded as he and his neighbours gathered their ‘air-raid kits’ and took them to the shelter in the basement.
Such studied calm was possible for the adults, but not so easy for the smaller children. Georg Frank, who had spent the day in his colourful clown’s bow and collar, was in his bed; his father had returned home from the meeting of the Volkssturm and his mother had warmed up some supper for him. He was already listening to the radio, as was the boy, half-waking in confusion, when a rather more emphatic announcement was made: ‘Attention! Attention! Anglo-American bombers in approach to Dresden! Seek the air-raid shelters immediately!’3
And Herr Frank could not later remember whether he, as a little boy, was still half-asleep when hauled out of his bed by his mother. The memory had the power of a bad dream: ‘Was it just the fright of being pulled out of bed that caused the tears?’ And with this rupture came the noise of the sirens which to the little boy were ‘ghastly’. He was wrapped in a blanket and, carried by his mother, rushed out of the apartment.4
Their shelter was the cellar; the long brick corridor with the little cells leading off from it. On the way down, he was conscious of ‘the faint stairwell lighting’ and the total blackness outside the staircase window. His father had brought down a few family belongings and now they all moved into that vaulted cell, with its simple table and home-made chairs, and the little boy watched as his father stowed their small treasures away in a corner. The few simple provisions they had brought were laid upon the table.
Just two or three blocks south of the main railway station, on Schnorrstrasse, was the apartment where ten-year-old Gisela Reichelt lived with her sister and her mother, Frieda, who was eight months pregnant. Gisela later remembered that the air-raid sirens had simply become an accepted part of life in Dresden; she did not associate them with horror, because the night-time alarms had all proved false. Even as a ten-year-old, though, she was aware of what the war had brought to others; she knew from the radio and from newspapers that Allied bombers had effectively destroyed other German cities such as Hamburg and Mannheim. Indeed, before 1945, in the earlier days of the war, when Bomber Command had been relentlessly attacking cities such as Frankfurt and Hanover, Dresden had been the sanctuary for so many refugees coming not from the east but from the west, from towns and cities and streets that had been transformed into smoking rubble. But, she later remembered, there was some form of general psychological block among Dresden’s citizens. ‘No one could ever imagine that our city would be the victim of a cruel and senseless bombing.’5
Gisela was in bed, though not asleep, when the sirens began their cry. ‘We grabbed our suitcases which were always to hand and went down to the cellar,’ she later remembered. Gisela also managed to pick up her dolls Monika and Helga. As she and her mother reached the cellar, anxiety set in almost at once. Gisela’s father was a soldier; where was he at that moment? The sorts of worries that even ordinarily could keep a child from sleep were hugely magnified in that enclosed space. There was no optimism now that it was a false alarm, for Gisela could see that her mother was also drawn with anxiety. Into that cellar came neighbours and latecomers, and all the while the sirens outside continued to cry.
One cellar with a very distinctive savour was that into which the American prisoner of war Kurt Vonnegut and his fellow captives had been escorted: what he described as a meat locker lay beneath the converted barracks of slaughterhouse number five.6 This cellar was accessed by means of an iron door and down an iron staircase. The room was very large and very cool; here and there slabs of animal carcases – sheep, pig, horse – were impaled upon hooks that hung from the ceiling. There were a great many other unused hooks dangling. The space was whitewashed and candlelit. In that cold February, electric refrigeration had not been deemed necessary for the meat; the air was sufficiently cold as it was. For the next eight or so hours, this was to be the physical limit of Vonnegut’s world, as his imagination was galvanized by the echoing noises from above. Many of the guards who usually stood watch over him and his comrades came off shift and returned to their nearby homes. The American POW was safer than his Nazi jailers.
Across the river, the sirens could be heard within the Sarrasani circus box office and the entertainment in the ring was instantly halted. That evening’s ringmaster, plus some of the attraction attendants, told the audience that all the shelter they needed was just down the stairs. There might have been a few soldiers in that audience who would have relished the prospect of a compulsory visit to the establishment’s subterranean bar. With no fuss or agitation, from the elderly to the young, row upon row stood and slowly made their way towards the exits indicated by their ushers. The circus animals, meanwhile, were led to their special enclosures in a vast yard at the back of the building.
On a smart street in the east of the city, Marielein Erler and her husband Georg had understood very well the meaning of the radio announcement: the wording, from the ‘bomber approach’ to the invocation of all necessary precautions, had been used on Herr Erler’s warden training courses: it meant that this was a serious emergency. And yet the Erlers felt that they were properly prepared. The house in which they lived had a cellar, and they were joined by their fellow residents. They had packed not two but six suitcases in readiness: as much of their clothing as they could manage.
Also in that cellar, Marielein recalled, was ‘a big box with the best porcelain – noblest Meissner’.7 It also had some items of crystalware. It would not be fair to interpret this as irrational materialism; rather, it was clear that these and other pieces were infused with memory. The pleasure the Erlers derived from these treasures was not greedy but delicate and subtle. There was also a sort of charmed optimism about the idea that such objects would be safe even deep in a cellar during a bombing attack. But Marielein wanted to offer comfort to others too. The neighbours who had gathered in the cellar included one small family, with two very young children: a girl called Elizabeth and her even smaller younger brother. As they adjusted to the low lighting amid the musty brickwork, Marielein tried to soothe the children. The girl, she noted, was trembling and she put her arm around her.8
Some cellars were more accommodating than others. Helmut Voigt, together with his mother and his older cousin Roland, had to leave their apartment building south-west of the railway station and make their way along the street to the entrance to an industrial basement beneath a local brewery (a rival to the Felsenkeller, which was not far away). This modern shelter – concrete stairs down, bare lightbulbs and pale walls – was several flights underground. Voigt estimated that it had room comfortably for about a hundred people.9 But as the sirens cried that night, the teenager noticed with a little discomfort that something new was happening: the cellar was filling with not only familiar neighbours but also a continual line of strangers whose footsteps could be heard descending those concrete stairs.
‘Many people came in who had never been there before,’ he later recalled. ‘Some were the passengers from a tram on line 6’10 and others were refugees; in other words, people out on the streets who understood suddenly how much danger they were in, and who had followed a line of other citizens making for the shelter. As each new arrival came down the stairs there was a palpable sense of shifting. Usually quite roomy, the cellar now no longer had any more seating free; each new entrant had to stand. There was an anteroom too, and a short corridor, but conditions in these were becoming cramped as well.
Through all of this, these citizens across Dresden who took shelter – thousands of people, moving in as orderly a fashion as they could – had no idea how much time they had before the raid would begin. The sirens and the radio announcements spoke of imminence, but what did that mean? Seconds? An hour? There were a great many who tried, above the incessant klaxons, to discern the approaching hum of aircraft. Indeed, in the heart of the Altstadt there were many still out in its streets and narrow alleys, ignoring the bellows of on-duty police officers and looking up at the sky.
One such was the soldier who had so recently recovered from his wounds in the snowy east. Lothar Rolf Luhm had become separated from his soldier comrade as he wove his way through the baroque lanes that wound around the castle and the Catholic cathedral. He found himself on the square outside the cathedral, overlooking the Augustus Bridge. There were stragglers running in all directions. Without quite realizing the futility of the question, Luhm – a stranger to the city – quickly grabbed one person and asked where he was.
Footsteps on cobbles, the endless undulating wail echoing off walls of thick stone. Luhm spotted people hurrying towards a grand structure that lay beyond the castle: an eighteenth-century building fashioned to look like a chateau. Setting off at a run, the soldier followed these figures in and was directed towards a staircase.11 As well as the bare concrete and pale wall lights, there was a feature that set this shelter apart: heavy steel doors. One other element immediately caught Luhm’s eye: the heavy presence of what he described as ‘Golden Pheasants’. This was slang for Nazi Party dignitaries: the colours of their uniforms – the browns and the reds, and the gold tassels – inspired the term.
Luhm was now underneath the Taschenberg Palace, for a long time a bureaucratic centre for the Wehrmacht. It had originally been built by Augustus the Strong as a residence for his mistress, the Countess of Cosel. Luhm found himself among a jostling, heterogeneous crowd, notable for a number of ‘well-fed burghers’ and police officers who were in radio communication with officers elsewhere.12 He was near the heart of the municipal Nazi establishment, and it transpired that his friend Günther had also made it down there. They were, Luhm recalled, the only soldiers among all these civilian personnel; and no one seemed to question their presence.
That little world beneath was very far away from the cobbled lanes above; aside from the continual complaint of the deep-throated sirens, the road outside, which turned on to the richly ornamental entrance to the Zwingergarten and then led, a few yards further on, to the cheerful classical structure of the Semper Opera House, was now quiet. Further on, past the Catholic cathedral and up the steps to the promenade of Brühl’s Terrace, with its flagstones and balustrades, the last stragglers were making their way to less secure cellars. Along that terrace lay the elegant facades of the Academy of Arts and the Albertinum; the latter institution, the base of the civic authorities and services, had its own extensive cellar, which was filling from the street side with a mix of public officials and citizens caught some distance from their usual refuges.
And just a few yards along from this lay the Judenhäuser. After a harrowing day delivering deportation notices to fellow Jewish citizens, Victor Klemperer was drinking coffee with his wife when the sirens sounded. A neighbour, Frau Struhler, exclaimed bitterly that she hoped the bombers would come and smash everything up.13 Clearly, this was the only escape that she could envisage. Klemperer did not seem at all shocked by the bitter nihilism.
There was a separate ‘Jew cellar’; Jewish people were not permitted to seek shelter among Aryans. Like many other cellars in this part of the Altstadt, this was a space of crumbling brickwork and not wholly underground; there was a window at pavement level. As in neighbouring streets, they contained only rudimentary facilities: chairs, buckets of water, blankets. Klemperer, his wife and all those others who resided in the old wooden structure made their way down the stairs. In such spaces, and such circumstances, there was little anyone could do but sit silently.
A few hundred yards south of this, the choirboys of the Kreuzschule had been ushered down to their main school building’s cellars. Beneath the February night sky, the neo-Gothic Kreuzschule, with its strong vertical and triangular lines, looked a little like a vast church organ in silhouette. The boys gathering under this structure were, in contrast to the inhabitants of the Judenhäuser, among Dresden’s most cherished souls: their intense musical talent far removed from the everyday squalor of war. On ordinary days, theirs was a rarefied life, and yet now they were in no more a privileged position than their Jewish neighbours. And with them in those cellars was the choirmaster, Rudolf Mauersberger: he was certainly keenly aware of the menacing dissonance in the city’s sirens. As a composer, he was acutely sensitive to the music of everyday life. Just weeks beforehand, his choir had been performing songs that he had written inspired by Saxon folk tales and melodies, delicate interweavings of rural history and Christianity.14 These compositions were a determined counterpoint not only to the war but also to the martial nature of the Nazi regime; they spoke of a Dresden heritage rooted in a more spiritually nourishing world. In those minutes of silence and waiting, Mauersberger was absorbing the tones and rhythm of the warning wails. The music of war was painful to him; a pain that he was determined to condemn, and to share.
Even in the unknowable chaos of an air-raid warning, the boys of the Kreuzschule had structure; an institution that was there to look after them. But some half a mile south, at the city’s main railway station, the situation was noisier: a vast crowd being hustled down the stairs into the underground spaces that lay beneath the platforms, a tumult of voices and footsteps echoing on stone. There was shuffling, scuffling; elderly people, small children, bewildered and directionless and moving where they were told by the station officials and railway police. The uncertainty here, perhaps, was stronger. With the air filled by sirens, these refugees would have had no sense of how much time they had to find themselves a secure spot in those corridors and tunnels, or even where the exits were.
Günter Berger was among the railway staff, with his colleague Georg Thiel. The crowds were even denser than on previous days and evenings because, for the past few hours, more steam locomotives than ever had been pulling up to the platforms. ‘In addition to the daily scheduled traffic, there were many specially scheduled trains coming in from the east,’ recalled Berger. ‘There were drivers and passengers who had covered immense distances in a day; and the train carriages were packed with refugees.’15
The unceasing sirens and the urgency of the radio announcements meant Berger and his colleagues had to act with single-minded efficiency if they were to get all these people to shelter; there was clearly no time to think of alternatives. ‘What we feared had now arrived,’ remembered Berger. ‘With heavy hearts, we had to act swiftly and with care.’16 He knew his main duty was to remain within the station precincts, and in those dark minutes he and Thiel met a train that had just pulled in. Careful not to spark panic, they disembarked the frightened refugee passengers as quickly as possible, instructing them to leave their luggage in the carriages and get down the stairs as swiftly as they could.
As Berger recalled, ‘A considerable mass of people had accumulated,’17 yet the new arrivals remained calm as they complied. Some corridors beneath the platforms made a cruciform shape; Berger and his colleagues briskly choreographed individuals along its arms. Some young helpers belonged to the League of German Girls, who had been instructed to tend to any wounded soldiers arriving by train, but many of those men were too badly injured to be moved easily from the station’s underground corridors.
In another train that was approaching the city in those minutes was the great-uncle of Margot Hille. ‘Uncle Hermann’, as Margot called him, was among those fleeing the lower Silesian town of Głogów. This quiet, pretty place had been transformed into a Wehrmacht stronghold, a line that the Nazis were determined that the Red Army would not cross. The Soviet troops responded to that with a terrible onslaught that destroyed the town centre stone by stone. Uncle Hermann’s train had been travelling through the countryside for the best part of the day, and at a few minutes to ten was nearing the darkened centre of Dresden and its glass-roofed main station.
A little to the north, where the railway tracks curved across the River Elbe and into the more modest station at Neustadt, there was also a jostling mass of refugees awaiting instructions. Winfried Bielss and his friend Horst were a few streets away on their Hitler Youth duty, having settled another refugee family into temporary accommodation at a commandeered school. They had been on the street and some distance from their homes as the sirens started. They had to decide very quickly what to do.
Among the elegant nineteenth-century houses and apartment buildings on Katharinenstrasse they found access to a shelter. It was little more than a simple cellar, and uncomfortably if understandably crowded. Extraordinarily, though, the boys were told that they could not stay; there was no room for them; they would have to find somewhere else. Seconds later, Winfried and Horst were back on the street, with the sirens echoing around them.
What to do? Should they return to the Neustadt station? Bielss was reluctant; there was no room there either. Horst suggested sprinting across the bridge and through the streets of the Altstadt to his family’s home near the Kreuzkirche, but it was a good mile away and Bielss did not think that they had enough time.
As the boys debated under that black sky, they were approached by two hurrying policemen and taken to another cellar a few doors along. It was too dangerous for them to remain out in the open air, one of the officers told them.18 But some curious quirk made Bielss demur. He felt an inexorable pull towards his own home, regardless of time or jeopardy. This too was a mile away, but on this side of the river, past the Neustadt.
Bielss talked Horst into leaving and they slipped out of the cellar past the police officers who were trying to maintain order among its many other occupants. The boys walked briskly along deserted residential back streets, the large villas and terraced apartment buildings blank, the darkness complete and the only noise to be heard the interminable rise and fall of the sirens. When they were stopped by more police officers, Bielss coolly reassured them that he lived only one street away and was nearly home. This was not true, of course, but the police were satisfied and they hurried to their own shelter. ‘I just wanted to walk home through quiet neighbourhoods,’ Bielss later recalled.19 Perhaps because the streets were empty, Bielss curiously remembered the atmosphere as calm – though navigation was slightly difficult because in the absence of any street lights the city before him was simply shapes in the dark.
They were now passing a small park, darker even than the street, and the boys were alone. They were on Alaunstrasse, which is halfway up the gentle slope that rises to the north of the Elbe, and from this point, they could see the silhouetted domes and towers of the Altstadt and the clouds above. It was now that they became conscious of the hum. ‘The sound of aircraft engines became audible,’ remembered Bielss. But neither he nor Horst was anxious; indeed, that deep note prompted them instead to speculate on the city’s air defences. They both assumed that there would be fighters taking off from the Klotzsche airfield, which lay about four miles to the north.
The boys’ faith in the city’s defences was ill founded. Some dozen or so Messerschmitt fighters had belatedly been scrambled, only just becoming airborne as the bombers began their sweep along the Elbe. There was a sense of exhaustion and resignation in this token response, the Luftwaffe either tragically underestimating the size of the incoming raid or simply accepting it as a force that could not be met in kind. It is possible, too, that the squadron was under orders to conserve fuel for the more terrible battles with the invading Soviets to come. The impotence of this force, simply circling around, was to be made clear a few minutes later; one Messerschmitt visible from the ground amid the haze of initial bright silver and green marker flares dropped from above.
This was what the boys down below, hurrying through those streets, were about to see. When Winfried and Horst reached the wider avenue of the Jägerstrasse, that hum intensified, the deep note resonating more powerfully, and quite unconsciously the boys found their pace quickening further. Here was something that sounded directly like a threat; a noise with an almost primal quality. The boys turned on to Zittauer Strasse, which was a little closer to the river, and it was at this point that they now began to sense what was coming: the prospect of many, many bombers, thousands of feet up, almost invisible against the darkness but the ever-louder hum now carrying a distinct edge of implacable aggression. The boys looked to the horizon and saw two balls of bright red falling from the sky above the Ostragehege, or city sports stadium. Following the illumination of the green and silver flares, these red falling stars were among the more mesmerizing of the ‘Christmas trees’, as they were termed: the glowing target indicators, dazzling in the darkness of blackout, thrown down from the lead Mosquitos in order to provide an aiming point for the bombers following close behind.
‘Now we started to run,’ remembered Bielss.20 The boys were close to Bielss’s home. They were at once mesmerized and horrified by the way that the sky and the city seemed slowly to be brightening. Out of the black clouds and the darkness were falling countless Christmas trees; the marker flares being scattered widely now, from the Altstadt to Johannstadt. Bielss recalled seeing other flares in different colours, brilliant blue, intense green and even a very bright orange, which turned the clouds above a sickly yellow. It might have been tempting from that viewpoint on the gentle hill on the opposite side of the river to stop and watch, at least for a few seconds. But the boys understood, perhaps prompted by the cacophony of the approaching bombers, that they had to sprint for sanctuary.
That macabre sense of wonder at this light show was left for others in the Altstadt itself. There were some 300-odd people, in the heart of that old city, who had fixed upon the crypt of the Frauenkirche for their shelter, hurrying across the dim cobbled square to the entrance at the side of the church. As they walked down the narrow stone steps and found places to sit amid the subterranean tombstones, the church above them was empty. In the darkness, in the main body of the church, it was still possible to see the golden glint of the altarpiece. The interior of the church’s dome, painted in unusual shades of pink and pale blue, always found new delicacy on nights when the beams of the moon streamed through the clear windows. But now, instead, the intense red falling stars outside cast their lurid moving light, and their fiercer colours, upon the faces of the painted saints.