Professor Heinrich Barkhausen’s laboratory was now open to the night air; great gulping flames exulting amid what was left of the delicate glass instruments, the wire coils, the electrodes and the diodes. The exquisitely calibrated means of controlling and directing certain frequencies, the sonic technology that had been the professor’s specialized life work, had been splintered and reduced to an elemental level. Dresden Technical University lay to the south of the Altstadt and had been hit with incendiaries and high explosive. The fire had been slow to take hold, but when it did, it fed avidly. This was an example of the ‘wild bombing’1 that, 10,000 feet above, the RAF master bomber had cautioned every crew about as they made their passes over the city – off target, not part of the mission.
Very close by was the striking structure of the city’s Russian Orthodox church, with its blue onion domes; those wanton random explosives had not touched it, whereas just yards away, the university was consumed. It is not clear precisely where Professor Barkhausen was at that hour, but his protégé Mischka Danos was not far away, a little further up that hill, having stationed himself and the ‘Karl May’ girl at an abandoned anti-aircraft battery position, from which both now gazed at the vast infernos before them. Danos recalled – to his own discomfort – that he felt like Nero, the emperor who watched Rome burn.2 Many others remembered that odd and guilt-inducing blend of emotions: shock shot through with a wonder at the terrible spectacle of it. The fire in the city was transforming into a new kind of destructive force. The air was turning inside out.
There were many in the ill-lit brick cellars under the Altstadt who had registered the change in atmospheric composition: the increasingly oppressive pulses of heat; the effortful thinness of breathing, of the sort experienced in nightmares; the dizziness that came with standing; a rising sensation in the diaphragm of nausea. The result was a sudden overwhelming desire to get out, to stand under the open sky. Some remembered that the brick tunnels led eventually to the bank of the Elbe, and were making for what they thought would be its clean, cold air. Others were intent upon reaching the Great Garden park, perhaps envisaging frost-twinkled trees and long cool groves. But the narrow passages and extemporized doorways that comprised the labyrinth were not made to cope with large numbers of people attempting to move in opposing directions. In addition, many of those sheltering were elderly, old men and women in winter coats, no longer nimble. One man in a constricted passageway stumbled, fell and then was slowly crushed as the uneasy queue behind him surged irresistibly forward. Two people became wedged into a doorway as people on either side tried frantically to push past.
The combined fires above – flames leaping and jumping from building to building, road to road, now rising higher than the spires of the stricken churches – were also beginning to be felt beneath the surface. The intensity was radiating through the stone and the brickwork. It was obvious to many that whatever lay outside was worth risking, in order to escape these dim and toxic overheated tunnels. But there were other instances of unforeseen terror: a passage that turned through ninety degrees had a suspended wooden fire door that panicked shelterers on either side, moving fast, in a tightening crowd, unaware of each other’s presence, were trying to push open. Of course, with the force balanced, the door would not yield and the panic intensified, with others then trying to move back only to find themselves firmly trapped in an unmoving mass.3 Bodies pressed against warming brickwork as people breathed ever deeper in their attempts to remain calm even as their hearts somersaulted with fright.
A great many of these sheltering Dresdeners were feeling increasingly unwell as listlessness combined with worsening headaches and muscles and joints began to protest. In the absence of adequate ventilation in the cellars, the oxygen was slipping away by stealth and gathering in its place – without odour, invisible – was carbon monoxide. The very elderly and small infants were the first to feel the effects, but before long men and women of any age would have closed their eyes. Sleep would be followed by unconsciousness and then in some cases heart attacks, in others simply a cumulative suffocation. Fourteen-year-old Ursula Elsner, sheltering with her family and younger brother Dieter in a cellar near the Frauenkirche, recalled that her own moment of panic came not through any of these symptoms, but when she saw, in that low glow, flakes of ash beginning to flutter in through the passageways, at first a sprinkling, but then more, horribly suggestive of an oncoming avalanche.4 She cried out to her family, and she and her little brother hurried down those rough-walled passages, to the steps to their exit. The Altstadt by this stage seemed composed purely of flame and sparks. She and Dieter ran in the direction of the wide Elbe. Many of her family remained behind in that cellar, perhaps by that stage simply unable to move, their limbs weighted by the poison in the air.
A little further east were streams of Dresdeners joining refugees and entering the darkness of the Great Garden park. The surviving boarders from the Kreuzschule and their teachers held back on the fringes. Those making their way into the dark groves near the park’s zoo heard the agitation from the caged animals, as they looked back at the Altstadt, and the extraordinarily coloured flames: from deepest orange to a curious sapphire where a nearby gasworks had been hit. Here, among the oaks and lindens and chestnuts – punctuated by the odd crater, earth scattered wide – was for many almost transcendent relief: the ice-kiss of that February drizzle, eyes adjusting to blessed dark after squinting and peering through molten yellows and reds. More than this, the taste of pure air, breathed deep down. Perhaps a few worried that there could be a further swarm of bombers that night but even for them this vast tree-filled space, which covered roughly the same area as the Altstadt itself, must have seemed intuitively safe, an anti-target, a substantial rectangle of darkness contrasted with the scorching spectacle to its west.
Another intuitive sanctuary was the wide patches of green that lay on the north side of the Elbe, the ‘meadows’ that led down to the water’s edge. Although some riverside municipal buildings, including the exquisite baroque Japanese Palace, had sustained serious damage and were still billowing flame and smoke, they were sufficiently far from the banks of the river to allow people to congregate on the grass in front of them. Doctors and nurses from hospitals half a mile away had contrived to get patients here, shuddering in the night air among the horses from the Sarrasani circus. It also became a form of auditorium; from this vantage point, the biblical conflagration across the river could be comprehended on something like its proper scale. The glass dome of the Arts Academy was still somehow intact; through it, and on either side of it, could be seen the towering fires. It is conceivable that from a distance, and separated from it by a wide, cold river, the sight was as compelling as it was terrifying, but the pervasive wind prevented the accompanying range of piteous noises registering with the spectators. The sounds of individual anguish did not carry across that distance over the underlying deep roar of innumerable flames.
Even then in the Altstadt there were some open spaces where it was possible to seek refuge, in particular the nine-foot-deep concrete reservoir that had been built in the Altmarkt square. Some struggling out of the increasingly asphyxiating cellars had clearly recalled it, and in that extremity many were desperate to drink and douse themselves. Men and women, overlooked by the burning Renner department store and the smoking ruins of the Kreuzkirche and other blazing buildings, began climbing over the waist-high wall of the reservoir and dropping into the cold pool. The shock, after the pervasive heat, would have been extreme, but growing numbers of people had the same idea and the large reservoir was now filling with bobbing figures.5 The fact that the water was not intolerably, limb-lockingly cold on that freezing February night was in itself a sign of the inferno’s fundamental strength. The firefighters were still present but seemed increasingly helpless. There were other reservoirs, and other districts of the city that were not yet past saving; but the Altmarkt was beyond their powers.
Just two streets away, Erika Seydewitz, with her mother, father, sister and elderly neighbours, was still crouching in a stone archway near the Rathaus. Her father was thinking with a kind of manic energy: he was convinced that they might yet be able to save the family car and possibly even some of the more valuable items from his photography shop. Tentatively – to the disbelief of Erika’s mother – father and daughter ran out into that white-hot rain of falling embers. The car was not yet on fire but it obviously would never move. And then, jumping at ear-piercing reports from the roaring apartment buildings, Erika slipped and fell. ‘The cobblestones were so hot that I burned my hands,’ she remembered. ‘My only thought was: even if you end up breaking your arms and legs, get up quickly.’6 She heard the creaking from above transform into a darker bellow: a house somewhere behind her collapsed in on itself.
In those few minutes, the world had changed. There was ‘a storm on the street’; a strong, searing wind, blowing embers and sparks. Erika was aware of just how dry their coats were now, despite their earlier soaking. They fought the firestorm that was tugging and twitching at their limbs, pushing their way back through those streets towards the uncertainty of the stone archway where the rest of the family sheltered. These impulses to protect belongings of both real and sentimental value seemed to have a degree of irrationality, even to those who acted upon them, but perhaps it was natural to try to cling to any symbols of certainty.
While Dr Fromme was making his way to the hospital, his family and neighbours in the west of the city saw the fires spreading unstoppably street to street, house to house, and their collective instinct too was to rescue a range of domestic items and take them into the street. Among the Frommes’ treasured items were, understandably, a wedding photograph and Dr Fromme’s beloved typewriter and, perhaps less accountably, an armchair and some coats. There was some debate about taking the most valuable bottles from the wine cellar; this was decided against. The idea was possibly for them to load as much as possible into the car and drive away. Yet the biting orange embers in the air were floating down and bringing their fiery touch everywhere: one neighbour’s suitcase, sitting out on the pavement, burst into flames. A radio hauled from the house had ‘to be defended from the sparks’.7
In the Altstadt, in the shadow of the smoking Catholic cathedral, Nazi officials remained in the cellars beneath the Taschenberg Palace. Lothar Rolf Luhm, back down from the roof, looked on as the mothers in that shelter pushed their small children close to the ‘Golden Pheasants’, as though somehow proximity to those in power would offer talismanic protection. It was a gesture of superstition that, as Luhm recalled later, made the young soldier suddenly yearn to be back in his tank, out in the field.8 There was more certainty offered by that sort of warfare than there was in this darkness. Having spent the earlier part of that night clambering on hot tiles, spotting the luminous, fizzing incendiaries and throwing them clear, there seemed nothing more that could be done; the torture of the uncertainty was the fact that he had no idea whether another attack would be coming that night or how long those cellars would continue to remain inhabitable.
In other cellars, less well appointed, mothers sat on bare chairs, staring into the eyes of strangers, the random shelterers caught in the storm. There were other women, heads back, eyes closed. One witness recalled desperately trying to wake her mother, who was proving very hard to rouse. A cry of ‘The fire is burning here!’ at last seemed to penetrate her slumber and she and her daughter got up and moved through the passageways, edging back and back to find another place to stop and rest beneath a flickering light.9 Already there were uncountable numbers in that maze of cellars whose sleep had become death, either through suffocation or heart failure. The earth above was baking. No rest was possible for anyone. Yet through all the fearful movement, the instinctive ideas of which way to turn, the oldest impulse of all, to remain close to loved ones, prevailed.
Up above, the sumptuous shops of Prager Strasse were charred shells; the interior of the Central Theatre, with its plush auditorium and rich red seating, was now blackened, the stage open to the fiery sky. The restaurant and bar that lay in a deep cellar under the theatre had hosted a meeting of the Volkssturm that night; at first, when the bombing had started, the bar must have seemed a congenial shelter for the men who had stayed on late, perhaps a chance for a few extra steins of the local Radeberger beer to see them through the attack before they made ready to perform their civic duties. But here the fumes from the fire were swifter and more insidious than in other quarters; all those drinkers were now dead.10
The flames that rose above Prager Strasse were met at the crossroads by blazes that had gutted the clothing stores of Wilsdruffer Strasse, the fires criss-crossing, filling every small street and passage so that from above, it looked as though the roads of Dresden were a dark mould into which molten gold had been poured. On the edges of the Altstadt, just beyond the city’s inner ring road, the darkness of the Great Garden park, stretching for a mile, was still drawing refugees with carts. The horses pulling them must surely have been alarmed by the animal noises echoing from the zoo as the elephants bellowed and the gibbons chattered in wild distress.11
From the hill to the south of the railway station, at the abandoned anti-aircraft battery, Mischka Danos was almost immobilized, not from fear but from a blend of high tension and intense curiosity. There was a form of lookout tower close by; he ran up its narrow steps to gain a wider view of the pulsating storm. He watched as fire joined with fire, as explosions sent up mushroom clouds filled with sparks and incandescence. He was fascinated by the strengthening inrush of the wind, by the sound of apartment-block rafters creaking, the throaty roar of collapsing roofs. And he watched as down in the Altstadt, just under a mile away, individual orange glares fused and merged, a wall of light climbing into the dark sky. It resolved, he recalled, and became more like a tower of flame,12 a vast cylinder of fire fed by a roaring gale, all other flames and sparks pulled irresistibly towards it. This fire tower started to burn over the very centre of the Altstadt. Indeed, it was now the city itself; thousands upon thousands of fires that had melded to become one incandescent entity, filling every street. This biblical pillar of light must have been an appallingly irresistible spectacle, but for Danos it was somehow too abstract at this stage for him even to begin imagining its effects on those close to it, or in its eye, or to contemplate what traces of flesh or bone could possibly be left after such a visitation.
Neither could he have known that there was no immediate prospect of peace for any living thing in the wider city. The civic authorities, in their bunker near the Elbe, had received the communication over the radio. There was another formation of bombers approaching.