In the strange noiselessness that now lay across the obliterated city, any sudden snap, any grinding girder was magnified in the still air. Where just a couple of days before had been the bells and rumbles of trams, the hubbub and bustle of commerce, thousands upon thousands of different conversations, families in apartments, assistants in shops, waiters in bars and cafes, there was simply a desert and the absolute vacuum of silence under a weirdly darkened sky of smoke.
On the morning of 15 February, the structure of the blackened sandstone in the Frauenkirche had at last been decisively transformed by the searing heat, and the building, over 200 feet high, was buckling and swaying on its mighty pillars. In some parts, these pillars were still glowingly hot, in others they were cool; the building was latticed with instability. And now, with a gathering thunder that echoed across the surrounding grey ruins, the pillars fractured and collapsed inwards, taking with them the vast dome that had dominated the Dresden skyline since the eighteenth century. The church imploded, a rushing roar; the exquisitely painted inner dome, the great bells, the delicately carved galleries, the vast clear windows, all pressed and crumpled down upon the marble floor and on the crypt below. Gravity sucked the church inside out, and chunks of masonry the size of cars were flung outwards onto the cobbled square beyond. The spiritual heart of Dresden had been shattered. Few were there to grieve it.
In the Altstadt, some 75,000 apartments and other housing had been either demolished or at best rendered uninhabitable. Amid the sudden movements of ragged brick structures on the point of collapse, isolated men and women clambered over rubble obsessively; in that uncanny grey, eclipse-like twilight, these were people who had no idea whether to hold on to hope or start mourning. Mothers peered intently at clothed, disembodied limbs; siblings picked their way through the stones and stared at the corpses that lay as if at peace. A family friend of Winfried Bielss fell into a routine: walking into the devastated old city, much of the architecture so levelled that she could see streets a quarter of a mile away; searching in vain among so many others for a sign of her daughter. In sick hopelessness she would return to her apartment in the Neustadt before, not long after, distractedly setting out again. Similarly, an older female relative of Margot Hille, injured and taken in by the teenager’s mother, walked constantly alongside every flame-gutted ruin near her home in the hope of catching even a glimpse of a familiar garment. In this way, so many citizens were forced into a form of suspended grieving.
That sense of fragility, of imminent collapse, was present not just in traumatized survivors and the fragmented remains of the tall buildings but also in the actual fabric of the city’s administration; the web of infrastructure – roads, power, water – had been effectively torn apart. All, from the minor officials to the senior dignitaries who had sat out the bombings behind steel doors, now gazed helplessly at a burned and bloody wilderness. The civic authorities drafted in all the civil servants they could muster, and SS men were dispatched from Berlin. They began their work quickly, for they knew that the broken threads of this society must swiftly be retied. If not, one result of many might be pestilence arising from the unburied dead. Coming in to oversee the general administration was a senior figure called Theodor Ellgering from the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Bomb Damage. Ellgering – who was close to Goebbels – had gathered a great deal of experience in other burned cities from 1943 onwards: Cologne, Hamburg, Kassel. The proficiency – especially at this stage in the conflict, with the fighting east and west depleting resources – with which he and his retinue acted was quite remarkable. Given that electricity and water in some parts of the city were either nonexistent or intermittent, there were three priorities: first, feeding and hydrating survivors; second, carrying out the immediate execution of looters and anyone felt to be peddling rumours or lowering morale; and third, in the mild conditions, finding a means of speedily identifying and meticulously cataloguing thousands of corpses before their disposal.
Ellgering might have been aware that one of his colleagues had visited Dresden just a month previously to check on the provision of shelters, that such provision had been found seriously wanting and that Joseph Goebbels had demanded the dismissal of the mayor, Hans Nieland.1 Somehow this notification had not come through to Nieland; he was now simply a mayor of ruins. In fact, he was not even that; faced with this devastation, Nieland was already making his plans to leave the city far behind him and also somehow to evade both responsibility and disgrace. His superior, the Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann, was in turn making plans to assume full mayoral authority. It is difficult to know how far Mutschmann had managed to convince himself that the Nazi regime could hold on to power, and that Dresden could be defended. Whatever his opinion, Nieland and his family were already packing. One Dresdener, in conversation with another at a temporary shelter, claimed that she had glimpsed Mutschmann; her interlocutor replied that if she had seen him, she would have smashed his mouth in.2 But such seditious talk was still unusual.
Theodor Ellgering saw to it that some roads were cleared and that others, whose half-collapsed buildings presented an obvious hazard, were blocked off. This was the easy part of the job; harder was commandeering supplies of food and coffee from undamaged suburbs and outlying towns and villages, and ensuring that the survivors gathered in school buildings and halls were given hot soup and sandwiches. As for looting, there was little in the blackened hollow shells of the Altstadt that would have been worth even the most desperate thief’s time, but there was always a possibility that grocery shops and similar outlets on the other side of the river might be targeted by the younger, fitter refugees and deserters.
There were serious difficulties, though, in the gathering up of the dead. Not from a shortage of labour for the hideous task: the city was still replete with ‘workers’ – in reality, slaves – who were based in camps in the suburbs. In addition, there were also large numbers of soldiers, and prisoner-of-war parties such as the one to which Kurt Vonnegut was attached. But the nightmarish hurdles they were going to have to overcome were twofold. First, above ground there was the practical problem of trying to establish the identity of bodies from a collection of detached limbs and heads; in the Great Garden there were body parts hanging from the branches of the trees that had survived the fire. The second was to extract the corpses entombed underground. A colleague of Theodor Ellgering recalled how soldiers had managed to dig through the ruins of a building in the Altstadt, and had found the buried entrance to the cellar. The door was opened and a terrible wave of heat pulsed out.3 The smell was not described. Whoever went down into those hot catacombs to begin retrieving the corpses – torches flashing, gas masks ready – would be left with images that they would see for the rest of their lives.
This was the prospect that lay before Kurt Vonnegut and other POWs of a variety of nationalities: a descent into unimagined depths. They were led in lines from their new barracks in the suburbs to hills of boulders in the Altstadt; apart from the barked orders, they too were listening to ear-pounding silence, punctuated by the rhythmic picking of steel tools into grey stone. At the very beginning, the task seemed fruitless, for all the various search parties could do was choose piles of rubble at random and begin digging into them. The architectural infrastructure of the Altstadt had been so comprehensively scrambled that former landmarks – cinemas, restaurants, theatres, wine bars, shops – could not be identified with any certainty. Sometimes rubble would be pulled away only to reveal yet more rubble. Nor were the routes through the subterranean maze leading from the Elbe and the Great Garden guaranteed to be passable; collapsing tunnels were always a possibility. Eventually, though, these digging parties began to find, beneath tangles of twisted metal and baked brick, little staircases leading down into the dark. Vonnegut described the first contact with seated corpses as being akin to entering a wax museum.4 But with the opening of these warm tombs came the chemical change that brought forth the stench of the dead, which was like ‘mustard gas and roses’;5 and he described all these cellars as ‘corpse mines’.6 All of this would form the dark bass line of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five – the narrator Billy Pilgrim flitting between different time streams, as the horrific past seeps into the present – and the prose did not need exaggeration.
Vonnegut and his fellow ‘corpse miners’ all saw the varieties of death that had been visited upon those in the cellars. By torchlight, they made their way down into the stifling brick recesses and a great many of the bodies they found looked as though they were simply practising meditation, having suffocated where they sat. Other cellars contained more terrible prospects: collapsed walls had crushed some bodies; others when moved became separated from their heads. One man’s detached head was still wearing a hat. The flies had been swift to materialize. The unidentified intact corpses were laid along the roads in lines in the hope that family members would be able to recognize them. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim recalls that he was digging with a Maori prisoner who became so violently sick as the work progressed that the ceaseless gut-wrenching retching actually killed him. There was a more generalized fear of miasma and illness and rats. Urban legends from other bombed cities featured accounts of rodents that had dined so royally that they had become obese.
A further difficulty was that in many cases the brickwork of these black cellars was still searing to the touch. Some corpses had been roasted so completely in the darkness that they had shrunk to the size of marionettes. The body of one old woman was recalled as having a much reduced, wrinkled face, but her silvery hair was still lustrous. Where the decaying corpses could not be extracted from collapsed cellars, soldiers equipped with flamethrowers had to try to cremate them in situ. In terms of logistics, there was something remarkable in the response organized by Ellgering, especially considering that it relied upon forced labour: the methodical efficiency with which the rubble came to be excavated over the coming hours and days and weeks did not immediately seem to speak of a dying regime.
Nor, from the point of view of the Allied forces, did there seem any sense that the survivors should be left in merciful peace to recover the remains of the dead. Also on the morning of 15 February, a formation of American bombers had taken off from RAF Deenethorpe in Northamptonshire intending to target a hydrogenation plant close to the city of Leipzig. They were instructed that if the cloud cover was too heavy to make accurate bombing possible, then their secondary target was to be Dresden. This became the case. The bombers set course for the city. But it is possible the filthy airborne debris from the previous attacks played a part in shielding Dresden, for the skies above were too murky that day for the US bombers to discern their perpetual target of the Friedrichstadt railway marshalling yards. Of the bombs that were dropped, a large proportion were wildly off the mark, landing in outlying small towns like Meissen and Pirna. In the south of the city, the notorious courthouse received a hit. Other than this, the ten-minute American raid appeared not to have even entered the consciousness of many citizens. The business of attending to the dead occluded all other considerations.
Families with undamaged homes in the wooded suburbs, their uneasy nights disturbed further by the distant howls of distressed ownerless dogs, made their way into the heart of the Altstadt to view the lines of bodies in those ruined avenues. Relatives, friends, colleagues were identified, sometimes simply by their clothing, a handkerchief, a watch, a ring or some distinctive jewellery. These orderly identification lines were sometimes joined by horribly irregular additions as old men pushed barrows and carts upon which had been placed the mangled, torn, bloodied remains of those that they believed to be their loved ones; one elderly woman was seen negotiating the dusty roads with a heavy sack which was found to contain a shrunken body. Where were these broken people going? What curious plans had they formed as they pushed and carried these grisly burdens? Some accounts were filled with recollections of how soldiers in and around the city were generally straightforward and kind; perhaps these victims of the most extraordinary trauma were treated gently too.
As many as 10,000 bodies, according to some accounts, were carefully catalogued, placed in trucks and taken to a cemetery to the north of the city near Dresden Heath, where spaces had been cleared in the woods for vast communal graves. Yet even the most meticulous planning was at a loss to cope with the truly horrific scale of the problem: if all the thousands of remaining corpses yet to be exhumed were dealt with in the same way, the process would take too long; they were fast becoming noisome. There was one other possibility, which would leave little room for mourning but which would be none the less effective: to subject those bodies to one final fire in the city itself and then bury the massed ashes among those trees. On the devastated Altmarkt, the reservoir now cleared of its bloated contents, the authorities had found a central location that would serve as an outdoor crematorium; once the bodies had been catalogued, the paperwork on each individual collated, there was no time to lose. The department store Renner – a shattered husk, its sales floors open to the sky – had one final contribution to make. The store’s steel shutters were the only part of the building’s structure to have come through the bombing relatively unscathed. To burn bodies requires a good air flow, so it was necessary for the heaped corpses to be raised from the ground. Accordingly, around the smashed and scattered cobbles of the Altmarkt, punctuated with singular brick walls and angled collapsed girders, metal rods of the shutters were arranged horizontally across the open spaces, and boards placed on top. Onto those boards were thrown the first of many thousands of bodies to burn, towering heaps of human mortality, a medieval vision unfolding on an industrial scale. Ashes and bones were removed; more bodies were brought forth; flames were rekindled.
The civic authorities did their best to be accurate with the accounting, and for those corpses found indoors or in cellars there were at least addresses that they could be checked against. But others found lying broken in the open air, especially around the Great Garden, were harder to attach names to. Unknowable numbers of these victims, from children to mothers to elderly women, were undoubtedly rural refugees, their documentation in cinders, who had either failed to find shelter or been too frightened to stay in the shelters that they had been directed to. Here too, on the edges of the park, vast pyres were built. And still, among all the blasted trees, the deep craters, there were people walking absently, peering, staring, moving on.
Across the river, and in the city’s suburbs, residents were making their own discoveries about fatalities. Winfried Bielss and his mother, walking around their own neighbourhood of apartment blocks and villas in the Neustadt, soon discovered that Winfried’s great schoolfriend Klaus Weigart had been killed along with large numbers of his family, including the respected Dr Wilhelm Weigart.7 One of Bielss’s schoolteachers, Walter Liebmann, was also dead, together with his wife. They had been in the basement when their house received a direct hit with high explosives. The only part of the structure that still stood was the music room.
Bielss and his mother also adopted the method used – as though transmitted by morphic resonance – by thousands of other residents in those dazed hours and days for leaving messages to be seen by those who might have escaped: notes written on card or paper and propped up against or wedged in familiar doorways, or what remained of them, simply addressed to the absent loved ones and friends who had lived in these places with pleas to get in touch.
There were also messages left for the searchers by those who had been evacuated to countryside billets. Mischka Danos left word for his mother, whom he understood to be travelling from Prague to Dresden by train; within hours, he would find himself with a great many others in a rural barn, with a single lightbulb and a great deal of straw. Elsewhere, the condemned British soldier Victor Gregg – who had escaped from his captors out onto the streets when his temporary prison in the police station received a bomb through its glass cupola, only to witness women with their hair on fire and their children being drawn up into the firestorm – was still managing to evade the military authorities.8 His instincts pointed him to the roads leading east, towards the hillier regions through which the Soviet forces were moving unstoppably.
The Hille family remained terrified – not without cause – that the Allied bombers would be flying over again. They had not been alone in making for the sanctuary of the Felsenkeller brewery’s rock-face tunnels. (They might have been less sanguine had they known of the concealed Osram precision-instrument factory that the complex also housed.) The tunnels, she recalled, were dank and soon became insanitary; conditions were basic, and especially uncomfortable for two pregnant women who had joined the shelterers. But they were determined to stay, especially overnight.
Elsewhere, having marched out of the city, Gisela Reichelt and her mother were finding the countryside disorientating and strange: they had been billeted on a farm and the stress upon Gisela’s heavily pregnant mother was understandably taking its toll. She was, her daughter recalled, ‘exhausted by the events and fearful for the future’.9
For others, though, there were outbreaks of gratitude and relief: the artist Otto Griebel, whose studio had been comprehensively destroyed in the firestorm, was reunited with his sheltering family. His son Matthias, aged eight at the time, was later to recall how their own shelter had been swept by fire, and that outside ‘was a vision of hell’. ‘The bombs had thrown people into the trees … the water mains were broken. The gas pipes were on fire.’10 The larger questions of responsibility and guilt were to inform the boy’s future career path in the city. That same gravity and perplexity was shared by a number of Dresden’s children, some of whom were to become writers and journalists and who would also later ponder the moral questions. Was it at all possible that the city itself had helped to invite its own destruction? Matthias Griebel was later to point at a swastika flag and say: ‘A fire went out from Germany and went around the world in a great arc and came back to Germany.’11
At the city’s centre, Professor Klemperer, having established for certain that some forty of the Jews in those allocated Judenhäuser had survived, took the advice urgently offered by a friend: to pass himself off as Aryan. He had already felt giddy with an odd tension merely by walking up and down Brühl’s Terrace, forbidden to Jews, but he and Eva reasoned it out: in the conflagration, huge amounts of paperwork and records had been incinerated, and if they were to join other evacuees – the army was terrifically well organized at taking citizens to prearranged farms and barracks – then there was every chance that he would not be recognized. In any case, the alternative was to continue to acknowledge his religion and face being murdered there and then. Just because the city had been destroyed did not mean that the Nazi regime had suddenly abandoned its plans for extermination. Professor Klemperer and Eva thus joined the city’s evacuees and were driven five miles north, to the airport, where temporary living quarters had been arranged.
Here there was water, and some incredibly satisfying noodle soup that Professor Klemperer devoured, although the herbal tea was less satisfying.12 And, as he confided with such winning frankness to his diary, he was less than thrilled with all the other people that they had been billeted with: working class, coarse, materialistic and, in a couple of cases, childlike. Klemperer pondered whether all Dresden’s intellectual class had been incinerated. The professor’s focus wavered extraordinarily between the unsatisfactory nature of their companions – one night Eva found that the woollen cardigan that she kept under her pillow had been stolen by a roommate, whom she had to shame into returning it – and the possibility that he might be recognized and denounced to the authorities as a Jew. He had been walking that tightrope of death for so long, and he understood that only getting away from Dresden entirely would lessen the chances of discovery. He and Eva could find lodgings in another city and simply start anew. For very different reasons, other Dresdeners were reaching the same conclusions, for as well as bombed-out houses there was still the threat of the oncoming Soviet forces.
The elegant Marielein Erler, who was having her eyes regularly treated with drops in the hospital in Kreischa, was told flatly that she would have to vacate her bed now that she had broadly recovered her sight and her head injury would soon heal; the need of others was greater. And so this demure lady in her fur coat, one of the last things of value that she owned to have survived, found herself discharged with several other Dresden citizens. They were pointed in the direction of a school in which to sleep that night. The ‘beds’ were simply chairs pushed together, and Frau Erler and her new companions spent the night ‘half-sleeping’, and quietly talking, reliving their experiences.13 Frau Erler still had no idea what had become of her husband. The next day she was able to hitch a lift from a military truck heading for the city. She simply wanted to see her home, but on arrival she was confronted with a prospect worse than she could have anticipated. The streets ‘smelled horribly’, both of fire and of death; they were ‘silent and extinct’. The bodies ‘had risen to mountains on the roadside’.14 She watched as men in white suits picked bodies up from the gutters and with a swift exclamation of ‘one-two-three!’ threw them onto trucks, which would then head off towards the Altmarkt. There were also, she remembered, soldiers with flamethrowers: ad hoc cellar cremations.
In the cases of both Frau Erler and the Klemperers, departure from the city was complicated but possible; the Klemperers had to hitch lifts, and walk for miles along flat country roads, but they eventually reached a railway station; similarly Frau Erler, driven back to Kreischa, also by means of a hitched lift with the military, managed to make her way to the railway station of a nearby town. Extraordinarily, given the damage wrought by both the British and Americans resulting in burned rolling stock, snapped rails and holed bridges, the regime was managing once again to run trains at least near to the city, if not through it, even though services were sporadic, and liable to unexplained delays of several hours. The outlying railway stations might have been a cacophony of refugee and soldier voices, but there were trains running west, to Leipzig, Chemnitz and beyond, away from the advancing Soviets.
At Dresden’s main railway station the labourers and the soldiers were still working to retrieve the bodies from what had become the catacombs beneath the concourse, lining them up on what remained of the platforms. Dr Fromme was taking a strong interest because his son, on civic duties, had ‘set up his mission’ at the station.15 Fromme himself was overseeing other casualties from around the city, taken to medical facilities in nearby towns like Arnsdorf, and was reconnoitring the area in his car, trying to get a sense of the scale of the human damage that had been wrought. At the station, Fromme’s teenage son could not calculate how many corpses he saw, nor would he dwell on their condition. But meanwhile, a little over half a mile away, engineers had already set to work on repairing the tracks that ran north to south on the main Berlin–Dresden–Prague line. It would be a matter of only days before a limited number of trains were once more running through the centre of the city.
Churchill had once counselled his senior commanders against trying to predict the effect of firebombing upon a population, and the citizens and civic authorities in Dresden were demonstrating that Allied ‘morale bombing’ induced neither the expected terrified immobility nor a hoped-for rebellion against the Nazi ideology. Instead, there seemed to be an overwhelming, almost detached urge to set the city in order and bring sense and meaning to a catastrophe that could not yet be comprehended except in its most singular details. It was also at this point that the wider world came to hear of what had been done, and reacted in some cases in such a way that Joseph Goebbels in Berlin scarcely needed to add his own embroideries.