1 Gerhard Ackermann, interviewed in the popular German newspaper Bild, 1 January 2018, a piece focusing slightly more upon his lifelong addiction to cinema-going rather than upon Dresden.
2 Corey Ross, ‘Mass Culture and Divided Audiences: Cinema and Social Change in Inter-War Germany’, Past & Present, no. 193 (November 2006).
3 Ibid.
4 Interview with Churchill’s interpreter Hugh Lunghi for National Security Archive, 1 July 1996.
5 Ibid.
6 Jörg Arnold, The Allied Air War and Urban Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
7 Dresden City Archives, series 6.4.53.1 (hereafter DCA), file 500.
8 DCA, file 477.
9 Tami Davis Biddle, ‘Dresden 1945: Reality, History and Memory’, Journal of Military History, vol. 72, no. 2 (2008).
10 DCA, file 107.
11 Victor Klemperer, To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942–45, trans. Martin Chalmers (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999).
12 DCA, file 500.
13 Ibid.
14 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
15 DCA, file 107.
16 An article in the arts journal The Burlington Magazine in April 2007 described the station as being one of Europe’s most ‘ethereal’.
17 See www.das-neue-dresden.de/kaufhaus-alsberg for an article on the architectural history, as well as the expropriation by the Nazis.
18 There is a haunting portrait of Elsa Frölich, and her daughter Sunni, drawn by fellow communist Lea Grundig in the mid 1930s; both Frölich and Grundig would flourish under the post-war regime.
19 DCA, file 475. Pleasingly, the brewery’s tunnels have recently been repurposed by Dresden University physicists for atom-colliding experiments.
20 The dairy today has a dedicated website (www.pfunds.de) and is still one of Dresden’s most pleasing and unexpected aesthetic spectacles.
21 Today the site is a stately and rather old-fashioned hotel; see www.schloss-eckberg.de.
1 A memo sent from Lord Cherwell to Churchill on 30 March 1942 in which he speculated about ‘de-housing’ one third of the German population; as cited in Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (Allen Lane, 2013).
2 Harris Papers, RAF Museum Archive, Hendon, file 40.
3 Harris Papers – ‘Correspondence with Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force’.
4 Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive (Collins, 1947).
5 Ibid. Harris, although styling himself as a curt colonial, had a feel for passionate and emotional rhetoric, of which there were echoes to be heard in his message to Bomber Command – ‘Special Order of the Day’ – issued on 10 May 1945, Harris Papers, folder 40.
6 Harris, Bomber Offensive.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid. He deployed the term in correspondence with his superiors.
9 DCA, file 101.
10 DCA, file 802.
11 Victor Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1933–41, trans. Martin Chalmers (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998).
12 The artist Monica Petzal – a key figure in the Dresden Trust – has written fascinatingly of her mother, Hannelore Isakowitz, who was brought up in the city; as a girl, Hannelore saw Dresden at its height of sophistication and artistic richness. Monica Petzal’s work, which exhibits in a range of galleries, explores the ghostly echoes of that city. For more information on her work see www.monicapetzal.com.
13 Dr Margarete Blank is often written about in German journals; and not just because of her execution at the hands of the Nazis. There are also portraits of the life of a female doctor in the early years of the twentieth century, and also articles to do with the way her memory was used by the post-war communists. For a concise and illuminating short biography see www.leipzig.de.
14 For a concise biography of Mutschmann see www.spitzenstadt.de.
15 Bizarrely, this item turned up on the online auction site www.liveauctioneers.com in February 2017, complete with a snap of Mutschmann’s inscription.
16 Daily Telegraph, 27 January 1933.
17 E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Automata’ was published in 1814. Two years later, in ‘The Sandman’, there is an even creepier fragment involving a young woman called Olimpia who beguiles the young hero; that young man is then driven mad when he discovers that she is clockwork, and he sees her eyes upon the floor.
18 The Nazi war on jazz music is fascinatingly explored in Michael H. Kater, ‘Forbidden Fruit? Jazz in the Third Reich’, American Historical Review, vol. 94, no. 1 (February 1989).
19 Patrick Merziger, ‘Humour in Nazi Germany: Resistance and Propaganda?’, International Review of Social History, vol. 52 (December 2007).
20 Daily Telegraph, 25 May 1935.
21 Daily Telegraph, 25 April 1935.
22 Daily Telegraph, 20 October 1937.
23 An interesting short biography can be found at db.yadvashem.org/deportation/supervisors.
24 A terrifying portrait of Hans Clemens can be found in Klemperer, To the Bitter End, and a fascinating piece in Der Spiegel (www.spiegel.de) from 16 February 2011 details his murky post-war career in Soviet espionage.
25 For an interesting and concise biography of Dr Kluge see Sächsische Biografie, http://saebi.isgv.de/biografie/Rudolf_Kluge_(1889-1945).
26 See Sächsische Biografie, saebi.isgv.de/biografie/Hans_Nieland_(1900-1976).
27 http://saebi.isgv.de/biografie/Rudolf_Kluge_(1889-1945).
1 For an extraordinary essay concerning Wagner, his friendship with the synagogue’s architect Semper, and his desire to have a copy of the lamp that hung before the tabernacle doors see Colin Eisler, ‘Wagner’s Three Synagogues’, Artibus et Historiae, vol. 25, no. 50 (January 2004).
2 Helen Rosenau, ‘Gottfried Semper and German Synagogue Architecture’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. 22 (January 1977).
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 For the restoration of the synagogue and its star, see ‘Dresden Synagogue Rises Again’, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1647310.stm.
7 The demolition was filmed by the Technisches Hilfswerk, a civil protection organization controlled by the German federal government; fragments of the film are to be found on YouTube, though it is the sort of footage that attracts unsavoury viewers.
8 The story of Erich Isakowitz is related by his granddaughter, the artist Monica Petzal. As well as creating powerful and haunting works inspired by her family and the city, Petzal has written of her family in brochures to accompany ‘Indelible Marks: The Dresden Project’. For further information, see www.monicapetzal.com.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness.
12 Ibid.
13 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European (Cassell, 1943; repr. Pushkin Press, 2009).
14 Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s First Victims: And One Man’s Race for Justice (Bodley Head, 2015).
15 See www.monicapetzal.com.
16 Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness.
17 Zweig, The World of Yesterday.
18 Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness.
19 Ibid.
20 These insights among others are discussed by John Wesley Young, in ‘From LTI to LQI: Victor Klemperer on Totalitarian Language’, German Studies Review, vol. 28 (February 2005).
21 Henry Ashby Turner, Jr, ‘Victor Klemperer’s Holocaust’, German Studies Review, vol. 22 (October 1999).
22 Young, ‘From LTI to LQI’.
23 Stills from surviving film clips can be seen at en.stsg.de/cms/node/815 – the Saxon Memorial Foundation.
1 The subject of Hamlet in Dresden – and other Shakespeare adaptations around the country in the seventeenth century – is discussed by Simon Williams in Shakespeare on the German Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
2 DCA, file 802.
3 Ibid.
4 The exhibits of such richly jewelled swords – and other wonders in gold, porcelain and tapestry – are now permanently on show in the Dresden Royal Palace. The site www.schloesserland-sachsen.de/en/palaces-castles-and-gardens/dresden-royal-palace/ gives a taste of the other aesthetic wonders.
5 As with the Royal Palace and its Green Vault, the Zwinger Galleries – literally across the road – are so fully restored that it is possible to spend days in them. For an overview of their exhibitions and works, it is worth looking at www.der-dresdner-zwinger.de/en/home/.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Dresden’s modern art museum, the Albertinum, contains many of Friedrich’s works among its dazzling array of exhibits. See albertinum.skd.museum/en.
9 For a discussion of Nolde see Michael Hoffmann, ‘At One with the Universe’, London Review of Books, 27 September 2018.
10 See Ian Buruma, ‘Art of a Degenerate World’, New York Review of Books, 27 September 2018.
11 Dix’s nightmares and the psychological impact of war upon his work are explored in fascinating detail by Paul Fox in ‘Confronting Postwar Shame in Weimar Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 29, no. 2 (June 2006).
12 Felixmüller was a friend of the Isakowitz family; examples of his work are at www.monicapetzal.com.
13 A short illustrated overview of Griebel’s work can be found at weimar art.blogspot.com/2010/06/otto-griebel.html.
14 A further analysis of the exhibition and its internal aesthetic conflicts is Neil Levi, “Judge for Yourselves!” – The ‘Degenerate Art Exhibition as Political Spectacle’, October, vol. 85 (Summer 1998).
15 There is an interesting blogspot on the original Dresden ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition and the works featured, plus the evolution of this artistic persecution, at hausderkunst.de/en/notes/beschlagnahme-der-entarteten-kunst-1937-1938.
16 As well as an illuminating range of his work in the Dresden Albertinum (see note 8 above), there is a good essay on earlier subjects before his dismissal and reluctant move into landscape studies by Sabine Rewald in ‘Dix at the Met’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, vol. 31 (1996).
17 For a short biography of Mauersberger and a range of photographs through the decades see www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Mauersberger-Rudolf.htm.
18 An interesting blog on Mauersberger and the Kreuzchor together with excerpts from his Dresdner Requiem can be found at www.overgrownpath.com/2006/02/dresden-requiem-for-eleven-young.html.
19 Siegfried Gerlach, George Bähr. Der Erbauer der Dresdner Frauenkirche. Ein Zeitbild (Böhlau, 2005).
20 Perhaps rather startlingly, a recording was made of this 1944 performance and was available into the 1990s.
21 Robert Giddings, ‘Wagner and the Revolutionaries’, Music & Letters, vol. 45, no. 4 (October 1964).
22 Hans Rudolf Vaget, ‘Wagnerian Self-Fashioning: The Case of Adolf Hitler’, New German Critique, no. 101 (Summer 2007).
23 Elena Gerhardt, ‘Strauss and His Lieder’, Tempo, no. 12 (Summer 1949), is a charming personal reminiscence that also mentions the occasion he took the Dresden Opera Company to London in 1936.
24 Zweig, The World of Yesterday, for this and what follows.
25 Zweig’s time as an exile in Brazil was dramatized in a film reviewed – with some background – in The Economist in 2016: www.economist.com/prospero/2016/06/22/stefan-zweig-in-exile-a-european-in-brazil.
26 Thomas Eisner, ‘Fritz Busch: A Friend Remembered’, Musical Quarterly, vol. 85 (Autumn 2001).
27 Raffaele De Ritis, ‘Circus Sarrasani’, www.circopedia.org/Circus_Sarrasani.
28 Ibid.
29 Hay’s memoir – ‘An Old Airman’s Tale’, as told to Malcolm Brooke – is available at www.bomberhistory.co.uk.
1 For a short biography see https://ethw.org/Heinrich_Barkhausen.
2 There is more at the Dresden university website: https://tu-dresden.de/ing/elektrotechnik/die-fakultaet/profil/100-jahre-schwachstromtechnik.
3 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (I. B. Tauris, 2017).
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Clare Le Corbeiller, ‘German Porcelain of the Eighteenth Century’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 47 (Spring 1990).
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Edmund de Waal wrote movingly about this theme in the Guardian, 18 September 2015.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Eike Reichardt, Health, ‘Race’ and Empire: Popular-Scientific Spectacles and National Identity in Imperial Germany, 1871–1914 (Lulu.com, 2008).
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1993). The Hygiene Eye painting was by Franz von Stuck.
16 Vintage examples of these cameras can be found pictured lovingly on a great number of websites. More on the history of the firm can be found in Michael Buckland, ‘Histories, Heritages and the Past: The Case of Emanuel Goldberg’, in W. Boyd Rayward and Mary Ellen Bowden (eds.), The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems (Information Today, 2002).
17 Ibid.; Buckland’s essay focuses on how Professor Goldberg’s name was both systematically and accidentally erased from histories of scientific innovation.
18 Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness.
1 DCA, file 855, for this and what follows.
2 DCA, file 107.
3 Tami Davis Biddle, ‘Sifting Dresden’s Ashes’, Wilson Quarterly, vol. 29 (Spring 2005).
4 Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (Routledge Revivals, 2011).
5 Walter A. Reichart, ‘Washington Irving’s Influence in German Literature’, Modern Language Review, vol. 52, no. 4 (October 1957).
6 Nadine Zimmerli, ‘Elite Migration to Germany: The Anglo-American Colony in Dresden Before World War 1’, in Jason Coy et al. (eds.), Migrations in the German Lands, 1500–2000 (Berghahn Books, 2016).
7 Ibid.
8 Digital versions of these advertisements, as featured in the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, can be seen at the British Library Newspaper Archive.
9 Charles Shields, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, a Life (Henry Holt, 2011).
10 Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, ed. and intro. Dan Wakefield (Vintage, 2013).
11 Ibid.
12 Victor Gregg with Rick Stroud, Dresden: A Survivor’s Story, February 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2019), for this and what follows.
13 Miles Tripp, The Eighth Passenger: A Flight of Recollection and Discovery (Heinemann, 1969; repr. Leo Cooper, 1993), for this and what follows.
1 Harris, Bomber Offensive, for this and what follows.
2 Ibid.
3 Cited in Abigail Chantler, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Aesthetics (Routledge, 2006).
4 An interesting essay by Patrick Wright – ‘Dropping Their Eggs’ in the London Review of Books, 23 August 2001 – explores how the RAF’s Hugh Trenchard deployed that startling phrase to describe how bombs would fall on city centres before the end of the First World War.
5 Malcolm Smith, ‘“A Matter of Faith”: British Strategic Air Doctrine Before 1939’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 15 (July 1980).
6 The anxieties surrounding the possibilities of city bombing are explored in Overy, The Bombing War.
7 As discussed in Philip K. Lawrence, Modernity and War: The Creed of Absolute Violence (Macmillan, 1997).
8 As cited in Hew Strachan, ‘Strategic Bombing and the Question of Civilian Casualties up to 1945’, in Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden 1945 (Pimlico, 2006).
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Stewart Holbrook, ‘The Peshtigo Fire’, American Scholar, vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 1944), is an extremely atmospheric retelling of the catastrophe. See also ‘Nature’s Nuclear Explosion’, in Denise Gess and William Lutz, Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History (Holt, 2003).
13 Philip G. Terrie, ‘“The Necessities of the Case”: The Response to the Great Thumb Fire of 1881’, Michigan Historical Review, vol. 31, no. 2 (Fall 2005).
14 Ibid.
15 A fascinating piece on the earthquake can be found in The Smithsonian magazine at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-japan-earthquake-of-1923.
16 J. Charles Schencking, ‘The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan’, Journal of Japanese Studies, Summer 2008.
17 The Smithsonian, as note 15.
18 Ibid.
19 Churchill wrote this in a speculative piece about future weaponry in the Pall Mall Gazette, 1924.
20 Strachan, ‘Strategic Bombing’.
21 Ibid.
22 Harris, Bomber Offensive.
23 Remarkably, a recording of Mann’s broadcast can be found at www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2012/12/listen-germany-thomas-mann-on-the-firebombing-of-lubeck.html.
1 According to Pia de Jong in a charming piece for the Institute of Advanced Study, it was young Dyson himself who came up with the phrase: his father overheard him using it, was tickled, and sent it to Punch magazine. The article is at www.ias.edu/ideas/2013/de-jong-dyson.
2 National Archives AIR 40/1680.
3 As recounted in Freeman Dyson, ‘A Failure of Intelligence’, MIT Technology Review, 1 November 2006, a mesmerizing piece that can be read at www.technologyreview.com/s/406789/a-failure-of-intelligence.
4 Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for Their Realization (Chatto and Windus, 1937).
5 Dyson, ‘A Failure of Intelligence’.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (Harper & Row, 1979).
9 David Lodge, ‘Dam and Blast’ (1982), in his collection Write On (Secker & Warburg, 2012). Lodge also pointed out that, although his father was in the air force, he somehow avoided going up in a plane.
10 Tami Davis Biddle, ‘Bombing by the Square Yard: Sir Arthur Harris at War, 1942–1945’, International History Review, vol. 21, no. 3 (September 1999).
11 Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2006).
12 Ibid.
13 National Archives AIR 20/4831.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Lord Portal Papers, Christ Church, Oxford, folder 10, file 3A.
17 Ibid., file 3B.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., file 3C.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., file 3D.
1 Daniel Swift, Bomber County (Hamish Hamilton, 2010).
2 A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified? (Bloomsbury, 2006).
3 Vera Brittain, Seed of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really Means (New Vision, 1944).
4 Lord Dowding, a spiritualist, wrote on the subject in, among other books, Twelve Legions of Angels (Jarrolds, 1946).
5 Letter from Michael Scott, RAF Wattisham, published in Andrew Roberts (ed.), Love, Tommy: Letters Home, from the Great War to the Present Day (Osprey Publishing, 2012).
6 Frank Blackman, quoted in Swift, Bomber County.
7 Tripp, The Eighth Passenger.
8 Ibid.
9 Russell Margerison, Boys at War (Northway Publications, 2009).
10 Swift, Bomber County.
11 Hay, ‘An Old Airman’s Tale’.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Swift, Bomber County.
15 Ibid.
16 Bill Burke, ‘The Sheer Thrill of Being a Member of an Operational Marking Team’, www.627squadron.co.uk/afs-bookpartIII-SheerThrill.html.
17 Tripp, The Eighth Passenger.
18 Burke, ‘The Sheer Thrill’.
1 www.iwm.org.uk/history/tips-for-american-servicemen-in-britain-during-the-second-world-war.
2 See www.americanairmuseum.com, part of the Imperial War Museum’s website.
3 For Fielder’s obituary, published by several Pittsburgh newspapers, see www.legacy.com/obituaries/postgazette/obituary.aspx?n=morton-irwin-fiedler.
4 Gordon Fenwick interviewed in the 384th Group magazine. As well as having an entry on the American Air Museum site, Fenwick has been interviewed frequently in the US press and television.
5 Ibid.
6 Pleasingly, the idea of the ‘friendly invasion’ is now a tourist attraction in Norfolk – see www.visitnorfolk.co.uk/things-to-do/Friendly-Invasion-in-Norfolk.aspx.
7 The term ‘spillage’ appears in Charles W. McArthur, Operations Analysis in the U.S. Army Eighth Air Force in World War II (American Mathematical Society, 1990).
8 Mentioned in an introduction to the subject at the Imperial War Museum by Carl Warner at www.iwm.org.uk/history/american-airmen-in-britain-during-the-second-world-war.
9 More information (plus pictures) at the American Air Museum website, http://www.americanairmuseum.com/place/136207.
10 In my The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (Aurum, 2010), Wrens recalled the urgency to attend a concert by Glenn Miller and his band at Bedford, which was close to the codebreaking centre.
11 Fenwick, in 384th Group magazine.
12 Eugene Spearman, ww2awartobewon.com/wwii-articles/bremen-mission-384th-bomb-group/.
13 There is a very interesting essay about James Stewart’s acting career before and after the war by Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books, 2 November 2006, which, although it only touches on his bombing experiences, none the less suggests that there was a duality to Stewart’s screen persona after the war.
14 Thomas Childers, ‘“Facilis descensus averni est”: The Allied Bombing of Germany and the Issue of German Suffering’, Central European History, vol. 38, no. 1 (March 2005).
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 For background see Smithsonian Institute, airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/messerschmitt-me-262-1a-schwalbe-swallow.
18 Fenwick, in 384th Group magazine.
1 DCA, file 803.
2 Ibid.
3 DCA, file 107.
4 DCA, file 802.
5 DCA, file 133.
6 DCA, file 855.
7 DCA, file 523.
8 DCA, file 477.
9 DCA, file 475.
10 Ibid.
11 DCA, file 855.
12 DCA, file 500.
13 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 DCA, file 802.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
22 Tripp, The Eighth Passenger.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 DCA, file 107.
26 Ibid.
27 DCA, file 133.
28 DCA, file 472.
29 DCA, file 104.
30 Tripp, The Eighth Passenger.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
34 Vonnegut, Letters.
35 Ibid.
36 Gregg, Dresden.
37 Bild, 13 February 2017.
38 Hay, ‘An Old Airman’s Tale’.
1 DCA, file 107.
2 More on the ‘Bob Gerry Troupe’ and their interesting post-war career at http://www.circopedia.org/Bob_Gerry_Troupe.
3 Griebel’s memoir, Ich war ein Mann der Strasse. Lebenserinnerungen eines Dresdner Malers (I Was a Man on the Street: The Memoirs of a Dresden Painter) (Röderberg, 1986), now out of print, has been widely cited for his intense and at times grotesque account of that night.
4 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
5 DCA, file 802.
6 DCA, file 133.
7 DCA, file 477.
8 DCA, file 116.
1 DCA, file 109.
2 Ibid.
3 DCA, file 803.
4 Ibid.
5 DCA, file 477.
6 Vonnegut, Letters.
7 DCA, file 802.
8 Ibid.
9 DCA, file 533.
10 Ibid.
11 DCA, file 472.
12 Ibid.
13 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
14 Pleasingly, a number of Mauersberger’s folk songs have been issued on CD.
15 DCA, file 847.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 DCA, file 107.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
1 The Imperial War Museum has an extended and wholly fascinating interview with William Topper which can be heard at www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80015851 and which informs much of what follows.
2 DCA, file 104.
3 DCA, file 802.
4 DCA, file 107.
1 DCA, file 109.
2 DCA, file 803.
3 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
4 DCA, file 475.
5 Ibid.
6 DCA, file 477.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 DCA, file 107.
10 Ibid.
11 DCA, file 802.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 DCA, file 472.
15 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
16 Ibid.
17 DCA, file 477.
1 DCA, file 477.
2 Ibid.
3 DCA, file 475.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 DCA, file 472.
7 Ibid.
8 DCA, file 104.
9 Ibid.
10 Although not currently in print, Griebel’s Ich war ein Mann der Strasse has a number of in print episodes that have been cited by admirers.
11 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
12 Michal Salomonivic, interviewed on Czech Radio (www.radio.cz).
13 DCA, file 506.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 DCA, file 533.
19 DCA, file 109.
20 DCA, file 802.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 DCA, file 107.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
33 Ibid.
1 As cited in Tripp, The Eighth Passenger.
2 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
3 Friedrich, The Fire.
4 Ursula Elsner, interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2015.
5 Biddle, ‘Sifting Dresden’s Ashes’.
6 DCA, file 506.
7 DCA, file 109.
8 DCA, file 472.
9 Friedrich, The Fire.
10 DCA, file 104.
11 An account from Dresden zoo inspector Otto Sailer-Jackson, cited in Alexander McKee, The Devil’s Tinderbox: Dresden 1945 (Souvenir Press, 2000).
12 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
1 Tripp, The Eighth Passenger, for this and what follows.
2 Hay, ‘An Old Airman’s Tale’.
3 Tripp, The Eighth Passenger.
4 A BBC tribute to Harry Irons can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-46201076.
5 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
6 Klemperer, To the Bitter End, for this and what follows.
7 DCA, file 472.
8 DCA, file 104.
9 DCA, file 477.
10 Ibid.
11 DCA, file 107.
12 Ibid.
13 DCA, file 802, for this and what follows.
14 DCA, file 533, for this and what follows.
15 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
16 A chilling account, given by Otto Sailer-Jackson, is cited in several sources, including McKee, The Devil’s Tinderbox.
17 Friedrich, The Fire.
18 DCA, file 109.
19 Ibid.
20 A fascinating account both of Dorothea Speth’s experiences, and also about the lives of Mormons in Dresden, can be found at rsc.byu.edu/archived/harm-s-way-east-german-latter-day-saints-world-war-ii/dresden-district/dresden-altstadt.
21 DCA, file 475.
22 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
1 DCA, file 802.
2 Ibid.
3 DCA, file 472.
4 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
5 DCA, file 477.
6 Ibid.
7 DCA, file 109.
8 DCA, file 475.
9 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
10 Klemperer, To the Bitter End, for this and what follows.
1 Interviewed in various American newspapers. His war records can be seen at 384thbombgroup.com.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Overy, The Bombing War.
5 Cited in Childers, ‘“Facilis descensus averni est”’. In 1982 Fussell wrote a searingly powerful essay about his war experiences – and the horror of that winter of 1944/45 – for Harper’s magazine which can be read at harpers.org/sponsor/thewar/wwiiharpers/my-war-how-i-got-irony-in-the-infantry/.
6 Overy, The Bombing War.
7 DCA, file 107, for this and what follows.
8 DCA, file 533.
9 DCA, file 802, for this and what follows.
10 As noted on the IWM site americanairmuseum.com.
11 DCA, file 475.
12 DCA, file 477.
1 DCA, file 107.
2 Ibid.
3 DCA, file 475.
4 DCA, file 802.
5 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
6 DCA, file 116.
1 Ralph Blank et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. IX (Clarendon Press, 2008).
2 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
3 Friedrich, The Fire.
4 Vonnegut, Letters.
5 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children’s Crusade – A Duty-Dance with Death (Cape, 1970).
6 Ibid.
7 DCA, file 107.
8 Gregg, Dresden.
9 DCA, file 477.
10 Matthias Griebel, interviewed in The New York Times, 11 February 1995.
11 Ibid.
12 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
13 DCA, file 802.
14 Ibid.
15 DCA, file 109.
1 Daily Mirror, 15 February 1945.
2 Daily Telegraph, 15 February 1945.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Tripp, The Eighth Passenger.
6 Ibid.
7 Biddle, ‘Sifting Dresden’s Ashes’.
8 Ibid.
9 Daily Telegraph, 17 February 1945.
10 Daily Telegraph, 5 March 1945.
11 Daily Mail, 5 March 1945.
12 Ronald Schaffer, ‘American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German Civilians’, Journal of American History, vol. 67, no. 2 (September 1980).
13 Manchester Guardian, 7 March 1945.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Harris Papers, folder H55, document 71A.
17 Ibid., document 73A.
18 Ibid., document 72A.
19 Ibid., folder 4B, document dated 28 March 1945.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., document dated 29 March 1945.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., document dated 1 April 1945, stamped ‘personal’.
1 DCA, file 802.
2 Ibid.
3 DCA, file 115.
4 Der Freiheitskampf, Dresden edition, 16 April 1945, for this and what follows.
5 Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War.
6 Griebel, Ich war ein Mann der Strasse, quoted in a fascinating essay by Francesco Mazzaferro which can be seen at letteraturaartistica.blogspot.com/2018/10/otto-griebel29.html.
7 As cited in an absorbing essay by Johannes Schmidt: ‘Dresden 1945: Wilhelm Rudolph’s Compulsive Inventory’, Art in Print, vol. 5, no. 3 (2015), artinprint.org/article/wilhelmrudolph/.
8 The Carus Classics 2013 CD issue of Dresdner Requiem has interesting sleeve notes by Matthias Herrmann, a detailed look at Mauersberger’s musical inspirations and English translations of the requiem’s lyrics.
9 Schmidt, ‘Dresden 1945’.
10 DCA, file 475.
11 Ibid.
12 There is some interesting background on Elsa Frölich and her husband as well as Dresden’s other underground communists at www.stadtwikidd.de/wiki/Elsa_Frölich (in German).
13 Victor Klemperer, The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945–59, trans. Martin Chalmers (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003).
14 There is some information on Nieland’s surprising post-war life and rehabilitation to be seen at Sächsische Biografie, saebi.isgv.de/biografie/Hans_Nieland_(1900-1976).
1 A very interesting – and frightening – piece about Kästner and his relationship with the Nazis (and the burning of his books) can be seen at Spiegel Online: www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/nazi-book-burning-anniversary-erich-kaestner-and-the-nazis-a-894845.html.
2 Erich Kästner, When I Was a Little Boy, trans. Isabel and Florence McHugh (Jonathan Cape, 1959).
3 DCA, file 802.
4 DCA, file 477.
5 Harris Papers, folder 40, document dated 10 May 1945.
6 Harris, Bomber Offensive.
7 Ibid.
8 Harris Papers, folder 3A, letter dated 18 June 1945.
9 Letter from Taylor to The New York Times, published 18 January 1992.
10 This is part of an epic oral interview conducted by Hugh A. Ahmann for the United States Air Force Oral History Program, the transcript of which can be read at www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/oral-histories/landryrb#146.
11 Dyson, ‘A Failure of Intelligence’.
12 Max Seydewitz, speaking in February 1950; the speech was widely reported in British newspapers.
13 Harris Papers, folder 40, ‘Lectures, Speeches, Talks etc.’.
14 David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (Kimber, 1963).
15 Observer, 5 May 1963.
16 Observer, 12 May 1963; Birkin was one of several readers taking issue with Nicolson.
17 Tripp, The Eighth Passenger.
18 As discussed by Mark Arnold-Foster in the Guardian, 14 February 1967.
19 Ibid.
20 This fascinating interview was screened by the BBC on 11 February 2013.
1 Klemperer, The Lesser Evil.
2 Some of the propaganda posters from this period – stylized and striking – are on display to very fine effect at the Dresden Museum of Military History.
3 The accent was even mentioned in his obituary in The New York Times on 2 August 1973.
4 Klemperer, The Lesser Evil.
5 Ibid.
6 Like so much of Dresden’s Soviet post-war architecture, there is something now quite strangely evocative about the Barkhausen building; pictures to be found at navigator.tu-dresden.de/gebaeude/bar?language=en.
7 For a concise biography of Dr Fromme see Sächsische Biografie, saebi.isgv.de/biografie/Albert_Fromme_(1881-1966).
8 Ibid.
9 According to some accounts, Griebel was based in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Department of the college, the purity of which must have appealed.
10 The rooms of post-war painting now in the Albertinum Gallery (where in 1945 the civic authorities were based) are fascinating, and they raise the further question of whether art and ideology in the wider world are more frequently fused than we imagine.
11 In later life, Matthias Griebel became director of the Dresden City Museum; he has been frequently interviewed, and profiled admiringly, such as in this piece for Disy magazine at www.disy-magazin.de/Matthias-Griebel.337.0.html.
12 Klemperer, The Lesser Evil.
13 This shop fracas was reported in the Daily Telegraph on 27 March 1953.
14 Neal Ascherson, in the Observer, 13 February 1965.
15 This gradual restoration features as a sort of mini-exhibit in its own right in the Zwinger galleries today.
16 Some of the details were recalled by Lyudmila in Vladimir Putin, First Person (PublicAffairs, 2000), a ‘Self-Portrait’ featuring interviews with the then new president. There was also interesting BBC news coverage in September 2015 tying in with Chris Bowlby’s Radio 4 documentary The Moment that Made Putin.
1 Donald Bloxham, ‘Dresden as a War Crime’, in Addison and Crang (eds.), Firestorm.