1945 On the night of 13 February 1945, three months before the end of the Second World War, the author Kurt Vonnegut was a POW sheltering in an underground animal slaughterhouse during the devastating fire-bombing of Dresden. He survived. Thousands didn’t. Dresden was thought wrongly by its inhabitants, and by the large numbers of refugees fleeing the Russian advance, to be an ‘open city’ and the ‘safest air-raid shelter in Germany’. It wasn’t, Churchill decreed (arguably to show the USSR some Allied muscle).
On the same night Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, is a POW in the same shelter as Vonnegut during the devastating fire-bombing of Dresden. He too survives. But he goes crazy.
Vonnegut published many accounts of his Dresden experience. The following is from an interview in 1974:
I was present in the greatest massacre in European history, which was the destruction of Dresden by fire-bombing … The American and British air forces together killed 135,000 people in two hours. This is a world’s record. It’s never been done faster, not in the Battle of Britain or Hiroshima. (In order to qualify as a massacre you have to kill real fast.) But I was there, and there was no news about it in the American papers, it was so embarrassing.
RAF estimates later downscaled the civilian casualties to 35,000. This figure has been disputed (notably by the right-wing historian David Irving, who goes for a number almost twice Vonnegut’s 135,000). Thirty-five thousand, of course, is not a figure to which one would attach the word ‘mere’. But it undercuts, if one wants to do a Bertram Rumfoord (the gung-ho military historian in Slaughterhouse-Five), Vonnegut’s allegation that Dresden was a worse massacre than Hiroshima – something that he was insisting up to a few months before his death in 2007.
Fiction, like history, has been generally silent about Dresden. Vonnegut himself had almost insuperable difficulty writing his ‘Dresden novel’. He had to forge an entirely new ‘schizophrenic’ technique, weaving realism, science-fiction schlock (little green men from Tralfamadore) and slapstick social comedy into a startlingly innovative pattern. The novel’s composition accompanied a catastrophic crisis in the author’s family life (his marriage broke up and his son developed schizophrenia). Slaughterhouse-Five was finally published, to huge acclaim, in 1969. Nonetheless, for all the praise he received, Vonnegut went to his grave angry (in his ironic way) that posterity would not recognise the firebombing of Dresden for the war crime he always maintained it was.