In the early days of February 1945, the sharp air in Dresden carried a flavour of smoke. Although wartime coal supplies were never certain, the city’s stoves and boilers were working against the morning frosts. The snow had gone but breath still lingered in the cold. The cobbles around the Frauenkirche were moist and treacherous, a potential hazard to those walking with hands thrust deep into overcoat pockets. The elderly gentlemen in hats making their way to work in the banks and the insurance companies near the Old Market each morning, maintaining a simulacrum of middle-class normality, watched their step.
Others moved more lightly through the narrow streets. Gerhard Ackermann, a young teenager dodging past the cream-and-brown liveried electric trams and the wooden greengrocery barrows, had managed to spend the best hours of the previous weekend at the cinema. Many German civilians at this point were throwing themselves into the alternative worlds conjured by films, watching them with a kind of hunger. The production Ackermann saw was In flagranti. Made a few months previously, and one of the last films to be produced under the Nazi regime, this was a screwball comedy, filled with farcical twists, involving a secretary becoming a private detective.1
Throughout that winter there had been films playing in all Dresden’s eighteen cinemas. Among the grandest of these was the Universum Kino, a thousand-seater establishment with an upmarket clientele. Film was predominantly the enthusiasm of working-class Dresdeners, but the middle classes could be coaxed into theatres such as the Universum by highbrow costume dramas and adaptations of classic novels.2 In flagranti was the last film to be shown in Dresden before the Nazis commanded that all cinemas in Germany shut down.3 Young Ackermann’s ticket would become a souvenir.
In any case, for many older Dresdeners, escapism was too great an effort. There was an instinctive and vertiginous understanding that the order of things, that the world they knew, was going to give way at any moment. These citizens could see for themselves that the rhythm of the city was fevered: the constant flow of trucks along the wide main roads and across the bridges, carrying young German soldiers and ordnance through the city and thence eastwards; the exhausted horses drawing behind them carts bearing equally tired refugee families from the countryside, making their painful way in the opposite direction.
There was real urgency amid all this movement. The Red Army under Marshal Georgy Zhukov had crossed the River Oder in Poland; the Soviets’ bewildering and breath-catching momentum sustained from mid January, when they had broken through the German lines like an axe cleaving a rotten door. To the west, the Americans and British were exerting fresh pressure following the Battle of the Bulge, pushing their way through wet, freezing forests and small towns.
Many German civilians were starting to look at the prospect of US occupation with a quiet degree of ambivalence, but the idea of Soviet conquest inspired real, vocal fear. Stories of the sociopathic relish with which the Red Army in the east had descended upon countless women, as well as civilian males, had been relayed ahead of their arrival. None of the German farmers and agricultural workers and their families in those regions fleeing this ineluctable advance would have been aware that, at that moment, the future of both themselves and their nation was being decided at a resort on the Black Sea some 1,300 miles south-east of Dresden; that in a once-ornate palace in Yalta, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the last jaundiced and visibly ill,4 had been discussing details of how a defeated Germany was to be governed and kept subdued; of how the country would be split into four occupied zones – American, British, French, Soviet – and ruled under meticulously democratic principles. At the conference, Stalin’s senior commanders requested that the transport nexus of Dresden, which would lie within the projected Soviet sphere of influence, be targeted by Anglo-American forces in order to hamper German movements to the east.5
By this stage of the war it was becoming clear that squadrons of heavy bombers were already outmoded; that the future of warfare was in the hands of physicists. The Americans were, in secret, close to producing the atomic weapon that the Nazis had unsuccessfully striven towards. Equally secretly, Stalin had been kept apprised of the work being carried out in the laboratories at Los Alamos in New Mexico by scientist and communist-sympathizer Klaus Fuchs.
German civilians must have found it hard to imagine any greater destruction than that which was already being wrought. On 6 February 1945 there were hugely destructive US Eighth Air Force raids on the towns of Chemnitz and Magdeburg. In the case of Magdeburg, 140 miles north-west of Dresden on the Elbe, the historic quarters of the city were already dust and rubble; a raid the previous month, broadly aimed at the oil refinery, had seen grand civic architecture as well as innumerable houses and apartments consumed in flame.6
Despite the daily radio bulletins telling of fierce German resistance to Allied predations and newspaper articles reassuring readers that Anglo-American aggression would be forestalled, every Dresdener knew that the city was attracting ever-greater enemy attention, the reconnaissance planes ‘silvery against the sky’, as then eleven-year-old Dieter Patz recalled.7 Mothers tried to shield their children as far as possible from the war. Frieda Reichelt, who had a ten-year-old daughter called Gisela, was expecting another child that March. ‘I was looking forward to the arrival of a new sibling,’ recalled Gisela. ‘Dresden seemed far from the war and we were careless of bombing raids. My mother enabled me as far as possible to have a nice childhood.’8
Despite the studied insouciance of many citizens, Dresden had already suffered raids from the Americans, one in the autumn of 1944 and another on 16 January 1945. The attackers had materialized from the daylight sky and killed several hundred people on each occasion. The primary target had been the vast marshalling yards not far from the Friedrichstadt hospital. To add to the tension, Dresden’s early warning sirens had been howling neurotically – and unnecessarily – at the darkness almost every night, making proper sleep impossible for many. Even if the city had for some years seemed removed from the war, its inhabitants were constantly reminded of the conflict, even as they dreamed.
Nightly news reports that superior German forces were holding the Red Army back were undermined by whispered rumours that Berlin might fall at any moment. Unknown to Dresdeners, the authorities in Berlin had recently designated their city a ‘defensive area’9 – meaning that in the event of a mass Soviet incursion, German soldiers would be expected to turn the streets and squares into a battleground. Dresden, with a population of some 650,000 – about the same as Manchester in England, or, indeed, Washington DC – was to be part of an Elbe Line, under the command of General Adolf Strauss, stretching up the course of the river from Prague and thence through Germany to Hamburg – a front that, in theory, would be held definitively and bloodily by the Germans.
There were many in Dresden, on those quiet evenings in the blackout, who imagined that they could hear the noise of death echoing from the distant hills. There were hideous stories of multiple rapes and mutilations, and they were true. The Red Army was a little over sixty miles away. Hertha Dietrich, a single woman who lodged in the house of a retired stable manager, was anxious that she would not be able to bear the city falling to such people and declared that she ‘would take the old man to her acquaintances’ in another town further west.10
And how many in the city had heard the rumours that just a few days beforehand, the advancing Soviets had happened across a Nazi concentration camp? Certainly, academic Victor Klemperer and his wife had picked up the terrible intelligence of Auschwitz, the Soviet soldiers exploring the abandoned camp and finding thousands of living skeletons, prisoners who had been left behind to die. This nightmare discovery had been made on 27 January. The whispered speculation about it had reached Dresden, and it merely confirmed to Klemperer that his fears had been justified. When, over the last few years, his friends and neighbours had been told by the Gestapo to pack a bag for one short journey, he had known that they were being sent by train to their deaths.11
The few Jews who were left in Dresden had had their properties expropriated and were crammed into specially assigned houses, run-down and split into tiny apartments. They were cold and sparse; the gas supply sputtered so that water could hardly be heated and at any time of day and night the residents might find themselves subject to violent, spitting house inspections by the authorities. Klemperer had seen countless Jews being handed ‘deportation’ papers; and he had seen how a pre-war Jewish population of thousands had been reduced to little more than a few dozen. Many in Dresden had the same suspicions, but everyone knew it was unwise to discuss such things openly. Both the local Gestapo and the police had the authority to execute anyone who was suspected of treachery, and damaging morale counted as treason.
Daily life was a challenge of seeing and yet not seeing, hearing and yet not hearing, but the dissolution of ordinary bourgeois standards was now taking startling forms. Rural refugees, who congregated down by the vast central railway station, could be seen squatting in adjacent alleys relieving themselves, because the queues for the station’s lavatories were simply too long; this was not the kind of thing fastidious Dresdeners were used to witnessing.
Sixty-four-year-old Dr Albert Fromme saw increasing numbers of refugees from Silesia arriving at his clinic, ill, bewildered, halted part-way through their treks westward. Dr Fromme was the preeminent surgeon at the Dresden Friedrichstadt hospital, the leafy grounds of which lay between the Elbe and the marshalling yards. (Despite the conflict, the institution was still open to all.) Among the difficulties he faced were anxiety over stocks of medicines and painkillers and the fact that fuel supplies for the hospital buildings were becoming sporadic.
Dr Fromme was one of Dresden’s more influential citizens. Just a year beforehand he had been appointed president of the German Society of Surgery and in Dresden he had founded a much admired academy for physicians. However, this did not make him a member of the establishment because he had never been a member of the Nazi Party. The Fromme home was filled with sober oil paintings and a huge variety of books. According to his children, their father was a reserved figure – when he came home for his lunch every day he expected quiet and decorum in the house – but that is hardly remarkable, given his experience as a medic in the First World War, when he had not only seen obscenities in the trenches, but also fought desperately to save those who had suffered so horribly. How could he have been anything other than grave?
Now, his work in Dresden was all consuming. Every day as he walked the corridors of the hospital, the air sharp and fresh with disinfectant, he and his younger colleagues were facing logistical difficulties that in peacetime might have seemed insurmountable. But, like everyone else in Dresden, Dr Fromme had somehow adapted to his old world being tilted upon its axis.
Just a short walk from the crowded hospital was another venerable Dresden institution, the mighty Seidel und Naumann factory, through the gates of which its mass of workers entered and left daily. For long a household name – indeed, Dr Fromme swore by one of its carefully crafted products, his private typewriter – by February 1945 its production was angled almost entirely towards war work.
Two great chimneys dominated the skyline above the Seidel und Naumann complex: industrial echoes of the cathedral spires of the old city just half a mile to the east. There were other echoes too, of elegance. The factory buildings had an austere dignity, looking a little from the outside like large residential apartment blocks. These formed an enormous square, in the middle of which lay open space, allowing light into every section. Before the war – indeed, since the start of the century – the firm had been producing intricately detailed and beautifully designed household items. Its typewriters, sold under the labels ‘Ideal’ and ‘Erika’, were exported all over Europe. Its sewing machines similarly were found in parlours across the continent. Its bicycles were enduringly popular. The firm had proved equally innovative and elegant when it came to industrial relations. Seidel und Naumann provided its workers with not only a large canteen serving nutritious meals but also a company health scheme and recreational outings.
Before the outbreak of the war, the Dresden site employed some 2,700 people, but the composition of the workforce making their way daily through the factory gates on Hamburger Strasse was now very different. In the absence of fighting-age men, the great majority of those who worked here were female, many of them forced labour: Jewish women and even women from the USSR. The degradation of the workforce had developed stage by inexorable stage during the war, and by 1945 these slave labourers – haggard, haunted, inadequately clothed – had somehow become accepted by Dresdeners as part of the normal world. The nature of the work in the factories had changed dramatically too. And the purpose of the finished products – from detonating fuses for shrapnel shells to ignitors for depth charges and anti-aircraft guns – was kept strictly secret even from those who were working long hours to produce the parts for them. Both supply of and demand for domestic goods were understandably hollowed out.
There were still some working-age men employed in Dresden rather than serving in the military. The father of eleven-year-old Dieter Patz worked relatively close by in a metalworking unit that specialized in intricate instruments. The boy was certain that his father ‘worked in a scissors factory’.12 The truth, of course, was quite different: the plant had been turned over to the rather more intricate business of military parts years earlier, and for these skilled workmen there were now extra duties, including compulsory attendance of meetings of the Volkssturm at the end of each day.
The Volkssturm, in its broadest sense, was the last redoubt of the German military and comprised all the men who for whatever reason had not been conscripted. Each city and each district had its own platoon of often middle-aged or elderly men, but it was not attached in any formal way to the army. It had been resurrected only in 1944, and the men who were required to attend its meetings knew that there was little likelihood of their ever being provided with proper weapons or equipment. In other cities, some members had been handed responsibility for filling in the potholes and craters that had been left by bombing raids. There was a cult-like aspect to it too: the meetings were filled with Nazi exhortations to do with death, blood and honour, threaded through with quasi-mystical invocations of the ancient homeland. Patz simply recalled that when his father at last arrived home each day, ‘it was way past the normal supper time, and he seemed utterly exhausted’.13
In terms of forced labour, it was the workforce at the Zeiss Ikon camera plant in the south-east of the city, near the Great Garden park, that had among the largest numbers. By 1942 the works were hugely important for the manufacture of precision instruments and optical technology for the military. Dresden’s Jews – including the academic Victor Klemperer – were among those compelled to work there.14 By February 1945, with so many shipped out to death camps in the east, the numbers at the factory had to be supplanted by extra forced labour: women brought in from Poland and from the fringes of the USSR. Here were sparse barracks for such workers to rest in; three-tiered bunks, inadequate heating, a perpetual shortage of food and weariness that eroded the soul. Yet moving among them were local women workers, fully paid, who either walked to work or caught the tram from the suburbs.
Such groups ought not to have been able to commingle without either intense resentment or horrified pity, yet they did. There were those everyday Dresden workers, Klemperer recalled, who certainly seemed to bear the Jews on the factory floor no sort of animosity, nor feel the need to keep separate from them, either out of hostility or silent sympathy. Instead, the atmosphere on the production line was frequently jocular.
As the working day began early for the free citizens of Dresden, so too were their children making their way to their schools, finding out whether they were open that day, assiduous about studies even in the increasing chaos around them. There had been extensive disruptions to timetables and schools had frequently closed, often to conserve fuel; children instead were left to play winter games in the city’s parks and in the wooded suburbs. Some classrooms had been converted into makeshift field hospitals for wounded men brought back from the eastern front.
Any German child under thirteen in 1945 had grown up knowing nothing other than Nazi rule; this, to them, was the natural order of the world. Those few whose parents secretly questioned the order of things behind closed doors must have felt conflicted when asked to learn and repeat the propaganda so willingly absorbed by their classmates. Among the smarter establishments in the city – certainly in terms of academic pride and attainment – was the Vitzthum-Gymnasium, the school attended by Dr Fromme’s elder son Friedrich. Throughout the course of the year, the establishment had suffered two major setbacks: first, the requisition of one of its main buildings for military use, necessitating a move to share premises with another school; then, in 1944, those premises were shattered by American bombs during a speculative daylight raid.
Among its pupils were many who would later become lawyers, engineers, doctors or journalists, but increasing numbers of the city’s fifteen-year-old boys were being drafted, via the Hitler Youth, into military positions in anti-aircraft batteries, pointing guns at the night sky not just above Dresden but in other cities too.
All boys were required to participate in the Hitler Youth, even the quieter, bookish ones not suitable for defensive duties. Winfried Bielss, fifteen years old in 1945, had his own after-school responsibilities. They seemed not to impinge greatly upon his larger concern, which was stamp collecting. Winfried and his mother lived in an apartment in a genteel suburb on the north bank of the Elbe. His soldier father was, at that time, in Bohemia: one of the more vicious crucibles of Nazism. There, in Czechoslovakia, the local Jewish population had been almost completely exterminated, and other minorities such as the Romany were persecuted too. Now, Bielss’s father was facing not merely Stalin’s advancing forces but also local resistance groups who were fighting back with real vigour while, little more than a hundred miles away, his son was returning home for his supper.
Even in those sparse times there was red cabbage and fried potatoes – and as his mother exclaimed, there could be scant cause for unhappiness if one ‘could still enjoy fried potatoes’.15 Indeed, in peacetime, staple Saxon comfort recipes had always revolved around potato soup (with cucumber and sour cream) and potato dumplings (with buttermilk). The only real absence now was rich cakes, a traditional Dresdener yearning.
By those early days of February 1945, Bielss’s Hitler Youth duties were centred on the grand central railway station; and they involved guiding the many disembarking refugees to their new temporary billets in the farms and villages that surrounded Dresden. The architecture of the station surely impressed upon all arrivals a sense of the city that Dresden had until recently been, with its elegantly curved long glass roofs and slickly designed platforms and concourse. Here was a structure that spoke of some cosmopolitanism; pan-European detailing in the whorls of the ironwork, in the light pouring in through those glass roofs, which gave a romantic haze to the rich smoke from the steam engines.16 There had also until recently been refugees arriving from some bombed-out cities in the west as well. Added to this, there were German soldiers arriving on leave or to convalesce.
Those disembarking at the station were frequently pointed north, to the New Town – Neustadt – that lay on the other side of the river. The Neustadt had streets with a distinctly Parisian flavour: long, tall terraces, shops and restaurants on ground floors, a maze of hidden leafy courtyards behind. Meanwhile, matching this sophisticated feel in the old town – the Altstadt – near the railway station was the elegant and sumptuous Prager Strasse, a shopping street that, even in the vice-grip of the total-war economy, still exerted a strong pull on the imaginations and desires of many local people.
In a curious way, the windows of Prager Strasse’s shops in earlier years had not only afforded glimpses of flashing beauty – richly coloured silks of indigo and emerald, chic haute couture, voluminous luxurious furs, the hard dazzle of jewellery – but also suggested a form of social stability: exquisite assets that unlike the cruelly inflationary German currency of the 1920s would keep their value, thus also buying their owners security and safety. There was no such security for many store owners, though; since the passing of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws forcing anti-Semitism deep into the constitutional heart of German life, business people had learned bitterly that such assets could be snatched – expropriated by the state. None the less, even by this later stage of the war this was still where the smarter ladies of Dresden society came to shop, dine and take coffee, albeit ersatz with an aftertaste of oats.
More down-to-earth Dresdeners favoured traditional stores such as Böhme, which by 1945 had become a thriving marketplace for gossip and war theories. There were modern department stores too: Renner, on the Altmarkt (old market), even in the depleted war years, stocked everything from children’s clothes to household goods. And a few streets up was an innovative shop that had once been called Alsberg. In contrast to the charmingly antiquated neighbouring streets, this was a temple of futuristic modernism, built with a carefully calibrated geometry of horizontals and subtle curves. Alsberg had been the first to introduce smooth escalators so that more genteel shoppers might not overexert themselves. Like so many other businesses both in this city and across Germany, it had been seized from its Jewish owners by the Nazi authorities as part of their Aryanization process; they changed the name to ‘Möbius’.17 The business would not have been much use to the owners as the decade wore on in any case: the Nazi boycott on Jewish shops was too thorough.
The ostentation of other, grander shops might have been regarded with a certain sardonic amusement by young working-class Dresden women such as seventeen-year-old Anita Auerbach; she was a waitress at The White Bow, a cheap and busy restaurant a few streets from the centre. In earlier years this had been an establishment filled with teetotal left-wing political radicals, an informal theatre of speeches and fiery meetings and long, shouting debates. One such prominent Dresden communist from those days, a young mother called Elsa Frölich, had been imprisoned by the Nazi authorities and subsequently released. She was now working as an accountant in a nearby cigarette factory that had been converted to manufacture ammunition. Frölich was one of the few in Dresden in February 1945 who yearned to see Stalin’s forces in the streets.18 The White Bow, however, was now teeming with German soldiers (and indeed the occasional furtive deserter, seeking to avoid scrutiny), its windows fogged from the steam of the hot vegetable broth that was served.
In the south-west of the city another young woman of seventeen, Margot Hille, had just a few months previously completed an apprenticeship that in peacetime might not have been available to her: she now had a full-time position in the Felsenkeller brewery, one of many breweries that thrived around the city. Established in the mid nineteenth century, the firm had excavated special tunnels for the purposes of brewing storage.19 War had also brought a new sort of production line to the firm – darkly secret and deep within the factory – that of highly technical components for military machinery. But there was still beer too. Felsenkeller specialized in a strong lager advertised with the image of a smiling golden-haired boy in checked trousers holding aloft a foaming stein.
If there seemed something slightly unreal about local manufacturing and drink businesses continuing as though the world was on a stable footing, the sense was magnified back in the Altstadt, where the banks and insurance companies continued their daily business. Like the department stores, the Dresden banks had been subject to Nazi theft. One of the city’s more prominent financial houses, owned by the Jewish Arnhold family, had been swallowed up by Aryanization in 1935; their bank was subsumed into the Dresdner Bank, which, although it had moved its head office to Berlin, still had substantial premises in Dresden.
Dresdner Bank’s business was now wholly war-related, and its tendrils reached into every part of Nazi-dominated eastern Europe. It is fair to speculate that in those dark months, some senior figures within the bank would have known and understood for certain what had been happening in those concentration camps so deep in the eastern forests. Part of their business had been about financing such efforts, and finding ways of profiting from them. In the streets where Dresdner Bank’s senior management operated, the bright red and black of the Nazi flag fluttered in the winter winds, the swastika stark against grey masonry.
Yet nearby were tokens of a city somehow not wholly steeped in war. There was (and is) the Pfunds Molkerei – an absurdly picturesque dairy shop, ornately decorated with nineteenth-century Villeroy & Boch hand-painted ceramic tiles, that represented an older Dresdener spirit, playful and blithe, a small temple to the virtues of sweetness.20 A tourist attraction in peacetime, here were pastries and buttermilk – a draw not merely for children but also for parents who had never quite forgotten their intense childhood pleasures. Further along the river, vineyards covered the slopes of Schloss Eckberg, a splendidly grandiose nineteenth-century structure built in the style and spirit of an English castle by a local wealthy merchant.21 Here and in many other nearby vineyards there was said to be an extraordinary terroir. Certainly it produced a subtle Riesling that was both light and as sharp as autumn apples. The Eckberg vineyard commanded a view of the river, and of the early twentieth-century bridge that was known locally as the Blue Wonder. It was also the bridge that many locals mentioned when they were discussing the advance of the Red Army. In these conversations, people wondered if this construction – considered a revolutionary piece of suspension engineering and a real source of local pride – would have to be sacrificed to slow the Soviets down.
The underlying fears of brutality and unstoppable violence were woven through with other profound anxieties. To each and every Dresdener, the city had a unique and perhaps sacred beauty: the cathedrals and churches and palaces that had lined the curve of the Elbe for centuries should have represented a form of eternity. Instead there was the fear that the barbarians would smash the beauty into dust. That religious sense of aesthetics had somehow found a way of coexisting with blood-red swastikas.
Yet the real shadow over the city was not being cast by the Soviets; instead, the broadly unsuspected threat lay in the secret plans and intentions of the Allies in the west.