At roughly the same time as the initial wave of 244 bombers were beginning their flight back to England, the next wave – very much larger – of 552 bombers were already reaching up into the dark over England, above the silver clouds, crossing the Channel to the continent; their stream of planes would come to form a line some 120 miles long.
Bomb aimer Miles Tripp recalled the discomfort of his own position on board his Lancaster; he was surrounded by ‘Window’, the packets of metallic strips that would later be dropped out of the craft to blind the German radar.1 At the start of their flight, minutely calibrated to join up with all those other bombers leaving from bases all over the east and the south of England, there had been an unsettling incident when Tripp had looked out into the darkness only to recoil in sudden panic as he saw another Lancaster making straight for them. He shouted with alarm and, equally suddenly, ‘the Lancaster vanished’. It had been an illusion, or an hallucination. He recalled his relief that his intercom was not on, and that his fellow crewmen had not witnessed his momentary fright. There had been enough disquiet already about fellow crewman Harry’s apparent gift of premonition. Death was inescapable and pervasive; superstitions and sudden visions were perhaps to be expected. As they crossed the Channel, Tripp noticed the starlight, the way it made it possible to just see the English coastline. Then he focused on his own task of monitoring the H2S radar and navigation system, the beams of which pulsed down to the earth and back up again.
His senses were on high alert in the near-darkness of the Lancaster interior, monitoring the steady bass line of the engines and, as they crossed battle lines, sightings of flak. A spat arose between Tripp and his crewmate Ray, whose job it was to jettison the thousands of strips of ‘Window’ through the perspex aperture; Ray complained that Tripp’s duties were light compared with those of others and Tripp irritated him by affecting a languorous aristocratic drawl to proclaim that, on the contrary, he was working terribly hard. Another crewman’s electrically heated flight suit was malfunctioning; as a result, ‘Junior’ was extremely cold. Throughout the four-and-a-half-hour flight there, they saw the thin glowing lines of flak aimed at other aircraft. The H2S guidance system, which seemed to have been playing up, now started into life, searching for their target, yet as they neared their objective it became apparent to the crew that it would hardly be required. The gold and red fires of Dresden, clamouring ever higher into that night sky, were visible from some forty miles away. Tripp wriggled his way into the bomb aimer’s compartment at the front of the plane and gazed down, noting that there was no cloud. Still a few miles away from the city, some half-dozen Lancasters were visible ahead, perfectly silhouetted black against the rosy glow. At a height of around 10,000 feet, Tripp found himself looking now at ‘a fantastic latticework of fire’, the ‘fiery outlines of a crossword puzzle’. He gazed down at ‘blazing streets … from east to west, from north to south, in a gigantic saturation of flame’.
Tripp was in charge of giving the instructions for the plane’s positioning as they neared the city, and it was at this point that he made a conscious decision not to add to the firestorm. He told the pilot, ‘Dig’, to veer starboard, and it was only when the plane was clear of the heart of the inferno that Tripp pressed the mechanism to release his explosives. He hoped, he later recalled, that the bombs would land in open country. It is most unlikely, however, that they did; it is much more probable that they detonated in peaceful streets on the outskirts, simply sparking yet more fires. The gesture was human (and possibly widespread – there were accusations of explosives being deliberately offloaded in the North Sea), but the fact remained that few bombs that night were going to land harmlessly. This second wave was to bring with it many more 4,000lb ‘Cookies’ and other varieties of explosives and incendiaries: in total, an additional 1,800 tons of bombs were to be dropped by the second wave, and many in areas that were not yet throbbing with that lethal light. Several miles away, on the Klotzsche airfield, the Messerschmitt fighter pilots sat poised, but no orders came to scramble. Their commanders no doubt understood very well how futile a gesture any attempt at defence would have been.
Of course, the bombers above were not to know this, and in Tripp’s Lancaster the curious, nerve-tautening structure of every raid was present once more: after a flight filled with hazard, the actual act of bombing lasted no more than a minute and then there was the fresh, quiet tension and fear of the flight back through that dark enemy territory: the red lines of tracer fire, bright white globules of fighter flares – ‘flaming onions’, as Flight Lieutenant Leslie Hay referred to them2 – falling in their flight path; distant fires in distant cities; the moment of nausea when another Lancaster was ‘coned’ by powerful searchlights, the plane blossoming in flame against the starlit sky. In Tripp’s plane there was a sense of compressed hush; a Thermos of coffee, and the lighting of (nominally forbidden) cigarettes, flavoured with menthol.
About the bombing itself, there seemed among other crewmen a sense of disassociation; but from so many thousands of feet up, with the ‘enormous bowl of rosy light’ arising from below,3 it would have been truly remarkable for any of these crews to have felt genuine empathy; for how could anyone imagine what it was like on those streets below? Miles Tripp recounted his feeling of squeamishness, but given the atmospheric phenomenon he was witnessing, he clearly did not allow himself to dwell on any idea of individuals caught in that horror. Among the other crews of those 552 second-wave bombers that swept through that astonishing storm there seemed an unwavering sense that this was something that had to be done; a mission that simply had to be completed.
There is a film sequence, taken from the underside of one of those Lancasters, that shows in black and white the fires across the city, pulsating points that sometimes flare up into lines of pure white, the sudden blooming of more huge conflagrations. Yet the film does not convey the most hypnotic element, as recalled by Tripp and others: the colours in that inferno. The bomb aimers in that second wave sensed from the most cursory glance at the city below that it was fast burning to destruction already, but for the most part they tacked close to their instructions. As Warrant Officer Harry Irons (later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross), a rear gunner, later put it: ‘We didn’t realize how big it was going to be.’ Nor was there any idea of guilt: ‘We were very young and we lost so many boys ourselves,’ he added.4 What all these thousands of crew members had been asked to do, in mission after mission, became an implacable routine. The fact that their own lives were so fragile added another layer to the complexity of their emotions.
Thousands of feet below, almost a mile away from the centre, as this fresh wave of bombers began its sweep through at just after 1 a.m., Mischka Danos made a move that would have been counterintuitive to many but perhaps natural to him as a physicist: he pulled the ‘Karl May’ girl across that patch of green space and into a bomb crater that had been left by the previous raid: another badly aimed projectile. Danos knew that, under a fresh attack, the crater would afford them cover – not, of course, from a direct hit, but from all other explosions. There was still not quite fear in his breast but instead a tight high tension, as he listened to the ‘hissing’ and the ‘whirring’ of the fresh incendiaries that were falling out of the sky.5 Over the lip of the crater they watched as, against the deep ruby and billowing black of the city landscape, the air was once more lit up as plummeting incendiaries opened and released rods of pure white.
For the citizens closer to the centre of the city, this second wave was greeted with not only terror but a sort of moral disbelief: how was it possible for anyone to inflict this abomination? The authorities had tried to reactivate Dresden’s air-raid sirens; but few were still functioning. The growing firestorm had melted most of the city’s electrical systems, rendering them as useless as the tram lines lying in the road.
In the Judenhaus on Zeughausstrasse, in a room whose shattered window admitted all the noise from the city outside, Professor Victor Klemperer slept – a measure of the seriousness of his heart condition, but also perhaps a traumatized reaction not just to the bombing but to the day beforehand, that tour of the city effectively handing out death warrants to most of its remaining Jewish population. He was woken suddenly by his wife. Because most of the city’s air-raid alarms were out of action, the civic authorities were sending officials with hand-held sirens out into those streets that were still negotiable. Faint but unmistakable, the noise was just about audible to Eva, who explained to her husband that there was no electricity.6 Now the couple had to prepare to flee back underground.
The professor had a rucksack containing some manuscripts and a bag with some of Eva’s ‘woollen things’. He also had a blanket, which he wore around his shoulders. Putting his hat on, he hurried with his wife downstairs and into the street, which was suffused with an intense and lurid light. In that corner of the Altstadt, near the Frauenkirche, Klemperer observed that the roads seemed empty, and now he and Eva made their way to the courtyard that held the entrance to the ‘Jews’ cellar’. Before they reached it, there was a vast explosion. The professor crouched, clutching a wall; a few moments later, with the booms of detonations elsewhere, he moved, turned, looked up – and could not see his wife. Assuming that she had gone down into the cellar ahead of him, Klemperer found the entrance, walked down the steps and took in a crowd of frightened faces. He scanned the dark cellar for his wife; but he could still see no trace of her. A moment later there came a crash and a flare of brightness and once again there were figures ready with water and a stirrup pump. The professor was desperate to find his wife; he started to back out of the cellar and into the courtyard. He recalled that he did not actually feel afraid at this point, more exhausted. And he speculated that it was because he was anticipating the end. Another vast crash and he felt a searing pain above his eye. His immediate impulse was to feel for the eyeball itself. ‘It was still there,’ he stated simply. But alongside the pain and the disorientation was now something new: as he looked at the streets, he no longer recognized them. The fire and the colossal damage were such that the city appeared to have been disassembled.
For Lothar Rolf Luhm in the Taschenberg Palace shelter, this fresh bombardment was worse than the first. ‘Again and again, we heard the cracking,’ he recalled. ‘Again and again, the walls trembled, even the ground under our feet seemed to tremble.’ A bomb landed closer. ‘The fire was so strong that it blew open a steel door,’ he remembered. ‘It got very hot and the air became scarce. My eyes burned. I couldn’t recognize anything. I thought that we were all going to burn.’7 And even in this comparatively well-built shelter, there seemed to be a sense of the clean air disappearing. Luhm, his vision dimming, recalled moving around, trying to find places where he might breathe more comfortably. The lights were on, but because of his painful eyes and gradually occluding vision, he seemed more aware of darkness. In the corners of the cellar were others who had managed to get in before the larger fires had filled the streets. At his approach they looked up but said nothing. Luhm found that he could not speak to them either; all just stared mutely as the frequent crashes from above shot through every nerve. Luhm found himself holding his breath, and the bombardment seemed to him without end. He and his fellow shelterers were now existing in a separate corner of time; unable to distinguish seconds, minutes, hours. The grand building above him had been all but annihilated.
In one of the cellar tunnels near the Elbe, Norbert Bürgel and his uncle had found shelter just a short while before the second raid began; their ordeal had a sensory violence. ‘The floor rose,’ he remembered, as bombs fell nearby; mortar was shaken from the walls and from the ceiling. There were frightened calls for sand; an outer shelter door, smouldering with thickening smoke, needed to be extinguished before the fire took a serious grip. In the pale yellow light of the ceiling bulb the grey fog of choking smoke spread to fill the room, leading to a number of people trying to push back into the cellar beyond, fearful that the oxygen was running out. They were met by others emerging from those passageways having themselves been pushed from the opposite direction, for deeper in that maze the air had in places been almost completely sucked out. The brickwork itself was beginning to smoulder with the heat radiating from the vast infernos above. And so it was, with bombs booming outside, that Bürgel and his uncle now found themselves caught in a brick chamber between those trying to get to the river and those trying to retreat from it. The chamber was, he recalled, very crowded. Yet somehow the infection of panic did not spread: he and those around him managed to stay calm.8
Just before those emissaries with the hand-held sirens had hurried through the passable streets, Gisela Reichelt and her mother had left their shelter south of the railway station and were surveying the hot rubble in the street outside their home when they were greeted by Gisela’s grandfather, Herr Thieme. Her grandparents lived near the city centre and, in the reverberating aftermath of the first bombing, Herr Thieme had manoeuvred his way past the burning station and up the gentle incline towards their apartment block. Even before that second wave of bombers, the chances of survival in that furnace citadel had been poor. He simply wanted to know that they were alive before turning back to the cathedrals of flame that were dominating the skyline to be with his wife. Thieme returned to his house near the Kreuzkirche and joined Gisela’s grandmother, sheltering in the cellar as the air filled with the deep choral music of the new approaching attack. And then their house was ‘hit hard’. It seemed to the old couple that the entire property was going to collapse in on them, perhaps trapping them in that brick chamber beyond rescue, so even as the raid continued they now scrambled up the cellar steps, energized by terror, desperate to get outside. On the threshold of the street, Gisela’s grandmother was hit by some falling burning material that her granddaughter was convinced was phosphorus.9 The flaming substance was more likely to have been an incendiary stick, or jellied petroleum from another sort of incendiary, or wood, or some other material, or fabric, but whatever it was it clung close to the old lady and set her clothes alight. Gisela’s grandmother burned to death. Herr Thieme, who had been a matter of seconds behind his wife, similarly fell victim to some other flaming debris and was blinded.
Some impulse made the old man walk away from the burning corpse of his wife. Stumbling through the intensely hot rubble, he used the muscle memory of his local area to move sightless through those flaming streets. Such a situation is difficult now to envisage or even comprehend; the wind rushing into the central inferno – suffocating, sparkling with bright embers – would have been soughing at over a hundred miles per hour; even those who were fit were finding it difficult to stay upright, let alone move. Some felt themselves being pulled by a hideous and implacable force towards the vortex, having to crouch down and brace themselves against its lethal attraction. Along narrow streets of tall buildings, their windows blank, brickwork blackened, tumbled burning debris in the fast-moving wind – the remains of domestic furniture, fragments of rubber and wood from cars, burning branches from fallen trees all being sucked into the great onrush. There were citizens in the midst of this trying desperately to hold on to lamp posts in order to escape the inferno’s anti-gravitational pull, but the lamp posts themselves were scorching to the touch. It was into this burning wilderness of night that the newly widowed, newly blinded old man walked.
Gisela would discover all this only very much later; her own immediate ordeal was also harrowing. Mother and daughter were back down in the apartment-block basement with their neighbours. ‘No one could imagine coming out of this hell alive,’ she recalled. ‘What did a ten-year-old girl think about such terror? It’s hard to imagine what was going on inside me. But like the first attack, I was thinking: “How can you be so cruel?” I was full of fear and could not imagine that we would emerge from that cellar alive.’10 She and her heavily pregnant mother held each other tight, and they prayed. Yet the bombardment continued for so long that they gradually found that they could no longer speak; a form of torpor had gripped them both.
On the other side of the Elbe, Winfried Bielss, his mother and his friend Horst had been considering making another attempt to cross both the bridge and the city, to establish that Horst’s family was safe, as well as checking on Winfried’s cousins. Then came the hand-held warning and once again the trio withdrew to the basement, from where, just a few minutes later, the renewed noise of distant explosions could be heard. The boys – as with the first attack – initially imagined that the explosions were at last evidence of the city’s anti-aircraft defences coming into play: mighty guns trained on their airborne enemy, but they swiftly and with leaden hearts realized that that was not the case; that these bombers were in fact flying over with insolent ease.
There was a difference this second time, though: the bombers had widened their angle of attack slightly. The explosions were coming very much closer. Winfried was preternaturally attuned to the sinister symphony of the attack. ‘The explosions came closer and closer and louder and louder, the floor began to shake more and more perceptibly,’ he recalled. ‘Before the explosions we heard again the hissing of the falling bombs – the metallic beats that may have come from flying bomb fragments or from the effect of firebombing on stone. In our area, many incendiary bombs either burned out without danger or became deeply stuck in the ground.’11 He was interested in the ‘small propellers’ on the incendiaries that would have given them a rotating motion and a distinctive sound. This, however, was only the start. The larger explosions grew closer yet.
The basement area had a sort of hallway, where they were crouching, and now they looked up as a mighty force smashed remaining windows and battered doors. Bielss recalled that, in the case of their own apartment, they had left the doors deliberately ajar, thinking it might mitigate the effects of the surge in air pressure and the destructive blast waves. But now the impacts were so close that the pressure of these waves could be felt compressing his eardrums and, even more distressingly, pushing down on his lungs. Dust cascaded from the basement walls; the air became immediately stuffy and breathing became noticeably and increasingly difficult. ‘The electric light flickered,’ recalled Bielss, ‘but it did not go out.’ And now the incendiaries and the bombs acquired a new quality of music; from that basement, it seemed that the night air was ‘singing’, ‘whistling’ and ‘hissing’.12 The explosions that followed were so deep that it felt as though his ears had been cracked. The aural effect completely surrounded the three of them; they sensed not only the bombs nearby, but those far away too. As for many others sheltering in basements throughout the city, time became an impossible abstraction; the passing of it could not be perceived. There was another extraordinary aural recollection: as they flew closer the baritone hum of the bombers was transformed into a high-pitched ‘howl’, and the sound of their engines changed register as soon as the heavy ordnance was released; suddenly the note sprang higher as the lightened planes likewise shot forward and upward.
Another shattering crash: it was clear that the apartments next door had been hit. The boys listened to doors and glass crashing down the central stairwell; the building seeming to undulate on its foundations, and from the next-door basement came the increasing sounds of panicked occupants convinced that the structure was about to implode in on them. The door in the wall between the two basements – installed, as in the Altstadt cellars, as a precaution – was tried and then opened. And as the neighbours peered through, with them came the heat: the block above was open to the burning sky, and to that lethal wind that now came rushing through the basement. The boys and the other residents took fright at the prospect of white-hot incendiaries landing on and setting fire to their own roof, and it was decided – even as the bombers continued to roar overhead – to make a fast search of the floors above. According to Bielss, the claustrophobic basement now started to look like a welcoming alternative, but it had to be done. The floor beneath crunched with glass, and as he and his neighbours moved up the stairs through the darkened block, they closed any windows that weren’t rendered completely beyond repair by the blasts. And as they did so, the fire in the distant sky grew higher.
The temperature change was apparent even inside the fast-moving planes above as the conflagration centred in the Altstadt rose an estimated mile into the sky. The bomber crews were flying through an extreme phenomenon of physics: an electrically charged firestorm. It was so far beyond any human capacity to assimilate that it is little wonder that later, back in their bases in the cool grey of morning, so many airmen could not find words to describe what they had witnessed.
Below, the oxygen was being pulled into the heart of the inferno, sent skywards with the shrunken, desiccated body parts and the pulverized debris. The roads were melting and burning; the cobbles were seething. Even a mile away, the great inrush sucked insistently at Marielein Erler as she searched for her husband Georg; when the second air attack came, he had been inspecting properties a couple of streets away for damage and was forced to take cover in the nearest shelter he could find. His anguish at being separated from his wife was possibly more acute than any other anxiety he felt during the bombardment. He knew that she had been checking on friends in their immediate neighbourhood; had she found shelter herself? Herr Erler was in a narrow cellar with some refugees and local residents.13 He had thought that this part of the city could never have been a target for anyone: there were no important strategic sites or factories or railway stations among these smart villas. But still the bombs came and the masonry ‘quivered’.
His wife Marielein was, in fact, nearby, having managed to get underground just in time. She had thought the worst was past, but now she sat rigid as the hammer blows struck again in relentless repetition. One mother sitting amid the bare bricks was holding her toddler tight and crooning reassurance: ‘Steppi, be calm, they will not hurt you.’ Frau Erler recalled her wonder at this sentiment as the walls around them threatened to burst. Then, as happened in so many other places, the interconnecting door – the breakthrough – that connected with the maze beyond suddenly slammed open. Through it flocked a panicked throng, fleeing from a cellar a little further along the way that had been filled with winter fuel. As the fires hungrily licked through, the store of coal and wood was billowing smoke, heat and sparks which followed the crowd through the breakthrough, making the air in Frau Erler’s shelter unbreathable. No matter what was happening above, they all simply had to get out; there was no chance of survival down there.
Through an exit framed with flames they emerged into the night air as the bombers above continued to fly towards the unearthly light. ‘This sight!’ recalled Frau Erler. ‘This hell on earth!’ She looked out on what had once been an upmarket neighbourhood: now it was a prospect of blazing houses, falling walls and torn roads. It was ‘a mad firestorm’. But worse was the obscenity of the corpses: the streets were littered with the dead. As the minutes passed and the bombers flew off into the night, Frau Erler and her friend Frau Jung, rather than retreating into darkness, felt impelled to walk up the road to the street in which they lived, holding each other for support both physical and moral. She recalled being ‘full of fear’ before, in one curious heartbeat, she was suddenly alive with elation as she rounded a corner and happened across her husband, who had left his own shelter at around the same time. That moment was, extraordinarily, one of the happiest of her life. ‘I was not alone any more,’ she remembered. ‘I was able to cry out my grief and shed my tears with my husband, who was in deep shock with me.’
They moved on to Striesener Plaza, now pitted with fiery craters, many houses around them glowing wrecks. She described the very air in that once handsome residential square as ‘terrible’ and ‘brittle’, and what was now ‘a howling storm’ blew in their faces, with all the hideous eye-burning hazard of sparks and embers. There were ‘wailing people, crying children’. The Erlers were sitting on a tree that had collapsed earlier; near them was ‘an old couple from Silesia’. The Erlers made a movement to get up and the refugees begged them to stay: they ‘did not know Dresden’ and ‘did not know where to go’.
Were it not for that second wave, Helmut Voigt might have spent the night simply staring at the changing colours in the sky. Before that attack had begun, he was with his mother back in their apartment in the south-west of the city, gazing out of the window in silence, and it was he who heard the faint sound of the hand-held siren. ‘My mother did not believe me at first,’ he recalled.14 He made her listen; the howling was being ineffectually amplified by a speaker mounted on a nearby water tower. Quickly they gathered themselves, left the flat, and went to alert their neighbours. The landing was illuminated in the reflected glare of the fires. Their designated shelter in the cellar of the nearby brewery was a few hundred yards away. Even as the residents hurried, they could hear the resonant low note of the approaching bombers. Everything ‘went very fast’, recalled Voigt.
The bombs began to fall as they were starting their descent into the gloom; the cellar was dimly lit only by emergency lighting. More and more people were running in off the street and trying to push their way down into the shelter. Young mothers trying to bring prams down the concrete stairs had to resist the weight of the people pressing behind them. The cellar had two levels and people were having to squeeze into the lower one to make room above for the frightened new arrivals. Voigt and his mother were among them. He remembered the emergency lighting ‘flickering’, threatening to plunge them all into darkness. From above came the hollow booms; the sense of the ground shivering. Yet as they moved into that deeper cellar, the higher floor now packed, Voigt experienced a curious sensation. They were now cut off from the noise of the world outside. He and his fellow shelterers felt oddly detached as they spread out in that industrial semi-darkness.
Then the light went out. The darkness was total, and there was little to be done but to endure. There was no panic, more a sense of helpless suspension. Then the light flickered back on again. Perhaps, however claustrophobic the conditions, these deep cellars seemed to many a comforting sanctuary, for when an air-raid warden made his way down the stairs unexpectedly and told everyone that they had to leave, and quickly, there was, Voigt recalled, a sense of astonishment which now had the effect of ‘rousing’ people from their positions. The shelterers were directed to a secondary stairwell and told they had to get out of there fast, for their own safety. But a swift evacuation was impossible at speed. Those mothers with prams and infants, the frail elderly with their clutched luggage, all slowed progress to a crawl.
Again and again the crowd halted on the concrete steps; no one could edge forward, no one could see anything beyond the heads up front. Still, though, there was no sense of panic, more a form of silent stress. When eventually they reached the top, they saw the reason for their evacuation. The shelter was next to a large coal store; if incendiaries had set the coal ablaze, those below would have been slowly and certainly suffocated as the smoke poured in. Under the pulsatingly bright sky, and with the planes apparently having all passed over, Voigt and his mother hurried to inspect their apartment block; it had suffered damage and small fires blazed in several of the flats. The residents made their way indoors, determined to extinguish them. Helmut ran to fill their bathtub, intending to take buckets of water up to the roof to extinguish the incendiaries there. With their sole safe shelter now deemed too dangerous to use, this practical activity might have kept their minds off the terrible possibility of yet more bombs falling.
Near the university, Mischka Danos and his companion had left their sheltering crater as the bombs fell closer and closer. The nearby abandoned anti-aircraft emplacement had a concrete bunker attached. After a struggle to get the doors open, the physicist and his friend found cool shelter. They were quickly joined in that darkness by others, all strangers and all women, mothers and teenage daughters who seemed to have arrived there quite casually, but who must in truth have been walking through burning streets in shock. One young woman complained that she had left many of her favourite gloves behind. Another was anxious about a diamond ring that she had failed to take with her.15 Danos was outraged, later recalling that he was stunned by the number of conversations he overheard concerning the loss of expensive stockings. But perhaps these comically tiny miseries were being voiced as a means of shutting out deeper shock, since he also noted that there were many others who did not utter a word during the bombing or its aftermath. The horror had overtaken them.
The very idea of minor materialistic complaints lay far beyond the reach of countless other Dresdeners. Before the sky had been criss-crossed with more bombers, the fires had already forced great numbers of both citizens and refugees alike from the choking streets, past the Hygiene Museum and into the sylvan cool of the Great Garden, walking deeper into the shadows cast by the eerie artificial sunset. In the centre of this vast grand park stood the rather beautiful baroque Summer Palace, an eighteenth-century construction. Here too was an exquisite and scientifically important botanical garden containing rare plants in small greenhouses and, inside its main building, a scientific library holding many antique manuscripts. Past this building walked the strange, silent, ghostly procession of forms moving as far into the woods as they could. Some tree-tops and high branches were already burning; floating, questing embers from the Altstadt having come to rest on dry bark.
When the second wave of bombers came over, all those below in the Great Garden were completely exposed. As explosives and eye-dazzling incendiaries fell in all directions, the dark air suddenly filled with the bright white flowers of detonation. Manicured parkland became peppered with great bowls of smoking earth, hundreds of them, stretching a mile back, containing smashed bone and flesh and viscera; people were either physically annihilated on the spot by direct hits or transformed into flickering torches by the savagely burning timber around them. The Summer Palace received some of the heavy bombs; it was demolished in a frenzy of sparks and flames as bright as the sun. And those refugees who had instinctively turned to this inner-city woodland for protection were now trapped in a savage forest fire, the air a new cocktail of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, benzene and nitrogen oxide.
The zoo also received direct hits. The animals suffered atrociously: there were gibbons whose paws were sheared off, leaving them with bloody stumps; hippopotamuses in their pool, hit by falling debris, were pressed under the water and drowned. The elephant house caved in, the blast wave and the sharp debris knocking one animal onto its back, its stomach torn open. The other elephants were ‘screaming’.16 The lions were for now unharmed, but the zookeepers understood that the risk of further bombs freeing them and driving them in a frenzy into the night meant they would have to be shot. A giraffe had already escaped from its bombed enclosure and galloped off. The screeches from the zoo sounded nauseously disorientating to those in the burning woods beyond; who was to tell which cry was animal and which human?
There was similar distress on the other side of the river, both on the banks of the Elbe and in the compound of the Sarrasani circus: in the open air, as the bombs and incendiaries fell, some of the performing horses were torn terribly by shrapnel. And the main Sarrasani theatre, which had survived the first raid almost intact, was now hit squarely with explosives; the great dome was penetrated and the supremely combustible material within – the plush seating, the matting, the wooden struts, the curtains – was brushed by the falling incendiaries and caught light instantly. Those who had retreated once more to the theatre’s underground bar no longer felt safe with the structure above so gravely damaged, but they at least had alternative exits. The circus animals in their compound had no chance to escape the flames. The tigers’ keepers looked on with horror as they realized they could do nothing but let their beautiful charges burn alive.
The implacable inferno in the Altstadt was now claiming victims who just a short while beforehand might have thought that they would be spared; those nine-foot deep reservoirs in the central Altmarkt square were already bobbing with corpses. The water level was well below the edge and there was no purchase to be had on the steep concrete sides to enable anyone to haul themselves out. No access ladder was provided, nor anything else that could have helped the exhausted water treaders to pull themselves up. Some of those who drowned had – in their scrabbling desperation – tried to hold on to others, but had only succeeded in dragging them down too. And among those who held on, repeatedly and fruitlessly reaching up that vertical stretch of concrete, the struggle cannot have continued for very much longer. In other reservoirs nearby, the hazards were even more unexpected. In one, so many people had jumped in that they had now become somehow immovably wedged together. In another, the violent heat of the firestorm and the debris made the water hotter and hotter; those who had lost consciousness could not have hoped to survive this braising of their organs.
And there were still those who, having found the poisonous, sweltering cellars beyond endurance, emerged at street level into a vast smelting furnace: a fire that was now wrenching at anything that could be pulled up high into that fast-swirling tornado. One young woman saw a mother struggling down a blazing street with her baby; and watched how the baby was snatched in a split second up into the white-hot flames. There were others now condemned to death by their shoes, which melted or simply caught fire in the bubbling black tar of the roads, leaving their feet unshod, blistered and swiftly scorched; they fell to their knees and hands, which also instantly burned, immobilizing them.17 Some died where they were, others were drawn upwards by that preternatural wind. Still others died on the spot; already comprehensively starved of oxygen, they had suffocated as they tried to walk.
A few thousand yards could be the difference between death and survival. There were tall, gaunt alleys – windows belching fire – where the heat was now so concentrated that clothes self-combusted, yet just beyond the Altstadt, along the slightly wider, newer roads that pointed to the suburbs, there were still stragglers walking, some with more purpose than others. A few were making their way towards medical help, with the additional hope that the hospitals themselves might offer sanctuary. Within the large Friedrichstadt hospital – which itself had been damaged – conditions were continually teetering on the edge of shutdown.
Dr Fromme and his team were doing what they could to bring relief to those who had been hideously burned. He recalled that one doctor went missing, never to be seen again.18 On the wards, the power failed, making it very difficult to work in the semi-darkness of emergency lighting. There were problems with the water supply too, which was becoming intermittent. Fires that had broken out in the cellars had to be contained and sectioned off. The lack of power and fresh water left instruments unsterilized and wounded patients literally parched. The bombers had dissolved back into the night, but they had destroyed the world outside the hospital grounds, leaving it in the most acutely vulnerable position. Where were fresh supplies to come from? Not merely the ordinary items of sustenance, but medicines, and in particular, painkillers. In a letter to his family written soon afterwards, Dr Fromme did not say precisely how he and his colleagues were able to alleviate the agonies of his patients. The walking wounded, by some accounts, were in an almost robotic state, pulsing with adrenaline. It seems that the nurses and doctors were too; Dr Fromme related how everyone worked all through that terrible night.
In the early hours, he could not yet know how many friends he had lost; how many neighbours. He was certain that the family’s dog, Elko, had perished, after the animal had run off into the night, barking at the bombs, never to be seen again. ‘I hope he had a gentle death,’ he said later.19 Dr Fromme also knew that his home was in ruins. There were family portraits, disintegrated by the flames; gone too was his extensive medical library, of which he had been extremely proud. In addition, the manuscript of a new medical monograph that he had been working on had burned. He – and everyone around him – had had their lives reduced to raw constituents: homeless, with the precious tokens of their pasts dissolved. Yet amid the fundamental uncertainty they were alive.
In a hospital on the other side of the city, conditions and cases were more extreme: the Johannstadt hospital had an extensive maternity wing. The second wave of bombers had dropped many of their explosives shy of the city centre and they had landed here, in this inner eastern suburb. The hospital itself had received serious hits; yet now, as the firestorm rose, it was one of the few buildings in the area left standing.
This hospital, like all other Dresden institutions, had underground shelters, to which many patients had been evacuated with the first warning. As the night had developed, however, there were some, mothers with newborn babies among them, who had the uncontrollable compulsion to get out of the hospital altogether. A few of them, wrapped in nightgowns, blankets, coats had already swaddled their newborns and hurried out of their wards and into the open, towards the Carolabrücke, crossing to the Elbe meadows where the air, even though thick with floating fingers of ash, at least had oxygen that could be breathed. The accompanying keen drizzle was an insignificant discomfort in comparison.
Back at the hospital, people moved like somnambulists towards the gates in the wake of the second wave; refugees who had been trying to find shelter. Dorothea Speth, one of Dresden’s tiny community of Mormons, recalled how one couple had been walking up the road with the fires dancing around them. Suddenly, it was as though the man had spontaneously combusted; he collapsed, enveloped in flame.20 Frau Speth attributed this extraordinary death to a form of invisible phosphorus that caught light as soon as anyone trod upon it, but the real explanation was somehow even ghastlier: just the accident of wearing dry clothes, with the air dancing with the orange orbs of embers, was to invite immolation.
As at Friedrichstadt, it is hard to conceive how doctors, nurses and orderlies were able to continue functioning with water running dry in taps, lights waveringly uncertain and burned people arriving from the blazing streets looking for sanctuary as much as treatment. A pervasive smell of scorched fabric, the raw, dark colours of scalded flesh, the multiple layers of pain. Margot Hille had a great-aunt who lived close to the Altstadt who somehow survived when everyone else in her shelter perished. She had severe burns; again attributed to ‘phosphorus’.21
In Johannstadt, as in much of the city, the landscape had been violently rearranged. Roads had been obliterated, familiar shopping streets reduced to stumps like grey broken teeth, the ashy ground around littered with bodies that were either whole or dismembered, clothed or naked. Yet even this diorama of death did not convey all that those 796 bombers had achieved across those two raids. There were Dresdeners still, at some distance, who were now witness to an apparent upturning of the laws of physics.
One of these was Victor Klemperer. With the second wave of bombers, and the wound to his head, which bled great gouts, he had lost sight of his wife Eva in the crowds near the trees of Brühl’s Terrace overlooking the Elbe. All was elemental confusion; at one point he stumbled into a public telephone kiosk in an effort to be free of the flying sparks that were making it so painful to see; then he was recognized by an acquaintance. Some brilliant quicksilver instinct had told the professor to cover up the yellow star on his coat and then taken him on to the historic riverside terrace forbidden to Jews.22 All Klemperer could think about was Eva: how had he lost her, and what had become of her? Those milling on that stone-flagged terrace appeared to be on the frontier between two worlds: the Dresden of night, with its rippling river and cool drizzly wind and, not more than a few hundred yards away, the airless, pitiless, unsurvivable landscape of fire. For Klemperer, time could be neither felt nor calculated. His acquaintance, seeing his bleeding head, extemporized a bandage for him; the professor did not seem aware of pain. Behind him, the creaking of rafters, the sharp percussion of cracking stone. In the Neumarkt, upon which stood the Frauenkirche, gutters and pipes had melted, the liquid metal joining with the viscous boiling tar. The church itself had somehow not been hit, but, already, its eight sandstone foundation pillars were radiating heat.
On the other side of the river, Horst Schaffel looked across at the city and the shimmering column of light. His friend Winfried Bielss still had his mother, at least; Horst had no idea if any of his family, who lived in the midst of that ghastly light, were alive, or whether he still had a home. The boy ran down towards a burning municipal building near the Carolabrücke; the few soldiers that were still in the area told him flatly that the bridge was a ruin and could not be crossed. Similarly, Margot Hille and Gisela Reichelt in the south of the city were aching with worry about relatives living in and around Johannstadt. Thousands of Dresdeners were taking comfort, however small, in the fact that this dreadful night must surely soon be at an end. But thanks to the colossal quantities of grey and black smoke that filled the valley of the Elbe, there would be no proper dawn over Dresden that morning.