As the night drew to its close, ever more people lost – or were losing – their sight. For Marielein Erler, itching became pain, almost fittingly at the point when, having spent her entire adult life surrounded by objects of beauty, she was now obliged to gaze upon the most extraordinary obscenity. Long after the last repercussions of the bombs had been felt, and with the air still dense with flecks of matter, she and Georg picked their way along shattered pavements past the scorched structures of burned-out houses, some still issuing flames. They saw along the way ‘large numbers of dead people’.1 The corpses were mostly naked and burned beyond recognition. Twice they saw the bodies of pregnant women whose bellies had somehow been opened to reveal their unborn children.
Of course, their own home was almost unrecognizable too; some odd compulsion made the pair go into the garden, where their carefully tended flower beds were buried under debris. At the back was a wire cage in which the neighbours had kept pet rabbits: the creatures were now simply ‘charred lumps’. Marielein Erler’s eyes were now seriously troubling her. She and her husband decided that they were going to walk to the home of her elderly aunt Else, who lived a little way out of the city centre in a suburb where the firestorm had not reached. They did so under an iron-dark sky, filled with the hot dust of charred debris, and along roads upon which ash had fallen like snow. They moved out into air that flowed more cleanly, and gradually away from the sight and the smell of burning. As they got there, they saw that the old lady’s house had been hit too, but it was not on fire, and Aunt Else herself was perfectly unharmed. ‘She greeted us with tears and hugs,’ recalled Frau Erler.2 By this time, she could hardly bear to open her eyes. ‘I asked for a handkerchief and some water,’ she remembered. ‘I had to cool my eyes.’ But a water pipe somewhere must have been shattered; none was coming from the taps. In some desperation, Frau Erler went to ask a neighbour, but all the woman had was some dirty water in a large pan. She tried to rest her eyes by sleeping, but they were no better for a short rest. She and her husband decided to return home. Hopefully they and their neighbours could band together and help one another.
Something similar was happening to the vision of Lothar Rolf Luhm. He and the others had emerged from the cellar of the Taschenberg Palace; miraculously, its entrance had not been blocked by the wreckage of the building above. It was difficult for them to know whether the sun had risen, as thick smoke filled the sky. As he and several companions explored the still creaking, cracking city, there were flames suddenly breaking out of house ruins, turning shards of glass into flying blades, the glow of fires in churches and the silent, pale rubble of what once had been narrow roads that were now wholly unrecognizable. Luhm’s unsteady steps, his ever-blurring sight, would have made this walk slow. Yet the group managed to find the wider avenues and cross the remnants of the Altstadt towards the Great Garden. They would have passed the Altmarkt, the bodies within the reservoir now discoloured and beginning to bloat. Luhm and his party picked their way through snaking tram cables, long severed; there was the wreckage of a tram in the road amid other debris. Luhm recalled that it was full of ‘women, children and soldiers’ who all ‘looked as though they were asleep’.
They reached the Great Garden, the clumps of the oaks and the lindens stretching for a mile, blasted and split and felled and blackened, the craters deep and decapitated bodies and torsos flung everywhere. It might have suggested to a scientifically inclined observer some kind of multiple meteorite strike: the grass and the soil and trees punched and wrenched and scattered by vast forces. As Luhm observed, there was an illusory and chilling peace about many of the corpses: women and children who at first glance seemed unharmed. Yet this was where his own vision was faltering badly; his eyes were darkening. Luhm did also notice, though, that they were not alone among the living; moving around the bodies were people who seemed intent upon giving aid, even in this haunted landscape. ‘Volunteers were everywhere, helping where possible,’ he recalled.3
Among his companions were his soldier friend Günther and a mother and daughter who had been with them in the palace basement. It was decided that the men would go with the mother and daughter in search of their relatives who lived a few miles away, in the countryside. But Luhm was functionally blind and none of them had any idea which direction to head in. A volunteer medical orderly checked Luhm’s eyes and proclaimed that he was suffering from nothing more than a temporary form of ‘smoke poisoning’. The daughter took Luhm’s hand and began to guide him as the little group now picked its way through rubble in search of an undamaged bridge across the river, and the road out into the chill, open landscape beyond.
At around the same time, Mischka Danos was also drawing close to the burning timber of the Great Garden; he’d felt at first when he’d left the sheltering bunker as though he was walking in his sleep. The wider avenue near the central railway station was easy to negotiate – strewn with brick and rubble and glass, there was none the less a path through – but with the narrower streets of the Altstadt, everything changed; here were hot boulders that had to be climbed. Danos at one point saw a little boy, no more than five years old, lying by a fence, looking as though he was sleeping. This was the first entire corpse that he had encountered. Other glimpses had been fragments of humanity: a leg and a foot jutting from under bricks, a mass of hair attached to an unseen head that was submerged beneath blackened stone. There was a kind of cumulative effect in all of this; the young man, who had originally been impelled by curiosity to see what had happened to the city, was now at last beginning to feel fear.4 The reaction might have been delayed but that did not diminish its intensity. It was there, deep down, like a flickering fire taking hold. His walk continued, taking him, directionless, towards the river and the Neustadt beyond.
Not far from where Danos had been sheltering, the grandfather of ten-year-old Gisela Reichelt was walking in that twilight morning; with the streets and alleys he had known all his life reduced to their constituent stone and dust, navigation would have been difficult enough, but now he was also entirely blind. Yet he still walked. Miraculously there were others, able-bodied, moving through the coagulating dust, who saw and came to his help. Slowly and carefully the old man with his streaming, sightless eyes was taken to the Johannstadt hospital. None there would be able to cure him but there he would at least find comfort and reassurance. His granddaughter and her mother, meanwhile, were some distance away. The nerve-stretching stress of the night had not ended for them as the last of the bombers echoed away: first, the main entrance to their cellar was blocked with intense flames and a pavement window had to be broken to allow all the residents to climb out. Gisela’s mother was two weeks away from giving birth. Then, having successfully climbed away from these flames, they were greeted, on that dark street, with an unending prospect of fire.5
Their own home was destroyed; there was no possibility of return. All that could be done was for the pregnant woman and her daughter to negotiate the still-sticky tarmac, the collapsing wreckage from tall residential buildings, the throat-clinging dust. On top of this, somehow Gisela’s mother had to find means of distracting her daughter from the twisted, naked mummies, coated with ash. The answer was to run, or at least to move as fast as they could. There was an aunt who lived a few streets to the south, in a rather smart suburb with elegant apartment buildings; these were in flames, but the aunt was safe.
They all went to check on Gisela’s other grandparents, on her father’s side, who lived close to the university, again on a tree-lined street with villas and apartment blocks in a style suggestive of France. Now, every property was either ablaze or simply gutted. But her grandparents, having emerged from their own basement, were also safe, and they decided to move on as a group. There was no coherent plan; their volition seemed mainly based on fear. They all moved ‘without actually knowing where to go’.6
They were not alone. Other figures were moving through the broken streets, the underlying impulse clearly to get out into the fields and woods beyond the town. They and Gisela’s family were as cut off and as vulnerable as any medieval inhabitants of a long-besieged village. They had been bombed out of the twentieth century, and out of the modern age.
As Horst set out with Winfried Bielss and his mother from their basement just before dawn, the boy still had no means of knowing the fate of his family. The teenager left his companions and pointed himself east, in the direction of the Loschwitz crossing some three miles upriver, a turn-of-the-century suspension bridge colloquially referred to as the Blue Wonder. This symbol of Dresden’s engineering genius still stood. But as the boy crossed, and picked his way through the eastern suburbs towards the shattered remains of Johannstadt, this was his last trace of reassurance. He reached his family home to find simply a burned-out void. There was no trace of his parents. He had with him a notebook, and he left a brief message wedged into what remained of the house’s front porch. Then Horst retraced his steps through the skeletal streets to the Blue Wonder. Crossing back to the east side, he climbed the hill and entered the clean, rain-laundered darkness of Dresden Heath, the forest that lay on the edge of the city. He picked his way through miles of trees and eventually reached the home of some relatives who lived in a small village.
Some knew precisely how horrific the sights would be, including civic officials, railway personnel and indeed Dr Fromme’s fifteen-year-old son, Friedrich-Carl, who was approaching the ruined railway station under that dark morning sky.7 The glass roof and the proud glass dome had been shattered; platforms, and the trains standing at them, had also been hit. Fires still burned; heat continued to radiate from the concrete of the platforms. There were a few bloodied, dismembered bodies on this upper level. It was also obvious that the lower levels, the darkened tunnels and corridors, had become a mass tomb. Some bodies were crushed, victims of panic, others had split open. And there were more yet of people who had found their way into the station’s bomb-proof air-raid shelters and then simply run out of air and suffocated where they sat. Some had baked, as the ambient temperature rose ineluctably in the fires. If Friedrich-Carl had been hoping to administer any kind of aid, it is difficult to know quite where he would have begun; the initial horrified estimates of mortality were numbered at 3,000. All these people, many of them rural refugees, had died in and around one tunnel. But such numbers, in any case, could only be understood on the most detached level; what could quantification have mattered to those who gazed upon those underground passages stuck fast with corpses?
Friedrich-Carl reported back to Dr Fromme, who was still working at the hospital. There were now more soldiers in evidence too; after the anarchy of the fire, the compulsion to restore order was strong and indeed, at the hospital, the military were proving to be of solid practical assistance to the doctor, providing trucks so that patients might be transferred to smaller, undamaged clinics and hospitals in the suburbs and countryside around the town. This was critical; without reliable supplies of electricity and water – and with finite stocks of painkillers, dressings and sterile instruments – there was only so much Dr Fromme and his large team could do. On top of this, some outbuildings, including the laundry, the dental clinic and the gynaecological unit, had been irreparably damaged by the bombs. As soon as he could, Dr Fromme requested a lift from a military truck to go and inspect the facilities of several small clinics in the surrounding area; this would also be a chance to give staff at these establishments an idea of the challenges they were going to face: the wet flesh around the discoloured burns, the smoke inhalation, the widespread damage to eyes.
Elsewhere in the city it was as though ghosts had returned. Margot Hille’s great-uncle Hermann had been on a train approaching the main station just moments before the first wave of bombers came over. Now in that ambiguous time before the feeble first light, Hermann presented himself upon the doorstep of his brother, Margot’s grandfather. Great-Uncle Hermann was wearing a suit that was not his and unfamiliar shoes. He explained that ‘the burning train had been driven out of the station’.8 There were few details, other than that in the fires of that night Hermann had lost his clothes, yet had somehow found the wherewithal to acquire more. His brother, who had emerged from the sheltering cellar to check that his bombed house was not being ransacked, agreed to take him in; faced with this surreal sight, it is difficult to imagine how he might have done otherwise.
Yet thousands of others suffered the opposite of that consolation. Margot Hille’s aunt, who lived quite close to the Altstadt, had lost contact with her daughter in the panic of that night; now in the dusk that should have been day, she was walking through the seething ash and still glowingly hot scattered bricks and stones of those ruined passages and alleys, in the hope that somehow she might chance across the girl. Margot joined her repeated, neurotic sorties, and this was when the teenager glimpsed the true visceral impact of the attack upon the city: the burned corpses lying in the melted roads; far-scattered limbs; severed heads lolling on seared earth. All these were, at least, identifiable – not that this would have offered any comfort, but Margot Hille’s aunt could see no indication of her daughter either alive or dead. The air was not still; there were the reverberations of cracking, creaking, collapsing structures both near and in the distance and continual movement from others who had either come to claim the dead or to help those who miraculously still lived.
Elsewhere, having crossed the river, Mischka Danos delivered the ‘Karl May’ girl to the home of her family in a wooded suburb, a large house that still had windows intact. The girl’s parents showed an exhausted Danos upstairs and invited him to lie down upon one of the beds. He did not sleep long, and on waking felt compelled to return to the ruins. Near the rubble of Johannstadt he was confronted with what at first he thought was some sort of vision: walking down the broken street was a giraffe.9
On Brühl’s Terrace, Victor Klemperer, his eye and temple still painful from the shrapnel, was gazing as though hypnotized at the fires in the Altstadt behind him; before any suggestion of morning light, he had the impression of a tall tower glowing dull red, as well as all the ‘theatrical’ fires elsewhere.10 He himself was numbed, save to reflect occasionally that, having survived the night, it would be awful now to meet with some form of accident. Where was his wife? They had now been separated for hours. He trudged a little further towards the Elbe, to a small copse at the end of the terrace that overlooked the river and there, sitting on a suitcase, was Eva. They embraced hungrily, knowing that they had lost every material possession and that it did not matter.
Klemperer was desperate to know where she had been. In the bloody confusion of that second raid she had been pulled down into an ‘Aryan’ shelter. She had left quickly and then, once more in the smoke-billowing street, set out to find her husband. The force of the fires and the threat of falling debris – she too was hit on the head by some fragment that had detached from a burning building – forced her into shelter once more, this time beneath the Albertinum, which was housing the civic authorities. Eva was underground for some time, but again she could not bring herself to stay. She was a committed and determined cigarette smoker, and as she had emerged into the haze of that unnaturally hot night, facing the smouldering Arts Academy, she was twitching for tobacco. She had a packet of cigarettes on her; but no matches. Seeing something glowing on the black ground, she bent forward to light a cigarette from it. The glowing object was a burning corpse.
After this, she had moved off in the vague direction of the cooler air from the river; now she was reunited with her husband. In that semi-darkness, the exhaustion was so deep that they seemed not even able to recoil with full fright from sights that in normal circumstances would have made anyone start. Professor Klemperer recalled walking past a man who had had the top of his head removed, the interior of the skull ‘a dark bowl’. There was also a severed arm, with a perfect pale hand, untouched, as though made from wax. The elderly couple watched as, in that uncertain grey morning light, a sort of procession formed on the road that ran alongside the Elbe. Locals and refugees had become indistinguishable. There were people with handcarts with miscellaneous household items, others who were carrying boxes. Klemperer’s yellow star had long been removed. The couple met another resident from the Judenhaus, Herr Eisenmann. He had his small son by his side, but he told the Klemperers that he could not find his other loved ones. His eyes filled with tears as he indicated his little boy and told the Klemperers that the child would soon be asking for breakfast, and that he did not know what to give him.
Across the river, on the wide Elbe meadows, individuals – some in coats, some still in nightwear topped with blankets – walked to and fro, gazing at the burning fires pouring yet more smoke into the blackened sky. They were bewildered by the amputation of so many familiar towers and steeples; the dark-stoned Catholic cathedral, now imploded; the grand opera house, disfigured and levelled beyond recognition; the baroque Zwinger Palace, much of its delicacy annihilated. Among the dislocated citizens were the teenagers of the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls, who had rushed in from the relatively unharmed suburbs, anxious to help wherever they could. Of the Nazi hierarchy there appeared little sign. Naturally, there were soldiers and firemen and medics attempting to organize people who scarcely knew that they were still alive, but the senior Nazis were nowhere to be seen. Most especially, there was no appearance from the Gauleiter of Saxony to rally his people. Martin Mutschmann was notable by his continued absence as the city’s civic servants now tried to bring some measure of rationality to this shattered world. Neither, of course, was he present when just a very few hours later a renewed humming resonance sounded in the distance.