The arguments, blazing and bitter, had long ago moved beyond ethics; possibly even beyond strict rationality. The exquisite calculations of military actions were being replaced with something more haphazard, and quite regardless of human mortality. This was the exhaustion of global war; especially apparent in those who were still haunted by the century’s earlier conflict. But the idea that civilians could be legitimately targeted was not new. Three years previously, in 1942, Joseph Stalin had told Winston Churchill that British bombers should be targeting German houses as well as German industry. At the time, there were still those – especially among the American senior command – who believed that the fine distinction between military and civilian objectives was still possible, and indeed was morally necessary. But Churchill had not needed any such admonitions from Stalin: among senior British commanders and politicians, total war had already become an accepted fact. Before Stalin had made his views known, men such as the prime minister’s singular scientific adviser Lord Cherwell were insisting that bombing raids against Germany should aim to ‘de-house’ the populations of the great cities; by doing so, they would begin to paralyse the industry and infrastructure of the entire country.1 The term ‘de-housing’ had a calculatedly bland, technocratic flavour.
The most enthusiastic proponent of this idea was Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris of Bomber Command, whose name was to become inextricably intertwined with the fate of Dresden. A man whose only streak of sentimentality seemed to extend to beautiful rural landscapes and the farmers who tended them, Harris never had a flicker of doubt about the need to destroy German cities. He was wholly and blankly indifferent to the ultimate fates of the civilians who lived in them. Yet he could morally justify all of this with ease. In a talk he gave in 1942 he insisted that he was not interested in retribution for the havoc wreaked upon Britain by German bombers.2 This was, as he saw it, simply about bringing a swift end to the war; and he clung to this belief with religious fervour.
RAF Bomber Command was based among the green Chiltern hills thirty miles north-west of London. Twice-married Harris, whose fair hair was turning silver, operated out of a simple office adorned with a slender grandfather clock, a large desk with a single black telephone and an angled lamp, one wall featuring a painting of an evening landscape, another with a vast map of Europe, and a view from the window of thin poplar trees – a sharp contrast to the bright futurist modernism of the base’s control room. He was very sociable; on evenings when he could be pulled away from his desk, he and his wife Therese threw dinner parties in their nearby home for a variety of figures, including senior US air commanders and diplomats, who always wrote afterwards to thank them for their sparkling hospitality.3 Since Harris had taken over the command in 1942 at the age of fifty, he had succeeded in two urgent objectives: persuading the prime minister that the continued bombardment of German cities was just as vital as every other theatre of war (at a time when critics were arguing otherwise); and hugely increasing the numbers of aeroplanes and crew members, with attendant leaps in technological and engineering progress. His intensely combative nature, directed as much at those above him as below, was renowned; his terms of abuse – always articulate, sometimes darkly witty – were intended to draw blood. Any who expressed moral qualms or doubts about the work of Bomber Command was a Fifth Columnist.4
But perhaps one of the reasons for this ever-burning ferocity was the astounding number of airmen who had lost their lives under his and his predecessor’s command: to date some 50,000 crew members had been killed on raids, their bodies burning as they fell through dark skies. ‘There is no parallel in warfare to such courage and determination in the face of danger over so prolonged a period, of danger which at times was so great that scarcely one man in three could expect to survive his tour of thirty operations,’ wrote Harris.5 In addition to this, as Harris was later to point out, there were huge numbers of deaths in training; even among the skilled mechanics on east coast airbases, exposed around the clock to hard English winters, and working under such horrible pressure that they succumbed to diseases usually only found among the elderly.
Harris had been with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and his own moral compass had to an extent been set by the fields of blood below; he had remained in the RAF in those inter-war years, proving himself a brilliant and incisive organizer, as the service was wrestling to keep its independence from the army and navy, and his view of Germans, whether military or civilian, was unyieldingly hostile. Yet he denied that he wanted to see ‘terror bombing’; he claimed he had ‘never gone in for it’.6 The reasoning was perhaps a little icier than that dismissive expression: he was interested in ‘the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, the disruption of civilized community life’, but as a means of shortening conflict and forestalling further carnage. He simply did not regard death by bombing as the worst way to lose life. When his superiors, such as Chief of the Air Staff Sir Charles Portal, insisted upon the bombers being used instead for highly specific industrial targets, Harris’s already brittle patience would crack. He later stated that people who talked a lot about ‘individual small targets’ had clearly never given any thought to the ‘European climate’; and that people who said ‘that sort of thing’ had clearly ‘never been outside’ or ‘looked out of a window’.7 This was a view that might have either amused or simply startled the commander of the United States Army Air Force in Europe, Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz. Major General Spaatz’s ‘oil plan’ – sending hundreds of US planes from English airfields to fly in daylight across the continent, aiming at specific plants and refineries to disable German fuel supplies – was, especially in the autumn of 1944, accounted by others to have been a terrific success.
In early February 1945 Harris’s bombers – working in conjunction with the US Eighth Air Force – had been attacking what Harris dismissively termed ‘panacea targets’:8 largely synthetic-oil plants (which, when disabled, were far from fitting Harris’s description – the damage caused genuine difficulties to supply lines). On 3 February there was an attack on Dortmund, intended to demolish the benzol works there. Similar plants at Osterfeld and Gelsenkirchen were attacked without success, but there were other effective strategic missions flown in those days too. On 7 February, for example, the Allied armies were about to move through the dense woods of the Reichswald on the Dutch border when bomber planes attacked the German troops stationed in the towns of Goch and Kleve, smashing roads, severing railways and so opening paths for the Allied troops to capture and move through. Harris was convinced that the conflict was edging closer to the point that decisive raids – well-rehearsed patterns involving a thousand bombers, sweeping irresistibly in a never-ending line over cities – would make the German High Command buckle. This long-established principle of area bombing, carried out in many hundreds of raids from Essen to Hanover, Cologne to Hamburg, Mannheim to Magdeburg, was to choke cities with helpless refugees. This was the point at which ordinary daily civilization could simply disintegrate.
To some senior figures in RAF Bomber Command, cities such as Dresden were now simply coloured zones upon detailed maps, populaces presided over by fanatical authoritarians. By this stage of the war, there were few who cared to make the exact distinction between civilians and soldiers, between German culture and Nazi cultism. Few had the time to envisage the lives of ordinary people.
There was a widespread fondness in Dresden for trees; a rich variety were encouraged and grown all over the city. Rudi Warnatsch, a boy living with his mother in a residential block, recalled vividly that ‘the larger part of the courtyard was taken up with a cultivated garden. A magnificent chestnut tree and a linden tree were to be found there.’9 In one of the smarter suburbs to the east of the city, Marielein Erler adored ‘the great oaks and lindens’ that stood in the park near her house.10 Georg Frank’s parents had planted a peach tree in their garden. Professor Victor Klemperer and his wife Eva had been intensely attached for both sentimental and culinary reasons to the cherry tree that stood in their back garden.11 Its fruits came to symbolize the sweetness of the life that had been stolen from them.
In broader terms, the leafy streets and squares and courtyards reflected the unusual care that had been taken with the city’s infrastructure. This was a city in which even the lower-cost housing for the working classes was of good quality for its time. Part of the reason was that there was in Dresden a decades-long tradition of obsession with hygiene, the richer industrialists frightened of the diseases that could threaten their workforces. Thus, people in the denser suburbs near the Altstadt lived in neat, ordered flats: four- or five-storey apartment blocks with well-scrubbed stairwells. A little to the south of the city, the middle classes favoured more opulent apartments, some of which featured ‘winter garden’ heated conservatory extensions.12
Trees also haunted the hinterland of Martin Mutschmann, the Gauleiter who held dominion over all Dresden lives. He felt most at home deep in the woods of the Saxon countryside, hunting. He was fascinated by traditional, ancient woodcrafts and by folk and fairy tales. If Dresden itself was a conscious expression of the value of art and harmony, then the man who ruled over it from the early 1930s right until the end of the war somehow represented a darker, more primitive unconscious current, something ungovernable that seemed more a part of those forests that lay close to the town. Mutschmann was Germany’s longest-serving Gauleiter, who, together with his openly sadistic and greatly feared deputies, precisely represented the sort of enemy that Air Chief Marshal Harris believed could be vanquished only by the trauma of complete civic obliteration: implacable, fanatical, remorseless.
Gauleiter Mutschmann had a slight (and not flattering) facial resemblance to the actor Peter Lorre; his asymmetric eyes were prominent, his gaze glittering and unreadable. He had thin hair and a heavy gut. In February 1945 he was sixty-six years old. He had been Gauleiter of Saxony since 1925, and upon Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933 was made its prime minister too. Mutschmann was among the very first to have joined the National Socialists in 1922. His implacably aggressive political views had been formed a long time before that. Mutschmann was close to the Führer and shared Hitler’s intense fervour. And through him, Dresden had been clothed in all the raiment of fascism from the start – not merely the vast swastikas draped over all public buildings, but also the pervasive presence in the streets of the SS, the Hitler Youth, of the Nazi newspaper Der Freiheitskampf, the necessity for ordinary people in public arenas to give the stiff-armed salute and exclaim ‘Heil Hitler’. Now, even in those first uncertain weeks of 1945 that saw traces of snow on the distant hills, Mutschmann had complete control not merely of the streets but of each and every private household: the old gentlemen, the mothers and their children, the young working women, the men in protected or reserved occupations.
Every coffee these Dresdeners drank in a restaurant, every film they went to see, any rationed purchase they made in a grocery shop, every telephone call, each and any interaction with the soldiers passing through the city on their way to distant fronts, all movements and utterances were potentially being monitored. Yet the people of Dresden had somehow found a way of adjusting to the relentless violence of his regime, to the grim tokens of oppression such as the signs on lamp posts in residential Johannstadt and other suburbs proclaiming them ‘Jew zones’; to the way that the Gestapo and the police between them terrorized the remaining Jews while rooting out any form of political dissent elsewhere. Both in the workplace and at home, conversation was carefully guarded. It was not uncommon for ordinary men and women to be arrested late at night and interrogated into the early hours. No one was more than one forbidden word away from imprisonment. Or, indeed, very much worse.
On 8 February 1945, following a meeting of the Nazi People’s Court, a judicial execution was carried out in the grey-flagstoned yard of the Dresden courthouse, just a little south of the central railway station. The victim: Dr Margarete Blank, forty-three, who had a rural medical practice and who now faced not the noose but the guillotine.13 Her crime: while she was treating the children of an officer, she had expressed doubts about Germany securing any kind of final victory. Dr Blank was subsequently reported to the Gestapo, arrested, accused (falsely) of being a member of a resistance group and finally sentenced to death by decapitation. There was nothing secret about the use of the guillotine: under the Nazis a wide range of suspected Bolsheviks and resistance figures had perished beneath its heavy blade. Everyone in the city knew the possible penalty for ill-calculated remarks, passed on anonymously by colleagues and neighbours.
For Martin Mutschmann, it was clearly the duty of the people of Dresden to stand and fight whatever forces threatened the city. Any form of dissent or reluctance was treachery. This burly figure, locally nicknamed ‘King Mu’, had been raised not far from Dresden in a town called Plauen; he had left his Lutheran school at fourteen, in the final decade of the nineteenth century, had himself apprenticed and had gained proficiency in two perhaps unexpected disciplines: lacemaking and embroidery.
This was the industry for which Plauen had acquired international renown. The lace designs – both for clothing and for household use – were intricate but also expressive. There were great swirls of leaves and vines, hypnotic geometry, epic webs stretching across vast tablecloths. Even in an increasingly mechanical age, this was an occupation requiring habitual delicacy as well as concentration, and Mutschmann went on to become a master embroiderer. Yet outside of the workshop, his aggression very soon became apparent as he established his own lace business in the city. Colleagues recalled his frequently voiced hatred of Jews, especially those who had arrived from eastern Europe. Then a slump in the lace trade across the continent just before the First World War hit hard; this was not just a matter of cold economics but also changing tastes. The frilly fuss of lace was being displaced by the crisper, cleaner designs of early modernism.
Mutschmann, however, was certain he knew what was harming his world: the pernicious activities of the Jews. He was keen to scapegoat his Jewish competitors in Plauen for sabotaging the market. Indeed, he succeeded in rousing local feeling against Jewish businesses, and the town, which appeared so ordered and stable, came close to seeing a pogrom.
The squalor and the exhausting horror of the Great War made their mark: Mutschmann was invalided out of the conflict in 1916 – he later claimed this was the result of a kidney infection – and he returned to his business.14 At its height, it had employed about 500 people, but there was no climbing out of this vertiginous slump. The jagged anarchy that came to Germany at the bitter end of the war – the violent battles between communists and right-wingers – further cemented Mutschmann’s prejudices.
As Mutschmann saw it, this was a world that was being dragged down by an international Jewish conspiracy, and Germany’s grovelling humiliation and abasement – its streets overrun with socialist firebrands – was the confirmation of their malign success. So Mutschmann joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in 1922 and quickly established a very strong bond with Hitler. At Christmas 1928 Mutschmann sent Hitler a book of fairy tales illustrated by Hermann Vogel, inscribed with Mutschmann’s greetings from the Vogtland forest.15
Mutschmann’s wife Minna (née Popp), whom he had married in 1909, played her own part in this new political life. She joined the women’s section of the party. As her husband ascended the political ladder, so she played a role in organizing events, sometimes fundraising, attended by female fellow Nazis. Mutschmann’s mother also joined.
By 1925, he was the Nazi Party’s Gauleiter (chief party administrator) in Saxony, and it seemed to some that he was fixated on Saxon identity to the exclusion of any wider political ambitions. Hitler’s triumphant assumption of power over Germany in 1933 in turn gave each regional Gauleiter a huge amount of new authority. The political violence came quickly to Dresden: a community hall meeting of around 2,000 ‘communists’ ended in a staged brawl, leaving nine shot dead. The arrests of left-wing figures followed swiftly.16 In addition, at this time Mutschmann was made Saxony’s Reichsstatthalter (state governor). As he enjoyed vastly enhanced powers over the state, so the former lacemaker became increasingly absorbed with what he understood to be traditional Saxon culture and folk art.
In the Tharandt forest, he had a grand hunting lodge built, a curious structure topped with a truncated pyramid. Associates and allies were invited to stay for hunts. Mutschmann was obsessed by the pursuit – not just the sport but also, specifically, its part in the folk tapestry of the region. He had a statue of a stag installed near the entrance to the lodge. There was also a sculpture of a wild boar that stood near the house. He was attracted to the primitive atavism of such imagery. It has been suggested that interest in such things was part of a general Saxon move in the early part of the twentieth century to assert its own identity as Germany became ever more centralized and uniform. But the Nazi interest in folklore and legends spoke to something deeper and parareligious.
In terms of crafts, Saxony also had a rich history of puppetry: the large, unblinking, staring eyes of marionettes were used in productions aimed at adults as well as children. Mutschmann was photographed at an exhibition gazing with fascination at a display of them. The craft that went into the manufacture of the marionettes – the wires for the arms, the legs, the heads – was exquisite. Yet it was always acknowledged that there was something measurelessly unsettling about the unchanging expressions of these effigies; something that would make you a little reluctant to stay alone in a quiet room with them. The nineteenth-century writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who lived for a time in Dresden, captured that sense in a fragment called ‘The Automata’, featuring a fairground marionette that answers questions mechanically and yet seems eerily able to see into the minds of the questioners.17
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, in response to the satirical use of marionettes by unruly modernist artists such as the Dresdener Otto Griebel, the Nazis had established the Reichsinstitut für Puppenspiel (puppetry); among the puppets that featured in approved and pre-censored plays staged by the Hitler Youth were grotesquely caricatured Jewish figures, with hooked noses and large, terrible eyes. Those audiences watching the movements of the ‘Aryan’ marionettes will surely have had moments of self-reflection about the symbolism of the manipulators and the manipulated.
Mutschmann’s interest in local Saxon sculpture and painting coloured his attitude to art in general. This was the man who, in the mid 1930s, banned jazz from Dresden (and later, in 1943, from the whole of Saxony), claiming it was ‘degenerate music’.18 As well as the underlying racism, there was also this sense that here was a musical form that was in its purest sense ungovernable, evoking responses that were anarchic and uncontained. This also extended to Mutschmann’s attitude towards public expressions of humour. Perhaps because of an innate class sensitivity, he moved throughout the 1930s and the war years to eliminate in public discourse all jokes and humour at Saxony’s expense. The area’s dialect was often mocked (it still is by some in the west of Germany), as was its people’s perceived rustic backwardness. One might imagine that the more sophisticated Dresdeners were both amused and bemused by the rural folk of the state, who even by the 1940s still inhabited a world in which the horse and cart was the main form of transport and manual farm labour the primary employment.
Not all Nazis were as unwilling to take a joke as Mutschmann. Indeed, there were some who felt in the earliest days of Hitler’s rule that the odd satirical jab would be a useful outlet for sentiments that otherwise might build into more serious resistance. Right from the start of the Nazi era there had appeared a new subculture of ‘whispered jokes’, and the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps even went so far as to state that good-natured humour about authority, expressed openly, was healthy and to be encouraged. It cited a joke about Goebbels doing the rounds that the propaganda minister himself had got to hear, exclaiming, ‘Oh, that old one again!’19
Later, such tolerance on the part of the SS wholly vanished, but Mutschmann had always been doctrinaire, governing Dresden with medieval brutality from 1933 onwards. Even on the sophisticated Prager Strasse, anyone failing to give the Nazi salute in greeting to an official could face instant arrest and imprisonment. In schools, Mutschmann insisted that all children were drilled in the values of the new regime, and any teacher felt to be even faintly resistant to such indoctrination was simply to be banned.
By 1935, under the Gauleiter’s guidance, Dresden was taking an enthusiastic lead in the Nazi policy of sterilizing those with special needs and disabilities. In that year alone 8,219 sterilizations were performed in the city, more even than in Berlin, where there had been 6,550.20 This was not a secret; it was reported prominently in the British press. Those who voiced ethical concerns were silenced, including ‘a number of evangelical pastors’ who were placed under ‘protective arrest’ – a measure that was ‘unavoidable’ in the interests of maintaining public order. These were pastors who had also spoken out about the ever-more pressing need for religious observance. The Gauleiter disagreed; the Nazi Natural Festival celebrating 1 May, for instance, ‘took legal precedence over all church festivals’.21 As with religion, so with culture.
The city’s ornamental past was infused, as far as Mutschmann could make it, with the totalitarian vision. In 1934, when Hitler and Goebbels made a sweeping visit to the city to mark the first Reich Theatre Week and were greeted by vast crowds of eager onlookers, Mutschmann accompanied them on a stroll through the baroque splendours of the Zwingergarten. The festival’s first Nazi-sponsored performance took place in the Semper Opera House: a lavish production of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde.
There were moments of social triumph for the Gauleiter too. In 1937 the Duke of Windsor, having abdicated as King Edward VIII, came to Dresden together with his new American wife prior to meeting Hitler. This was a tremendous moment for the Nazi Party, not merely for propaganda purposes but also to give its senior officials a sense of cultural acceptance. Gauleiter Mutschmann staged a grand banquet in the city to honour the duke’s visit, after which Edward made an effusive speech to Mutschmann and the other Nazis present: ‘As a student, I visited Germany for the first time to become acquainted with your language, your art and your literature. After twenty years, I return again as a student but this time to become acquainted with the essential problem – concerning the whole world – of the well-being of the working-class population.’22 Gauleiter Mutschmann sought to impress the duke with an intricate scale model of the Zwinger Palace. Here was both enterprise and art, a contrast to the artlessness of the royal visitors.
Some eight years later, after six years of war, Dresden was a more huddled, threadbare city, the grand opera and galleries and museums reluctantly closed. It was a city that had still somehow not been wholly ground down by Mutschmann’s blunt brutality. Yet the landmarks of fear were there for everyone to see. The florid Gothic bulk of the old courthouse on Mathildenstrasse, just a few streets away from the old town, housed a particularly brutal prison that all the citizens would have been aware of. The Mathilde, so named after the street, was used to confine and torture Jews, political dissidents, captured prisoners and Czech resistance figures. The conditions were medieval: straw on stone floor, wall shackles, whips. A few streets away, the once elegant Continental Hotel, across the road from the central railway station, was the headquarters of the local Gestapo. The incursion into commercial and civic space was deliberate: no corner of life was to remain free from the presence of the regime. Little children still had footballs bearing swastikas; even some brands of toothpaste carried the symbol.
A notable absence in the city’s wartime infrastructure was, with a single exception, the purpose-built air-raid shelter. Mutschmann had considered them an unnecessary expense. Instead, across the Altstadt countless musty cellars had been garnished with bare lightbulbs, sparse wooden sticks of furnishings. The exception was, of course, the concrete bunker built for Herr Mutschmann in the grounds of the city residence that he had expropriated from its Jewish owner.
Also active in the days before the bombardment was a figure who, for Dresden’s Jews especially, had embodied the most hideous malevolence. Untersturmführer Henry Schmidt of the Dresden Gestapo – running a special department dedicated to persecuting Jews – had, like Mutschmann, lost none of his faith in the Nazi regime, nor in its power to prevail over the Western Allies and the Soviets. Schmidt, like Mutschmann, had come to the Nazis with zeal relatively early; and he had learned his craft in the secret police with an enthusiasm that had taken him all over the country.23 By 1942 he had specifically requested a transfer to Dresden, not too far from where he had been brought up. He had exulted in his new responsibilities. In 1945 Schmidt was still young: a thirty-two-year-old man who had the power to condemn anyone he chose to death. The war crimes he committed in Dresden in the space of those three years alone were to make him a fugitive for many decades afterwards.
The apartment he lived in with his wife had been stolen from a Jewish couple who had been transported to Theresienstadt concentration camp and thence to their deaths. It was to him and his colleagues Hans Clemens and Arno Weser that any possible outbreaks of dissent among citizens were reported. Clemens – a blond, sturdy figure – had been noted and commended by his superiors for a particular ruthlessness and brutality that bordered on psychopathy; his interrogations in cells with bare white tiles were less about answers to questions and more about the simple exercise of inflicting terror and extraordinary cruelty.
Even in his ordinary dealings with Dresden citizens Clemens could not control the impulse to use physical violence and intimidation, whether he was carrying out an ‘inspection’ of a suspect’s apartment or checking credentials in the street.24 It cannot be known, as he walked through the old city, whether there was any part of his soul that had the slightest resonance with its gentle beauty.
That beauty was certainly very much appreciated by one of Dresden’s more prominent civic leaders, although it did nothing to temper his bitter prejudices. Dr Rudolf Kluge was, for a time, the Burgomeister (or mayor) of the city. He had been born in Dresden in 1889, and although he had studied elsewhere, gaining a degree in law in Berlin, he always returned. Possibly the lurching economic plunges of the 1920s Weimar government hit him and his young family hard, for otherwise it is not entirely clear what made Dr Kluge join the NSDAP in 1928. But he came – with some ease – to occupy the darkest of moral positions: a key lawyer conjuring legal justifications not just for the Nazi Party but also for the entire new regime that was clamping itself around Germany’s body politic.25
The other figure of real authority in the city by that first week of February was Hans Nieland, another early NSDAP loyalist and SS member, who had joined the party in 1926. He had studied for a doctorate in law; his thesis was entitled ‘Power as a Governmental Concept of Law’.26 As the Third Reich grew, Nieland was appointed to various dry technocratic positions involving civic structures. That did not mean that he was any less fervid about the virulent ideology. In 1940, at the comparatively young age of thirty-nine, he was appointed Burgomeister in place of Kluge, who stayed on as his deputy and later reassumed the position. It was, then, Nieland who should have been structuring the means for the city to defend itself, and Nieland who knew in February 1945 just how naked Dresden was.
In the 1930s Rudolf Kluge had been bathetically convinced that Dresden’s tourist industry would be boosted by Hitler’s conquests, bringing ever more fascinated visitors to this new centre of Germany.27 In 1945, he could still gaze out of his window with love at the unbroken domes and spires of the city; yet this aesthete was stonily indifferent to the extraordinary suffering he had helped to inflict.