Once the Americans had departed, some could not resist the urge to explore and examine the ruins more closely; there were those in search of the missing and others impelled by a form of horrified fascination. Winfried Bielss and his mother wanted to know what had become of cousins across the river in devastated Johannstadt, but perhaps unconsciously they also wanted to prepare their own inventory of the wider devastation. As they walked through the Waldschlösschen area that overlooked the river, the boy and the mother gazed with some intensity at bomb craters. They saw a ‘bent bicycle’,1 and near it, the limbless body of a man. They walked on, passing the Deaconess hospital complex, parts of which were still burning. Once-smart villas were now ruins. The boy noted – perhaps with some proprietorial hubris – that his own school seemed undamaged. Many other pupils might have felt a surge of disappointment. Now they passed more villas that seemed simply to have burned down rather than having been demolished by bombs. Here too were more schools, and municipal buildings, gaping and knocked through. At the river it looked as though the Albertbrücke, which crossed to Johannstadt, had been damaged. The meadows in front of the water were, despite the heat of the city on the opposite bank, rimed with pockets of ice.
On crossing the river, mother and son were able to take in the panoramic sweep of destruction. On Sachsenplatz, tall residential blocks and shops were now jutting, fractured remnants. A road that led between two such blocks was impassable: electric tram lines, fallen, were twisted like spaghetti on the streets in all directions; trees had been wrenched out by the roots and lay across the avenue; there were burned-out cars, and a burned-out tram as well. Bielss and his mother picked their way carefully around these obstacles, to the main thoroughfare of the Lothringer Strasse, upon which stood the court building. This fearful symbol of authority, with its courtyard guillotine, was still standing, but had been deconstructed by fire, leaving exposed its blackened insides and, in that chill air, the sharp tang of burned wood and fabric. On what remained of the pavement before it lay bodies and detached limbs, still clothed. Mother and son moved on.
This was a landscape that had been turned into a puzzle; it was very difficult to orientate oneself along former roads of shapeless boulders, to discern where streets had once been, with apartment blocks smashed to the ground, villas now simply consisting of two or three walls, their domestic innards indelicately exposed to all. The boy noticed that his mother stooped a little to examine each corpse that they passed. Any one of these bodies might have been family. There was still worse to see. A little further south, the middle of one road had been smashed to form a giant bowl, around which on the gravelly rubble lay twisted, naked corpses. The blast, and the inrush of oven-hot air, had sucked the clothes from their bodies as it toasted their flesh. This was the succinct degradation of organized civil and aesthetic society; a manifestation of physical force and a manipulation of physics that had comprehensively desecrated the dead. On they moved, Frau Bielss having checked the undressed cadavers.
On a narrow street near the hospital was a wall of dusty, sharp debris, three feet high, spanning the entire width of the road and topped with more corpses. As they reached the corner of another smoking street the boy suddenly thought of their family tailor, Wenzel Lupinek, who lived and worked in this area. Just the previous year Lupinek had fitted him for his first suit, intended for his church confirmation. How could he have survived among these collapsed buildings?
The pair went to check on some relatives who lived close by. With trepidation they looked at the buildings that seemed relatively undamaged, and at those that were now skeletal. The boy found one reason for a sliver of hope: unlike many of the older buildings in the inner city, these apartment blocks had been constructed with girders and supports made from steel rather than wood. This meant that the cellars were more likely to have maintained their structural integrity.
The dark stairs and passages that led to them were still too hot to descend; heat radiated from them as if from a baker’s oven. A little further on they discovered a minor miracle: their relative Horst Poppe was on the cracked pavement outside the exoskeleton of an apartment block. Winfried was bemused by the quantity of valuables Poppe had apparently saved; here, out in this dense, savoury, smoky air he had created a small mountain of rescued glass ornaments, porcelain and handicrafts. And he had news: two of Frau Bielss’s other relatives had gone to the apartment of his sister-in-law and were safe. The only person he had not yet been able to account for was his mother-in-law. Even as the three of them talked in this eerie landscape, that same mother-in-law suddenly came walking around the corner; she had been forced to seek shelter elsewhere. There was the reunion; and then the mother and the boy – having established these survivals – were now anxious to get back to their own home, and indeed to a district that still felt alive.
As they walked back through the maze of demolished buildings, the boy and his mother breathed in the burning wood, mixed with the smell of scorched clothes and seared rubber. There was a new element too: a rising smell from the multitude of corpses, a ‘disgusting sweet mixture’ that, Bielss recalled, he could still summon even at the distance of fifty years.2
The boy and his mother were, relatively speaking, extremely fortunate; they had found the people they were looking for, and discovered they were alive and unhurt. Nearer the Altstadt, elderly men and women searched for missing spouses, children for parents and parents for children. In the alleys near the Kreuzkirche, they too were climbing on rubble that was still hot. On the main stretch of Prager Strasse the concrete and stone debris in the middle of the road was piled almost at head height, and could be clambered upon only with the greatest difficulty, in the process dislodging individual stones that might reveal clumps of hair or disembodied hands. It would be like disturbing a grave. A little further south, soldiers, nurses, doctors and volunteers worked by the ruins of the railway station. Those who had died on the platforms and the ground-floor concourse were now arranged there in neat rows. Dresdeners scanned the macabre display to see if they could identify loved ones, many of the bodies with skulls so extensively damaged and faces so burned that identification was possible only by what they wore. Efforts were being made to retrieve the corpses from the darkened lower levels, but people had been packed together so tightly, and the atmosphere was still so hot, airless and toxic, that so far very little progress had been made. Rumours spread with extraordinary speed; Dr Fromme swiftly heard from one of his staff about the speculation that 3,000 people had been down in those dreadful tunnels.
Even though many cellars were still too hot to enter, the authorities were anxious about the possibility of pestilence. Mere minutes after the American raid, soldiers and volunteers, firemen and medical staff were directing the aimlessly milling crowds of refugees and bombed-out citizens firmly towards the city’s arterial roads, telling them that if they kept moving, out of the suburbs and into the countryside, further volunteers would guide them to villages and farmhouses where they would be well fed and billeted in large barns filled with fresh straw. The Gauleiter of Saxony had finally emerged from his own private shelter and was now ordaining that anyone caught looting would face certain execution.
Such a declaration would have meant nothing to those who, badly hurt and silent with shock, were being gently ushered from the streets to makeshift field hospitals erected with startling speed around the town. There was a small military medical unit at Arnsdorf, among the tall trees of the heath. Dr Fromme had led the efforts to ensure that the facilities were sufficiently robust to take more patients. Private cars were pressed into service; Dr Fromme’s own vehicle – which unlike so many others had not had its tyres liquefied or its engine melted – was jolting back and forth along country roads as patients were ferried to temporary accommodation. Beyond the conflagration, winter had retained its grip, making the rural evacuations treacherous with snow. Dr Fromme also had to contend with a telephone system that was only partly functioning. Remarkably, health care was something that many Dresdeners somehow knew would be available. Margot Hille, who had the previous day been twitching to volunteer for the League of German Girls, despite having sustained a blow to the head, was the next day still being held back by her fearful mother. But Frau Hille, regardless of the American raid, was also insistent that afternoon that her daughter instead go to a clinic that had been established at a school near to where they lived. The mother was convinced her daughter had suffered a ‘concussion to the brain’3 and a broken nose.
Margot was examined and pronounced fine, following which the pair hauled their packed suitcases to the complex of buildings that comprised the Felsenkeller brewery. They, along with a few other employees and their families, had decided in the aftershock to relocate to the safety of the brewery’s tunnels, dug deep into the rock of a hill and secure against further attack from whichever direction. The chilly tunnels had earlier had proper lighting installed, and the Felsenkeller management had presciently even ensured that there were bathroom facilities for use in the event of the shelter being occupied for prolonged periods. For a while, these tunnels would become a sanctuary.
For Marielein Erler, sitting stunned on the bench by the Great Garden park, her temple bleeding after the American attack, there was also efficient help. After having pulled herself away from one potential saviour, she was approached by another man, who managed to coax her into standing and led her to a car. She was driven some ten miles south to Kreischa, an area high on the plateau above the city. Here was an impressive hospital, sanatorium and spa facility. Marielein was taken straight to casualty, where three doctors were attempting to tend to a great crowd of patients. Her temple wound was of concern, but it was quickly decided that it could simply be cleaned and stitched. A greater problem, said the doctor who had pronounced her lucky, was her eyes, which were still painful and dimmed and causing her distress.4 Eye drops were administered. Then Marielein was led away to one of the clinic’s wards, where a bed waited for her. Naturally, she was anxious about her husband, not having seen him since minutes before the American attack, but no sooner had she been helped into the crisp bed than intense fatigue overcame her. Like so many others, she plunged deep into a blank sleep.
While so many thronged the city’s outer roads and bridges in their quest for safety, others barely moved. Professor Klemperer, reunited with his wife Eva, had spent part of the day at the Jewish cemetery, which had been nominated as a meeting point for the city’s remaining Jews in the wake of catastrophe. Finding no one there, he had returned to his wife at Brühl’s Terrace. The exhaustion was so great that even an explosion caused by one of the American bombers – though creating a moment of terrific fright – appeared very quickly forgotten. Indeed, Klemperer seems to have been largely unaware of – or perhaps simply dulled to – the third raid. By the late afternoon the city was filling with medical personnel and ambulances summoned from nearby towns and cities, and even from as far away as Berlin. Like Klemperer, many on the terrace seemed to be having painful difficulty with their eyes.5 Young medics were moving among them with eye drops and thin spatulas with which they tried to clean away a little of the dirt from the corners and beneath the eyelids. Klemperer heard the jocular command from the medics of ‘Hold still, Dad!’
He and Eva moved into the bulky black edifice of the Albertinum, in the cellars of which she had taken shelter. The roof had been hit but the structure of the lower two floors was perfectly sound. This civic fortress had vast rooms with very high ceilings; electricity was being provided using a hand-operated generator. And in one of these high rooms, the medics had set up as many makeshift beds as they could, and guided their often elderly patients to lie down on them. Some were Jews; no one seemed to be checking, and certainly no one was turned away. Klemperer had heard from a friend outside that everyone in the professor’s building had survived.
That cold February evening in that echoing room was both uncomfortable and curious. Despite the best efforts of the medical teams in attending to their charges, there was next to no food or drink to sustain them because emergency supplies had yet to be assembled. The medical workers shared their own rations – largely bread and sausage – with their patients, but water was the biggest problem. There had initially been enough in the taps to allow patients a mouthful of tea each, but then the water supplies gave out entirely and some on the rickety makeshift beds were now tormented by dusty dehydration. Klemperer recalled that one old gentleman had awoken suddenly in deep distress, having apparently been dreaming that he was drinking deep draughts of cooling water. Klemperer himself recalled that he fell into a near mesmerized state in the lengthening shadows; he watched as two men started to crank at the manual generator, the emitted light throwing their own vast shadows against the wall. They must have seemed like images from one of the expressionist films by which Dresdeners had once been so hypnotized.
The ruined city in twilight; the flickering orange of the still-burning fires within buildings; in the Altmarkt, the discoloured bodies floating in the water of the reservoir; nearby, the sudden groans and cracks from the blackened Kreuzkirche, the roof open to the starry night. Near the Kreuzkirche, in the now completely demolished blocks and alleys and passages leading to the Frauenkirche, a young soldier named Hans Settler stood like a ghost, still and watchful, gazing at the absence that had once been the block in which his girlfriend had lived. Around him were figures moving like somnambulists. These he later termed ‘death-men, dreamers’.6
Beyond that now empty space, towards the Neumarkt, amid the vast piles of masonry, one great structure still stood, newly silhouetted against the velvet sky. The Frauenkirche, with its huge dome, its stolid octagonal structure, appeared untouched, an unspoken symbol of defiance. Those who had taken refuge in its crypt, having passed the night and the morning safely, had left to try to reach family and friends, leaving the building unattended. But the fires that had washed through the city had not yet finished with the Frauenkirche, and as dusk fell the soot-blackened sandstone could in places be seen glowing with a dull ruby light. As without, as within, there was a sound like that of an old ship creaking and yawing, as though swaying in the night. Despite its apparent invulnerability, in the earlier bombings one of the foundational pillars holding the tiers and the galleries and the great dome hundreds of feet above the ground had shifted under the enormous impact of detonation. Another explosion had created a symmetrical effect in another foundation which had the benefit of balancing the first dislocation, but the gravitational pressures that had been captured and held by the architect two hundred years earlier were slowly becoming unharnessed.
There were few people that evening to witness it. Even the prisoners of war were far from this place now. Kurt Vonnegut had spent the larger part of 14 February being herded by guards and corralled into organizing carts and wagons and wheelbarrows; the 150-odd prisoners were being transferred from their slaughterhouse quarters to Gorbitz, another camp just a little outside the city. Later that day the prisoners were still painstakingly manoeuvring their primitive conveyances through the maze of blocked streets and sticky roads. By the time they reached the hills that climbed out of the city, the wheels were claggy with melted tar. Like so many others, they had both seen and not seen the bodies of children, the bodies of mothers. They were soon to inhabit a necrotic nightmare. It was to fall to these men – among other prisoners – to excavate the city’s buried dead, starting the next morning.