The fear was so pervasive and continuous among so many people that when, a few weeks later, the next attack came, it was met with fatalistic paralysis. The Dresden skies filled with silver in the early days of March: a new American raid on the railway marshalling yards. This was in the mid morning and, as ever with precision bombing, a number of the explosives landed elsewhere, including upon the already damaged police headquarters and in the meadows that lay by the side of the burned Waldschlösschen brewery. The response seemed to be one of traumatized indifference; later, it featured fleetingly in the collective memory.
Even in the midst of this general dread, however, nothing hindered the city’s relentless efforts to restore a semblance of normality. Near where the central theatre had stood, and where just days previously hideously burned and shrunken bodies had been deposited from wheelbarrows, a temporary bureau for missing persons was established in one of the few buildings that remained stable enough to work in. Here, information and messages could be exchanged. Separated families, disorientated in the dust and dwelling in temporary shelters, could leave news of their whereabouts for loved ones.
Another cause for fear, especially among those billeted in the leafy countryside, were the rumours that Soviet soldiers had been spotted in the forests. In the woods around Dresden, evacuees saw ever-younger German soldiers – acned teenaged lads – who seemed curiously listless in the face of what appeared to be fast-approaching vengeance from the east. On top of all this was the anxiety inspired by the authorities’ iron fist: the signs proclaiming that looters would be shot.
Middle-class refugees who had lived all their lives in suburban comfort now found themselves trudging across frozen agricultural plains. Marielein Erler, who had linked up with other well-to-do Dresdeners in the countryside thirty miles out of town, was curiously buoyant, even though the whereabouts of her husband Georg were still not known. Her plan was to travel north to her daughter in Lüneburg; there was a dauntless resourcefulness about her knack for hitching lifts with young German soldiers. She later recalled being alive to the piercing winds that blew across the plains; and to the simple but profound pleasure of a bowl of hot goulash.1 Her route involved travelling via her parents’ house in Schöningen, her progress a mosaic of hitchhiking, walking and train journeys on a German rail network that, although unpredictable, still criss-crossed the country despite the Allies’ best attempts to destroy it. Frau Erler’s parents greeted their daughter with huge relief, having heard the news of Dresden’s fate. The family’s happiness was complete when, after Marielein had spent a few days resting in these cosy surrounds, a knock at the door signalled the arrival of Georg. The reunion was ecstatic.2
Her husband recounted the nightmare of separation, the numberless bodies he had seen in the flames and his own meandering travels, via Leipzig, until mutual friends had told him where to find his wife. What seems even more extraordinary now is that Marielein, throughout her own ordeal, was able to continue writing to her mother and daughter: letters and postcards from the sanatorium in Kreischa and notes from the towns en route. The Saxon postal service was, like the trains, performing with remarkable efficiency.
The middle-class wanderers also included Victor and Eva Klemperer; they, along with so many others, were sent from town to town and even to tiny villages across the country in search of acceptable lodgings and rations, and their lives became a cycle of waiting for late-night trains and pitching up at village inns where the landlords were either movingly generous with food and space, or snarlingly hostile.
Little Gisela Reichelt and her mother remained unhappily billeted on their farm; conditions were not comfortable and it was here that Frau Reichelt gave birth to Gisela’s little brother. There would be complications, and just a few months later the baby died. It was a fearful time to be pregnant.
In April, a band of young soldiers, none older than seventeen, were temporarily stationed in one of the city’s grand villas on the hills that overlooked the Elbe. They were joined by even younger boys from the Hitler Youth. One teenager had found in the villa’s attic an exceptionally fine electric model train set manufactured by Märklin, a firm that produced exquisitely crafted replica engines. A space was cleared in one of the downstairs rooms and the boys laid the rails quickly. Suddenly they were all completely absorbed in the movement of the model trains: boys kneeling and lying on the floor and taking turns with the controls to drive the miniature locomotives.3 This was both a reversion to a curtailed childhood and a means of exerting at least some control over an imaginary world while knowing that they would soon be sent east to face a brutalized enemy.
There was a widening gulf between the citizens of Dresden and those who had power over their lives. In mid April, Gauleiter Mutschmann informed them, on the front page of the local newspaper, that their city was now a fortress. ‘We are not willing to deliver ourselves to a cruel enemy without fight and without honour,’ he declared.4 Any suggestion either of defeatism or even simply of false rumours from any citizen would invite terrible punishments: anyone perceived to be ‘advancing the enemy’ by these means would be ‘ruthlessly eliminated’. (Such elimination was already occurring in other cities such as Munich, where the authorities were hanging those perceived to be defeatist.) This was to be a battle ‘for freedom’ and ‘for life’, the article continued; the Führer himself had assigned a general to focus on the defence of Dresden, and Mutschmann would be staying within the ‘fortress’ to ensure that the party continued to support the population in those difficult days. Part thunderous threat, part exhortation, the declaration might have inspired a few resolute party loyalists. But another report in that Dresden newspaper the same day illustrated just how far from reality the authorities were drifting. Claiming that all the Germans needed to secure victory was more time, the report feebly suggested that, in England, Churchill’s premiership was being threatened by attacks from Labour’s Aneurin Bevan; that there was a ‘highly dangerous power struggle’ underway. Dresdeners were facing a rather more immediate and terrifying threat.
The previous day Arnhem had been captured by the Allies as the Red Army continued their advance to Berlin and a British division entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which the Germans had abandoned. There, among some 60,000 starving and desperately ill prisoners, they also discovered the great mass of corpses that the Nazis had not found time to dispose of: some 13,000 bodies. The gradual unveiling of this national psychosis, the Allied discovery of the scale of the Holocaust across Germany and Europe, was not easily appreciated by people in cities such as Dresden that remained under Nazi control, but there were a few there who suspected none the less. Mischka Danos, for instance, recalled how in 1944 he had struck up a friendship with a young nurse who was on vacation from an institute some distance from Dresden that she would not name; she was pale and haunted and Danos had wondered to himself if she had been corralled into helping with some of the live medical experimentation he had heard rumours of.5
For the city’s artists – including those deemed by the regime to be ‘degenerate’ – the days and weeks after the destruction produced intense creative reflection. The ordeal of Otto Griebel and his family had been similar to that suffered by so many others; at first reunited, the family was separated again in the confusion immediately following the bombing, Griebel and some of the children being ushered to one billet, his wife and the other children to another. Eventually, via the formal and informal grapevine, the Griebels were at last reunited – all unharmed – and evacuated to a little place called Eschdorf. Griebel had lost the great bulk of his work, that which had not already fallen victim to the Nazi obsession with degenerate art. He recalled later that all this came around his fiftieth birthday, upon which it was ‘customary’ in more normal circumstances for such a milestone to bring celebratory exhibitions of an artist’s work and public honours. ‘All this has been spared me,’ he wrote.6 He did not feel that he could ‘start again’, that the impulse had been ‘sunk with the city of Dresden that I loved so much and where at the same time my work and everything that I loved have disintegrated’. Yet the next few weeks – and an upturned political landscape – would bring an unexpected new development to his artistic life.
Similarly, another of the city’s artists was brooding over his incinerated work. But for fifty-six-year-old Wilhelm Rudolph – a former expressionist who from the 1920s had reached back into some of the traditions of Saxon folk art to produce nature drawings and elaborate woodcuts – the bombing had instead sparked a compulsive pulse of fresh creativity. Rudolph, like so many others, had had difficulties with the Nazi regime’s art monitors; though not wholly proscribed, he had had to move carefully. Now he became one of the more prominent figures around the city’s ruins; scrambling through the dust among the fast-sprouting weeds that were forcing their way through the cracks in the shattered paving, Rudolph saw the need to capture all this on paper, with reed pen and black ink. He positioned himself before the splintered ruins of the railway station, meticulously capturing streets of hollow buildings, their now empty windows admitting sunlight and casting unfamiliar shadows.
He did all this in the face of official suspicion: the signs forbidding looting were prominent and the police scrutinized him closely. In addition to this was an unspoken accusation of morbidity: photography was one thing, ensuring that the atrocity was captured for history, but was this a place for art? Rudolph was as unheeding as the elderly men and women who daily haunted the rubble looking for lost loved ones. His work has a spare, unflinching quality.
‘There was no time for mourning,’ said Rudolph later. ‘In 1945 no one mourned; it was survival. I drew, I drew obsessively. It was all still there, that’s the unimaginable thing. Dresden still stood. The fire had left the sandstone of the buildings standing like skeletons. Only later did it all collapse or was blasted away.’7
And in a city that was renowned above all for the richness of its music, it was just weeks afterwards that the cataclysm began to be memorialized in the slow composition of a requiem. The Kreuzkirche cantor Rudolf Mauersberger had survived that night, sheltering with the boys of the choir not far from the charnel wasteland of the Great Garden park. In the days that followed, the memory of those eleven choirboys and three priests who had died in the raid preyed upon him intensely. Amid the general exodus, Mauersberger was billeted in the countryside, where he started to give thought to what would become the most important work of his life. ‘How Desolate is the City’ was the introduction to the requiem addressed to Dresden itself.8 Among its lines were: ‘How is the city that was so populous now so deserted? … How are the stones of the sanctuary scattered?’ These were the questions that had to be addressed, in perplexity, to Heaven: ‘We have lost our hearts, and our eyes have become dark … Lord, look at my misery, O Lord, look at my misery!’ Unlike the prevailing fashion at the time for atonality, Mauersberger instead found moving echoes of old German hymns and wove them together with the deep chimes of the Kreuzkirche, a resonating choral baritone hum signifying the approaching bombers and episodes of intense percussion signifying the fire: ‘Alas, that I was born to see the destruction of my people!’ The imagery was apocalyptic: pale horses, angels in the sky, the earth trembling and fiery hail shooting down from above.
And as Dresden continued living its fever dream, the Nazi regime at last started collapsing inwards: Hitler turned the gun on himself in the Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945. Yet the war was not quite over; the Führer’s chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, understood that surrender was necessary – but, as he saw it, only to the west. To the east of the country, it was imperative, as he and the remnants of the previous regime saw it, to continue to fight and resist the oncoming Soviet forces. If they did not, millions of German soldiers would simply be captured and marched to Siberia, and the women and the children they left behind would be at the mercy of men they regarded as barbarians. In Silesia and Pomerania there had been outbreaks of murder-suicide; young families in their terror choosing to kill their own children either by drowning or through poison to evade the approaching Red Army before ending their own lives.
In Dresden, where the nights were experienced as agonies of suspense, either in anticipation of further fire attacks or simply listening out for the ghostly booms of battle echoing from the distant hills, the population was apprised by the Gauleiter of his own intentions. Even as news of Hitler’s death (the exact circumstances carefully omitted) became official, Martin Mutschmann was apparently at one with the new Dönitz government. Although the Americans had reached Leipzig, there was no prospect of their penetrating further into Saxony and reaching Dresden before the Red Army. Thus, in Mutschmann’s view, the citizens would have to prepare to meet the Soviet invaders with ruthless resistance: the city – or at least those parts of it still navigable – was to be the battleground. Snipers would be stationed street by street on fire-blackened rooftops, while the swastika was to continue to fly on any civic building that had come through the bombing relatively intact. Yet even as these fierce directives were issued, the increasingly chaotic movements of the German army – many troops now being led far south of Dresden towards Bohemia in a futile effort to block the Red Army – told Dresdeners another story. Did Martin Mutschmann truly believe at any point that the people of this single city could prevail over the might of Stalin’s men? Or that he could surrender to the Americans, but not to the Soviets? Such delusion is hard to imagine.
On 7 May Wilhelm Rudolph tried to ignore the rumbling of troop vehicles, the blend of disciplined soldiers and – in other corners – the deserters who were abandoning their weapons. ‘The Russian artillery was already firing on the city; it was dangerous in the rubble,’ he later said. ‘There were also defensive positions in the ruins, which one did not see; Dresden ought to be defended. They could pick you off like a hare.’9 Despite that, he continued his obsessive drawing. It was also on 7 May that Martin Mutschmann – giving the lie to all his furious Nazi fundamentalism – quietly fled the city. He secured transport, making for the Erzgebirge, about sixty miles south-west, where he planned to hide in the house of a friend. As the Red Army now captured thousands upon thousands of German soldiers to the south and the east of the city, Dresden was wholly defenceless.
Margot Hille and her mother had left the brewery tunnels and returned to occupy their broadly undamaged apartment in the southwest of the city. Having witnessed both the raids and their macabre aftermath, their lives would never again be truly normal, but when the Soviets marched across the Blue Wonder on 8 May – VE Day – the seventeen-year-old saw even more of the true pitilessness of war. The Red Army entered in triumph, and even though the soldiers were apparently ordered on pain of immediate execution neither to steal nor to assault, there was little sign that the threatened penalty acted as a deterrent. Almost immediately there were hideous stories of sexual assaults so serious that they caused lasting injuries. Close by to the Hilles was a villa where a number of Soviet soldiers were billeted. Opposite this house lived two friends of Margot, fellow female apprentices at Felsenkeller. They drew the attention of the billeted soldiers and, as Margot recalled, the Soviets went ‘in and out’ of their apartments and ‘celebrated’ with them. ‘What followed then, I do not have to describe.’10
Nor would she have wanted to. After repeatedly raping the two girls, the Soviet soldiers were insistent that they wanted more women and it seemed only a matter of time before they came looking in Margot’s apartment block. Margot’s mother quickly hatched a plan to protect her daughter. There was a workshop at the back of the block to which Frau Hille obtained access, and then set about rearranging the machinery stored within to create camouflaged hiding spaces for her daughter and the other young girls in the building. When the Soviets came, Margot and her neighbours took cover in the dank, oily space and waited, not daring to breathe, as the men demanded that they be produced. The teenagers lay beneath rusted metal in the dark, listening to the harsh bellows, the commands, the fractured German. The soldiers, losing patience, turned their attentions to the next apartment block along. Margot heard later that one young woman had been forced to climb down the building from her first-floor bedroom window in order to escape. Another female colleague of Margot simply jumped out of her third-floor window as Soviet soldiers came systematically crashing into apartments in search of fresh prey. Margot recalled that her guardian angel must have been present; there was a lawn below and she escaped with only a few broken ribs.11
In those first few days after VE Day, the Soviets were very quick to consolidate control over the civic offices of Dresden, and were equally quick to issue communiqués concerning the welfare of the people; they also ensured that fresh supplies of potatoes and wheat were brought into the shattered city. While Dresdeners were being fed a little better, the speedy reordering of its courts, its schools, its university, its radio broadcasts, its cinemas, its bureaucracy, its shops, its cafes, its restaurants, its factories and precision laboratories and workshops was already underway. The ‘Golden Pheasants’ and other Nazi Party officials were arrested and imprisoned. Some would face transportation to labour camps in Russia, others chose poison. In their place were appointed citizens who were exultant about the new regime. Among them was the cigarette factory accountant Elsa Frölich, a communist sympathizer who had remained unswerving – if necessarily silent – in her opposition to Nazism. On 8 May she and a friend, Erna Fleischer-Gute, presented themselves at makeshift offices established on Taschenberg Square by Soviet officials who were restructuring the organization of the city. Frölich was made most welcome, and one of her first duties was to oversee the return of prisoners from concentration camps to the city.12
For Victor Klemperer and his wife Eva – who since the bombing had been on a seemingly interminable journey back and forth across the country, witnessing the coming of the American soldiers in the west and their wry generosity in little villages towards German civilians, who were by turns startled and charmed by the warmth of black soldiers – the return to their old house had the flavour of ‘a fairy tale’.13 To know once more after all those years in dread a semblance of security, to have the anvil weight of oppression lifted, was extraordinary, and at times fearful too, because of the anxiety that fast-switching fortunes might change once again.
In the midst of the general chaos were symbols of more profound confusion: in those days, Klemperer recalled, no one in Dresden was quite certain of the exact time. The reason was that Radio Berlin – which marked the hours – was in one time zone; Bremen, occupied by the British using GMT, was in another; and Dresden was on Moscow time. There were other tokens of change. Klemperer was hearing stories of Soviet expropriation: everything from precision factory equipment, loaded onto trains and taken east, to the human technical experts who engineered these marvels also finding themselves en route to Moscow. For Klemperer, though, any qualms about the forced egalitarianism of the new regime were balanced out by his own hopes that Dresden’s university might be not only restored but also elevated to a new level by Moscow’s requirement for intellectual excellence. Any anxiety he had that the new forms of coercion might produce a fresh outbreak of Nazi resistance were balanced by his own dazed pleasure at being suddenly treated with so much friendliness, warmth and respect by those who had previously shunned him.
The Gauleiter’s whereabouts, meanwhile, were discovered in a matter of days by the Soviet forces, who took him into custody. Many of his colleagues and friends had chosen to kill themselves rather than fall into Soviet hands. Mutschmann preferred to protest his innocence, but if he felt that he had no crimes to answer for, the Soviets considered differently. He was taken by train to Moscow, where he was interrogated and imprisoned in the Lubyanka. His fate was deliberated with some care, for the final decision to execute him did not come until 1947. By this stage, the full, unthinkable scale of Nazi atrocities had been exposed and judged at Nuremberg. In contrast to Mutschmann, however, his former mayor Hans Nieland – who had also fled the city shortly after the bombing – was treated more leniently. After four years of internment in British facilities in West Germany, Nieland was found to have been merely ‘marginally incriminated’ in the crimes of the Reich. By 1950 he was a free man; shortly after this, he became a banker. Nieland died in 1976, aged seventy-five.14
In the spring and summer of 1945 the silent grey vista of the levelled Altstadt, from the river to the Great Garden, was a landscape that Dresdeners viewed with unease. At night, in humid lightning storms, with skeletal structures made stark in the flashes and rain teeming and hissing furiously in the dust, many avoided the ruins. Urban legends arose about what might happen in these wastelands after the sun went down: tales of malign figures lurking behind fragments of wall waiting to attack. Old men walked arm-in-arm for protection. Yet if cities can be said to possess their own spirits, then the coming years saw Dresden tentatively begin to regenerate and renew its soul, especially through art and music. Even as cattle were driven through the wilderness of stone that comprised the remains of the Neumarkt, the city’s sense of itself as a place of culture and high expression was slowly reawakening. Meanwhile, the ethical debates about the ferocious destruction wreaked upon it began – in England and America especially – to find new force and bitterness in some corners, and to cement the view of the city as a treasure that had been brutally ravaged.