The small children of Dresden in 1945 had never heard an English or American voice; if they had, their parents would have been committing a clandestine criminal act. There were radio broadcasts – jaunty, friendly propaganda from the Allies – that were wholly forbidden. The Americans never seemed a heavy threat in the sense that the Soviets did: they appeared coercive rather than menacing. The pervasive popular culture of golden-hearted cinema cowboys had reached deep into Germany before the Nazis could wholly extinguish it.
But many of those Dresden children were also perfectly aware that the first serious bombing attacks upon the city, in the autumn of 1944 and at the very start of 1945, had been carried out by the Americans. This they gleaned from their parents. And these raids had been during the hours of daylight. The curious thing was that even after this strong foretaste of the hideous damage that could be wrought by the bombers, Dresdeners had remained complacent to the point of blitheness. The first American attack – carried out by thirty B-24 bombers aiming some seventy tons of explosive at the railway marshalling yards to the west of the Altstadt – was remembered with some clarity by Dieter Haufe, who had just recently turned eleven in October 1944. Because, inevitably, there were many bombs that did not hit their targets.
That 7 October, a Saturday, was ‘a gorgeous warm Indian-summer day’,1 recalled Haufe. ‘My mother and I were tending our recently planted peach tree’ in the communal garden of their apartment block. Suddenly, to their shock, the city’s air-raid sirens started wailing: a ‘pre-alarm’ signal. Throughout the war, Dresdeners had become quite accustomed to very frequent – and almost always false – alarms. Generally, though, these had come after dark. There was something unexpected about that unearthly low moan on such a rich autumnal afternoon. Mother and son first had to sprint up to their fourth-floor apartment to grab their ‘alarm packs – blankets, pillows, gas masks’. Dieter was also anxious to get ‘my faithful companion Waldi’ – the family’s dachshund.
They ran down the stairs and into the cellar of the apartment block, which, like similar residential buildings across the city, had been prepared as a shelter. And there mother, son and dog sat with several of their neighbours under a bare lightbulb. Minutes later, the attack began. ‘The noise grew stronger, rose into swelling drones,’ remembered Haufe. ‘There were several detonations. And then the electric light flickered.’
The prospect of being cast into complete darkness, with the seismic roars from above, was terrifying. ‘Then, very close: a deafening bang – an insanely strong rush of air.’ The boy remembered the procedure as ‘automatic’: speedily donning his child’s gas mask, ‘strapping it tight’. The light went out and there was nothing but blackness. In this murk and panic, there was now only one thought in the boy’s mind: ‘I will never see my mother again.’ And under the onslaught, ‘my body vibrated’ and even ‘my fingers tingled’. Then, silence. ‘I pressed Waldi close to me.’ Some moments later, ‘A flaming candle appeared in front of my face.’ It was held by a neighbour, ‘Frau Schmidt from the second floor.’
The bombers seemed to have gone. But in the confusion, time took great gulping jumps. The boy found himself outside, with his dog but not his mother. The pavement, oddly, ‘felt like cotton’, a result of the thick layer of dust that now covered it. The apartment block opposite looked as though it had been demolished. The air was dense and throat-catching. But it was at that point that the boy heard his name being called; his mother was there, quite safe, just a few steps away.
Even a target as large as a railway marshalling yard was impossible to hit with complete certainty from a height of tens of thousands of feet, though the daylight made the American bombers more precise than they would otherwise have been. Some explosives either missed or deviated from their intended target. How could it be otherwise? As well as apartment blocks, and a chunk of the Seidel und Naumann factory, a large school was hit; if this attack had not come at the weekend, hundreds of children would have been killed. As it was, the city’s death toll on that day was about 270. According to Haufe, Gauleiter Mutschmann ordered that news of mass fatalities be suppressed; bodies were buried not all at once, but at intervals, and mourning families were told that they would simply have to wait. Mutschmann might have been seeking to avoid any possible damage to morale. Yet as it was, the citizens – who could see perfectly well the destruction for themselves – seemed close to dismissive about the attack.
Another American raid, this time with the aim of disrupting all connections with the eastern front, came on 16 January 1945. Again, the roaring damage – as well as the apparent impunity of bombers operating in bright daylight, evading the attentions of Luftwaffe fighters scrambled from the airfield north of the city – seemed not to create much of an impression upon the wider city, though by that stage, when every day was filled with fear, perhaps there was little left that could surprise or shock. Fifteen-year-old Winfried Bielss, whose fascination for trains and public transport equalled his love for stamps, noted the damage that was caused to the city’s ‘Tram Line 5, which ended at St Paul’s Cemetery’. The line, Bielss noted, ‘was interrupted for several days’.2
Neither he nor any adult Dresdener could have had any notion in February 1945 that it was the railway lines rather than the factories that were the primary preoccupation of the US Air Force’s commander Carl Spaatz, or that, while the British were to continue area bombing, the future plans agreed for American bombers focused on the heavily used connections that ran from Berlin through to Dresden and onwards from that busy junction on lines pointing outwards via the valley of the Elbe and the central European uplands.3 In addition, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Air, Robert Lovett, concerned at growing numbers of American war casualties and at German resistance, and also at the possibility that the Nazis were developing new secret weapons, had recommended that air attacks be spread wider across the country. In terms of lending support to the Red Army, the targeting of Dresden had for some time been seen as legitimate.
Yet there were elderly Dresden citizens who would have remembered a time not so long back – perhaps now with some bewilderment – when Americans were not the enemy but in fact an integral part of the fabric of Dresden life. The same was true of the English. And certainly, at the start of the twentieth century, the English language had been perfectly common, spoken by English and American expatriates in the streets of Dresden and displayed in the English-language newspapers they bought from its newsstands. Even into the 1930s the city had attracted a variety of international visitors, distinguished and otherwise, and there had been boarding schools where many of the girls were native English speakers.
It was for this reason, as noted by Victor Klemperer, that local gossip in the early days of 1945, even after the January bombing raid by the Allies, was filled with speculation that Dresden had never been targeted in earnest because there was still too much residual affection for the city among the English and Americans. Indeed, Dresden had its own specialized urban rumour: that Winston Churchill wanted the city spared because his American grandmother had loved it so (other variations made the relation his aunt). Curiously, even though no reliable records exist, it is eminently possible that both Churchill’s grandmother and his mother had been swirled briefly into Dresden’s social maelstrom.
The grandmother, Clara Jerome (née Clarissa Hall), was an American heiress who, midway through the nineteenth century, savoured her first taste of Europe when her diplomat husband was posted to Trieste, and found herself intoxicated with the possibilities. Paris seemed very much more alive to her than Manhattan. Certainly, this was a great deal to do with the grandeur of her new social connections, but here too was a world filled with art and conversation and ideas. So it is perfectly natural to imagine that, at some stage, this ardent Europhile paid a visit to Dresden, which was, after all, home to a very lively American community throughout the nineteenth century and where might be encountered writers and academics who had found the city irresistible, and extended brief stays into lengthy sojourns.
The anglophone taste for the city had begun earlier, in the mid eighteenth century, when the future British prime minister Lord North visited Dresden with his friend the Earl of Dartmouth, who wrote: ‘We spent a fortnight in a sort of little London, in a continual hurry of amusements … We have danced a great deal, and have been at 3 balls a night. I did not expect to see English country dances so well danced, out of England … We are extremely happy here in the fine weather we have enjoyed.’4
It was not long before notable Americans were discovering this continental ornament. One such was the short-story writer and essayist Washington Irving, author of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. He had travelled extensively throughout Europe but had never been able to find anywhere to settle. Leaving Vienna in the early 1820s, he happened across Dresden and was immediately delighted. Here, he declared, was ‘a place of taste, intellect and literary feeling’.5 Irving was hoping to gather material for fiction inspired by deep-rooted German folk tales, but sophisticated Dresden society kept him far from the villages and the forests. There was great demand from all corners of society – from artistic to diplomatic – to have Irving grace their evenings. The months that he lived in Dresden were testament to the city’s openness towards Americans and other English speakers, and this was to remain the case throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was an English church, American restaurants, a local English newspaper; for a small city, Dresden was very accommodating: it was estimated to receive over 100,000 visitors a year; a large number to be found threading their way through the streets near the Albertinum art museum and the Frauenkirche.
Kathleen (later Dame Kathleen) Courtney was sent to Dresden at the turn of the century after she left her boarding school in England. She was enrolled at a finishing school where she was to learn German.6 The city charmed her immediately, and she described how one morning, simply looking out of her window at the school, she witnessed a comical cultural battle on the square below, the notes of an American organ coming from the American church being ruthlessly drowned out by a local Dresden street band.
Those finishing schools sent young ladies out to the opera in the evening, and it was noted that the foyer resounded with the noise of the English tongue. By 1909, one American socialite eagerly told the English-language Daily Record that ‘Dresden had impressed her as quite the finest city for foreign residents she knew in Europe, being infinitely superior to Paris or Berlin as far as climate, pretty surroundings, opportunities for artistic and musical education, and homelike conditions were concerned.’7
Naturally, the First World War brought all of this to an end, but only temporarily. By the 1920s and 1930s there was once again a strong influx of English visitors; there was a suggestion, indeed, that certain strata of British society were more sympathetic to the Germans than to the French following the slaughter on the battlefields, for the French were behaving so mercilessly over the matter of reparations.
The craze, meanwhile, for young English ladies to come to Germany to hone both etiquette and cultural experience did not let up throughout the 1930s. The advent of the Nazis, for many of the upper-class families of these young women, represented simply a new kind of order, a bulwark against the threat of filthy Bolshevism. So for a while Dresden continued to host numbers of debutantes, who would be invited to dances with dashing young German military officers, losing themselves in the extraordinary formality of uniforms and deep bows.
Meanwhile, the Nazis had also been assiduous at marketing the country to less socially exalted visitors. With the steady growth of the white-collar middle and lower-middle classes in Britain in the 1930s came a greater appetite for foreign travel, and the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda was adept at drawing curious souls. Even as early in the regime’s life as 1934, when the streets of the cities convulsed with shocking political violence, there were advertisements in British newspapers reading: ‘Germany is News!’, followed by the strapline ‘See Germany for yourself as it is today’.8 There were ‘Cook’s Tours’, run by the travel firm Thomas Cook and advertised to readers in the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. ‘English-speaking guides’ were promised; they were Nazis. In Dresden, as elsewhere, they did not feel that they had anything to hide. They wanted British travellers to see the imposed order in the streets and squares and to undertake guided tours of a surrounding countryside that they themselves viewed as quasi-mystical. In addition to this, Dresden’s musical and artistic life was familiar even to readers of the more popular newspapers: the Dresden Opera Company’s 1936 visit to London suffused the gossip columns with admiring Mayfair titbits.
By February 1945, the only British and Americans to be found in Dresden were underfed prisoners of war. Among them was a young American, twenty-two years old, called Kurt Vonnegut. He had been in Dresden since 10 January 1945, having been taken prisoner a week before Christmas as the Wehrmacht startlingly struck back against the Allies on the borders of Luxembourg and Belgium.9 In the intervening weeks he had been granted a view of the sort of hell that men can seemingly plunge into with ease: disintegration of human feeling and sympathy and imperviousness to squalid death. Yet his life beforehand had not been without trauma. While he was undergoing military training in the US, close to his hometown Indianapolis, he returned on leave to see his mother to find that she had committed suicide by taking a combination of sleeping pills and alcohol.
There had been financial problems too. Vonnegut’s family, originally from Germany, had interests in brewing and architecture, and prospered in the early years of the twentieth century until Prohibition in the 1920s destroyed the beer business, and the crash that rippled out from Wall Street in 1929 halted countless building projects in their tracks.
Young Vonnegut, who had studied at Cornell, was a pacifist. His original specialized subject was biochemistry. But both he and Jane Cox, the childhood sweetheart he had vowed to wed, were fascinated by journalism and writing. Vonnegut had always told his fiancée that they would be married in 1945. In 1944 he was shipped out from the US and across the Atlantic. Within weeks he and his company would be stepping into the darkness of Europe. He was a private, attached to military intelligence, and he was there in the freezing wet forests at the end of 1944 when the Battle of the Bulge saw the Wehrmacht infused with a demonic new energy. Private Vonnegut’s company was cut off; he and 150 others were rounded up by German soldiers on 19 December. Thence began not just an ordeal, but also a terrible tutorial in the hinterland of human nature.
Vonnegut and his comrades were forcibly marched some sixty miles, the cold biting into their bones, boots grating the soles of their feet. They reached a town called Limburg, and it was here that the men were loaded into boxcars,10 the sealed, windowless wooden crates that served as railway carriages. There was no room to manoeuvre, the floor crusted with frozen dung, and to add an element of existential absurdity the train remained stationary. Possibly because tracks ahead had been bombed by the Allies, these airless, cold goods wagons filled with half-conscious human freight were left standing in sidings for days on end.
Consequently, they themselves were now vulnerable to Allied bombs, and one crisp night there came an American raid during which the train was hit. Hundreds were killed or injured. Vonnegut and the other survivors were put into another rancid carriage and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Mühlberg, just a short distance outside of Berlin. According to Vonnegut, commissioned officers were not to be compelled to work; anyone of humbler rank, however, could be selected to help satisfy the ever more rapacious Nazi demand for labour.
The train journey to Dresden at that time – taking into account timetable changes caused by Allied attacks and to accommodate the extra services transporting Jews – would have taken between three and four hours. There must have been some way upon arrival that Vonnegut, herded from his barbaric conveyance, was able to glance around at the bridge over the Elbe, and the very pretty roofscape punctuated with spires and towers. For, as he later told Jane, he thought this was the first ‘proper’ city that he had ever seen.11
One of their shared literary heroes was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment; Vonnegut did not seem aware that this idol had himself lived in Dresden for several years, from the late 1860s to the early 1870s. What would the Russian have made of the city in 1945, his eye searching out all the agonies of moral compromise, the piercing awareness of sin and cowardice? Certainly, Kurt Vonnegut was fascinated by the gradations of morality he observed there. He swiftly satisfied himself that there was a sharp distinction between the sadists who made up the German guard parties and the inhabitants, past and present, of a city clearly as cultured as this one.
Vonnegut was put to work on a production line bottling malt syrup. Such sweet luxury was by February 1945 beyond most citizens of the Reich, but supplies were deemed important for pregnant mothers. The accommodation assigned to him and others in his group was in the abattoir complex: barracks set up in the slaughterhouse. And he was to recall that in those nights of late January and early February 1945, the city’s sirens appeared to react to the tiniest provocation, usually, it seemed, when it was quite another city receiving a bombing raid. Vonnegut himself could not envisage Dresden as a target; it never apparently occurred to him that his own side might want to unleash a roaring fire on the beauty of the old city.
And so, after each day’s shift, and after the uncomfortable, rib-jabbing, rifle-butt-thumping march back to the abattoir, after the grim evening rations of soup threaded with strings of horsemeat gristle and hard-to-swallow bread, he was not apprehensive about any threat from above. Indeed, he and his fellow soldiers must instead have been wondering quite how long it would be before either the Americans or the Soviets materialized on Dresden’s bridges.
Similarly blithe was the twenty-six-year-old British rifleman and paratrooper Victor Gregg. He too had been taken prisoner in the later stages of 1944 after Arnhem. Like the American, London-born Gregg was put to work, but in his account the labour was initially comparatively congenial.12 He was attached to a road-sweeping gang in the city, which gave him a chance to take in the extraordinary architecture. The gangmaster – a native Dresdener – was apparently a man of high good humour. Gregg and a few other POWs were treated to stew, black bread and even beer.
Gregg was receiving such good rations that his strength levels were consistently high, and this in turn meant that he could contemplate escape. According to his own account, he tried to slip away from his barracks and his work parties twice, both times unsuccessfully. As a result he was detailed to rather more secure work duties. By the beginning of February 1945 Gregg and his fellow prisoners had been sent to work in a soap factory some way out of the city centre; the ingredients were in such pitifully short supply that Gregg and his party had to make it using pumice rather than the regular fats.
In all this time Gregg certainly sensed that Germany was nearing the end of its war, and he, like others, recalled Dresdeners telling him that the city would never be considered a target by the Allies, because it was both too precious historically and insufficiently important to the war effort. One day Gregg and his workmate Harry ‘confused’ a quantity of cement for pumice. The result was soon a grinding, roaring protesting machine, sparks and flames, and the outbreak of a fire that might well have burned the factory down.
The Gestapo were adamant that the duo had acted deliberately (which, of course, they had, despite Gregg’s protestations). In Nazi Germany, sabotage could only carry one sentence. At a makeshift tribunal conducted with nightmarish speed, the pair were sentenced to death. Gregg and his friend were told they would face a firing squad on the morning of 14 February 1945. Harry put on a brave front, telling Gregg that he was sure something would turn up.
In an earlier, more elegant age, one particular RAF airman – later to become a successful novelist – would have revelled in Dresden’s cosmopolitan atmosphere. But within a few days he would instead be in a briefing room being told why the city was a target for his bombs. Flight Sergeant Miles Tripp, twenty-one, was based near the small Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds. For him and his six fellow bomber crew members, this town represented a solid reality from which they were becoming increasingly detached. With its pale-bricked market square, half-timbered shopping streets, its abbey and cinemas and pubs, this was the quiet world to which they returned after flying through darkness – and through occasional fugue states of terror – to bomb German cities.
Tripp was a bomb aimer: the man who lay on his belly on the floor of the Lancaster, watching the green and white and red flares thousands of feet below and using them as the prompt to unleash his load of explosives and incendiaries. At the start of one mission, convinced the pilot was about to mess up the take-off and crash the plane, Tripp suddenly found himself curled up with his knees to his chin and with no recollection of how he had scrambled into that position.13
He and the rest of the crew, who were days away from being told that they were to fly their longest, deepest mission into Germany yet, understood very well all the different degrees of mortal fear, and indeed the destabilizing elation that survival could bring. By the early days of February 1945 they were acutely, silently aware of the mortality rate for bomber crews, and of how it was more likely than not that their lives would soon end in blinding fireballs.
Like many who flew with Bomber Command, Tripp became unselfconsciously eccentric: his hair was for the time extraordinarily long; with his blue uniform, he wore a bright scarlet scarf.
In the first week of February 1945 he and his fellow crew members had been sent to bomb the Gremberg railway marshalling yards in Cologne. The mission over what he could see was the already ruined city scared him; despite the ferocity of the 1943 bombing attack that had left the historic town looking like a blasted cemetery, the defences still had bite; the skies around Tripp’s bomber glowed with tracer fire from the ground seeking out his plane’s fuselage, and there were the illusory ‘scarecrows’: rumoured rockets that visually imitated the explosion of an aircraft when hit, but which were in fact a tragic optical trick caused by other planes exploding. He watched another plane being hit and ‘dropping like a stone’. The mission was judged a success, but the repeated intense levels of fear after having made over twenty-five such flights were corroding his psyche. The mission to come would be yet more haunting.
Upon his return from that Cologne bombing mission, Tripp made his way off base and to the Angel Hotel in the centre of Bury St Edmunds. Already there was his girlfriend Audrey, who was with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. They regularly spent the night together in the Angel. In an age when only married couples were permitted to share rooms, the hotel staff, Tripp related, looked at them both with a special affection and understanding. Sometimes Tripp had a stock of ‘wakey wakey’ pills – officially supplied Benzedrine, intended to ward off tiredness on missions – as he felt it was a waste to ‘go to bed with an attractive woman’ only to fall asleep.
Those hours in the quiet dark of the hotel bedroom helped him to stay connected to life, and to sanity. In all the wartime tenderness of their affair, he and Audrey shared both intimacy and laughter. There was a defiance there, a spirit that extended beyond conflict and one that could prompt a restoration of faith, even to those who had lost it. Such consolations were grabbed by Tripp and so many other airmen with a kind of desperate hunger.