Dresden, Sowing the Wind

If there are but fifty righteous, will you not spare the city?

Dresden November 2019. Photograph © Denise Heap.

There’s nothing quite like a front row seat to Stadt Dresden. Three months in an apartment overlooking the Goldener Reiter, balcony view of the drama that played out in the tree-lined pedestrian zone below. Pub eats at Watzke, with their special brews, and a growler to go. Tractors blaring their horns at 4 a.m., slowly rumbling to city center to protest on behalf of agricultural interests. Being there, right upstairs, as daring thieves set a fire under the Augustus Bridge and robbed the world-famous Green Vault at the Residenzschloss of $500 million to $1 billion (jury’s out) in irreplaceable jewels. And fireworks going off for well over an hour New Year’s Eve 2019, wave upon wave, west to east, east to west, illuminating grand old edifices with the colors of the rainbow, and plenty of noise.

Those magnificent fireworks gave me pause, however. My residence faced the old city with its Zwinger royal palace, Hofkirche, Frauenkirche, and other iconic buildings, with only the Elbe River and Groβe Meiβner Strasse between my balcony and Old City. The specific apartment building at the corner of Hauptstrasse and Groβe Meiβner Strasse originated postwar, one of those drab concrete structures thrown up in a hurry to put a roof over the heads of displaced inhabitants.

Whatever building had been there in 1945 had been obliterated in the night between February 13 and 14, 1945. Its occupants would have had a front row seat they’d have gladly relinquished, one that saw wave upon wave of bombers dump payload on churches, museums, palaces, homes, factories, warehouses, leaving behind smoldering embers. Most Americans know of this night from hell because of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five. Indeed, when the devastating bombing of Dresden is discussed, it’s usually in the context of Vonnegut’s personal experience, one of the American GIs trapped in a German POW camp as the bombs fell. [An older friend in Houston, a US Air Force pilot, was also held in a POW camp near Dresden. Years later he learned that one of his best friends was a pilot who was dropping the bombs on the very prison where he was captive. “You mean you’re the one who almost killed me?”]

Even the most patriotic member of the ‘Greatest Generation’ is likely to speak in terms of the bombing of Dresden as “a shame”, or “unnecessary”, or other phrases that would lead American listeners to believe that Dresden should have been spared the fate of Cologne, or Munich. Dresden wasn’t dreadfully military. It’s long been assumed that armament factories or special ops forces were not in Dresden.

And yet, those who did not keep step with the brutal brown-shirted men, or the even more brutal SS-men in severe black garb with polished boots, those men and women who marched to the beat of their conscience, those people speak a different language altogether. Dr. Armin Ziegler, a German economist who retired to research White Rose and other German resistance, had his roots in Leipzig, Dresden, and Posen (Poznan). Sixteen at war’s end, he had no sympathy for the citizens who watched their comfortable, peaceful lives wiped out by Allied bombers.

Nor does Matthias Gretzschel, a journalist who grew up in postwar Dresden, and whose father was a rare pastor who had signed the Niemoeller-Bonhoeffer confession when doing so meant loss of status and income. I stumbled across his book, Als Dresden im Feuersturm versank[i] [When Dresden sank into the firestorm] and simply could not put it down. In preface to his book, Gretzschel tells of the power of the memory, and how young people in the former DDR remembered the night of February 13, 1945. Despite massive oppression from the East German government, in 1982 young people formed a human chain through the city, standing in solidarity before the Frauenkirche – still in ruins – as vivid reminder that war destroys.

Gretzschel focuses his attention on the buildup to February 13. His position is clear from the very first chapter: He who sows the wind… In case his fellow German citizens had forgotten, he hammers home those first ruthless years of the war:

• Guernica, leveled on April 26, 1937, described by a German Luftwaffe pilot as “einfach toll” – simply splendid. Unknown how many of its 5000 residents survived.

• Warsaw, September – October 1939, 400 bombers spent three days wiping out the city, killing approximately 20,000 inhabitants, leaving neighborhoods in ruins.

• Rotterdam, May 14, 1940, in violation of an existing ceasefire, 900 dead before the ceasefire could be implemented.

• London, August 1940-March 1945, approximately 40,000 dead, Parliament destroyed.

• Coventry, November 14, 1940, 449 bombers laid the city waste, with 550 dead.

• Belgrade, April 6-7, 1941, around 2200 killed.

• Stalingrad, August 1942, over 40,000 killed, both bombing and infantry.

Other German cities began to feel the wrath of the Allies, as first British, then British and American, forces punished centers of German commerce and military might. Although smaller bombing runs targeted critical military and armament locations in 1940-1941, the bombing of Cologne in May 1942 was designed to demoralize German citizenry and cripple the war industry. The October 1942 air raids over Munich, though not nearly as devastating as the “1000 bomber raid” of Cologne, served the same purpose. And the July 1943 bombing of Hamburg created the first known firestorm.

But this post does not pretend to educate anyone on military history as basis for the February 1945 bombing of Dresden. Instead, it provides context.

Gretzschel also highlights the even more immediate context of February 12, 1945: NSDAP officials began to round up the remaining Jewish population of Dresden, including those who had been protected by marriage to “Aryans”, for deportation to concentration camps. They were told to bring work clothes, good shoes, bed linens, one set of flatware, and a drinking cup. They were told not to bring cash, stocks and bonds, records of savings accounts, matches, or candles. The highly-respected Victor Klemperer received this summons. This death sentence.

Dresden had also become a transportation hub for troop and civilian movements between Eastern Europe and Germany. Refugees fleeing Russians, Poles, and others who wanted revenge for German atrocities on their soil were passing through Dresden on their way to points further west. It had not even been a month since the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, and the Allied discovery of the bestiality perpetrated in that place.

The deportations to remaining destinations of horror were not to be. Before the trains could be loaded, before knapsacks of Jewish citizens could be weighed and inspected, the bombs began to fall. Trapping German refugees who had thought Dresden was merely a layover. Laying waste to centuries of culture and civilization. Marking the beginning of the end – finally – in bright red fire falling from the sky.

• February 13, 1945, 10:09 pm – 10:35 pm: 3000 high explosive bombs, 400,000 incendiary bombs

• February 14, 1945, 12:15 – 12:25 am: 1500 high explosive bombs, 50,000 incendiary bombs

• February 14, 1945, 1:22 am – 1:54 am: 4500 high explosive bombs, 170,000 incendiary bombs

• February 15, 1945, 12:10 am – 12:50 am: 900 high explosive bombs, 35,000 incendiary bombs

Despite the massive destruction, the NSDAP newspaper in Dresden was remarkably upbeat, denouncing British “terrorists”, vowing that the citizens of Dresden would remain strong and tough. Gretzschel writes, “Whether the editor who wrote this article believed in the slogans of ‘perseverance’ himself? Most survivors of the inferno in Dresden wanted only one thing: The quickest possible end to the war.”

And that had been the primary goal of the Allies since the 1000 bomber raid of Cologne: Convincing German citizens that the quickest end to the war was in their best interests.

To those who question the late date of the Dresden firestorm, a reminder or two:

There was a small group of translators who banded together in an attempt to convince fellow Germans to surrender. It’s often referred to as a resistance movement, but that would not be fair to the people who penned leaflets and fostered active resistance. The Freiheitsaktion Bayern (FAB), or Operation Freedom Bavaria, had as its goal full and complete surrender to Allied forces, now on their doorstep. FAB organized on April 27, 1945, more than two full months after the bombing of Dresden, less than two weeks before Germany surrendered.

FAB was led by Captain Rupprecht Gerngross, CO of the translator unit of Military District VII in the Saar barracks in Munich. He and his handful of men intended to take over NSDAP radio stations as US troops approached. They would command citizens to fly white flags, so the Americans would not destroy their villages and cities. After the war, Gerngross would say that he wanted FAB to bring back freedom of the press and rid Germany of National Socialism. But from April 27 – May 8, 1945, this small band only spoke about surrender and protection of property.

Harald Dohrn was father-in-law to Christoph Probst of the White Rose – who had been executed on February 22, 1943. Dohrn himself had been on trial for his involvement in White Rose resistance and was acquitted solely because the Gestapo lost the evidence that would have convicted him. After his release in July 1943, Dohrn searched for other ways to bring down the NSDAP regime. In April 1945, he and his brother-in-law Hans Quecke joined Gerngross’s small group of men.

On April 29, 1945, an SS-commando hunted him down and killed in him cold blood. No trial, no interrogations. Killed him for participating in a movement that simply asked German citizens to surrender.

Harald Dohrn’s daughter and Christoph Probst’s wife Herta had taken their three children high into the mountains. A mere three days before war’s end, the SS came looking for her. She had believed that the “good people” in the mountains would protect her. But when her brother showed up on her doorstep and warned her to flee higher into the mountains, hiding out with three small babies without shelter or food, she understood that those “good people” would have stood by as she and babies were executed.

While we would like to believe that without the Dresden firestorm, German citizens would have risen up and overthrown Hitler, restoring liberty and justice for all, that is simply not borne out by facts. Even with Dresden firestorm, Harald Dohrn was murdered in cold blood for suggesting surrender, on April 29, 1945. And Herta Probst understood that her neighbors had betrayed her, first week of May 1945.

We have not even begun to learn all the lessons left behind from the era known as the Third Reich. Maybe the Dresden firestorm is a good place to start.

Photograph from German Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-041-07. Unknown author. CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de.

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[i] Matthias Gretzschel, Als Dresden im Feuersturm versank [When Dresden sank into the firestorm] (Hamburg: Ellert & Richter Verlag, 2006)