by Ian Kershaw
There was a sharp escalation of the bombing as Allied strength grew and the Luftwaffe was increasingly rendered ineffective. In 1942, a total of 41,440 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany. In 1943 the figure rose to 206,000 tons, and in 1944 expanded more than fivefold to 1,202,000 tons. And 471,000 tons, or more than twice the amount dropped in the whole year of 1943, were dropped between January and the end of April 1945.112 The 67,000 tons dropped by the RAF in March 1945 amounted, in fact, to almost as much as the entire tonnage unloaded onto Germany during the first three years of the war.113 Some of the most devastating attacks were made on near defenceless populations in the very last weeks of the war with the near obliteration of Pforzheim, ‘Gateway to the Black Forest’, on 23–4 February, killing 17,600 people (a quarter of the population), and the savage bombing – militarily quite pointless – of Würzburg, on 16 March, leaving 4,000 dead out of 107,000 inhabitants as incendiaries destroyed 90 per cent of the beautiful baroque centre, a cultural gem, within seventeen minutes.114
Germany was paying a dreadful price, reaping the whirlwind for what it had begun, even before the war, with the merciless bombing of Guernica in 1937, then, once the war had started, in the ruthless attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry and densely populated parts of London. In all, it is adjudged that Allied bombing of Germany killed close to half a million people. A third of the population suffered in some way. More than a quarter of the homes in Germany were damaged by attacks from the air.115
In this terrible catalogue of death and destruction through enemy bombing, the ferocious attack on Dresden on 13–14 February holds a special place. There were perfect conditions for complete aerial annihilation: good weather for bombing, the almost total absence of air defences, the lack of provision by the Nazi leadership of even semi-adequate air-raid shelters (apart from the bunker built for the use of Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann), and a city overcrowded by the accommodation of thousands of refugees to add to the population of 640,000. All this was the target of a double British incendiary and explosive attack of enormous severity that ensured the complete firestorm which turned the old town into a raging inferno. This was followed by a further heavy raid next lunchtime, now by the Americans.
People taking cover in makeshift shelters were suffocated. Those on the streets were sucked into the devouring firestorm. When survivors emerged onto the streets after the first attack, they were caught up in the second, which magnified greatly the ferocity of the firestorm and widened the area of devastation. Those diving into the large reservoir in the middle of the city to escape the flames, among them people who were injured or non-swimmers, found that, unlike swimming-pools, there was no easy way of getting out, since the walls were of smooth cement, and many drowned. On the burning streets, charred corpses lay everywhere. Basements and cellars were full of bodies. In the main station, which had been crammed with refugees, there were ‘corpses and parts of bodies wherever one looked, in the tunnel passages and waiting-rooms in horrific numbers. Nobody got out of here alive.’116 In the pandemonium, the difference between death and survival was a hair’s breadth – often a matter of pure luck. The best hope was to reach the Elbe, and the safety of the river. When the firestorm finally blew itself out and the bombers of next day’s raid had dispatched their lethal loads and left for home, Dresden was a city of the dead.117 But for a few, remarkably, the night of horror brought salvation. The remaining Jews of the city had been awaiting their imminent deportation, and were aware what that meant. In the chaos, they were able to rip off their yellow star, join the homeless ‘aryan’ masses, and avoid deportation to their deaths.118
Even at this late stage of the war, and amid all the mayhem of the ruined city, the regime showed a remarkable capacity for organizing an improvised emergency response. Aid teams were dispatched to Dresden the morning after the attack. Two thousand soldiers and a thousand prisoners of war, together with repair teams from other cities in the region, were rushed in. A command post and communications system were erected to coordinate work. Within three days, 600,000 hot meals a day were being distributed. Martial law was declared and looters arrested and, in numerous cases, executed forthwith. The gruesome task of collecting charcoaled bodies started, some of it undertaken by prisoners of war. With bureaucratic precision, the city’s authorities collected and counted the corpses. More than 10,000 were buried in mass graves on the edge of the city. Thousands more were cremated between 21 February and 5 March in huge pyres on the Altmarkt, in the centre of town. The official report on the victims of the bombing, compiled in March, spoke of 18,375 dead, 2,212 seriously injured, 13,718 slightly injured, and 350,000 homeless. Taking account of others still presumed to be lying beneath the masses of rubble in the inner city, the report estimated the death toll at 25,000 – still accepted as the most reliable figure.119
This figure is lower than the grim toll of mortalities in Hamburg in July 1943, though as a proportion of the population higher (if considerably smaller than in Pforzheim, which, measured in this macabre way, suffered the worst raid of the entire war).120 The shock of Dresden was all the greater since it had long presumed that, as such a cultural jewel, it would be spared the fate of other big cities in the Reich. Of course, Munich’s reputation as a city of priceless art and architecture had offered no protection against as many as seventy-three air raids.121 And the centre of Würzburg, a testament to the rococo genius of Balthasar Neumann, was almost totally wiped out in March.122 But Munich, apart from its art treasures, was the ‘capital of the [Nazi] movement’ (as it had been labelled since 1933). And the flattening of Würzburg (where despite the level of destruction the death toll was perhaps a fifth of Dresden’s) might have been a bigger shock had it preceded, not followed, the bombing of the Saxon capital. Dresden had been a huge attack, and, with the end of the war in sight, had caused immense loss of life and had destroyed a city of singular beauty. Perhaps all this was sufficient of itself to turn Dresden, of all the cities mercilessly pounded from the air, into the very symbol of the bombing war.
There was, however, something else. Dresden gave Goebbels a propaganda gift. He seized upon an Associated Press report, which, remarkably, passed the British censor, and spoke not inaccurately of a policy of ‘deliberate terror bombing of great German population centres’.123 Within days he was castigating a deliberate policy to wipe out the German people by terror-attacks aimed, not at industrial installations, but at the population of a peaceful centre of culture and the masses of refugees, many of them women and children, who had fled from the horrors of war. The numbers of refugees in the city and killed in the attack were inflated in the reportage (though many had, indeed, fallen victim to the bombing, and the Allies were well aware that refugees had poured into the city in recent weeks in the wake of the Red Army’s advance). Also deliberately misleading was the image of a city without war industries, devoid of military signifiance. Its position as an important railway junction gave it some importance, and most of its industry was involved in war production. The attempt to disrupt the passage of German troops through Dresden to reinforce the eastern front, and thereby to assist the Soviet offensive, was, in fact, the rationale behind the bombing of Dresden along with other eastern cities (including Berlin).124 It was, nevertheless, the case that the main target in Dresden had been the heavily populated area of the old town, not the more outlying industrial installations. Not least, Goebbels magnified the number of victims, by the simple device of adding a ‘0’ onto the official figure. Instead of 25,000 dead – itself a vast number – Goebbels created a death toll of 250,000.125 From horrific reality, he created even more horrific – and long-lasting – myth.
He and other Nazi leaders also used the bombing of Dresden to emphasize the need to fight on – the only response possible, his weekly newspaper Das Reich claimed, to the threat to Germany’s existence posed by the western Allies as much as by the Soviets.126 It seems unlikely that most ordinary Germans drew this conclusion from the devastating attack. True, there were vo
ices to be heard – echoing Goebbels – that Germany would not be forced by terror to capitulation.127 But they were probably the exception. Letters to and from the front speak of the horror at the news of what had taken place, but not of strengthened morale or determination to hold out.128 Doubtless, the prevalent hatred of ‘air gangsters’ gained some new sustenance. For the most part, however, the destruction of Dresden probably signified for most people not the need to resist to the last, but the helplessness against such wanton devastation and the futility of fighting on while Germany’s cities were being obliterated. And Dresden, the most glaring manifestation of the Nazi regime’s inability to protect its own population from the bombers, brought no deflection of the mounting antagonism of the German people towards their own leaders. ‘Trust in the leadership shrinks ever more,’ ran a summary of letters monitored by the Propaganda Ministry in early March. ‘Criticism of the upper leadership ranks of the Party and of the military leadership is especially bitter.’129
VI
The horror inflicted on Dresden did little or nothing to hasten the end of the war. But it was a reminder to many that the end was not far off. The regime’s leaders, too, were well aware – not that they would openly acknowledge it – that the game was up, that it would be a matter of weeks, not months, before Germany was totally crushed. They could intensify the terror and repression directed now also at their own population and throttle any possibility of a repeat of 1918. But they were powerless to stop the flood tide of impending defeat.
The outward façade of invincibility had to be maintained. Robert Ley, the Labour Front Leader, whose public utterances – and reputation for drunkenness – were an embarrassment to Goebbels and other leading Nazis,130 even managed to draw positives from the Dresden inferno, declaring that as a consequence the struggle for victory would no longer be distracted by concerns for the monuments of German culture.131 Yet privately Ley could see as well as anyone how desperate the situation was on the fronts.132 Even within leading SS circles, Himmler held to the myth that the war would turn out well for Germany. Rituals were to continue as usual. Himmler wrote to Obersturmführer Freiherr von Berlepsch to congratulate him on the birth of his eighth child and let him know that the ‘light of life’ (Lebensleuchter) – part of the pseudo-religious cultism within the SS – for little Dietmar could be sent only after the war.133 The Reichsführer-SS let it be known among his leading aides that he wanted every year in May to establish which book he would give to higher SS leaders at the ‘Julfest’ – the order’s pagan version of Christmas. A list was to be provided by 30 April 1945 on which the titles of the books in question were to be presented.134 And replying to the father of one of his godchildren, who had written to thank him for all the presents to his family, mentioning that a Christmas plate (Julteller) had arrived broken, Himmler had Rudolf Brandt, his aide, provide assurance that, should a small contingent be available after the war, ‘I will gladly again send you a Christmas plate’.135 Speaking privately to Albert Speer, Himmler kept up pretences. ‘When things go downhill, there’s always a valley-bottom, and only when that’s reached, Herr Speer, do they go up again.’136 This maintenance of illusions came from a man, wavering between his own growing sense of delusion and hard-headed awareness of realities, who was already making tacit overtures to the enemy with an eye to his post-war future.
A curious mixture of unreality and ‘business as usual’ prevailed, too, in the highest ranks of the state bureaucracy. Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the long-serving Finance Minister who had held office since 1932, before Hitler’s accession to power, dispatched numerous letters in early 1945 to Nazi leaders and government ministers offering advice on the conduct of the war. Little notice was taken of them. His main preoccupation, however, was the desolate state of Reich finances. In January he compiled a lengthy dossier, sent to leading figures in the regime, which began by stating: ‘The current finance and currency situation is characterized by rising costs of war, falling state income, increased money supply and smaller purchasing power of money.’ It was urgently necessary, he concluded, drastically to restrict money supply by reducing Reich expenditure and by increases in postage, rail and local transport prices, and by raising taxation on tobacco and alcohol, visits to the cinema, hotel accommodation, radio licence fees and newspapers, as well as increasing the war supplement on gas, water and electricity prices. With remarkable logic – justifying the post-war impression of him as an individual of singular ineptitude, an utter ‘ninny’137 – he reasoned that ‘it cannot be objected that essential provisions for the population are thereby being made more expensive’ since ‘a large part of the population has already been entirely without regular access, or with only restricted access, to water, gas and electricity for months’.138 He presented his proposals for a fourfold rise in property tax to a meeting of ministers on 23 February, lamenting Bormann’s absence from the meeting and his unwillingness to discuss the dangers of a collapse of the currency. All he could get out of the Party Chancellery was a suggestion that a programme should be devised by state officials after which Bormann would be able to judge whether it could be ‘politically implemented’.139 In any normal political system, the imminent collapse of the state currency would have been a matter of the utmost priority. To the Nazi leadership, in the conditions of February 1945, it was of no consequence. Undeterred, Krosigk continued to work on his plans for tax reform, which were criticized in late March by Goebbels – as if they were about to be implemented – for placing the burden upon consumer tax rather than income tax. By that time, it was at best an arcane issue: most of the country was under enemy occupation.140
Constantly in Hitler’s close proximity, Martin Bormann was more aware than most of the true scale of the disaster closing in on Germany. His frequent letters to his wife, Gerda, show his anxious recognition of the plain realities of the military situation, brought home to him at first hand by the bombing of the Reich Chancellery on 3 February. The day following this heavy raid, he feared (he wrote) that ‘the worst phase of our fortunes is still to come’ and told Gerda frankly ‘how very unpleasant – indeed, if I am completely honest, how desperate the situation really is’. But pretence had to be maintained, and he added: ‘I know that you, like myself, will never lose your faith in ultimate victory.’141 Next day he wrote again, first with scarcely veiled pessimism about the outlook on the western front, but then reverting to a form of fatalistic hope in the future:
Anyone who still grants that we have a chance must be a great optimist! And that is just what we are! I just cannot believe that Destiny could have led our people and our Führer so far along this wonderful road, only to abandon us now and see us disappear for ever. A victory for Bolshevism and Americanism would mean not only the extermination of our race, but also the destruction of everything that its culture and civilisation has created. Instead of the ‘Meistersinger’ we should see jazz triumphant…142
Gerda replied: ‘One day, the Reich of our dreams will emerge. Shall we, I wonder, or our children, live to see it?’ Martin interpolated some words in his wife’s letter at this point: ‘I have every hope that we shall!’143 In another letter to her, a little later, he added: ‘As I have often emphasized, I have no premonitions of death; on the contrary, my burning desire is to live – and by that I mean to be with you and our children. I would like to muddle on through life, together with you, as many years as possible, and in peace.’144
Goebbels was, for many Germans, the outward face of the regime in the last months, appearing in public more frequently than any other Nazi leader, visiting troops at the front as well as urging on bombed-out civilians – a constant driving force, in his radio broadcasts and newspaper articles, to ever greater efforts to hold out and fight on. He still worked feverishly to drum up new recruits for the Wehrmacht and, now, to plan the defence of Berlin (for which he saw Bolshevik methods in Leningrad and Moscow as a possible model).145 He remained among the most utterly fanatical Nazis, widely regarded alongside H
immler as one of ‘the strong men’ of the regime.146 He urged rapid sentencing by drumhead courts martial and execution to address the ‘miserable mood’ among the 35,000 ‘stragglers’ and deserters recently rounded up, looking to Stalinist methods to restore order and combat sunken morale.147 His fanaticism led him to advocate the execution of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war in response to the bombing of Dresden.148 He was still a figure of remarkable dynamism, able not just to put on a show for the masses, but also to fire up those in his entourage and continue to represent the face of optimism and defiance. Yet he was among the most clear-sighted of the Nazi leaders. When, in early February, his wife Magda lamented the loss of so many territories that Germany had once conquered and the weakness now unable to prevent the threat to Berlin itself, Goebbels replied: ‘Yes, sweetheart. We’ve had it, bled white, finished. There’s nothing to be done.’149