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Dresden
Tuesday, February 13, 1945

Chapter One

Blood and Treasure

"The English were treasured. I think it was only after the raid that there was a hatred of the English in Dresden, not before."

Pastor Karl-Ludwig Hoch, Lutheran man of God, architectural historian, and community leader, is in his early seventies now. A profoundly spiritual man, he is saved from otherworldliness by a wry, almost cynical sense of humor. His patrician features are folded in a sad smile as he describes his fellow citizens' lost love affair with England.

"People just knew that the British and the Americans loved Dresden so much ... St. John's was the English church on the Wiener Platz, and the American church was All Saints."

In the garden of the Hoch family's suburban waterside villa is a stone monument, from which it is possible to look downriver and view the skyline of Dresden two or three miles distant. It was built by some long-ago Francophile to commemorate the afternoon when Napoleon, on headlong retreat from Moscow and considering where to make a stand, was led to that same height, at that same spot, so that he too could examine Dresden from a distance. The year was 1813. Saxony was one of the few allies Napoleon had left. The French emperor was thinking of having a battle on its territory. In the event, he liked the idea so much, he had several. The Saxons, as the pastor often points out, have never been especially clever in their choice of friends.

In 1945 Pastor Hoch's family were spared the total destruction visited upon the inner city. Isolated stray bombs scarred their leafy neighborhood, but the Hochs and their lodgers and neighbors just took refuge in the shelter in the garden until the raid was over. Then -- when the roar of aircraft engines had faded -- they emerged, to be presented with a grandstand view of their native city, two miles or so distant, being devoured by flame. A woman who lived up the hill, a fervent Nazi, spotted them out on their balcony and called out, "So, Frau Hoch! Was Goebbels right or not? Are the English criminals or not?"

Josef Goebbels. In many ways, the legend of the destruction of Dresden was the dark, agile Nazi propaganda minister's last and grimmest creation. For Goebbels the city's near-annihilation was both a genuinely felt horror and a cynical opportunity.

Most Germans had realized at the time of the fall of Stalingrad that talk of victory was hollow. By the winter of 1944–45, even Nazi fanatics realized that to all practical intents the war was lost. Ever resourceful, Goebbels now made a characteristically bold and cunning decision: Instead of putting a positive gloss on the German position, he would hammer home the horrors in store if the Third Reich was defeated. The Bolshevik hordes pressing from the east, raping and looting as they advanced into the neat, untouched towns of East Prussia and Silesia; the treacherous, hypocritical Anglo-Americans with their pitiless bomber fleets and their cosmopolitan (read Jewish) contempt for Germany's unique cultural heritage. These were the threats to German -- and European -- civilization.

The only answer was to nobly resist these enemies, totally and to the end -- and wait for the miracle that might come any day from the new wonder weapons that Germany's scientists and engineers would soon bring to devastating application, or from the growing cracks in the impossible, artificial alliance between communism and capitalism. Meanwhile, the worse the crimes that could be laid at the door of the Reich's enemies, the more powerful the spell this twilight masterpiece of Goebbels's black art would cast. Failing the élan of everlasting victory, Germany must summon up the courage of temporary despair.

Therefore no attempts were made to minimize the atrocities being committed by the advancing Russians. On the contrary, unsparing accounts of the horrors that German forces had discovered during brief reoccupations of East Prussian towns during the ebb and flow of battle were broadcast and rebroadcast on the radio. Refugees still in shock were interviewed, and horrifying atrocity articles appeared in the thin newssheets that had now replaced the Reich's once-voluminous press. The newsreels showed devastation and ruin -- and the brave determination of those still eager to resist the enemy. It was a grim route to final victory, Endsieg, but (so the propaganda implied) that route remained open despite all the setbacks.

So, in the early days of 1945, Dresden waited; but for most of the city's people, the arrival they feared was not that of Allied air forces, but of the Soviet Red Army. A hundred and more miles to the east, the capital of the neighboring province of Silesia, Breslau, had been all but encircled by the Russians. From the air base at Klotzsche just north of Dresden the Luftwaffe was running an airborne supply shuttle to the beleaguered Silesian metropolis. The eastern defenses of the Reich were threatening to crack, and after Breslau the next major German city in their path was Dresden.

Camera in hand, on February 13, 1945, Karl-Ludwig Hoch met his brother, and together they took a number 11 tram to Postplatz, in the heart of the Altstadt, the old town. Their plan was to snap photographs of the proud city of Dresden to remember it by. This was because their mother had said that, as an aristocratic family, they might soon have to flee the Communist advance, and so might never see Dresden again. The weather was wintry-mild under slight cloud. The brothers wandered through familiar streets and alleys, passing landmarks they had seen most days of their lives. They returned to their suburban home late that same afternoon, as the twilight crept over the valley of the Elbe, not knowing that they had just seen Dresden for the last time in its historic form ...

Dresden
Tuesday, February 13, 1945. Copyright © by Frederick Taylor. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.