- As the British bombers streamed towards Dresden, 18-year-old
Gtz Bergander was heading home on a tram with his mother.
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- The family's second-floor flat in Friedrichstrasse was
one of the few homes in the city equipped with a proper air-raid shelter.
'It had steel doors and rubber curtains. Most other people had merely dumped
a few sandbags in the cellar,' said Bergander, who survived the raid on
Dresden 60 years ago today and later became a historian. It was the shelter
that almost certainly saved his life when, at 9.50pm on 13 February 1945,
the first RAF planes appeared in the cloudless skies above.
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- According to Bergander, the city's population had wrongly
assumed that the allied air raids that had devastated Hamburg, Cologne
and other German cities wouldn't affect them. Dresden's Nazi gauleiter
had encouraged the myth that the baroque city wasn't a target, he added.
'The opera house and theatre closed down only in September 1944. Right
up until the attack, cinemas were still open,' Bergander, now 78, recalled.
'I was going there two or three times a week. People weren't prepared.'
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- After the alarm sounded, Bergander retreated to the air
raid shelter, taking with him his Philips radio. 'From there we followed
the progress of the bombers as they flew across Germany.'
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- The first attack lasted 30 minutes. When Bergander emerged
from his shelter, he found Dresden's central Neustadt on fire. The nearby
yeast factory where his father worked had survived, but much of the city
no longer existed. 'Many houses were burning. People were fleeing from
the city. They were covered in dust. Other people headed to the hospital
because their eyes had been burnt.
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- 'And then we heard the air raid sirens again. We thought,
"There can't be another attack. It isn't possible."'
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- The second raid was even more devastating. The family
again retreated into their bunker.
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- 'We heard the bombs, the sound of them exploding. Afterwards
I came out to see the cigarette factory burning. It was fascinating and
different somehow, but also terrible. The sky was filled with thousands
of sparks in the air. Wherever they settled, there was a glow.
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- 'Three bombs had landed in the corner of our house, but,
amazingly, it had survived,' he added. 'I went out to take photographs.
My father was furious.'
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- The family spent the night in the cellar. The following
day, Bergander, who had been drafted into manning Dresden's anti-aircraft
batteries, started walking towards the main railway station, where thousands
of refugees from the Eastern Front had been sheltering. There were few
signs of life. 'It was a dead city. Everything had burned out. An extraordinary
silence hung over everything. There was no traffic noise, no trams, nothing.'
-
- Bergander passed the Gestapo's ruined headquarters. He
saw a dead man lying in the street. At the station, he found hundreds more
bodies piled on a cargo ramp.
-
- 'It was impossible to tell how many. It was obscene,
really. The slips of the dead women were flung up. There were children
among the dead. Most people weren't burnt: they had been asphyxiated,'
he recalled.
-
- Bergander's entire family - including his brother Klaus
and younger sister Regine - survived the RAF raids and a follow-up strike
by the US air force the next day.
-
- At last it was safe to emerge. On 16 February, Gtz and
Klaus walked across the entire city. At their old school, they found a
boy sitting on the steps. He appeared to be asleep.
-
- 'In fact he was dead. After three days, rescuers had
arrived at the school and opened up the cellar. Inside they found two or
three dead children.'
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- After the war, Bergander embarked on a career as a journalist.
In the Seventies, he wrote the first definitive account of the raid on
Dresden from a German perspective, Dresdenim Luftkrieg (Dresden in the
Air War), a book that strongly influenced the British historian Frederick
Taylor.
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- Taylor's own book on the attack has just been published.
In it, he argues that Dresden was a rational target for the allies because
of its war industries and its role as a major transportation hub, even
if the raid itself was brutal, horrific and excessive.
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- Yesterday Bergander, who lives in Berlin, told The Observer
he believed the destruction of Dresden was 'a mistake with terrible consequences'.
But he added: 'To understand it you have to understand the motivation of
the other side. In many ways the raid was routine.'
-
- Bergander attributes his survival to his father, who
fought in the First World War and had a grimly realistic understanding
of what war meant. He also listened secretly to the BBC, and was well informed
about Germany and its imminent defeat.
-
- Bergander, meanwhile, is precise about how many people
were killed - 'the documents all indicate it was about 35,000' - a far
lower total than that claimed by revisionist historians and neo-Nazi groups.
-
- 'People started collecting the bodies immediately. The
dead were piled up in one place and their luggage was piled in another.
There were too many to count.'
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- 'I was shortening the war'
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- Freddie Hulance, above, has had 60 years to reflect on
his role in the bombing of Dresden, writes David Smith. 'I had no doubts,'
he says. 'The object was to win the war.'
-
- On the evening of 13 February 1945, Hulance was at the
controls of one of 244 Lancaster bombers that took off from Swinderby in
Lincolnshire. Hours later, he was in the first wave to strike Dresden,
where Allied bombing created a firestorm that killed tens of thousands
of civilians and turned the city, an architectural jewel dubbed 'Florence
on the Elbe', into an inferno.
-
- Hulance, now 81, still believes the target was morally
and strategically justified.'We were told it was a target nominated at
the Yalta conference to support the Russian front,' he recalled. 'I was
happy to support the Russians, who at that time had borne the brunt of
the ground fighting.'
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- Hulance rejected the claim that Dresden was a war crime.
'I felt it was shortening the war and saving lives, not taking them. Last
year, I met a Czech man who had been assigned to forced labour in a munitions
factory in Dresden. He shook me warmly by the hand and thanked me for helping
him escape. It was a very emotional experience.'
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
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- http://observer.guardian.co.uk
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