The Dresden Bombing – An Eyewitness Account

By Edda West, Canada

On September 11, 2001, as I watched the horror of the World Trade Center attack and destruction, I started having flashbacks of where I had come from, what my family had lived through, and the deep cellular memory I still hold as a survivor of the Dresden firebombing in 1945. I could feel the desperation and terror of the poor people trapped in those towers, the hideous realization that there was no escape and that I was witnessing the collective death of thousands of people – an unimaginable act of mass murder. My mind was screaming. This is Dresden!! This is Dresden again!! I am witnessing this over again - another time, another place, but the horror and destruction are the same, differing only in a lesser death toll, a few thousand people compared to the several hundred thousand innocents that died in Dresden.

Over the years, I have often wondered what karma, and strange fates brought me into this world during that intense bombing raid, and the miracle that allowed us to survive not only that night of terror, but many other episodes of near death as we fled the oncoming soviet forces that engulfed Estonia for the next 50 years.

 
   

During the second world war, Estonia had been occupied numerous times by both the Soviets and the Germans. Historically, Estonia had suffered under the brutal threats of invasion from the Russians to the east, had endured occupation and violence against its people over the centuries, and had struggled to defend its culture and language from the perpetual threat of annihilation.

And although Estonia had also been occupied by the Germans over the centuries, there was a different feeling regarding the influence exerted by the Germans. There was a sense of Estonian culture having evolved under German influence in terms of the education, architecture, literature. And there was a sense of alignment with a more gentile culture, versus the marauding hoards that would pour in from Russia in terrorizing waves of plunder and murder.

During the latter point of 1944, it became clear that Germany was pulling back in retreat and the army made preparations to leave Estonia for the last time. The chilling realization settled in on the people that there would no longer be a buffer against the Soviets and that the inevitability of a brutal and permanent occupation by the Communist forces was imminent. Already my grandfather and many others in our community had been sent to the Siberian gulags (slave labor camps) during earlier Soviet occupation in 1939/40 where they had died of cold and starvation, and most of the men in the country had been pressed into military service.

My grandmother’s farm had been occupied by German troops for some time. It was a large working farm which enabled her to feed many of those soldiers. There was a sense of gratitude for the protection received against the Soviet forces. And my mother fell in love with a German officer who was a doctor. When the German army began it’s retreat in the autumn of 1944, and it was clear that the final communist invasion was inevitable, the kind German doctor arranged for my mother and I and grandmother to also leave the country.

We left by ship with the German evacuation, which traveled by the Baltic sea to Germany. The ship ahead of us had been bombed and sunk and all lives lost. Life was in the moment, and my mother’s motto was “live for today for tomorrow might never come”. My mother and Grandmother had faith that whatever unknowns were to be faced would be better than being sentenced to Soviet prison camps and sure death had we stayed in Estonia. We never saw the German doctor again who was called to serve his homeland. We joined the stream of thousands of refugees looking for shelter and safe haven – every day wondering where to find food a roof over our heads and where could we go to find safety?

Hunger and starvation were constant companions. My mother would crawl on her hands and knees through farmers fields in the middle of the night, searching for any little bit of food, digging with her hands in the hope of finding the odd bits of potato that might have been left behind Even years after the war when we were safely in Canada, tears would spring to my grandmother’s eyes if I started fussing about food I didn’t particularly like, reminding me of the sacredness of food and how she had saved every precious little crust of bread with which to feed me.

The stream of displaced humanity, the desperate, shell shocked homeless, starving refugees all had one fervent prayer – that the war would soon end, that they would survive this horror, that they could go home again to be reunited with their families, and that for now, they might find a safe shelter where they could rest their war weary souls.

Fleeing To Dresden To Escape The Russians

And it came to pass that Dresden became that destination, the prayer come true, the safe haven for hundreds of thousands of refugees, the majority being women and children. Many fleeing from the soviet army encroaching from the east, they came to Dresden, having heard this was a safe place to go and was not targeted for bombing as there were no armaments factories, no military installations, no heavy machinery that could feed the war machine. Even the Red Cross had been promised that Dresden would not be bombed. It is estimated that over a half million refugees flooded into the Dresden area for safety, more than doubling the city’s normal population.

I am not exactly sure where our ship landed or the route by which we traveled to Dresden. But it is likely that we landed near Danzig, and slowly made our way inland towards Dresden. I remember the anxiety spoken so often by my mother and grandmother of finding themselves repeatedly during this journey, once again behind Soviet lines as the Russian army advanced from the north and the east. They walked for hundreds of kilometers carrying rucksacks on their backs and me as a little child strapped to the wagon they pulled with their few belongings. For years, my mother saved the old ski boots she had worn - a reminder of the long march and bleeding feet. She would take them out of the closet when the war stories were told. Those worn and blood soaked boots were like old reliable friends that had helped her on that long journey.

 
   

How long we were in Dresden, I am not sure. My grandmother was able to get work as a nurse at a hospital on the outskirts of the city, in exchange for a little food and we had found a small attic room to live in nearby. But even though the safe haven had finally been reached, both women knew instinctively that it would be short lived as the Soviets were moving towards Dresden steadily and were getting closer every day. Throughout their journey as refugees, their greatest fear was that we would fall again into communist hands, and be sent back to Estonia and Soviet prison camps.

My memory of the Dresden firebombing is through the eyes of my grandmother who witnessed the horror of the devastation, and includes as well some pieces of recorded history. As well, the experience of Elisabeth, the only other survivor of the Dresden bombing I have met during my lifetime, brings a powerful personal dimension to this story. Although I was too young to have a conscious memory, I relived it through night terrors that replayed over and over the first 12 years of my life, as my subconscious mind struggled to unload the collective terror imprinted on my soul that tormented me with scenes of death and destruction - of terrible fires bringing the end of the world, and the earth splitting wide open into crevasses of hell that would swallow me up.

My grandmother would always begin the story of Dresden by describing the clusters of red candle flares dropped by the first bombers, which like hundreds of Christmas trees, lit up the night sky - a sure sign it would be a big air raid. Then came the first wave of hundreds of British bombers that hit a little after 10 pm the night of February 13-14, 1945, followed by two more intense bombing raids by the British and Americans over the next 14 hours. History records it as the deadliest air attack of all time, delivering a death toll that exceeded the atomic blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 20 minutes of intense bombing, the city became an inferno. The second bombing raid came three hours after the first and was “intended to catch rescue workers, firefighters and fleeing inhabitants at their fullest exposure”. Altogether, the British dropped nearly 3,000 tons of explosives that shattered roofs, walls, windows, whole buildings, and included hundreds of thousands of phosphorous incendiaries, which were small firebombs that sprinkled unquenchable fire into every crevasse they rolled into, igniting the inferno that turned Dresden into a “hurricane of flames”.

By the time the Americans flew in for the third and last air raid, smoke from the burning city nearly obliterated visibility. One American pilot recollects - “ We bombed from 26,000 feet and could barely see the ground because of clouds and long columns of black smoke. Not a single enemy gun was fired at either the American or British bombers.” The Americans dropped 800 tons of explosives and fire bombs in 11 minutes. Then, American P-51 fighter escorts dived to treetop level and strafed the city’s fleeing refugees.

My grandmother described the horrific firestorm that raged like a hurricane and consumed the city. It seemed as if the very air was on fire. Thousands were killed by bomb blasts, but enormous, untold numbers were incinerated by the firestorm, an artificial tornado with winds of more than 100 miles an hour that “sucked up its victims and debris into its vortex and consumed oxygen with temperatures of 1,000 degrees centigrade.” Many days later, after the fires had died down, she walked through the city. What she saw was indescribable in any human language. But the suffering etched on her face and the depths of anguish reflecting in her eyes as she told the story bore witness to the ultimate horror of man’s inhumanity to man and the stark obscenity of war.

 

Escaping To The Water

Dresden, the capital of Saxony, a centre of art, theatre, music, museums and university life, resplendent with graceful architecture – a place of beauty with lakes and gardens was now completely destroyed. The city burned for seven days and smoldered for weeks. My grandmother saw the remains of masses of people who had desperately tried to escape the incinerating firestorm by jumping head first into the lakes and ponds. The parts of their bodies that were submerged in the water were still intact, while the parts that protruded above water were charred beyond human recognition. What she witnessed was a hell beyond human imagination, a holocaust of destruction that defies description.

 

Three Months To Bury The Dead

It took more than three months just to bury the dead, with scores of thousands buried in mass graves. Irving wrote, “an air raid had wrecked a target so disastrously that there were not enough able-bodied survivors left to bury the dead.” Confusion and disorientation were so great from the mass deaths and the terror, that it was months before the real degree of devastation was understood, and authorities fearful of a typhus epidemic, cremated thousands of bodies in hastily erected pyres fueled by straw and wood. German estimates of the dead ranged up to 220,000, but the completion of identification of the dead was halted by the Russian occupation of Dresden in May.

Elisabeth who was a young woman of around 20 at the time of the Dresden bombing, has written memoirs for her children in which she describes what happened to her in Dresden. Seeking shelter in the basement of the house she lived in she writes, “Then the detonation of bombs started rocking the earth and in a great panic, everybody came rushing down. The attack lasted about half an hour. Our building and the immediate surrounding area had not been hit. Almost everybody went upstairs, thinking it was over but it was not. The worst was yet to come and when it did, it was pure hell. During the brief reprieve, the basement had filled with people seeking shelter, some of whom were wounded from bomb shrapnel.

“One soldier had a leg torn off. He was accompanied by a medic, who attended to him but he was screaming in pain and there was a lot of blood,. There also was a wounded woman, her arm severed just below her shoulder and hanging by a piece of skin. A military medic was looking after her, but the bleeding was severe and the screams very frightening.

“Then the bombing began again. This time there was no pause between detonations and the rocking was so severe, we lost our balance, and were tossed around in the basement like a bunch of ragdolls. At times the basement walls were separated and lifted up. We could see the flashes of the fiery explosions outside. There were a lot of fire bombs and canisters of phosphorous being dumped everywhere. The phosphorus was a thick liquid that burned upon exposure to air and as it penetrated cracks in buildings, it burned wherever it leaked through. The fumes from it were poisonous. When it came leaking down the basement steps somebody yelled to grab a beer (there was some stored where we were), soak a cloth, a piece of your clothing, and press it over your mouth and nose. The panic was horrible. Everybody pushed, shoved and clawed to get a bottle.

“I had pulled off my underwear and soaked the cloth with the beer and pressed it over my nose and mouth. The heat in that basement was so severe it only took a few minutes to make that cloth bone dry. I was like a wild animal, protecting my supply of wetness. I don’t like to remember that.

“The bombing continued. I tried bracing myself against a wall. That took the skin off my hands – the wall was so hot. The last I remember of that night is loosing my balance, holding onto somebody but falling and taking them too, with them falling on top of me. I felt something crack inside. While I lay there I had only one thought – to keep thinking. As long as I know I’m thinking, I am alive, but at some point I lost consciousness.

“The next thing I remember is feeling terribly cold. I then realized I was lying on the ground, looking into the burning trees. It was daylight. There were animals screeching in some of them. Monkeys from the burning zoo. I started moving my legs and arms. It hurt a lot but I could move them. Feeling the pain told me that I was alive. I guess my movements were noticed by a soldier from the rescue and medical corps.

“The corps had been put into action all over the city and it was they who had opened the basement door from the outside. Taking all the bodies out of the burning building. Now they were looking for signs of life from any of us. I learned later that there had been over a hundred and seventy bodies taken out of that basement and twenty seven came back to life. I was one of them – miraculously!

“They then attempted to take us out of the burning city to a hospital. The attempt was a gruesome experience. Not only were the buildings and the trees burning but so was the asphalt on the streets. For hours, the truck had to make a number of detours before getting beyond the chaos. But before the rescue vehicles could get the wounded to the hospitals, enemy planes bore down on us once more. We were hurriedly pulled off the trucks and placed under them. The planes dived at us with machine guns firing and dropped more fire bombs.

“The memory that has remained so vividly in my mind was seeing and hearing humans trapped, standing in the molten, burning asphalt like living torches, screaming for help which was impossible to give. At the time I was too numb to fully realize the atrocity of this scene but after I was “safe” in the hospital, the impact of this and everything else threw me into a complete nervous breakdown. I had to be tied to my bed to prevent me from severely hurting myself physically. There I screamed for hours and hours behind a closed door while a nurse stayed at my bedside.

“I am amazed at how vivid all of this remains in my memory. (Elizabeth is in her late 70’s at the time of this writing). It is like opening a floodgate. This horror stayed with me in my dreams for many years. I am grateful that I no longer have a feeling of fury and rage about any of these experiences any more – just great compassion for everybody’s pain, including my own.”

“The Dresden experience has stayed with me very vividly through my entire life. The media later released that the number of people who died during the bombing was estimated in excess of two hundred and fifty thousand – over a quarter of a million people. This was due to all the refugees who came fleeing from the Russians, and Dresden’s reputation as a safe city . There were no air raid shelters there because of the Red Cross agreement.

“What happened with all the dead bodies? Most were left buried in the rubble. I think Dresden became one mass grave. It was not possible for the majority of these bodies to be identified. And therefore next of kin were never notified. Countless families were left with mothers, fathers, wives, children and siblings unaccounted for to this day.”

 

Who Ordered The Bombing?

According to some historians, the question of who ordered the attack and why, has never been answered. To this day, no one has shed light on these two critical questions. Some think the answers may lie in unpublished papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill and perhaps others. History reports that the British and American attack on Dresden left more than 2-1/2 times as many civilians dead as Britain suffered in all of World War II, and that one in every 5 Germans killed in the war died in the Dresden holocaust.

Some say the motive was to deliver the final blow to the German spirit – that the psychological impact of the utter destruction of the heart centre of German history and culture would bring Germany to its knees once and for all.

Some say it was to test new weapons of mass destruction, the phosphorous incendiary bomb technology. Undoubtedly the need for control and power was at the root. The insatiable need of the dominators to exert control and power over a captive and fearful humanity is what drives acts of mass murder like the Dresden firebombing and Hiroshima.

I think there was also an additional hidden and cynical motive which may be why full disclosure of the Dresden bombing has been suppressed. The Allies knew full well that hundreds of thousands of refugees had migrated to Dresden in the belief that this was a safe destination and the Red Cross had been assured Dresden was not a target. The end of the war was clearly in sight at that point in time and an enormous mass of displaced humanity would have to be dealt with. What to do with all these people once the war ended? What better solution than the final solution? Why not kill three birds with one stone? By incinerating the city, along with a large percentage of its residents and refugees, the effectiveness of their new firebombs was successfully demonstrated. Awe and terror was struck in the German people, thereby accelerating the end of the war. And finally, the Dresden firebombing ensured the substantial reduction of a massive sea of unwanted humanity, thereby greatly lessening the looming burden and problem of postwar resettlement and restructuring.

We may never know what was in the psyche of those in power or all the motives that unleashed such horrific destruction of civilian life - the mass murder of a defenseless humanity who constituted no military threat whatsoever and whose only crime was to try to find relief and shelter from the ravages of war. Without the existence of any military justification for such an onslaught on helpless people, the Dresden firebombing can only be viewed as a hideous crime against humanity, waiting silently and invisibly for justice, for resolution and for healing in the collective psyches of the victims and the perpetrators.

 

 

 

 

 

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