Dresden

Dresden Read Free Page B

Book: Dresden Read Free
Author: Frederick Taylor
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eastern front. The city is completely unprotected.
    One man’s diary for February 13 also describes “perfect spring weather” in Dresden during the daylight hours. But there is nothing else cheerful about his report of the day’s events. This citizen, Professor Victor Klemperer, changed careers in early middle age from journalist and critic to become a distinguished academic. A decorated veteran of World War I and a firm German patriot, in the past ten years he has lost his job, his house, and his savings. He is not permitted to own or drive a car or a bicycle, or to use public transport. He cannot keep pets. There are certain streets he cannot walk along, or can cross only via specific junctions. This is because Klemperer is Jewish. He has been saved from “deportation” until now, not because his family has been established in Germany for two hundred years, but because he is married to an “Aryan.” * And today, he reports in the pages of his journal, he has been touring the homes of the few other Jews still remaining in the city (about two hundred out of a prewar total of six thousand), to tell them that they will be deported to an undisclosed “labor task” in three days’ time, on February 16. Every one of them knows what this means.
    That evening, arriving back at the house he and his wife sharewith other Jewish survivors since their own home was confiscated, he eats a modest dinner. Klemperer sits down to coffee just as the air raid sirens sound. Then they hear aircraft overhead. One of his companions says with bitter prescience: “If only they would smash everything.”
    The Lancasters are over their target; their bomb doors have opened. The raid is under way. The first wave of destruction lasts between fifteen and twenty minutes. The second, two hours later and featuring even more aircraft, lasts slightly longer. The time lag is a deliberate, cold-blooded ploy on the part of Bomber Command’s planners, who have become expert at such pieces of business. By this time many who survived the first raid will be back above ground, and there will be firefighters, medical teams, and military units on the streets—including auxiliaries who have raced along frozen roads from as far away as Berlin. Now a fresh hail of high explosive and incendiary bombs will suck the individual existing fires into one, and the firestorm will begin to build. In the morning Flying Fortresses of the Eighth U. S. Army Air Force will finish the work of destruction. Dresden is doomed.
    The next morning aircrew from the 796 Lancaster bombers that flew to Dresden have almost all landed safely back at their bases in England. The young fliers are debriefed and then released to enjoy hearty breakfasts. Used to horrendous losses over Germany during the previous three years, they have reason to celebrate a mission that was, for them, a bloodless affair.
    Not so for Dresden. Overnight, those same aircrew dropped more than twenty-six hundred tons of high explosives and incendiary devices on the target city, utterly destroying thirteen square miles of its historic center, including incalculable quantities of treasure and works of art, and dozens of the finest buildings in Europe. At least twenty-five thousand inhabitants are dead, and possibly many more: blown apart, incinerated, or suffocated by the effects of the firestorm. Bodies will be piled up in one of the main squares. They will be placed on huge slatted shutters, salvaged from the display windows of one of the city’s department stores, then burned in the thousands to stop the spread of disease.
    Victor Klemperer and his wife, two out of a relatively small group of human beings for whom the horrors of mass destruction represent not acataclysm but a miracle of deliverance, have taken advantage of the chaos. The professor has torn the telltale yellow star from his coat, and they are on their way to safety and freedom. But that is another part

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