Dresden 1945
Dresden in the winter of 1944/1945
During the first few weeks of 1945, the sixth year of the Second World War, the war drew ever closer to Dresden: Soviet troops reached the eastern borders of Saxony and American bombers had already attacked the city for a second time. For the people of Dresden, war had now long been part of everyday life, with its ever-increasing restrictions and encumbrances, with an all-pervading sense of threat, with fears about relatives on the front and in the bombed cities in the west.
Like all German cities, Dresden was involved in the war in various ways: as an important military location, as a transport hub, and as one of the main remaining arms storage sites. As in the rest of the Third Reich, in Dresden, too, people suffered racist exclusion and political monitoring, were systematically deprived of their rights, and were imprisoned, deported and killed in state-organised murders on an everyday basis. The old Saxon royal palace had long ceased to be a place of unworldly artistic isolation.
Click on photos to enlarge.
1 May 1933.
National Socialist rally at Theaterplatz in Dresden
(Photo: DVB archives)
The Allied air attacks on Dresden
In the second week of February 1945, the Western Allies began another large-scale bomber offensive. Its target was the remaining oil refineries and cities in Middle Germany, which were now well behind the Eastern Front.
Every night almost 1,500 British aircraft were sent out against Germany, and every day an even larger fleet of American bombers and fighters. Systematically they attacked town after town in Middle Germany: Dresden, Chemnitz, Cottbus and many more.
In the night of 13 February 1945, half of the aircraft deployed in two successive attacks sufficed to set off a huge firestorm in the centre of Dresden – one it was impossible to combat.
13 February 1945.
Firestorm over Dresden
(Photo: Hans-Joachim Dietze / archives of "13. Februar 1945 e.V." group)
Catastrophe and trauma
On 14 February, the attack was followed by American bombers; the following morning, the burnt-out walls of the Frauenkirche gave way under the weight of its stone dome. The final collapse of the church was the symbolic concluding act of the catastrophe; the pile of rubble left behind now marked the centre of an area of almost complete destruction covering twelve square kilometres, or more than four and a half square miles.
"Dresden was like the moon now", the American writer and eye witness Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
Amid the torn, shattered, rubble-strewn city, thousands of people had been killed: struck down by bombs or collapsing buildings, burned to death in the fierce heat of the firestorm, suffocated in the cellars beneath the burning city. In Dresden, the sorry straggle of survivors who dragged themselves out of the ruined city centre became a symbol of the lost war. The experience of helpless vulnerability and mortal fear, of destruction and loss, went down in the history of the city and its people.
1945. Rampische Straße and ruins of the Frauenkirche
(Photo: DVB archives)
1945. Walpurgisstrasse
(Photo: Heinz Kröbel / Stadtmuseum Dresden)
Life goes on in the ruins
In terrible conditions, the survivors' main concern was now staying alive. However, the military and authorities in the ruined city had different priorities: their aim was to get Dresden into shape to continue the war – which had long been lost. A few weeks after the catastrophe Dresden was declared a "fortress"; even in the last two days of the war, Soviet soldiers died trying to occupy the wrecked city.
Author: Matthias Neutzner
August 1945. The Kreuzchor boys' choir holds a concert in the burnt-out Kreuzkirche
(Kreuzkirche community archives)