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02/13/2005:

"'Dresden was a dead city- everything was burnt'"

As the British bombers streamed towards Dresden, 18-year-old Götz Bergander was heading home on a tram with his mother.

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.

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.'

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.'

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.

'And then we heard the air raid sirens again. We thought, "There can't be another attack. It isn't possible."'
Full Article: guardian.co.uk