Dresden (20 page)

So, by the beginning of 1945, there were certainly more, not fewer, children in the city than a year earlier, when the vain attempts at evacuation had begun.

But surely Dresden, of all places, must be safe. It was a
Kulturstadt
, famous for nothing except its beautiful buildings and treasures. Why would anyone want to attack Dresden?

ACCORDING TO THE
1944
handbook of the German Army High Command's Weapon Office, the city of Dresden contained 127 factories that had been assigned their own three-letter manufacturing codes, by which they were always referred to (for example, Zeiss-Ikon = dpv; Sachsenwerk = edr; Universelle = akb). This assured secrecy, while at the same time allowing the military authorities to identify individual weapons, munitions, and military equipment back to their manufacturing sources. An authority at the Dresden City Museum describes the handbook's code list as “very incomplete,” and it did not include smaller suppliers or workshops that were not assigned any codes. Even by this measure, however, Dresden was ranked high among the Reich's wartime industrial centers. As the 1942
Dresdner Jahrbuch
(
Dresden Yearbook
) boasted:

The “industrial activity” had always included a surprisingly large number of precision engineering companies, but before the war Dresden remained known to the outside world almost exclusively for its leisure-related and luxury industries. This was an important factor
in the pervasive postwar myth that at the time of the bombing raids it was a “city without industry” and “of no military or industrial importance.” Even many prosperous Dresdeners seem to have been only half aware of what went on in their city, away from the pleasant suburbs where they lived.

However, when it became clear that the war was going to be a long one, Dresden quickly followed the rest of Germany into the integrated war economy, a process accelerated after the campaign against Russia began. Most of the factories formerly making consumer goods or luxury items had, by 1944, been turned over almost entirely to war work.

The Army High Command's list of company codes includes firms that any casual browser would never conceive of as war-related. It contains machine and engineering companies, which are more obvious, but also manufacturers of leather goods, wooden furniture (including a company making “school benches”), curtains and lingerie, pianos, and towels.

A typical example of the how Dresden's economy, after a slow start, became a war economy is Seidel and Naumann, the well-known typewriter and sewing machine manufacturer, whose factory was situated close to the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards. An employee reported:

The same was true of Richard Gäbel & Co., a smaller company with factories in the Pirnaische Strasse and the Caspar-David-Friedrich-Strasse. It had been founded almost sixty years earlier to produce machines for making waffles and marzipan, and later packaging for the candy industry. However, in March 1944, the company's own report to the regional Rüstungskommando (Armaments Command) in Dresden stated that 96 percent of its production was for the Wehrmacht High Command, including torpedo parts for the navy. There reigned a similarly strict regime of secrecy, as at Seidel and
Naumann. Wartime instructions included an order to employees that they must, when referring to items made at the factory, at all times use codes (“list attached”) to identify them (“That is, not cartridge cases but KG31/630”).

Another larger firm was the J. C. Müller Universelle-Werke in the Zwickauer Strasse. Founded in 1898 as a maker of cigarette-making and-packaging machines, Universelle was bought during the First World War by J. C. Müller, who rapidly diversified into making shells for the army. With the peace, the factory returned to its original business. After 1933, when Germany began to rearm, new assembly sheds were added and the firm took on armaments contracts again (including, in 1936–37, one producing aircraft parts for the Spanish Nationalists). By 1944 Universelle was employing four thousand workers, many of them foreigners from the occupied countries. In the latter half of 1944 there arrived seven hundred women, many Jews, from Ravensbrück concentration camp. Everything the company now made was for the war, including machine guns, searchlights, aircraft parts, directional guidance equipment, torpedo tails, and much more. In that year J. C. Müller was able to chalk up a record turnover of around 40 million Reich marks.

Ilana Turner, one of several hundred women concentration camp prisoners brought to Dresden from Liztmannstadt (Lodz) in Poland via Auschwitz in October 1944, tells of filling bullets in a former cigarette factory on a machine adapted from making cigarettes. The factory was known by the harmless name of Bernsdorf & Co. She and her coprisoners were working for the Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionswerke (German Weapon and Munitions Works), part of the complex of companies owned by the fabulously rich Quandt family.

Born in Lodz to a middle-class Jewish family, Ilana had been set to go to high school when the Germans invaded Poland. Soon the family had to move from their comfortable home to the ghetto; 230,000 Jews were crammed into this area before it was sealed. In 1942 the schools were closed and all the children over ten put to work. “Otherwise you were sent away. We didn't know where to, but not to a good place.”

So for more than two years, from the age of thirteen to fifteen, Ilana worked in a military uniform factory making hats. Sometime a few months before the dissolution of the Lodz ghetto in the early summer of 1944, the authorities decided she was capable of handling
heavier work. She was set to making military saddles, which was indeed demanding and hard. Then came the evacuation of the ghetto, which by 1944 had been emptied of the sick, the young and the old and had become almost entirely a center for forced labor.

Ilana Turner went from Lodz to Auschwitz, but after a few days was transferred along with her fellow workers to Stutthof, a small but notorious camp on the Baltic coast near Danzig (Gdansk). It was not an extermination camp, but conditions were appalling, the German guards brutal, and sickness prevalent. Luckily for the girl and her comrades, the Germans now desperately needed workers. Even Jews.

It was sometime in the second week of October 1944 when they were put into boxcars and transferred by train from Stutthof to Dresden. The beauty of the city's streets was stunning. They were marched through the streets from the station to the factory in their rags and their shaved heads, but still they looked around in wonder. A pedestrian bridge connected the factory with the big Zeiss-Ikon plant on the Schandauer Strasse.

Since the slave laborers also lived under guard there, the factory amounted to a camp. It was nevertheless the least bad place the Jews from Lodz had been. They even encountered kindness, but the work itself was hard—twelve hours a day, seven days a week, making cartridges. It was repetitive, demanding labor. Ilana had to coordinate pressing a foot pedal with pushing each cartridge through a small hole. One thousand per hour.

The list of factories turned over to war production goes on—camera factories, cigarette makers, confectionery manufacturers, furniture, electrical goods. Even arts and crafts centers.

The Deutsche Werkstätte (German Workshops) at Hellerau, in the leafy northern reaches of Dresden, were founded in 1898. They represented an idealistic attempt to make fine German furniture and crafts while at the same time exploiting modern machines, with designers and craftspeople living in an idyllic, purpose-built garden-suburb setting based on the English model.

An artists' colony grew up around the original workshops and dwellings, attracting famous visitors from all over Europe, including Rilke, Kafka, George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, Diaghilev, Le Corbusier, and Rachmaninoff. A. S. Neill, later founder and headmaster of Summerhill progressive school in England, started his first school at Hellerau. In 1911 a magnificent art school–cum–festival hall was built, providing space for an educational institute as well as for performances of progressive dance and drama. This international bohemian flowering was sadly cut short by the First World War, and though the workshops continued, the artists' colony never really recovered.

By 1944, the Festival Hall was an SS barracks. As for the workshops, these too were pressed into working for the Wehrmacht. As metal became scarce toward the end of the war, craftsmen at Hellerau made wooden tail assemblies for planes, and possibly even wooden parts for V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets.

In the Albertstadt industrial area, the war years also saw a huge expansion by a company that had formerly represented the brave new world of communications and entertainment. Radio-Mende, founded by Otto Hermann Mende in 1923, had begun with modest manufacturing premises in the former ordnance shops, but its embrace of new technology (in this case the radio receiver) brought rapid growth. Soon Mende's radios were being sold all over Germany.

Mende was a right-wing nationalist who welcomed the Nazi regime. By the late 1930s, after a disappointing involvement with the manufacture and sale of the Nazi-encouraged “people's receiver” (
Volksempfänger,
colloquially known as
die Goebbelsschnauze
—the “Goebbels Gob”), the company decided to ride the wave of rearmament and began to exploit its in-house expertise (and underemployed workforce) in pursuit of Wehrmacht contracts.

The move was successful. By July 1943 Radio-Mende was employing about twenty-five hundred workers, more than half of them women. The company, like most in Germany, was crying out for labor. During the next year and a half, more women were recruited from forced labor sources—Russians and Poles, and from the concentration camps of Flossenbürg (three hundred women) and Bergen-Belsen (six hundred women). They manufactured field telephones, radios that fit into knapsacks, and two-way radios. They had also expanded into other forms of communications equipment for the Wehrmacht, including teleprinters, artillery observation devices, and—in the tens of thousands—electrical fuses for the Luftwaffe.

In the same Albertstadt industrial area, the other larger firms, including the box and packaging firm AG für Cartonnagenindustrie; the Infesto-Works, which made steering elements for torpedoes, aircraft, and U-boats; Gläserkarrosserie GmbH Works III (parts for Messerschmitt planes); and many of the others, were according to the Albertstadt industrial area's chronicler, almost all working for the armed forces in some way or another. There was a navy-approved testing station for specialized turbines, which were also produced there by Brückner, Kanis & Co.

The largest employer in Dresden by far, though, was Zeiss-Ikon. And it was a long time since that distinguished company had produced anything as innocent as a snapshot camera.

 

NO.
2
SPORERGASSE,
in the Dresden Altstadt. The date is November 23, 1942. (We know this because this is a scene from a film, in which titles have been inserted to explain the date and context of the events.) In front of the house stand overfilled, unemptied garbage bins. This is one of Dresden's “Jew houses” (
Judenhäuser
). Young men with “Jew stars” on their clothing are carrying household objects out of the house, while uninvolved passersby hurry past on the pavement. The same scene plays out in front of another house, the Jewish old people's home at 24 Güntzerstrasse. Individual pieces of luggage come repeatedly into the shot, with the names of their Jewish owners clearly legible.

The next sequence of pictures is introduced with the title: “City Disinfecting Institution.”

The delousing of these respectable middle class citizens is a delib
erate humiliation, especially for the women. The camera dwells implacably on them as white-coated, dutiful city employees pick through their hair for vermin. Some of the women drop their gaze, embarrassed by the camera's presence, others stare with an edge of defiance.

Four men watch from the yard of the disinfecting institution. Two are uniformed Dresden Gestapo officers, one a police officer in civilian clothes, and the fourth is a civilian, in well-tailored coat and Homburg hat, smoking a cigar. The Gestapo men are grinning and chatting in animated fashion. One is SS-Scharführer Martin Petri, the other SS-Untersturmführer Henry Schmidt, head of the Jewish Department in Dresden, the notorious Judenreferat. Schmidt, hands clasped behind his greatcoated back in an attitude of relaxed command, is almost laughing as he addresses a remark to the plainclothes policeman. Between them is the enigmatic, cigar-smoking civilian, Dr. Johannes Hasdenteufel, a powerful executive of Zeiss-Ikon AG, prewar giants of the camera and lens industry and Dresden's largest single private employer.

The scenes at the disinfecting institution conclude. The Jews fetch their overcoats and suitcases, which have been separately handled. Then, in the rain and temperatures only just above freezing, they must set off on the five-kilometer walk to their destination. This is the
Judenlager
(Jew camp) Hellerberg, on the northern outskirts of the city, near the old aerodrome. In the barrack huts there they will be housed until the Gestapo decides what to do with them. They pause and stare into the camera—obviously by order—as, protected by a scattering of umbrellas, some in rain capes foraged from luggage, they trudge through the rain toward the entrance to the camp. The camp lies in a sandy depression bordering the St. Pauli cemetery and not far from the entrance to Weinbergstrasse. At the camp they are “greeted” by the Gestapo men, who have traveled there by official car.