Granades

During the day, one of our motorcycle messengers had gone missing, probably in Dresden, and a car had to turn back to try to find him. To make sure they didn’t drive past us, a sentry had to be posted by the road, and a few of us took turns standing there. That gave us a chance to witness the spectacle unfolding in the direction of Berlin.

The burning city lit up the sky with a fiery orange glow, interspersed with a constant stream of sharp, white flashes from the bomb bursts. The narrow, intense beams from the German anti-aircraft searchlights swept back and forth, and when they caught a bomber, which then gleamed almost silver-white, a couple of other beams would immediately cross over the plane. Shortly afterward, one could see countless flashes around the aircraft; sometimes the plane disappeared, but several times planes were hit and fell toward the ground as balls of fire.

All around where we stood, one could hear shrapnel from the shells striking the ground. Occasionally, there was a loud explosion nearby from shells that did not detonate until they hit the earth. To reduce the risk, people stood under a viaduct, but those lying in the woods had little protection from the trees, so there was not much sleep or rest that night either—but no one was hit.

At dawn, we set out again. The car had returned, but not the motorcycle. (By the way, he managed to get back to Friedrichsruh on his own a week later.) Already on the outskirts of Potsdam, the effects of the previous night’s events were visible. Misplaced carpet bombs had torn huge craters in long rows, and countless trees lay toppled and shattered.

Inside the city, which we had passed three days earlier when it was undamaged and beautiful, everything was now in ruins, with fires and chaos. Fire trucks tried to extinguish the flames, people were digging through the rubble for survivors, or attempting to clear the streets to make them passable. We had to get through in order to reach the road leading further west toward Denmark. In many places, tram lines had fallen or been torn apart.

To get the buses through, in some places we had to lift the wires using poles or long boards we could find among the ruins. Occasionally, loud explosions could be heard—these were time-delayed bombs hidden in the rubble, intended to hinder the clearing and rescue operations.