Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Günther Raschke

The various major attacks by British and American bombers began on 6 February 1945, when we were deployed from the school to the main railway station to look after arriving refugees. There was an air raid alarm around midday and we had to go to the LSR (air raid shelter) of the State Academy of Technology, now Chemnitz University of Technology. That's when the first bombs fell. The nearby opera house suffered the first damage from the bombs.

In the immediate neighbourhood of our house in Mozartstraße, 4 bombs fell in a straight line from the corner of Haydnstraße and Stollberger Straße, on Zimmermannstraße, in the house at Mozartstraße 6 and on Goetheplatz. The first window panes of our flat were shattered!

After the subsequent attacks on 2 and 3 March, we Pimpfe of the Deutsches Jungvolk had to help rescue the buried or dead from the cellars. This was also the case on 3 March after the midday attack. There was a butcher's shop called Müller on Zwickauer Straße between Reichsstraße and the Metropol cinema. There we had to help rescue people who were buried or had died. We 15-year-olds weren't allowed into the cellars, but had to pass on the fragments of wall and bricks in a chain so that the older helpers could get into the cellar. A dead baby and a dead woman were brought out and dumped in the abandoned slaughterhouse. Among the dead was the butcher's wife, a distant relative of my mother. We boys were then sent home when the other dead were brought out. That evening I was sick of eating.

I still remember the 5th of March very well.

There was another attack at midday, Bernsdorfer Straße was particularly affected. A former playmate who was a year older than me was killed there.

Around 7.30 pm, while we were sitting in the kitchen, the only room that could be heated, eating our evening meal, the pre-alarm sounded, soon followed by the real alarm. Around 9.45 pm, wave after wave of bombers flew over us. Then the hissing, howling and bursting of the explosive and incendiary bombs. The inferno had broken out. Screams from the children and especially from the refugees in the house. In between, the voice of a man: Keep calm, keep calm!

My mother, grandmother, sister and I huddled on the floor, putting our heads together because we wanted to die together. I remember praying: Lord God, make an end and let the bombs come quickly, make an end. A few minutes later, when all we could hear was the sound of the first wave of bombers taking off, we looked through the cellar windows, whose earth-filled crates had been knocked over by the blast waves and the windows shattered, and saw how the houses on Hübnerstraße, now Lortzingstraße, behind our house were on fire. The garden fence in the courtyard was also on fire.

The gentleman who had called for calm went down to the ground floor to see what had happened in his flat. When he came back, he only said: "Our lamp is still on. But suddenly the neighbouring house, whose occupants had panicked, opened the breach in the wall, even though they still had a functioning exit from the cellar to the street. But the neighbouring house was on fire, a phosphorus bomb had fallen into the 4th floor and incendiary bombs had done the rest. We also thought that our house was on fire, because it looked like it from the street, as there were still pieces of glass in the windows reflecting the flames. So we took our air-raid shelter luggage on a handcart to the meadow opposite.

That's when I noticed that our house wasn't on fire after all, but burning beams and boards from the neighbouring house, which was higher up, were falling onto our roof. My flatmates and I then went to the upper floor and used grappling hooks to push back the boards, I extinguished the fire through the skylight with the air-raid sprayer, an older man pumped water and the women fetched water from bathtubs filled with water. The fact that the roof hadn't started to burn after all was also due to the thick snowfall at around zero degrees, which kept the roof damp.

Then suddenly there was the sound of aeroplanes and machine-gun fire again. The Royal Air Force was firing at the people fleeing along Stollberger Straße in the direction of Neukirchen. So back down into the cellar.

Then around midnight, when all you could hear were desperate shouts and the crackling of the blazing flames, we went into the rooms adjoining the neighbouring house and moved the furniture away from the firewall, as the wall was already getting very hot. Today I can hardly imagine how I moved the full bookcase away from the wall.

A few days later, we saw that a stick incendiary bomb had fallen on the tin roof of the stairwell, which had obviously been blown down by the high air pressure of the air mines that had destroyed the corner house on Neefestrasse and Hübnerstrasse, and had burnt in the courtyard. There were 23 dead in this corner house!

When the danger of the fire spreading from the neighbouring house was averted, we fell into a deep sleep sitting somewhere for a short time.

At dawn we could see the great catastrophe, houses smoking and still burning all around us. I walked through the rubble towards Goetheplatz. The fire brigade had stood there under the trees during the attack. On the corner of Hübnerstraße and Goetheplatz, a fire engine was completely burnt out, torn hoses hanging in the trees. The villas around Goetheplatz, the Van de Velde tennis clubhouse on Goethestrasse belonging to the Esche Tennis Club and the Bellevue ballroom were in ruins. I continued along Stollberger Straße in the direction of the Zimmermannsche Stiftung sanatorium. This hospital had also burnt down. Down Mozartstraße again, everything was burnt out.

From what is now Mitte station, formerly Nikolaibahnhof, to Mozartstraße, 7 to 9 houses were still standing!

(...)

Something that may have saved my life was the following event: At the end of February, when I had just turned 15 on 8 February, I received a postcard with the following request:

"You have to report to the Dresdner Straße police barracks at 9.00 a.m. on 6 March 1945 to volunteer for the Waffen SS. You must bring a parent with you."

A week after the attack, I thought about it again and told my mother. She told me: "This card didn't make it through all the attacks. I've already burnt it!" If I had enlisted, I might have been burnt like many young lads my age. My father was killed in action in Italy on 6 April 1945.

At the beginning of April there was another attack on a smaller scale, but it was bad enough for those in the Schloßviertel on Ludwigstraße, because once again bombs were dropped on children and women, even though the Americans were only a few kilometres away from Chemnitz with their ground troops. It was one lunchtime and I still remember exactly when the bombs detonated, my whole body began to tremble with fear, my knees were shaking and my teeth were chattering. And I wanted to be brave!

The bottom line after the war was that I'd rather starve and freeze, but never go to war again.

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