Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Harry Scheuner

When I was a little boy and crawled into every corner of our small kitchen-living room with my red fire engine and the incessant call of "Tatütata, the fire brigade is here...", I had no idea that at the same time the "uncle with the black moustache", who looked so lovely everywhere from newspapers and pictures in flats, was just about to set the world on fire and that I would now be able to see it on our neighbour's house on 5 March 1945. March 1945 at our neighbour's house in Zinzendorfstraße.

On the evening of 5 March, after the so-called pre-alarm siren from the roof of the Altendorf school, we sat or crouched in the cellar of my birthplace at Zinzendorfstraße 19 (air-raid shelter in the basement corridor) in Altendorf, right next to St Matthew's Church. Through a hole in the wall opening to the neighbouring house at Zinzendorfstrasse 17, which belonged to the master roofer Alfred Mann, we listened to the so-called wire radio, which could only be received if a telephone connection was available. This wire radio, which, as I remember, had an intrusive transmission signal, the exact tone sequence of which I can no longer reproduce, constantly reported "Strong enemy bomber units approaching Chemnitz". As I remember it, we were in the cellar for quite some time (only the brave dared to approach the front door from time to time) without anything happening and the hope grew that our city might not be the target. This hope was fuelled when the radio reported: "Bomber units have split up and are turning in a southerly and northerly direction". Later it was partly reported that this was an evasive manoeuvre to attack the city from two directions and deceive the flak. After about ¾ of an hour, the reassuring sound of the pre-warning was heard and some prepared to leave the cellar.

Immediately afterwards, the wailing sound of the main alarm suddenly went through everyone's limbs and the humming of the aeroplanes could already be heard. The anti-aircraft guns fired, searchlight beams circled in the sky. Brave people ran into the street and reported that it was getting light as day and that many so-called "Christmas trees from Rottluff" were flying over us. The wind drove them towards the city centre, which meant that the western districts of the city got off relatively lightly and it was only from the centre of Kaßberg onwards that the impacts and destruction increased. In the beginning, we heard the impacts sporadically immediately after the engine noise was first heard, until a tremendously loud thud and bang shook our house. Someone shouted: "Now we've been hit!" The brave ones ran out and shortly afterwards shouted into the cellar: "It's burning at Mann's, at Sandner's too".

Then the firelight over the town grew stronger and stronger. The residents of the houses at Zinzendorfstraße 17 and 19, most of whom were women, began a self-sacrificing fight to contain the flames. This was done with air-raid sprinklers and lots of water collected in large barrels in the house, as well as by draining the two courtyard wells to the bottom. In addition, flammable items, including furniture, were carried outside or thrown out of the window.

And then something probably unique happened that night, or at least certainly quite rare. The fire brigade, summoned by residents of the neighbouring house, arrived; it was the company fire brigade of the Gebrüder Langer company from the western end of Waldenburger Straße, which later became the RFT Gerätewerk. They laid their hoses to the extinguishing water pond on the corner of Kochstraße and Weststraße and tried to control the flames of the neighbouring house until the pond was completely drained and to prevent the flames from spreading to my birthplace. We succeeded in doing the latter despite the fact that the walls of the firewall were already red-hot.

However, it was not possible to prevent the neighbouring house from burning down to the first floor, with the flames reigniting several times the next day. The extinguishing water pond on Kochstrasse and the courageous women who dragged water to the point of exhaustion (the barrels in the house were repeatedly refilled with snow, which I also helped to do) were a great help.I was also allowed to help), but above all the Langer brothers' company fire brigade saved our house at Zinzendorfstaße 19 and thus saved my family and me from the fate of being bombed out. Later, the thought that described the futility of many air-raid defence measures stuck with me: a large pond of extinguishing water saved a house.

Incidentally, the residents of the upper part of Zinzendorfstraße managed to extinguish the fire at No. 25, owned by master builder Arthur Sandner, using only the available fire-fighting water from the affected house and the neighbouring single-family homes and air-raid sprinklers. Today, only the flat roof remains as a reminder of the roof truss that burnt down on 5 March 1945.

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