Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Roland Kaden

I was born on 25 January 1937 to a working-class family with a total of five children in the industrial city of Chemnitz. During the war and for a long time afterwards, I lived with three other siblings "at the foot of the Sonnenberg", Sonnenstraße 5, right next to Dresdner Platz. My father, born in 1901, was drafted directly to the front towards Stalingrad in 1943. His death was thus sealed early and he never returned home to the family. My mother was now solely responsible for four children and half-orphans from 1945 onwards. She gave us children a great deal of support during the war years, especially during the air raids and retaliatory bombing raids. My slightly older sister Anita no longer lived in the parental home, but her support was missing everywhere.

The evening and night of 5 March 1945 turned out to be a harrowing and agonising "experience" for all the residents of the house, elderly senior citizens and war wounded, women and mothers with children. "Fir trees" lit up the sky in the evening and were accompanied shortly afterwards by a droning, approaching hum. After the wailing of the sirens, the first bombs hit in the immediate vicinity of our house. Explosive bombs hit Sonnenstraße 9. Then a terrible intermezzo began. Air mines, phosphorus, explosive and incendiary bombs were discharged and ignited, colouring the sky fiery red. The houses began to tremble as if the earth were shaking. The children in the basement of the Carl Mühle bakery surrounded their mothers and screamed for help, but no help came. The cellar walls to the neighbouring houses 3 and 7 were broken through by women and a free passage to the backyard was created. A chain of terrible impacts followed in the immediate vicinity. Our house shook and rocked.

Those who could, hurriedly made their way out of the cellar and around the corner to Dresdner Platz. But a terrible sight awaited us. Freiberger Strasse and Dresdner Strasse in the direction of Goldener Anker, Johannes-Platz and Waisenstrasse, just a few hundred metres away from us, were engulfed in a "blazing sea of flames". Ash polluted the air. The centre of the city was "engulfed by purgatory". The embers sucked up all oxygen. There was an eerie warmth, accompanied by a stormy heat wave, embers, loud collapsing noises and people screaming for help. Cries for help came from the nearby houses on the upper Freiberger Straße, which were burning to the ground, where the houses and street were surrounded by a blaze and could no longer be walked or entered. We quickly fled back to our house. The houses at Sonnenstraße 3-7 had staggered considerably, but held out. Everyone was glad to be back in the cellar and bakery of the Mühle bakery. Shards and debris all around were manageable, but fire meant death for the most part that night. Such a terrible event, experienced in just a few minutes, is never forgotten and remains in the memory forever.

By late morning on 6 March, all the "inmates" in the cellar of the Mühle bakery had survived hell. The house at Sonnenstraße 5 and both neighbouring houses 3 and 7 "miraculously" survived the immediate hail of bombs. Numerous incendiary bombs in the back yards and on the roofs of the sheds obviously failed to ignite due to excessive amounts of snow and turned out to be unexploded bombs. This was our great good fortune. However, everyone involved, young and old alike, remained exhausted for weeks and months. The shared experience gave rise to a respectful relationship with one another and social interaction for the years that followed. However, I will refrain from recounting further events on the night of the bombing and immediately afterwards, which I experienced as an 8-year-old with three other siblings, and will conclude here.

My mother was 45 years old on 5 March 1945 and we children 5, 8, 10 and 11. Our father could no longer stand by us. He himself experienced war and cruel misery at the front in Stalingrad in 1943/44 and also "his death by fire" in a few minutes, as our mother learnt later in 1947 from a surviving and severely wounded former comrade-in-arms. There had been no sign of life via the field post since October 1943.

After the interlude just described and experienced, the common struggle for survival and survival began in Chemnitz. We were surrounded by rubble and ruins. The cityscape was characterised by mourning communities for weeks, and the cemeteries were very busy. The first rubble brigades were deployed. The provision of ration cards for the residents of Chemnitz was slow to start and worked hesitantly. Single mothers with several children had a particularly hard time again. In our family, for example, our mother had to go to the farmers in the countryside to exchange unused or new bed linen, towels and tea towels and other textiles for butter, flour, potatoes, eggs, bacon and vegetables. With four children left at home, she was now forced to do paid work every day for financial reasons. We children now took on some tasks independently. My sister Sigrid was responsible for organising the shopping, e.g. at the butcher's shop Burkard, the bakery Mühle in the house, the dairy Drechsler diagonally opposite and the fish shop Seifert next door. These shops were in the immediate vicinity and any deliveries of goods could be quickly registered outside school hours. We three boys took responsibility for the coal and wood. Equipped with rucksacks, we collected briquettes and coal lost from locomotives in the Reichsbahn railway yard under the Dresdner Platz bridge every day, despite the great dangers. We collected the wood we needed from the nearby Zeißigwald forest and there was plenty of waste wood available. Deliveries of turnips and potatoes in the autumn of 1945 helped to alleviate the great need. With the increasingly stable provision of food stamps in 1946, supplies gradually improved. During the war years, large families without a father had already learnt to be very modest when it came to food and had long been used to it. Our family with five and later four children was one of them. Solidarity was hardly the order of the day at that time.

As a child, my personal feelings deepened after the war and the bombing of Chemnitz on 5 March 1945. March 1945 on Chemnitz and the tragic and incomprehensible hardships experienced by families with many children during the war and in the immediate post-war period.The majority of German citizens and the population themselves became victims of Hitler's bestial dictatorship, dictated by an installed NSDAP and cruel SS and Gestapo rule. Millions of Germans lost their lives during the fascist era. Men died at the front, in military hospitals or in captivity. Those who refused to do military service were immediately shot by summary execution or locked up in concentration camps and penitentiaries. Particularly in the last year of the war and after it ended, millions more Germans died as a result of bombing, expulsion, flight. Famine and disease, among them again mainly defenceless women, numerous children and elderly people. An objective and historical reappraisal of the facts in remembrance of the millions of dead should never be neglected here. This also includes the connections to Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the subsequent establishment of his inhuman fascist dictatorship. The events and developments in Germany at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s ultimately led to the end of the Weimar Republic, Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the beginning of the Third German Reich. The invasion of Poland by the German Wehrmacht on 1 September 1939 marked the beginning of a terrible world war, combined with an equally terrible end and the defeat of Hitler's fascist dictatorship. The world war started by Hitler's fascism returned to Germany in 1945 with all its harshness, scorched earth, great misery and millions more victims and dead.

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