Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Roland Schulze

It was 13 February 1945, Shrove Tuesday, and I turned 11 on that day. But I can't remember my birthday or the children's carnival. Instead, I remember the bright red night sky in the east as if it were only yesterday.

At around 9.30 p.m., the air raid alarm sounded and once again it was time to get out of bed, get dressed, distribute the things we had ready to the family and get down to the cellar as quickly as possible.

My family was my mother, who was 37 years old at the time, my 4-year-old brother, my aunt, who had recently lost both parents, her husband and one son, as well as her flat in Brühl, and of course me, the "replacement father". At this point, we hadn't heard from my father, who was 41 years old at the time, for more than 6 months. There is still no news to this day.

My mother's older sister, who lived with us, was mentally confused by the strokes of fate described above and only had one thing on her mind: to follow her son and husband at the earliest opportunity.

Our house was in the courtyard of the former district headquarters on Kaßberg in Metzschstraße, and it was about 120 metres across the huge courtyard to the air-raid shelter in the main building. However, the cellar was excellently constructed, with metre-thick walls with vaulted ceilings below ground level, emergency lighting and several exits, protected doors and ceilings reinforced with pillars, giving a feeling of great safety. However, all of this was not built for us, but for the then District President, Obersturmbannführer Popp and the then District Administrator Lehmann, as well as the senior employees of the district administration. While District Administrator Lehmann always gave the impression of being a decent, people-orientated man, District President Popp, who always appeared in SS uniform, acted like a real Nazi. It was probably 13 February when he said after the all-clear, "... so, now the Tommys can bomb Chemnitz, because tomorrow I'm being transferred to Pomerania!"

Even while the alarm was sounding, word leaked out via the circles just mentioned that Chemnitz would probably be spared today because Dresden was being bombed. At the time, people were happy with that because everyone, including us children, only lived from day to day and it was clear that the attacks would come again and then it would be our turn. So after the all-clear, we had to go back across the courtyard and there we saw the unbelievable, a bright sky up to the zenith, not a dark glimmer or a strip of light on the horizon, no, a bright, silent, cruel glow of fire. Three weeks later, the time had come for Chemnitz too. But the people weren't surprised at all, because they would still come to us. We children realised this too, because we were trained to be aware of the dangers and to protect ourselves from them, or so we thought.

A lot of snow had fallen in the days before 5 March 1945, 10 to 15 centimetres on the Kaßberg. Snow was good, even the more mature children knew that, because it takes away a lot of heat and the asphalt can't burn so quickly.But that doesn't mean that we bravely and courageously awaited the next alarm, no, we were scared, terrified and even years later my heart raced when the time siren sounded. The air raid siren sounded at around 9 pm and our "survival community" set off again, the young woman with her two children and seriously ill sister and the constant uncertainty about her husband and father.

The actual attack probably began at around 9.45 pm and lasted about 1.5 hours. The hollow roar of the engines of entire squadrons is still ringing in my ears today, but I can't really describe it. Everyone there in the cellar was quiet, everyone there was expecting the day to come, everyone there was terrified and everyone was just inward-looking and preoccupied with themselves. The situation during a bombardment is hard to explain and even harder to describe.

The basement floor shook and you could feel the pressure waves very clearly, and nobody spoke except the mothers who sometimes comforted their children or told them to open their mouths wide, lie flat on the floor, it's almost over. The mortar trickled off the walls and you could only think in seconds and everyone was happy that they were still alive that minute. As the bombing progressed, more and more firelight came through the cracks in the window fuses in the basement corridor, which themselves began to rattle more and more and already had an alarming amount of air. While the bombs were still dropping, I soaked all the blankets and bathrobes in a water barrel in the next room, which was just as well equipped as the actual cellar but was completely empty, because the Kaßberg at this point was rather sparsely populated and the cellar was never full.

When it had been quiet for about 20 minutes, someone said: "We have to get out of here." Two of the three exits were buried and at the tower exit the earth thrown up by a heavy bomb had been thrown right up to the cellar door, which was just short of a catastrophe.

The basement corridor was still clear and luckily there was the person who had just said "we have to get out of here", because the building above us was already burning up to the first or second floor. After about 30 metres, my mother said, "We left the bag with the shoes in the cellar." I still remember it clearly, I went back into the cellar on my own in protest and got the bag, it was dark but bright enough to find my way through the firelight. Even today, I get a shiver down my spine when I think of the fear I felt alone in the cellar corridor back then, even though I didn't think about those events for many years.

We boys didn't know many games or festivities or hobbies, but we knew exactly the laws of escape and we knew the types of incendiary bombs and were able to categorise the effects of the bombs well and we were able to judge whether a cellar was safe or more of a death trap. Air raids and air raids continued until 10 April and were then seamlessly replaced by Allied bombardment. The boundless fear, especially in the completely inadequately secured cellars of the village houses, remained until the end of the inferno.

Even today, when I enter an unfamiliar cellar, I automatically look up at the ceiling and I can't enter a hotel room without first memorising the escape route. We learnt to escape thoroughly in Hitler's barbarism.

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