belong in the high command,” he wrote. “They must be elimi-
nated.”
Hitler agreed. “I am glad,” he remarked, “that his wife at
least has moved down to the Obersalzberg. She was the rotten
influence on him.”
Göring gloomily wrote his last will and testament on Feb-
ruary , and drove into Berlin for the afternoon conference. A
thaw was breaking up the ice along the Oder, so the immediate
danger there was lessening. But his fighter defenses were virtu-
ally immobilized by the lack of fuel.
Late on the thirteenth, radar reported enemy bombers
penetrating deep into Germany behind a screen of electronic
jamming. The night’s real target was Dresden, Germany’s “Flor-
ence of the Elbe.”
One of Europe’s most beautiful historic cities, Dresden had
no air-raid shelters, and its streets were crowded with a million
refugees from the east when the first three hundred RAF heavy
bombers unloaded their fire bombs at : .. Three hours
later, with the city’s heart already a raging inferno visible two
hundred miles away, more Lancaster bombers completed the
destruction. Dresden, reported the Luftwaffe war diary, was
“critically damaged, its inner city virtually destroyed, with im-
mense casualties.” On the following midday, the record book
continued, twelve hundred American bombers attacked with
“grave terror effect.” Dresden had been engulfed during the
night by a fire storm. The horrific scenes were without parallel
in history far worse than in Hamburg, Kassel, or Berlin. All
telegraph lines were down, and British code-breakers heard
Heinrich Himmler radioing to SS Obergruppenführer Ludolf
von Alvensleben, the Dresden police chief, a message that
showed how little Berlin was aware of the true horror. “I have
received your report. The attacks were obviously very severe, yet