13. February 1945

A touching new addition to our collection: In a letter dated 21 February 1945, Paul Seibt from Dresden describes how he and his wife Gertrud experienced the night of the bombing on 13 February. We received the letter in 2025 from the author's grandson.

The scene of the report is the site of today's university location in Dresden-Strehlen (Weberplatz 5 / corner of Teplitzer Str. 16). The historic building from 1945 was destroyed in the bombing. between 1950 and 1964, a new building was erected on the site for the Faculty of Labour and Agriculture, which was later taken over by the TU Dresden for cultural studies and is now used as the headquarters of the Faculty of Education.

The original building from 1910 served as a training centre for teachers under various names (from 1942/43 "teacher training college"). Paul Seibt worked here as a stoker from the 1920s. He lived with his family in a staff flat in the school building. A postcard from our collection shows the building in 1911 (then König-Friedrich-August-Seminar).

We went to bed at 9am on Tuesday and the alarm went off at around ten. I was already feeling so restless that we got up straight away and got dressed, which wasn't usually our style. [ 2] Then the announcer on the radio said that there were heavy convoys approaching Dresden, 20 kilometres away. We quickly got the essentials together and went down to the cellar, where I habitually went to the front door to see what was going on. The whole town was covered in Christmas trees, an indescribably beautiful sight. I quickly fetched Gertrud so she could see it too. The moment we opened the door, a heavy bomb exploded on the street in front of our door and we couldn't hear or see. You can imagine how it sent us whirling through the hallway and we couldn't even find each other again.

Already with the first bomb all the doors and windows in the building were torn out so that we could overlook the street from our basement corridor and now it went on for 40 minutes without stopping, so that we often flew from one corner to the other and didn't know where to save ourselves. And how long does forty minutes last?

Gertrud, myself, Mrs Müller [3] and little Christa always kept us together. During the attack, we could already hear the crackling and crackling of the fire, and as soon as it died down a bit, we got out, but by then the whole school [4] was already on fire in every corner.

I wanted to get into our flat quickly, but the smoke and flames made it impossible, so all our belongings were burnt. We had various things in the cellar, especially a lot of our clothes. I must have gone into the house ten or twelve times to get them out and also some things for Mrs Müller from her cellar, until it was too dangerous and you had to expect everything to collapse at any moment. My throat was so dry from the excitement and the running that I couldn't get a word out. I was really close to collapsing. Gertrud met me on the stairs and took it from me and brought it into the garden where Mrs Müller and Christa were. Then I got our carts and the bike trailer out of the house and loaded up our stuff. The whole school garden was a picture of devastation - not a tree, not a bush, the memorial - everything gone and ransacked by bombs. We couldn't get out into the street, so we went over the fence by our garden and to Mrs Götz's [5], where everything was still intact, to spend the night.

The whole town was already a sea of flames and it was as bright as day. Then I started to unload our things and wanted to take them to the cellar when I saw that Tommy was already setting three Christmas trees again and in no time at all the roar started again, much worse and longer than the first time. They may have experienced something in the cellar. The whole cellar was always shaking and full of people. The neighbouring villas had been hit and were in flames and I got out with Gertrud in the middle of the attack because our things were still outside the door and we didn't want them to burn. We hurriedly dragged everything out into the street and then lay down against the garden wall until the attack subsided. Then we quickly loaded everything up again because the heat and the rain of sparks were unbearable and there was a storm so bad that we couldn't even stand on our feet. During the second attack, a beam had knocked the drawbar off our wagon. We now had to flee from the heat and the rain of sparks further and further into the open field. In addition, the two handcarts were fully loaded and the field was soaked so that we were always up to our ankles in mud. Time bombs exploded every moment and what a calibre they were. I was dripping with sweat. We then sat down in a ditch and rested for a while, and after a while we moved the wagons a bit further, as the sparks from the burning houses threatened to set the last one on fire. That was around two o'clock at night. We then sat down in the sodden ditch and covered ourselves with coats and blankets as, to make matters worse, it started to rain heavily.

When we couldn't stand the cold and wet any longer and it started to get a bit light, we went into a ruined house and waited out the day there. Then we picked up the cars, my bike and Mrs Müller's bike. Everything was so stuck in the mud that we had to unload and carry everything and we could hardly get the carts off the ground empty. Where we'd been sitting all night there was a big bomb hole that we only saw in daylight, and everything was covered with incendiary bombs. Then we went to Kluth's [6], which had been spared, and first got some rest and then loaded up all our belongings again and set off for here [7] around noon. It was a three-hour walk, but with the wagons and always uphill, we had only travelled two-thirds of the way in four hours and were so exhausted that we simply could go no further. At Kluths we met Lotte Münch, who had also lost everything, and we came here together. We spent the night at a farmer's and then continued on the next day. The country roads were one big migration of distraught people, because hundreds of thousands of people had become homeless in one night without the thousands of dead.

Almost the whole of Dresden is a pile of rubble, simply unimaginable. We are now staying with relatives of Gertrud. All in all, there are nine of us here in the house and we each have a bed, and everyone is making a real effort to make us feel comfortable. Now we have to see how everything works out.

The next day I went back to Dresden with the bike and the trailer to see what can still be saved. Our cellar and Mrs Müller's were the only ones that didn't collapse and at least our things in there have been preserved, especially the food, and I've already made the journey four times and brought the most important things here. I had to slaughter all the rabbits except for two females with young ones, which I took here alive. Ten metres from our hutch, two heavy bombs had exploded and the hutches were riddled with splinters, but none were injured. They were all sitting shyly in a corner. The paths were a hard piece of work. Once I was so broken that I lay down on the road to rest. But you have to save what can still be saved. There's not much left anyway.

Will I ever have a flat again? You can't even think about it. And there's so much that nobody can replace. I've never felt so poor as I do now. And you're no longer at the age where you can start all over again with fresh courage. We're also worried about Conrad. He posted his last post on the third of January. But the postal situation is dismal and it could be because nothing is coming. Let's hope for the best, but what will happen if everything continues like this, because it looks bleak wherever you look. Tomorrow I want to go to the university, which is also largely destroyed, and see what will actually happen.

I had forgotten one more thing. After the first raid, the Schröders' [8] and the director's [9] house was on fire and they were able to move a lot of their furniture into the garden. During the second attack, a very heavy bomb hit between the things and nothing was left of it. Schröder himself was injured by shards of glass in his face during the first attack. During the second attack, the people from the school were all lying in the school garden and on the sports field and there were also fatalities and serious injuries. During the attack, a herd of horses raced across the field and kicked one of them in the face, making Schröder look bad. His whole head is bandaged. The Götz villa, where Gertrud used to go, was completely burnt out when we left.

I haven't been into the town beyond the railway station, but it looks desolate. Just ruins and rubble metres high on the street so that you can't get through. Everyone is still trying to save something, but most of them in vain. It was a night that no one who survived it will forget. Today was Hermann's birthday and Reinhold's but we didn't feel like writing. Now it's your dear mother's [10] birthday and we wish you all the best and good health and hope that this cursed time will soon come to an end and that we will all meet again in good health. So I will now close for today.

In the hope of hearing something from you soon, Paul and Gertrud send you their warmest greetings.

[1]Presumably he is the lumberjack Oskar Grahl from Karsdorf. Paul Seibt's wife Gertrud came from the village. It is possible that the Grahl family were relatives or acquaintances of hers.

[2] At the time of 13 February 1945, the Seibt couple lived in the basement of the former Teachers' Training College at Teplitzer Str. 16. Paul Seibt, born in 1896 in Lauingen, Bavaria, came to Dresden from Beienrode (Gifhorn district) in 1919, where he married 23-year-old Gertrud Schurig from Wendischcarsdorf. From 1926, the trained locomotive stoker was employed as a stoker at the Pädagogisches Institut der Technischen Hochschule Dresden (the later teacher training college) and moved into a staff flat there with his wife. After the war, they returned to their old place of residence and work, where Paul Seibt then provided caretaker services.

[3]Mrs Müller is probably the wife of the then 38-year-old caretaker Walter Müller, who, according to the Dresden address books, had lived in the official flat on the second floor of the school building at Teplitzer Str. 16 since 1940. There is no further information on the daughter (?) Christa, who is also mentioned.

[4]Teacher training institute of the state of Saxony (formerly the Pedagogical Institute of the Dresden University of Technology)

[5]Dorothea Heiser, born in Dresden in 1886, married the Swiss engineer Heinrich Goetz in 1918. They lived in Chemnitz, where Goetz worked as director of the Elektrizitätsactiengesellschaft vorm. Hermann Pöge. After his death in 1929, Dorothea Goetz returned to Dresden. She owned the two houses at Schinkelstr. 14 and 16. She lived in the ground floor flat of the former in 1945, where Mr and Mrs Seibt presumably fled during the night of the bombing.

[6]The couple in question were probably Emil and Erna Dora Kluth, who lived at Waterloostr. 9 (from 1946 Heinrich-Zille-Str.). The actor Emil Kluth, born in Düsseldorf in 1882, married 19-year-old Erna Dora Pfeifer from Dresden in 1917. After his military service during the First World War, he settled in Dresden and presumably worked as a photographer until his death in 1950.

[7]To Karsdorf

[8]Otto Schröder, born in Dresden in 1899, was initially employed as a stoker and later as head machinist at the school. From 1923, he lived there together with his wife Emma Elise (née Geipel) in a staff flat in the basement of Teplitzer Str. 16.

[9]This refers to school headmaster Prof Richard Vogel (1886-1955).

[10]Elise Karoline Christine Seibt (née Kühne), mother of Paul Seibt