Would I Go Back To Dresden, Chemnitz And Leipzig?
I enjoyed my two days spent exploring these three cities in the former East Germany. On a properly planned trip, there is a lot to see to satisfy any particular taste.
I would probably choose Dresden or Leipzig as a base, depending on which was the easiest for you to get to.
An interesting trip would be to perhaps fly to Prague and spend time there, before taking the train to Dresden up the Elbe. After Dresden you could go on to Berlin, from where you could fly home.
Typical journey times are as follows.
Prague to Dresden – 2 hr. 15 min.
Dresden to Chemnitz – 1 hr. 30 min.
Dresden to Leipzig – 1 hr. 30 min.
Dresden to Berlin – 2 hr.
The two shortest routes are double-deck regional trains, so you can relax upstairs and enjoy the countryside. Comfort on these double-deck trains is about the same on say any of the Class 379 trains or similar, that are fairly numerous in the UK. But the on-board train information is generally of a much lower quality than we would accept in the UK.
A Railway Station In A Tent
Leipzig Airport station is unusual.
But why shouldn’t a railway station have a tented roof, if it’s good enough for Lords and Goodwood Racecourse?
From Leipzig To Braunschweig
This was the longest leg of my journey from Krakow.
Most of the journey was across the former East Germany, with the old border at Helmstedt, which is on the Magdeburg to Braunschweig Line.
Magdeburg and its Hauptbahnhof seem to be definitely worth a visit. Wikipedia says this about reconstruction of the station after 1945.
At the end of March 1946, the restoration of the electrification was completed on the rail networks in the Soviet occupation zone. The Soviet military authorities then demanded the removal of the overhead line equipment and the transfer of the electrical rolling stock as reparations to the Soviet Union, which was partly returned in the early 1950s in need of repair. The rail network was then electrified for the third time, and electric train operation resumed in 1956. Reconstructed of the main station started in 1946, but without the roof of the historical station was omitted.
In 1974 the Magdeburg S-Bahn was established. More extensive alterations were made in 1984. In 1992, platforms were altered to allow Intercity-Express operation. In 2003, the pedestrian tunnel was extended to connect the various platforms to an entrance on the western side of the station. The station is being modernised again between 2008 and 2015 at a cost of about €300 million.
What a way to manage a railway!
This Google Map shows Magdeburg and its location with respect to the railway and the River Elbe.
Magdeburg
Magdeburg would be another place for a stopover. It’s probably a city on a par with somewhere like Stoke or Middlesbrough.
Philistines Like Islamic State Are Nothing New
We are all worried about what Islamic State will do to important world heritage, as is reported on the BBC in this article about Palmyra.
In Leipzig I came across a modern church that was not to my liking with a model of an old Gothic church in front.
So I got thinking, that perhaps the church was something like a cathedral or important church that had been destroyed in the Second World War.
But it isn’t!
The model church is the Paulinerkirche and it stood on the site. Wikipedia sums up what happened to the church as follows.
The church survived the war practically unscathed but was dynamited in 1968 during the communist regime of East Germany. After the reunification of Germany, it was decided to build a new university church on the site in the shape of the former church. A new building, the Paulinum (formally: “Aula und Universitätskirche St. Pauli”, i.e. “Assembly Hall and University Church St. Paul”), was built on the site beginning in 2007.
Enough said!
The Nikolaikirche
The Nikolaikirche in Leipzig is introduced in Wikipedia like this.
The St. Nicholas Church (in German: Nikolaikirche) has long been one of the most famous in Leipzig, and rose to national fame in 1989 with the Monday Demonstrations when it became the centre of peaceful revolt against communist rule.
As I was close I had to visit.
It seemed shut, so unfortunately, I had to pass on a visit to such an iconic place in the fall of another evil dictatorship. In Peaceful Demonstrations in the church’s Wikipedia entry this is said.
Cabaret artist Bernd-Lutz Lange said about the events which started in the St. Nicholas Church:
There was no head of the revolution. The head was the Nikolaikirche and the body the centre of the city. There was only one leadership: Monday, 5 pm, St. Nicholas Church
But then my father always said that St. Paul’s stood defiantly against the Nazis in the Blitz.
Leipzig
I didn’t know what to expect in Leipzig and I was pleasantly surprised.
It was another city, where you could find a city centre close to the excellent rail station. I wasn’t specifically looking for a hotel, but I saw several that looked to be a sensible place to spend the night. Although, I’ve just looked for next Friday and everything affordable seems to be sold out.
The Largest Railway Station In The World
My journey took me to Leipzig Hauptbahnhof. Wikipedia says this about the station.
Leipzig Hauptbahnhof is the central railway terminus in Leipzig, Saxony. At 83,460 square metres, it is the world’s largest railway station measured by floor area. It has 19 overground platforms housed in six iron train sheds, a multi-level concourse with towering stone arches, and a 293-metre long facade. Two Leipzig City Tunnel underground platforms were inaugurated in December 2013. The station also functions as a large shopping centre.
Train services are operated by Deutsche Bahn, S-Bahn Mitteldeutschland, Erfurter Bahn and Mitteldeutsche Regiobahn. As of 2008, Leipzig Hauptbahnhof handled an average of 120,000 passengers per day.
The station is probably bigger physically than Kings Cross and St. Pancras International combined, although together they handled 153,000 passengers per day last year. This Google Map shows the station and the centre of Leipzig.
Leipzig
Note the size of the station and the number of platforms. And there are two more underneath on the Leipzig City Tunnel.
I found it an easy walk between the station and the centre.
These pictures show the station.
Note how like St. Pancras, there is a shopping mall underneath the platform level. I bought some excellent strawberries there. They were smaller and flavourful, unlike the tasteless, large Elsan variety we get offered in Supermarkets all the time.
From Dresden To Leipzig
This was not the most stimulating of journeys, as there was nothing worth photographing.
The train was fairly full.
There was also a bit of a problem at Leipzig, where the passengers had to manhandle and womanhandle a guy in an electric wheelchair out of the train. Obviously, Deutsche Bahn have a different attitude to wheelchair passengers compared to most UK rail companies.
The Bombing Of Dresden
I could not leave Dresden without commenting on the Bombing of Dresden by the Allies in World War II.
Some feel it was a war crime and many say it was justified. This is the first paragraph in the Wikipedia section describing the background to the bombing.
Early in 1945, after the German offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge had been exhausted — including the disastrous attack by the Luftwaffe on New Year’s Day involving elements of eleven combat wings of the Luftwaffe’s day fighter force — and after the Red Army had launched their Silesian Offensives into pre-war German territory, theGerman army was retreating on all fronts, but still resisting strongly. On 8 February 1945, the Red Army crossed the Oder River, with positions just 70 km from Berlin. As theEastern and Western Fronts were getting closer, the Western Allies started to consider how they might aid the Soviets with the use of the strategic bomber force. They planned to bomb Berlin and several other eastern cities in conjunction with the Soviet advance—to cause confusion among German troops and refugees, and hamper German reinforcement from the west.
It is a sensible argument, but I feel that decisions earlier in the War meant that to cause the required confusion, they had no alternative.
Churchill and others were also worried about what the Russians would do with the territory they captured. And he was right, as their colonisation and subjugation of Eastern Europe happened and it was something of which no-one can be proud.
In some ways it’s a pity that the German leaders in 1944, didn’t know how close we were to perfecting the atom bomb. But if they had,would the likes of Hitler ever surrendered? I doubt it! When you’re dealing with the really mad, all logic goes out of the window.
So could there have been an alternative to the bombing of Dresden and Leipzig?
What my father had been involved with in the war, I know not! But he was a passionate believer in the abilities of the de Havilland Mosquito. My father was well-connected in some way to John Grimston, who later became the 6th Earl of Veralem. In the 1950s and 1960s, Grimston’s company, Enfield Rolling Mills, was my father’s biggest customer. I know he was well-connected because when I needed a vacation job, my father rang the Earl and called in a favour, which got me three months extremely useful work in the Electronics Laboratory. My father did move in some unusual circles before and during the war. At one time, he was even working at the League of Nations in Geneva.
I have just read the section in Wikipedia about the Inception of the Mosquito. To say it was a struggle to get de Havilland’s wooden design accepted and then built would be an understatement. My father and others have said that there was scepticism in the Air Ministry about sending out crews to bomb Germany in a bomber with no defensive armament, which was built out of ply and balsa wood and stuck together with glue.
You have to remember that together the RAF and the USAAF lost hundreds of thousands of crew bombing Germany with four-engine heavy bombers. So was it the right policy?
One of my late friends, was a Mosquito pilot, who flew the aircraft in the RAF in the late 1940s. Several times we discussed the bombing of Germany in the 1970s. He had flown many types of aircraft, but in his view nothing compared with the amazing Mossie. The only flying problem, was an engine failure on take-off, which as a pilot with several hundred hours on a Cessna 340A, I know is a serious problem on any piston-engined twin. Luckily it never happened to either of us!
It is useful to compare the performance of a Mosquito to a B-17 Flying Fortress.
The following words are taken from the Bomber section in Wikipedia for the Mosquito.
In April 1943 it was decided to convert a B Mk IV to carry a 4,000 lb (1,812 kg), thin-cased high explosive bomb (nicknamed “Cookie”). The conversion, including modified bomb bay suspension arrangements, bulged bomb bay doors and fairings, was relatively straightforward, and 54 B.IVs were subsequently modified and distributed to squadrons of RAF Bomber Command’s Light Night Striking Force. 27 B Mk IVs were later converted for special operations with the Highball anti-shipping weapon, and were used by 618 Squadron, formed in April 1943 specifically to use this weapon. A B Mk IV, DK290 was initially used as a trials aircraft for the bomb, followed byDZ471,530 and 533.[108] The B Mk IV had a maximum speed of 380 mph (610 km/h), a cruising speed of 265 mph (426 km/h), ceiling of 34,000 ft (10,000 m), a range of 2,040 nmi (3,780 km), and a climb rate of 2,500 ft per minute (762 m)
And the Flying Fortress had a maximum speed of 287 mph, a cruise speed of 182 mph and a range of 1,738 miles with a 6,000 bomb load. In addition it needed a crew of ten, as against the Mosquito’s crew of just two.
I have seen statistics that Mosquito bombers could sometimes do two trips to Germany in one night with different crews and that they had the highest safe return rate of any Allied bombers.
So why did we not use Mosquitos to bomb Germany?
The statistics and according to my friend, the crews, were in favour, it’s just that those that made the decisions weren’t!
If we had been using a substantial number of Mosquitos, then a totally different strategy would have evolved, as the Allied Air Forces wouldn’t have lost so many experienced crew and the number of bombing raids would have increased and would have been of a much higher accuracy.
A serious mathematical analysis may or may not have been done since the war, but if it has been, it could have given surprising results.
This strategy could have meant that the destruction of Dresden and Leipzig might not have happened. If nothing else Mosquitos could almost have reached the German lines on the Eastern Front to support the Russians, from bases in South Eastern England.
As an aside here, after having visited Dresden, I have seen how the historic centre is all along the River Elbe, with the railway, which surely was an important target to disrupt traffic and cause confusion behind German lines, slightly further away from the river. As any pilot, who has flown at night by the light of the moon as I have, will tell you, rivers stand out like nothing else and it would have been very easy to find the historic centre of the city to drop bombs.
So I feel strongly, that the crude, misplaced philosophy of four-engined heavy bombers contributed to the destruction of Dresden. There were raids for which these bombers were ideal, like the destruction of dams, U-boat pens and V-missile sites, but carpet-bombing cities was not one of them!
To sum up, I have also heard arguments from former Mosquito pilots like my friend, and others, that properly used Mosquitos could have shortened the war by several months.
Where My Friend David Goes To Let Off Steam
I just had to take this picture of a tram destination in Dresden.
I’ve no idea what’s there! Perhaps it’s a Zoo?
The Anonymous Widower 