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On our last night, I stroll through the nearby village of Neustadt with soundman John Rosborough. It’s the Christmas festival, and we walk among booths filled with crafts and sample steaming hot mulled red wine. The stars glisten in the night sky, people are bundled up, buying presents and filled with delight. It seems too cheerful in the presence of the grim history we have seen today. And yet I know, from visiting Dora’s museum, that every one of this village’s schoolchildren has, since 1954, visited that camp, and since 1995, has ventured into the tu
A new generation of Germans is preserving the past in an effort to learn from it and to ensure that it is never repeated. I think about that as I sit in Neustadt’s tiny church, surrounded by villagers raising their voices in song. As carols fill the air, I am reminded by those words of peace and love of the duality of the human heart. That gives me hope, even as I continue to be haunted by what I saw in the depths of the mountain.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE LAST GERMAN CRUISER
Kapitan zur See Fritz Emil von Lüdecke listened carefully as Leutnant Arnold Boker, standing rigidly at attention and breathless from his dash to the bridge, reported that he had sighted a British cruiser approaching their position. Turning his binoculars to the horizon, Lüdecke could make out the silhouette of the cruiser, black smoke from its fu
Even as Lüdecke ordered the alarm to call the men to quarters, the smoke of another British ship appeared on the horizon, this one from the opposite direction. Then Lüdecke spotted the smoke of a third ship. Sharp whistle blasts ordered the crew to muster on the deck, but not at their battle stations. Dresden was, after all, off the coast of Chile in neutral waters, and was safe. The British could not take any hostile action against them.
Lüdecke watched in shock as a salvo of shells passed over Dresden and hit the steep cliffs off the starboard side. Another salvo screamed through the air, and this time the shells ripped into Dresden’s stern, mangling steel and men and sending a sheet of fire across the deck. Dresden’s gu
The British cruisers circled the helpless German ship and kept pumping shells into the burning wreck. One witness later reported that the shells burst inside Dresden “with a sound like subterranean thunder.” Flames were licking at two of the magazines, where what was left of the ammunition was stored, and Lüdecke knew he had to act. The enemy must not seize his ship. With what crew he had left, he had to open the ship’s valves, set explosive charges and sink Dresden. That meant fighting through the fires and the smashed passageways to go below into the torn and broken hull. He also had to rescue the last men trapped in the burning hulk and take off the dead and wounded from the sinking ship.
To buy time, Lüdecke hoisted a signal calling for a cease-fire and surrender negotiations, and sent Oberleutnant zur See Wilhelm Canaris, in Dresden’s pi
Then, in a massive roar that shot out of the port side of the bow, Dresden shuddered as Lüdecke’s scuttling charge detonated inside the No. 1 magazine. The forward casemate and its heavy guns blew out, and the bow was half torn off, leaving the rest of the hull open to the sea. It was 10:45 a.m.
At 11:15 a.m., Dresden’s bow slipped beneath the surface of Cumberland Bay. Striking the seabed, the bow twisted and tore free as Dresden rolled to starboard. The ship was twice as long as the bay was deep, so instead of the stern rising dramatically into the air, the cruiser settled slowly by the stern. The shivering crew huddled on the beach and cheered a final explosion from a second scuttling charge deep within the engine room. Their ship, they felt, had died an honorable death, sunk by its crew rather than falling into enemy hands at the end of a long and eventful voyage. British sailors on Glasgow cheered, their ship’s last shots insuring not just that the German cruiser sank but also exacting vengeance for the loss of British ships and sailors the last time their fleet had encountered Dresden.
Built at the Hamburg yard of Blohm und Voss, which launched the half-completed hull in October 1907 and delivered it to the German Navy a year later, the 4,268-ton, 388-foot Kleine Kreuzer (small cruiser) Dresden was built to be a fast raider on the high seas rather than a rugged warrior built to slug it out with other warships. Modeled after the successful Confederate commerce raiders of the American Civil War, Dresden’s job was to range the oceans, seeking out the enemy’s merchant fleet and sending its commerce to the bottom. Dresden’s steam turbines and four propellers drove the cruiser at speeds up to 25.2 knots. The cruiser carried ten 4-inch guns and eight smaller semiautomatic rapid-fire 2-inch guns, and could fire torpedoes from two tubes. If all else failed, or if they needed to save ammunition, the crew could ram and sink a ship with the huge cast-steel ram built into the bow.
Troubles in the Caribbean, particularly a civil war in Mexico, where rebels fought to overthrow the despotic government of President Victoriano Huerta, sent Dresden there in December 1913. Remaining on station in the region through July, the cruiser spent considerable time in Veracruz protecting German citizens and commercial interests, particularly when the United States invaded it and seized the port and city to protect its interests. On July 20, when rebels toppled Huerta’s government, Dresden’s captain took the Mexican president, his family and staffaboard, then carried them to Jamaica, where the British government granted Huerta asylum.
Dresden was due back in Germany for a much-needed refit, and on July 26, rendezvoused with the new cruiser Karlsruhe to trade captains. Dresden’s new commander, Fritz Emil von Lüdecke, was to take the ship back to Germany, but when war broke out in Europe a few days later, he took Dresden to Brazil to attack British merchant ships. Dresden engaged several British ships, sinking some but letting others go because they carried cargo from countries not yet at war and, in one case, because the ship was loaded with women and children, and Lüdecke was an officer and gentleman of the old school with “incredible gallantry.”