Arabian Horse In History

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Arabian Horse In H i s to ry

The World War II Bombing Of Dresden

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ARABIAN HORSE IN H I S TO RY THE WORLD WAR II BOMBING OF DRESDEN: Arabians Survive Fiery Apocalypse

by Linda White

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he fire bombing of Dresden was one of the worst chapters in the annals of World War II. Similarly, the story of the Polish government’s Arabian stud farms and their wartime efforts to protect the irreplaceable bloodstock with which they had been entrusted is an especially grim episode in Arabian horse history.

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eginning in September 1939, as German troops from the west began their advance on Poland’s state stud farms, Russian troops advanced from the east. This caught Poland, with no natural boundaries, in an unhappy, easily plundered vise. Poland, whose strength and very identity rested on the backs of its cavalry horses, had been breeding Arabians for nearly a thousand years. The Polish considered Arabian horses to be their greatest national treasure; thus, the aphorism, “a Pole without a horse is like a body without a soul.”

The stallion Ofir, hailed as the best Arabian stallion bred in Poland between the wars, was bred at Janów Podlaski, established in 1919 on the River Bug. Ofir’s superior progeny included: six Polish Derby winners; the brothers Wielki Szlem, Witez II and Witraz; and daughters Ofirka, Wilga, Zalotna and Wierna, among others. Ofir was lost to the Russian army, which appeared at Janów with five tanks on September 25, 1939, remained there two weeks, and departed with 400 horses. When the Germans marched into Janów, they found nothing but empty stables. Only Najada, an extremely head-shy Fetysz daughter who refused to be haltered, remained.

An interesting footnote, attested to by Roman Pankiewicz in his The Purebred Arab Horse In Poland, published in 1977, is that an unnamed weanling Ofir filly escaped from her dam’s side among the Russiabound enclave, and was taken in by neighboring peasants. She was discovered after the war by the Polish horse-breeding commission, searching for remnants of the Janów herd.

“When Adam Sosnowski, head of the commission, saw the skinny, bay filly with the distinctive white blaze covering her nostrils,” Pankiewicz recounts, “he exclaimed in excitement, ‘Ofirka (an Ofir daughter)!’

Further checking proved Sosnowski correct. Ofirka went on to produce 18 foals, including 12 daughters, becoming one of the breed’s most influential matrons.”

By August 1944, a renewed Russian offensive caused the Germans, now in control of all the Polish state studs, to evacuate to Germany all the horses remaining at the provincial and state breeding farms. This evacuation meant moving more than 170 stallions and nearly 250 mares and youngsters. With the new year of 1945, the tide was clearly turning against Germany. Further evacuations were ordered, but, by now, most of the Polish mares in the Germans’ care were heavily in foal or had young foals at foot. With only a few railroad cars available for transport of the most critically needy, the horses had to set out on foot on the icy, wintertime roads.

Their destination took them through Dresden, which they reached the morning of St. Valentine’s Day, February 14, and in 1945, the first day of Lent. The story of the bombing, and of the horses’ fates, was vividly painted across the political canvas of the 1950s and 1960s, always with the finger of shame pointed at the United States and Britain. New information, available since the Soviet Union’s fall, has put the misdeed into clearer wartime perspective, but the truths—and the losses—are unarguable.

The Arab Horse in Europe author Erika Schiele’s account, published in 1967, of what befell the horses

LEFT: A picture of Dresden, Germany, taken in 1910. RIGHT: A picture of Dresden, Germany, in the spring of 1945.

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THE ARABIAN HORSE

IN HISTORY came to her first-hand from interviews with the most reliable eyewitnesses imaginable—the Janów Podlaski staff who accompanied them.

“For a few months, they had found quiet asylum in Sohland, a remount depot in Saxony,” Schiele writes, “but soon they had to move on. The only railway boxes were earmarked for 58 foals and five mares heavy in foal. The remainder—more than 200 horses—set off for Torgau by way of Dresden on February 13, 1945. Ninety of the horses were harnessed to carts in pairs, mares with foal at foot were tied to the cart-tails, young stock were led in hand, and the German Colonel von Bonnet led 40 men, each riding a stallion with another in hand.

“By fall of night, Colonel von Bonnet resolved to march straight on with them, into the barracks at Dresden. At 1:30 a.m., they were in the middle of the city, which was under heavy attack.

Bombs exploded all around, veiling them in fire and smoke. The stallions went mad and broke away. In less than a minute, there were 40, then 50, then 60 stallions milling around loose.

“The men were in almost equal panic, and all, but a puny-looking, little stud groom named Jan Ziniewicz, were thinking only of their own safety. Ziniewicz forgot the danger, so intent was he on the two Ofir sons, Witraz and Wielki Szlem, which had been entrusted to him. An incendiary bomb exploded close beside them.

Witraz’ tail caught alight, so that he raged and reared up, but Ziniewicz did not let go of the head rope. The

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blood ran from his lacerated palms, but he hung on, for at the other end of the rope was the future hope of Arab breeding in Poland. Of 80 stallions, only 20 remained in the morning.”

Historian Fredrick Taylor took an understandably different perspective in the prologue to his Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945, (Harper Collins Publishers, 2004). “Like so many others of my age,” he wrote, “I had learned of the city’s destruction principally through a work of fiction: Kurt Vonnegut’s acidly surreal masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, written from the perspective of his own grim personal experiences as a prisoner of war who shared the city’s fate.” Vonnegut was one of only seven American prisoners of war in Dresden to survive in a cell, located in the underground meat locker of a slaughterhouse.

“Utter destruction,” Vonnegut recalled. “The carnage was unfathomable.”

“Versions of what happened between 10 p.m. on the night of February 13, 1945, and noon on February 14, 1945—many versions originating from the fertile brain of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels—became set in cold-war stone,” Fredrick Taylor continued, “and further reexamination of the circumstances was not encouraged by a communist government eager to blacken the names of the Western Allies.”

The grim facts are these. In England, at twilight on Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, 244 Avro Lancaster heavy bombers, attached to 5 Group of Britain’s Bomber Command took off, headed for a rendezvous point over

WITRAZ

WIELKI SZLEM

(Ofir x Makata)

(Ofir x Elegantka)

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Berkshire. The cumbersome planes, each carrying a seven-ton load of bombs and incendiary devices, were equipped with extra fuel tanks to accommodate the unusually long round-trip distance to their destination: the city of Dresden, Germany, along the Elbe River, southeast of Berlin.

While a crushing blow against Berlin seemed unlikely, shortages of high-explosive bombs increased the attraction of targets that would burn easily with cheap and plentiful incendiary devices. Thus, Dresden had emerged as an attractive target. Over the previous few months, there had been a scattering of daylight raids by American formations on the suburban industrial areas and on sites just outside the city center. Several of Dresden’s residential blocks had been hit a month earlier, with more than 300 civilian fatalities. Nevertheless, most citizens still considered their city inviolable. Rumors persisted to the effect that Dresden would not fall victim to the massive destruction suffered by other Reich cities.

Advancing Russian armies were temporarily halted about 70 miles to the east of Dresden, but fleeing refugees from the east were beginning to overload the city’s shelter and housing resources. Although the historic, old baroque city’s famous cafés remained open for business, theaters and opera houses were closed by orders from Berlin.

The Lancaster bombers, at a cruising speed of around 220 m.p.h., maintained a southeasterly course at first and then continued over northern France. They next banked northeast, heading for Aachen, which was in Allied hands, before flying due east into enemy-held territory. At 9:51 p.m., as the bombers passed south

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of the Ruhr Valley’s industrial area, Dresden’s air-raid sirens began to sound.

Ten minutes after the first air-raid alarm, an advance guard of De Havilland Mosquito pathfinders dispatched from the Royal Air Force’s Squadron 627 swooped in over the darkened metropolis, dropping marker flares to allow the massive force of bombers coming in after them to find their targets. The ominous rumble of engines overhead caused local civil defense authorities, huddled in a bunker beneath police headquarters, to realize that Dresden was about to be bombed. A near-hysterical announcer on a local radio station pleaded urgently with his listeners to find shelter quickly.

On the morning of February 13, Britain’s RAF meteorological officers had predicted cloud breaks and good weather over the area. The final elements of the catastrophe were supplied by the failure of the Dresden authorities to provide the city with adequate public shelters. There were remarkably few major public airraid shelters for a city of this size. One of the largest, beneath the main railway station, built for 2,000 people, was housing 6,000 refugees from the eastern front.

There were no anti-aircraft guns to retaliate and no searchlights to scan the darkening sky, because the Germans had dismantled all of the city’s mostly obsolete defensive weaponry shortly before and taken it east to fight the Russian onslaught. The ancient city was completely unprotected.

Even as the Lancasters begin their final approach to the target, visibility remained poor. Only as they rounded the southeastward curve of the Elbe, did the cloud cover begin to thin, allowing the aircrew to

WITEZ II

GRAND

(Ofir x Federacja)

(Kuhailan Abu Urkub x Sagar)

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THE ARABIAN HORSE

IN HISTORY glimpse occasional buildings, roads and railways. The first wave of destruction lasted nearly 20 minutes. A second wave, with more aircraft, came two hours later and lasted a bit longer, but, by that time, no one on the ground was counting. This time lag was a carefully calculated ploy to increase the destruction, because after two hours, many who survived the first sortie had ventured back above ground, and firefighters, medical teams, and military units filled the streets. As the fresh inferno of high explosives and incendiary bombs sucked the existing fires into one, an asphyxiating firestorm began to build.

Overnight, British and American aviators dropped more than 2,600 tons of high explosives and incendiary devices on Dresden, utterly destroying its historic center, untold quantities of treasure and works of art, and dozens of examples of Europe’s finest architecture. At least 25,000 inhabitants were killed, and untold numbers more incinerated or suffocated by the effects of the oxygen-devouring firestorm. The gigantic column of heat rising from the firestorm created hurricane force winds and sucked in oxygen surrounding the fire to feed the blaze. The heat was so intense that it melted asphalt. Thousands of people on the streets and in airraid shelters died from the heat, from carbon monoxide poisoning, or from asphyxiation. The events happened to coincide with young Dresden resident Lothar Metzger’s 10th birthday.

“About 9:30 p.m. the alarm was given,” wrote Metzger in 1999 from Berlin in an account published on timewitnesses.org. “We children knew that sound, so we got up and dressed quickly, then hurried downstairs

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into our cellar, which we used as an air-raid shelter.

My older sister and I carried my baby twin sisters, my mother carried a little suitcase, and the bottles with milk for our babies. On the radio, we heard with great horror the news: ‘Attention, a great air raid is coming over our town!’

“Some minutes later we heard a horrible noise: the bombers. There were nonstop explosions. Our cellar was filled with fire and smoke, the lights went out and wounded people shouted dreadfully. In great fear, we struggled to leave this cellar. My mother and my older sister carried the big basket holding the twins. With one hand, I grasped my younger sister, and with the other, I grasped my mother’s coat.

“We did not recognize our street anymore. Fire, only fire was wherever we looked. The broken remains of our house were burning. On the streets, there were burning vehicles and carts with refugees, people, horses, all of them screaming and shouting in fear of death. I saw hurt women, children, old people searching a way through ruins and flames.

We fled into another cellar overcrowded with injured and distraught men, women and children shouting, crying and praying. There was no light, except some electric torches.

“Suddenly, the second raid began. This shelter was hit too, and so we fled through cellar after cellar.

Explosion followed explosion. It was unbelievable. So many people were horribly burnt and injured, and it became more and more difficult to breathe. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, the basket with our twins covered was snatched up out of my mother’s

CANARIA

CARMEN

(Trypolis x Saga)

(Trypolis x Wilga)

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hand, and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm.”

Metzger continued his narrative, clearly reliving the unimaginable nightmare. “We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, whole families burnt to death, burning people running to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, and fire everywhere. The hot wind of the firestorm kept throwing people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape.

“I can never forget these terrible details. The basket with the twins had disappeared, and then suddenly, my older sister vanished. We found shelter the rest of the night in the cellar of a hospital nearby, surrounded by crying and dying people. In the morning, we looked for our sister and the twins, with no success. The house where we lived was only a burning ruin. Soldiers told us we could not go into the house where our twins were left because everyone had been burned to death.

“Totally exhausted, badly burnt and wounded by the fire, we walked to the Loschwitz Bridge, where we found good people who allowed us to wash, to eat and to sleep.

This lasted only a short time, because suddenly another air raid began (February 14) and this house, too was bombed. We hurried over the River Elbe Bridge with many other homeless survivors. In all this tragedy, I had completely forgotten my 10th birthday. Later that day, my mother surprised me with a piece of sausage she begged from the Red Cross. This was my birthday present.”

Dresden survivor Edda West, only 3 years old at the time, hid with her mother and grandmother in the

basement of their apartment building. She described her impressions of what happened between the first and second bombing waves to The Idaho Observer reporter Don Harkins in an April 22, 2003, article.

“Our building and the immediate surrounding area had not been hit,” she explained. “Almost everybody went upstairs, thinking it was over, but it was not. The worst was yet to come. The bombing began again. This time, there was no pause between detonations and the rocking was so severe, we lost our balance, and were tossed around in the basement like a bunch of rag dolls.

At times, the basement walls were separated. As they lifted up, we could see flashes of the fiery explosions outside. Firebombs and canisters of phosphorous were being dumped everywhere. The phosphorus was a thick liquid that burned upon exposure to air, and as it penetrated cracks in buildings, it burned wherever it leaked through. The fumes from it were poisonous.

I tried bracing myself against a wall, but that took the skin off my hands —the wall was so hot. The last I remember of that night is losing my balance, holding onto somebody, but falling and taking him or her too, with them falling on top of me.

“When I came to, it was daylight. I started moving my legs and arms. It hurt a lot but I could move them. I guess my movements were noticed by a soldier from the rescue and medical corps. The corps had been put into action all over the city, and had opened the basement door from the outside. Now, they were looking for signs of life from any of us. I learned later that there had been over 170 bodies taken out of that basement, and only 27 were still alive. I was one of them … miraculously!”

Future Janów Podlaski director Andrez Krysztalowicz, who had been in charge of the mare party, was aboard stallion Amurath Sahib.

He rode along the highway, sadly surveying the damage, counting and identifying the bodies of the many Arabian horses that had perished in the inferno.

AMURATH SAHIB (Amurath II x Sahiba)

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THE ARABIAN HORSE

IN HISTORY Bodies were piled in the main square on huge, slatted shutters salvaged from department store display windows, then burned in the thousands to stop the spread of disease. Ironically, it was Ash Wednesday, February 14, 1945, 84 days before the end of the Second World War in Europe.

Future Janów Podlaski director Andrez Krysztalowicz, who had been in charge of the mare party, was aboard stallion Amurath Sahib. He rode along the highway, sadly surveying the damage, counting and identifying the bodies of the many Arabian horses that had perished in the inferno.

“As he rode into Dresden, he had to pass the carcasses of his dead stallions lying on the roadside, which nearly broke his heart,” Schiele writes. “Four days were spent in a search for stragglers, but only 38 were ever found alive, and one of those had already been hitched to a gypsy’s wagon.”

Fortunately for future breeders, stallions Amurath Sahib, Witraz, Witez II, Wielki Szlem, Grand, Rozmaryn, Bad Afas, et al, survived, as did Canaria and Carmen, both by Trypolis, and old Gazella II, who endured the hardships of the trek to Russia at the age of 26, surviving to foal and suckle a filly at Tersk. Her Fetysz daughter, Najada, was the only horse the Russians left at Janów.

The mares Saga (Hardy x Jaga II), dam of Canaria, Estokada, stallion Sedziwoj, and Wilga (Ofir x Jaskolka II), dam of Carmen, also survived to found their own families in post-war Poland. Through Carmen, Wilga became the maternal grandam of Comet.

Taraszcza, an Enwer Bey daughter foaled in 1937, survived the trip to Russia to produce important sire

Negatiw in 1954. Koalicja, a Koheilan IV daughter foaled in 1918, also went to Tersk in 1939. Her progeny included daughter Konfederacja, sons Miecznik and Enwer Bey (sire of Trypolis), and grandson *Witez II (by Ofir), who became an influential sire in the United States. Partner, another Koalicja grandson and sire of significance, was selected 1981 European Champion Stallion at the Salon du Cheval. The post-war survival of these horses and others enabled governments and private breeders throughout the world to tap into the Polish fountainhead in their ever-hopeful stewardship of the world’s oldest purebred domestic animal.

“As he rode into Dresden, he had to pass the carcasses of his dead stallions lying on the roadside, which nearly broke his heart,” Schiele writes. “Four days were spent in a search for stragglers, but only 38 were ever found alive, and one of those had already been hitched to a gypsy’s wagon.”

The late Andrez Krysztalowicz.

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