On 15 February 1945, then 14-year-old Götz Bergander walked through Dresden’s destroyed city centre:
“I wanted to find out what had happened to my classmates who lived near the main railway station and what the situation was in the station itself, where I had been sent so often in the previous weeks to do ‘refugee welfare work’.
who lived near the main railway station and what the situation was in the station itself, where I had been sent so often in the previous weeks to do ‘refugee welfare work’.
On the way there I only came across a few dead bodies. (…) But in Bismarckstraße, underneath the ramp leading up to the freight platform of the main station, corpses were stacked. There they lay, neatly placed, body by body, ready to be taken away. Corpses of every age and in every conceivable condition. Naked and clothed, cramped and stretched out, encrusted with blood and spotless, mutilated and apparently uninjured. Children, who needed less space, squeezed in between the adults. (…) A lunatic monument, a long barricade.”

Marked in 2001
Further reading: see bibliography on pp. Bergander, Dresden, p. 178.