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half their normal size or worse. Children under the age of three or four were impossible to identify at all, these tender human beings just melted in the heat of the oven they were sitting in. In the majority of cases the victims looked as though they had died peacefully through lack of oxygen, just losing conscious and falling asleep in the process. After which the terrible heat took over and shriveled them up. This was on the outskirts of the Altstade, the old city, and it turned out to be the easy bit. Even the hardest of us was going to flinch as we got near to where the centre of the firestorm had been and where fierce fires were still raging.
    The approach of darkness made the work impossible so The General called his gang to order and what remained of our forty strong group trudged back to our position by the Railway embankment. This night we were treated much better. The General has been in contact with the main big boss of the area and now came over to us to tell us that we would be sleeping in a couple of wagons for the duration of the exercise and that even some blankets were to be supplied. Talk about organisation, we had food, drink and somewhere to kip. We still had no water for washing and if you had to answer the call of nature then it was just a question of making a hole in the rubble. We must have stunk like polecats, but so what, we were alive. So the second day ended.
    The third day turned out to be a repeat of the day before. This was because we were still working in the same designated area, the main difference was there were more of us. Gangs had been bought in from far and wide, some on lorries and buses, others came along the only working railway line. Our sleeping wagons had been lifted off of the tracks, out of the way, by a giant crane. Everywhere I looked I could see men working in small gangs of up to a dozen men, usually escorted by a couple of armed guards.
    I think the reason that our ‘General’ and those of us in his crew were left to our own devices was because we were doing the real dirty work of entering the shelters. As far as I could make out there were only about six or seven gangs employed on this task. Once a shelter was located we had the job of clearing the rubble from the doorway, this could take a couple of hours before we could uncover an entrance. Then came the horrendous task of forcing our way in, carefully managing the stairs that led to the basement below, and there we met the sight that so many of the men were unable to stand, the bodies of the unfortunates, sometimes seemingly untouched and in a kind of peaceful repose, but more often than not burnt to a crisp and smouldering shell. These experiences were to get much worse the nearer we got to the centre of the city.
    Once we found the bodies, the General ordered the men who had not taken part in clearing access to the shelter to go down and try to bring the bodies that could be moved to the surface. Some of the corpses were so brittle that any attempt to move them resulted in a cloud of ash and dried flesh, and yet so methodical were these Germans that, where it was impossible to manhandle the bodies, they were ordered to stuff any part of the corpse that help identify the victim into a sack. It was all so gruesome that to describe what was going on with any degree of clarity is something that I, for one, can’t do. I later heard that gangs of SS were used to gather these remains, I only heard about this through the chit chat in the evening so whether it’s true or not I don’t know. What I did know was that in spite of the fact that we were working day and night, our progress could only be measured in terms of yards per day. Even so, by the end of the third day we were so much nearer the fires that were still raging unabated, that nobody was looking forward to tomorrow’s tasks.
    There was a surprise in store for our gang when that evening we returned to the wagons, a shower wagon had arrived upon