THE memories tumble out of Rose Hartmann as she steers us through Dresden: the street corner where she saw a cart piled with bent and blackened corpses; the stench; the smoke and heat that was so powerful that people boiled to death when they plunged into the fountains.

Suddenly she pauses and looks at us, the reporter and the photographer, squinting through her thick glasses.

“You’re the first Englishmen I’ve ever talked to and it’s nice that I don’t have to associate you with war or killing, just good men speaking gently,” she said.

The first Englishman she encountered was also her first corpse — a pilot with a face apparently darkened by fire, glimpsed when she was 11, the day after British bombs set Dresden ablaze.

There is no doubt in Rose’s mind that this was the body of an airman who had been coming in to strafe the inhabitants as they fled the city. Historians say this is improbable. “I know what they say, but I also know what I and others saw with our own eyes,” she said.

As Dresden has become the focus of wartime memory for Germans — where tears are shed for all the civilian dead in cities across the country — so myth-making has obscured the facts. It is almost as if the eyewitnesses, clinging to their version of events, are trying to trip up the historians.

“We thought at first the British wanted to destroy Dresden’s cultural treasures before the Russians arrived; later I realised that was nonsense,” Rose said.

Other rumours circulated to explain why Dresden had not been seriously hit earlier in the war. Dresden, said one theory, was being shielded because Churchill’s cousin was secretly living there.

How is Rose, a 71-year-old music teacher, to thread her way around this historical labyrinth? She does it by sticking to the geography of the tragedy and has virtually memorised the suffering and damage in each street. She guides us around the Altmarkt, the old market square that used to be the heart of the city.

“Here,” she said, “is where they laid the corpses, sometimes one on top of each other. There were not enough coffins and they had to be put somewhere until graves were dug.”

Every niche of Dresden seems to be stained in this way. Aerial photographs of the city taken two days after the raids showed it still engulfed by flames.

The nightmares have left Rose, but when we pass a barge loudly transferring its cargo, she flinches like a gun-shy dog. “For years I was terrified of planes — and of fireworks,” she said.

The children of 1945 Dresden have formed their own association and the talk seems to be helping them. The sense of delayed shock is seeping away.

“It’s just so good to be alive, to be able to talk to you; but it’s happening again isn’t it?” Rose said. “Buildings are getting smashed and lives are being torn apart by war. I thought Dresden was going to teach the world a lesson. I’m not sure that it has even taught us a lesson — at the last local elections here 33,000 voted for the neo-Nazis. Can you imagine? After what the real Nazis brought on our heads!”

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