![Fotothek df ps 0000010 Blick vom Rathausturm](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Fotothek_df_ps_0000010_Blick_vom_Rathausturm.jpg)
The bombing of Dresden was a joint
British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
and
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
aerial bombing attack on the city of
Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...
, the capital of the German state of
Saxony
Saxony (german: Sachsen ; Upper Saxon: ''Saggsn''; hsb, Sakska), officially the Free State of Saxony (german: Freistaat Sachsen, links=no ; Upper Saxon: ''Freischdaad Saggsn''; hsb, Swobodny stat Sakska, links=no), is a landlocked state of ...
, during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772
heavy bomber
Heavy bombers are bomber aircraft capable of delivering the largest payload of air-to-ground weaponry (usually bombs) and longest range (takeoff to landing) of their era. Archetypal heavy bombers have therefore usually been among the larges ...
s of the
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) an ...
(RAF) and 527 of the
United States Army Air Forces
The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II ...
(USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of
high-explosive
An explosive (or explosive material) is a reactive substance that contains a great amount of potential energy that can produce an explosion if released suddenly, usually accompanied by the production of light, heat, sound, and pressure. An expl ...
bombs and
incendiary devices on the city.
[*The number of bombers and tonnage of bombs are taken from a USAF document written in 1953 and classified secret until 1978 .
*Taylor (2005), front flap, which gives the figures 1,100 heavy bombers and 4,500 tons.
*Webster and Frankland (1961) give 805 Bomber Command aircraft 13 February 1945 and 1,646 US bombers 16 January – 17 April 1945. ]
"Mission accomplished"
, ''The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'', 7 February 2004. The bombing and the resulting
firestorm
A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. It is most commonly a natural phenomenon, created during some of the largest bushfires and wildfires. Although the term has been used ...
destroyed more than of the city centre. An estimated 22,700
to 25,000
people were killed. Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March aimed at the city's
railway marshalling yard and one smaller raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas.
Postwar discussions
[Norwood, 2013, page 237] of whether the attacks were justified, and the tens of thousands of civilians killed in the bombing, have led to the event becoming one of the moral ''
causes célèbres'' of the war. Despite the current understanding of the ability of Nazi Germany to continue the war, at the time, Allied intelligence assessments gave undue emphasis to fears of the Russian advance faltering or the establishment of a Nazi
redoubt
A redoubt (historically redout) is a fort or fort system usually consisting of an enclosed defensive emplacement outside a larger fort, usually relying on earthworks, although some are constructed of stone or brick. It is meant to protect soldi ...
in Southern Germany (see
Alpine Fortress
The Alpine Fortress (german: Alpenfestung) or Alpine Redoubt was the World War II national redoubt planned by Heinrich Himmler in November and December 1943"Himmler started laying the plans for underground warfare in the last two months of 1943 ...
). Two
United States Air Force
The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Aerial warfare, air military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part ...
reports, published in 1953 and again in 1954, defended the operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which they noted was a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort.
Several researchers assert that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas which were located outside the city centre. Critics of the bombing have asserted that Dresden was a cultural landmark with little strategic significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate
area bombing
In military aviation, area bombardment (or area bombing) is a type of aerial bombardment in which bombs are dropped over the general area of a target. The term "area bombing" came into prominence during World War II.
Area bombing is a form of st ...
and were not
proportionate to the
military gains. Some have claimed that the raid constituted a
war crime. Immediate
German propaganda claims following the attacks played up the death toll of the bombing and its status as
mass murder, and many in the
German far-right
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
refer to it as "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs".
[
In the decades since the war, large variations in the claimed death toll have fuelled the controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. The city authorities at the time estimated up to 25,000 victims, a figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council. However, in March 1945, the German government ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids, and death tolls as high as 500,000 have been claimed. One of the main authors responsible for inflated figures being disseminated in the West was ]Holocaust denier
Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that falsely asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a myth, fabrication, or exaggeration. Holocaust deniers make one or more of the following false statements:
* ...
David Irving
David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author and Holocaust denier who has written on the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. His works include '' The Destruction of Dresden'' (1 ...
, who subsequently announced that he had discovered that the documentation he had worked from had been forged, and the real figures supported the 25,000 number.
Background
Early in 1945, the German offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II. The battle lasted from 16 December 1944 to 28 January 1945, towards the end of the war in ...
had been exhausted, as was the Luftwaffe
The ''Luftwaffe'' () was the aerial-warfare branch of the German ''Wehrmacht'' before and during World War II. Germany's military air arms during World War I, the ''Luftstreitkräfte'' of the Imperial Army and the '' Marine-Fliegerabtei ...
's disastrous New Year's Day attack involving elements of 11 combat wings of its day fighter force. The Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, afte ...
had launched its Silesian Offensives
The Silesian offensives were two separate offensives conducted in February and March 1945 by the Soviet Union, Soviet Red Army against the ''Wehrmacht'' on the Eastern Front (World War II), Eastern Front in World War II to protect the flanks of ...
into pre-war German territory. The German army was retreating on all fronts, but still resisting strongly. On 8 February 1945, the Red Army crossed the Oder River, with positions just from Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
. A special British Joint Intelligence Subcommittee report, ''German Strategy and Capacity to Resist'', prepared for Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from ...
's eyes only, predicted that Germany might collapse as early as mid-April if the Soviets overran its eastern defences. Alternatively, the report warned that the Germans might hold out until November if they could prevent the Soviets from taking Silesia
Silesia (, also , ) is a historical region of Central Europe that lies mostly within Poland, with small parts in the Czech Republic and Germany. Its area is approximately , and the population is estimated at around 8,000,000. Silesia is split ...
. Despite the post-war assessment, in the period before the Dresden raid, there were serious doubts in Allied intelligence as to how well the war was going for them, with fears of "Nazi redoubt" being established, or of the Russian advance faltering. Hence any assistance to the Soviets on the Eastern Front could shorten the war.
A large scale aerial attack on Berlin and other eastern cities was examined under the code name Operation Thunderclap in mid-1944, but was shelved on 16 August. This was later reexamined, and the decision made for a more limited operation. The Soviet Army continued its push towards the Reich despite severe losses, which they sought to minimize in the final phase of the war. On 5 January 1945, two North American B-25 Mitchell
The North American B-25 Mitchell is an American medium bomber that was introduced in 1941 and named in honor of Major General William "Billy" Mitchell, a pioneer of U.S. military aviation. Used by many Allied air forces, the B-25 served in ...
bombers dropped 300,000 leaflets over Dresden with the "Appeal of 50 German generals to the German army and people".
On 22 January 1945, the RAF director of bomber operations, Air Commodore Sydney Bufton, sent Deputy Chief of the Air Staff Deputy Chief of the Air Staff (DCAS) may refer to:
* Deputy Chief of the Air Staff (Australia)
* Deputy Chief of the Air Staff (India)
* Deputy Chief of the Air Staff (Pakistan)
* Deputy Chief of the Air Staff (United Kingdom)
The Deputy Chief ...
Air Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley
Air chief marshal Sir Norman Howard Bottomley, (18 September 1891 – 13 August 1970) was the successor to Arthur 'Bomber' Harris as Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command in 1945.
RAF career
Born in Ripponden, West Riding of Yorkshire, Bot ...
a minute suggesting that if Thunderclap was timed so that it appeared to be a coordinated air attack to aid the current Soviet offensive then the effect of the bombing on German morale would be increased. On 25 January, the Joint Intelligence Committee supported the idea, as it tied in with the Ultra
adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. ' ...
-based intelligence that dozens of German divisions deployed in the west were moving to reinforce the Eastern Front, and that interdiction Interdiction is a military term for the act of delaying, disrupting, or destroying enemy forces or supplies en route to the battle area. A distinction is often made between strategic and tactical interdiction. The former refers to operations whose ...
of these troop movements should be a "high priority." Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, AOC-in-C Bomber Command
Bomber Command is an organisational military unit, generally subordinate to the air force of a country. The best known were in Britain and the United States. A Bomber Command is generally used for strategic bombing (although at times, e.g. during t ...
, nicknamed "Bomber Harris", and known as an ardent supporter of area bombing
In military aviation, area bombardment (or area bombing) is a type of aerial bombardment in which bombs are dropped over the general area of a target. The term "area bombing" came into prominence during World War II.
Area bombing is a form of st ...
, was asked for his view, and proposed a simultaneous attack on Chemnitz, Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...
and Dresden. That evening Churchill asked the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair
Archibald Henry Macdonald Sinclair, 1st Viscount Thurso, (22 October 1890 – 15 June 1970), known as Sir Archibald Sinclair between 1912 and 1952, and often as Archie Sinclair, was a British politician and leader of the Liberal Party.
Backgr ...
, what plans had been drawn up to carry out these proposals. He passed on the request to Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Charles Portal
Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Frederick Algernon Portal, 1st Viscount Portal of Hungerford, (21 May 1893 – 22 April 1971) was a senior Royal Air Force officer. He served as a bomber pilot in the First World War, and rose to become fi ...
, the Chief of the Air Staff, who answered, "We should use available effort in one big attack on Berlin and attacks on Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz, or any other cities where a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the East, but will also hamper the movement of troops from the West." He mentioned that aircraft diverted to such raids should not be taken away from the current primary tasks of destroying oil production facilities, jet aircraft factories, and submarine yards.
Churchill was not satisfied with this answer and on 26 January pressed Sinclair for a plan of operations: "I asked ast nightwhether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in east Germany, should not now be considered especially attractive targets ... Pray report to me tomorrow what is going to be done".
In response to Churchill's inquiry, Sinclair approached Bottomley, who asked Harris to undertake attacks on Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz as soon as moonlight and weather permitted, "with the particular object of exploiting the confused conditions which are likely to exist in the above mentioned cities during the successful Russian advance". This allowed Sinclair to inform Churchill on 27 January of the Air Staff's agreement that, "subject to the overriding claims" on other targets under the Pointblank Directive
The Pointblank directive authorised the initiation of Operation Pointblank, the code name for the part of the Allied Combined Bomber Offensive intended to cripple or destroy the German aircraft fighter strength, thus drawing it away from front ...
, strikes against communications in these cities to disrupt civilian evacuation from the east and troop movement from the west would be made.
On 31 January, Bottomley sent Portal a message saying a heavy attack on Dresden and other cities "will cause great confusion in civilian evacuation from the east and hamper movement of reinforcements from other fronts". British historian Frederick Taylor mentions a further memo sent to the Chiefs of Staff Committee
The Chiefs of Staff Committee (CSC) is composed of the most senior military personnel in the British Armed Forces who advise on operational military matters and the preparation and conduct of military operations. The committee consists of the C ...
by Air Marshal Sir Douglas Evill
Air Chief Marshal Sir Douglas Claude Strathern Evill, (8 October 1892 – 22 March 1971) was an Australian-born Royal Naval Air Service pilot and squadron commander during the First World War. Serving in the Royal Air Force between the wars, h ...
on 1 February, in which Evill states interfering with mass civilian movements was a major, even key, factor in the decision to bomb the city centre. Attacks there, where main railway junctions, telephone systems, city administration and utilities were, would result in "chaos". Ostensibly, Britain had learned this after the Coventry Blitz
The Coventry Blitz ( blitz: from the German word ''Blitzkrieg'' meaning "lightning war" ) or Coventration of the city was a series of bombing raids that took place on the British city of Coventry. The city was bombed many times during the Sec ...
, when loss of this crucial infrastructure had supposedly longer-lasting effects than attacks on war plants.
During the Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference (codenamed Argonaut), also known as the Crimea Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the post ...
on 4 February, the Deputy Chief of the Soviet General Staff, General Aleksei Antonov
Aleksei Innokentievich Antonov (russian: Алексей Иннокентьевич Антонов; 9 September 1896 – 16 June 1962) was a General of the Soviet Army, awarded the Order of Victory for his efforts in World War II. From 1945 to 1 ...
, raised the issue of hampering the reinforcement of German troops from the western front by paralyzing the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig with aerial bombardment. In response, Portal, who was in Yalta, asked Bottomley to send him a list of objectives to discuss with the Soviets. Bottomley's list included oil plants, tank and aircraft factories and the cities of Berlin and Dresden. However according to Richard Overy, the discussion with the Soviet Chief of Staff, Aleksei Antonov, recorded in the minutes, only mentions the bombing of Berlin and Leipzig. The bombing of Dresden was a Western plan, but the Soviets were told in advance about the operation.
Military and industrial profile
According to the RAF at the time, Dresden was Germany's seventh-largest city and the largest remaining unbombed built-up area. Taylor writes that an official 1942 guide to the city described it as "one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich
''Reich'' (; ) is a German noun whose meaning is analogous to the meaning of the English word "realm"; this is not to be confused with the German adjective "reich" which means "rich". The terms ' (literally the "realm of an emperor") and ' (lit ...
" and in 1944 the German Army High Command's Weapons Office listed 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops that were supplying the army with materiel
Materiel (; ) refers to supplies, equipment, and weapons in military supply-chain management, and typically supplies and equipment in a commercial supply chain context.
In a military context, the term ''materiel'' refers either to the specif ...
. Nonetheless, according to some historians, the contribution of Dresden to the German war effort may not have been as significant as the planners thought.
The US Air Force Historical Division wrote a report in response to the international concern about the bombing that remained classified until December 1978. It said that there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers in the city supporting the German war effort at the time of the raid. According to the report, there were aircraft components factories; a poison gas
Many gases have toxic properties, which are often assessed using the LC50 (median lethal dose) measure. In the United States, many of these gases have been assigned an NFPA 704 health rating of 4 (may be fatal) or 3 (may cause serious or perman ...
factory (Chemische Fabrik Goye and Company); an anti-aircraft and field gun factory (Lehman); an optical goods factory (Zeiss Ikon
Carl Zeiss AG (), branded as ZEISS, is a German manufacturer of optical systems and optoelectronics, founded in Jena, Germany in 1846 by optician Carl Zeiss. Together with Ernst Abbe (joined 1866) and Otto Schott (joined 1884) he laid the ...
AG); and factories producing electrical and X-ray apparatus ( AG); gears and differentials (Saxoniswerke); and electric gauges (Gebrüder Bassler). It also said there were barracks, hutted camps, and a munitions
Ammunition (informally ammo) is the material fired, scattered, dropped, or detonated from any weapon or weapon system. Ammunition is both expendable weapons (e.g., bombs, missiles, grenades, land mines) and the component parts of other weap ...
storage depot.
The USAF report also states that two of Dresden's traffic routes were of military importance: north-south from Germany to Czechoslovakia
, rue, Чеськословеньско, , yi, טשעכאסלאוואקיי,
, common_name = Czechoslovakia
, life_span = 1918–19391945–1992
, p1 = Austria-Hungary
, image_p1 ...
, and east–west along the central European uplands
The Central UplandsDickinson (1964), p.18 ff. (german: die MittelgebirgeN.B. In German die ''Mittelgebirge'' (plural) refers to the Central Uplands; das ''Mittelgebirge'' refers to a low mountain range or upland region (''Mittel'' = "medium" and ...
.[: Cites Chambers Encyclopedia, New York, 1950, Vol. IV, p. 636,] The city was at the junction of the Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
-Prague
Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and List of cities in the Czech Republic, largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 milli ...
-Vienna
en, Viennese
, iso_code = AT-9
, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
, postal_code =
, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
railway line, as well as the Munich
Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Ha ...
- Breslau, and Hamburg
(male), (female) en, Hamburger(s),
Hamburgian(s)
, timezone1 = Central (CET)
, utc_offset1 = +1
, timezone1_DST = Central (CEST)
, utc_offset1_DST = +2
, postal ...
-Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...
lines.[ Colonel Harold E. Cook, a US POW held in the Friedrichstadt marshaling yard the night before the attacks, later said that "I saw with my own eyes that Dresden was an armed camp: thousands of German troops, tanks and artillery and miles of freight cars loaded with supplies supporting and transporting German ]logistics
Logistics is generally the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation. In a general business sense, logistics manages the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of consumption to meet the requirements of ...
towards the east to meet the Russians".
An RAF memo issued to airmen on the night of the attack gave some reasoning for the raid:
In the raid, major industrial areas in the suburbs, which stretched for miles, were not targeted. According to historian Donald Miller, "the economic disruption would have been far greater had Bomber Command targeted the suburban areas where most of Dresden's manufacturing might was concentrated".
In his biography of Attlee and Churchill, Leo McKinstry wrote: "When Churchill arrived at Yalta on 4 February 1945, the first question that Stalin put to him was: ‘Why haven’t you bombed Dresden?’ His enquiry reflected the importance that the Soviet Union attached to an attack on the city, following intelligence reports that Germany was moving large numbers of troops towards the Breslau Front. Siege_of_Breslau_">Siege_of_Breslau.html"_;"title="Siege_of_Breslau">Siege_of_Breslau_Churchill_was_able_to_assure_Stalin_that_just_such_an_Allied_attack_was_imminent."
_The_attacks
_Night_of_13/14_February
The_Dresden_attack_was_to_have_begun_with_a_United_States_Army_Air_Forces.html" "title="Siege_of_Breslau_.html" ;"title="Siege_of_Breslau.html" ;"title="Siege of Breslau">Siege of Breslau ">Siege_of_Breslau.html" ;"title="Siege of Breslau">Siege of Breslau Churchill was able to assure Stalin that just such an Allied attack was imminent."
The attacks
Night of 13/14 February
The Dresden attack was to have begun with a United States Army Air Forces">USAAF
The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II ...
Eighth Air Force bombing raid on 13 February 1945. The Eighth Air Force had already bombed the railway yards near the centre of the city twice in daytime raids: once on 7 October 1944 with 70 tons of high-explosive
An explosive (or explosive material) is a reactive substance that contains a great amount of potential energy that can produce an explosion if released suddenly, usually accompanied by the production of light, heat, sound, and pressure. An expl ...
bombs killing more than 400, then again with 133 bombers on 16 January 1945, dropping 279 tons of high-explosives and 41 tons of incendiaries
Incendiary weapons, incendiary devices, incendiary munitions, or incendiary bombs are weapons designed to start fires or destroy sensitive equipment using fire (and sometimes used as anti-personnel weaponry), that use materials such as napalm, th ...
.
On 13 February 1945, bad weather over Europe prevented any USAAF operations, and it was left to RAF Bomber Command to carry out the first raid. It had been decided that the raid would be a double strike, in which a second wave of bombers would attack three hours after the first, just as the rescue teams were trying to put out the fires. As was standard practice, other raids were carried out that night to confuse German air defences. Three hundred and sixty heavy bombers ( Lancasters and Halifaxes) bombed a synthetic oil plant in Böhlen
Böhlen () is a town in Saxony, Germany, south of Leipzig. Its main features are a small airport and a power-plant. It is located in the newly built Neuseenland, the lakes created in the former open-pit mining areas.
History
The first docum ...
, from Dresden, while 71 de Havilland Mosquito medium bombers attacked Magdeburg
Magdeburg (; nds, label=Low Saxon, Meideborg ) is the capital and second-largest city of the German state Saxony-Anhalt. The city is situated at the Elbe river.
Otto I, the first Holy Roman Emperor and founder of the Archdiocese of Magdebu ...
with small numbers of Mosquitos carrying out nuisance raids on Bonn
The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ru ...
, Misburg near Hanover
Hanover (; german: Hannover ; nds, Hannober) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the 13th-largest city in Germany as well as the fourth-largest city in Northern Germany ...
and Nuremberg
Nuremberg ( ; german: link=no, Nürnberg ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the second-largest city of the German state of Bavaria after its capital Munich, and its 518,370 (2019) inhabitants make it the 14th-largest ...
.
When Polish crews of the designated squadrons were preparing for the mission, the terms of the Yalta agreement were made known to them. There was a huge uproar, since the Yalta agreement handed parts of Poland over to the Soviet Union. There was talk of mutiny among the Polish pilots, and their British officers removed their side arms. The Polish Government ordered the pilots to follow their orders and fly their missions over Dresden, which they did.
The first of the British aircraft took off at around 17:20 hours CET
CET or cet may refer to:
Places
* Cet, Albania
* Cet, standard astronomical abbreviation for the constellation Cetus
* Colchester Town railway station (National Rail code CET), in Colchester, England
Arts, entertainment, and media
* Comcast En ...
for the journey. This was a group of Lancasters from Bomber Command's 83 Squadron, No. 5 Group, acting as the Pathfinders, or flare force, whose job it was to find Dresden and drop magnesium
Magnesium is a chemical element with the symbol Mg and atomic number 12. It is a shiny gray metal having a low density, low melting point and high chemical reactivity. Like the other alkaline earth metals (group 2 of the periodic ta ...
parachute flares, known to the Germans as "Christmas trees", to mark and light up Dresden for the aircraft that would mark the target itself. The next set of aircraft to leave England were twin-engined Mosquito marker planes, which would identify target areas and drop target indicator
Target indicators, also known as target markers or TI's for short, were flares used by the RAF's Bomber Command during World War II. TIs were normally dropped by Pathfinders onto the target, providing an easily seen visual aiming point for the ...
s (TIs) that marked the target for the bombers to aim at. The attack was to centre on the Ostragehege
Ostragehege is a multi-use sports venue in Dresden, Germany. Key buildings of the venue include the Heinz-Steyer-Stadion and the ice hockey stadium of the Dresdner Eislöwen (or ''Dresden ice lions''). The stadium was the primary aiming point for ...
sports stadium, next to the city's medieval ''Altstadt'' (old town), with its congested and highly combustible timbered buildings.
The main bomber force, called ''Plate Rack'', took off shortly after the Pathfinders. This group of 254 Lancasters carried 500 tons of high explosives and 375 tons of incendiaries
Incendiary weapons, incendiary devices, incendiary munitions, or incendiary bombs are weapons designed to start fires or destroy sensitive equipment using fire (and sometimes used as anti-personnel weaponry), that use materials such as napalm, th ...
("fire bombs"). There were 200,000 incendiaries in all, with the high-explosive bombs ranging in weight from —the two-ton "cookies", also known as "blockbusters", because they could destroy an entire large building or street. The high explosives were intended to rupture water mains and blow off roofs, doors, and windows to expose the interiors of the buildings and create an air flow to feed the fires caused by the incendiaries that followed.
The Lancasters crossed into France near the Somme, then into Germany just north of Cologne
Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and 3.6 millio ...
. At 22:00 hours, the force heading for Böhlen split away from Plate Rack, which turned south east toward the Elbe. By this time, ten of the Lancasters were out of service, leaving 244 to continue to Dresden.
The sirens started sounding in Dresden at 21:51 (CET). the 'Master Bomber' Wing Commander
Wing commander (Wg Cdr in the RAF, the IAF, and the PAF, WGCDR in the RNZAF and RAAF, formerly sometimes W/C in all services) is a senior commissioned rank in the British Royal Air Force and air forces of many countries which have historical ...
Maurice Smith, flying in a Mosquito, gave the order to the Lancasters: "Controller to Plate Rack Force: Come in and bomb glow of red target indicators as planned. Bomb the glow of red TIs as planned". The first bombs were released at 22:13, the last at 22:28, the Lancasters delivering 881.1 tons of bombs, 57% high explosive, 43% incendiaries. The fan-shaped area that was bombed was long, and at its extreme about wide. The shape and total devastation of the area was created by the bombers of No. 5 Group flying over the head of the fan (Ostragehege
Ostragehege is a multi-use sports venue in Dresden, Germany. Key buildings of the venue include the Heinz-Steyer-Stadion and the ice hockey stadium of the Dresdner Eislöwen (or ''Dresden ice lions''). The stadium was the primary aiming point for ...
stadium) on prearranged compass bearings and releasing their bombs at different prearranged times.
The second attack, three hours later, was by Lancaster aircraft of 1, 3, 6 and 8 Groups
A group is a number of persons or things that are located, gathered, or classed together.
Groups of people
* Cultural group, a group whose members share the same cultural identity
* Ethnic group, a group whose members share the same ethnic ide ...
, 8 Group being the Pathfinders. By now, the thousands of fires from the burning city could be seen more than away on the ground, and away in the air, with smoke rising to .["14 February 1945: Thousands of bombs destroy Dresden"]
, BBC ''On this Day'', 14 February 1945. Retrieved 10 January 2008. The Pathfinders therefore decided to expand the target, dropping flares on either side of the firestorm, including the ''Hauptbahnhof
Central stations or central railway stations emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as railway stations that had initially been built on the edge of city centres were enveloped by urban expansion and became an integral part of the ...
'', the main train station, and the ''Großer Garten
The Großer Garten (English: Great Garden) is a Baroque style park in central Dresden. It is rectangular in shape and covers about 1.8 km². Originally established in 1676 on the orders of John George III, Elector of Saxony, it has been a p ...
'', a large park, both of which had escaped damage during the first raid. The German sirens sounded again at 01:05, but as there was practically no electricity, these were small hand-held sirens that were heard within only a block. Between 01:21 and 01:45, 529 Lancasters dropped more than 1,800 tons of bombs.
14–15 February
On the morning of 14 February 431 United States Army Air Force
The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II ...
bombers of the Eighth Air Force's 1st Bombardment Division were scheduled to bomb Dresden near midday, and the 457 aircraft of 3rd Bombardment Division were to follow to bomb Chemnitz, while the 375 bombers of the 2nd Bombardment Division would bomb a synthetic oil plant in Magdeburg
Magdeburg (; nds, label=Low Saxon, Meideborg ) is the capital and second-largest city of the German state Saxony-Anhalt. The city is situated at the Elbe river.
Otto I, the first Holy Roman Emperor and founder of the Archdiocese of Magdebu ...
. Another 84 bombers would attack Wesel. The bomber groups were protected by 784 North American P-51 Mustang
The North American Aviation P-51 Mustang is an American long-range, single-seat fighter and fighter-bomber used during World War II and the Korean War, among other conflicts. The Mustang was designed in April 1940 by a team headed by James ...
s of the Eighth Air Force's VIII Fighter Command
The VIII Fighter Command was a United States Army Air Forces unit of command above the wings and below the numbered air force. Its primary mission was command of fighter operations within the Eighth Air Force. In the World War II European The ...
, 316 of which covered the Dresden attack - a total of almost 2,100 Eighth Army Air Force aircraft over Saxony during 14 February.
Primary sources disagree as to whether the aiming point was the marshalling yards near the centre of the city or the centre of the built-up urban area. The report by the 1st Bombardment Division's commander to his commander states that the targeting sequence was the centre of the built-up area in Dresden if the weather was clear. If clouds obscured Dresden but Chemnitz was clear, Chemnitz was the target. If both were obscured, they would bomb the centre of Dresden using H2X radar
H2X, officially known as the AN/APS-15, was an American ground scanning radar system used for blind bombing during World War II. It was a development of the British H2S radar, the first ground mapping radar to be used in combat. It was also know ...
. The mix of bombs for the Dresden raid was about 40 per cent incendiaries—much closer to the RAF city-busting mix than the USAAF usually used in precision bombardment. Taylor compares this 40 per cent mix with the raid on Berlin
The Raid on Berlin took place in October 1760 during the Third Silesian War (part of the Seven Years' War) when Austrian and Russian forces occupied the Prussian capital of Berlin for several days. After raising money from the city, and with the ...
on 3 February, where the ratio was 10 per cent incendiaries. This was a common mix when the USAAF anticipated cloudy conditions over the target.
image:96bg-b17.jpg, B-17s similar to some of the Dresden raiders, with H2X radar
H2X, officially known as the AN/APS-15, was an American ground scanning radar system used for blind bombing during World War II. It was a development of the British H2S radar, the first ground mapping radar to be used in combat. It was also know ...
s extended from the belly where a turret would normally have been. Other B-17s relied on signals from those with radar
316 B-17 Flying Fortresses bombed Dresden, dropping 771 tons of bombs. The remaining 115 bombers from the stream of 431 misidentified their targets. Sixty bombing of Prague in World War II, bombed Prague, dropping 153 tons of bombs, while others bombed Brux (city), Brux and Pilsen. The 379th bombardment group started to bomb Dresden at 12:17, aiming at marshalling yards in the Friedrichstadt district west of the city centre, as the area was not obscured by smoke and cloud. The 303rd group arrived over Dresden two minutes after the 379th and found their view obscured by clouds, so they bombed Dresden using H2X radar. The groups that followed the 303rd (92nd, 306th, 379th, 384th and 457th) also found Dresden obscured by clouds, and they too used H2X. H2X aiming caused the groups to bomb with a wide dispersal over the Dresden area. The last group to attack Dresden was the 306th, and they finished by 12:30.
Strafing
Strafing is the military practice of attacking ground targets from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic weapons.
Less commonly, the term is used by extension to describe high-speed firing runs by any land or naval craft such ...
of civilians has become a traditional part of the oral history of the raids, since a March 1945 article in the Nazi-run weekly newspaper '' Das Reich'' claimed this had occurred. Historian Götz Bergander, an eyewitness to the raids, found no reports on strafing for 13–15 February by any pilots or the German military and police. He asserted in ''Dresden im Luftkrieg'' (1977) that only a few tales of civilians being strafed were reliable in detail, and all were related to the daylight attack on 14 February. He concluded that some memory of eyewitnesses was real, but that it had misinterpreted the firing in a dogfight as deliberately aimed at people on the ground. In 2000, historian Helmut Schnatz found an explicit order to RAF pilots not to strafe civilians on the way back from Dresden. He also reconstructed timelines with the result that strafing would have been almost impossible due to lack of time and fuel. Frederick Taylor in ''Dresden'' (2004), basing most of his analysis on the work of Bergander and Schnatz, concludes that no strafing took place, although some stray bullets from aerial dogfights may have hit the ground and been mistaken for strafing by those in the vicinity. The official historical commission collected 103 detailed eyewitness accounts and let the local bomb disposal services search according to their assertions. They found no bullets or fragments that would have been used by planes of the Dresden raids.
On 15 February, the 1st Bombardment Division's primary target—the Böhlen
Böhlen () is a town in Saxony, Germany, south of Leipzig. Its main features are a small airport and a power-plant. It is located in the newly built Neuseenland, the lakes created in the former open-pit mining areas.
History
The first docum ...
synthetic oil plant near Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...
—was obscured by clouds, so its groups diverted to their secondary target, Dresden. Dresden was also obscured by clouds, so the groups targeted the city using H2X. The first group to arrive over the target was the 401st, but it missed the city centre and bombed Dresden's southeastern suburbs, with bombs also landing on the nearby towns of Meissen and Pirna
Pirna (; hsb, Pěrno; ) is a town in Saxony, Germany and capital of the administrative district Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge. The town's population is over 37,000. Pirna is located near Dresden and is an important district town as well as ...
. The other groups all bombed Dresden between 12:00 and 12:10. They failed to hit the marshalling yards in the Friedrichstadt district and, as in the previous raid, their ordnance was scattered over a wide area.
German defensive action
Dresden's air defences had been depleted by the need for more weaponry to fight the Red Army, and the city lost its last massive flak battery in January 1945. By this point in the war, the Luftwaffe was severely hampered by a shortage of both pilots and aircraft fuel; the German radar system was also degraded, lowering the warning time to prepare for air attacks. The RAF also had an advantage over the Germans in the field of electronic radar countermeasures.
Of 796 British bombers that participated in the raid, six were lost, three of those hit by bombs dropped by aircraft flying over them. On the following day, only a single US bomber was shot down, as the large escort force was able to prevent Luftwaffe day fighters from disrupting the attack.
On the ground
The sirens started sounding in Dresden at 21:51 (CET). Frederick Taylor writes that the Germans could see that a large enemy bomber formation—or what they called ''"ein dicker Hund"'' (lit: a fat dog, a "major thing")—was approaching somewhere in the east. At 21:39 the Reich Air Defence Leadership issued an enemy aircraft warning for Dresden, although at that point it was thought Leipzig might be the target. At 21:59 the Local Air Raid Leadership confirmed that the bombers were in the area of Dresden-Pirna
Pirna (; hsb, Pěrno; ) is a town in Saxony, Germany and capital of the administrative district Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge. The town's population is over 37,000. Pirna is located near Dresden and is an important district town as well as ...
. Taylor writes the city was largely undefended; a night fighter force of ten Messerschmitt Bf 110
The Messerschmitt Bf 110, often known unofficially as the Me 110,Because it was built before ''Bayerische Flugzeugwerke'' became Messerschmitt AG in July 1938, the Bf 110 was never officially given the designation Me 110. is a twin-engine (Des ...
Gs at Klotzsche airfield was scrambled, but it took them half an hour to get into an attack position. At 22:03 the Local Air Raid Leadership issued the first definitive warning: "Warning! Warning! Warning! The lead aircraft of the major enemy bomber forces have changed course and are now approaching the city area". Some 10,000 fled to the great open space of the Grosse Garten, the magnificent royal park of Dresden, nearly one and a half square miles in all. Here they were caught by the second raid, which started without an air-raid warning, at 1:22 a.m. At 11:30 a.m., the third wave of bombers, the two hundred eleven American Flying Fortresses, began their attack.
There were few public air raid shelters. The largest, beneath the main railway station, housed 6,000 refugees. As a result, most people took shelter in cellars, but one of the air raid precautions the city had taken was to remove thick cellar walls between rows of buildings and replace them with thin partitions that could be knocked through in an emergency. The idea was that, as one building collapsed or filled with smoke, those sheltering in the basements could knock walls down and move into adjoining buildings. With the city on fire everywhere, those fleeing from one burning cellar simply ran into another, with the result that thousands of bodies were found piled up in houses at the ends of city blocks.
A Dresden police report written shortly after the attacks reported that the old town and the inner eastern suburbs had been engulfed in a single fire that had destroyed almost 12,000 dwellings. The same report said that the raids had destroyed the Wehrmacht
The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the '' Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previo ...
's main command post in the Taschenbergpalais
Taschenbergpalais is a palace hotel owned by the Kempinski Group. It is located on Sophie Street next to the Dresden Castle and in front of the Zwinger. In direct proximity are the Semperoper, the Theaterplatz (theatre square) and the Dresden C ...
, 63 administration buildings, the railways, 19 military hospitals, 19 ships and barges, and a number of less significant military facilities. Six hundred and forty shops, 64 warehouses, 39 schools, 31 stores, 31 large hotels, 26 public houses/bars, 26 insurance buildings, 24 banks, 19 postal facilities, 19 hospitals and private clinics including auxiliary, overflow hospitals, 18 cinemas, 11 churches and 6 chapels, 5 consulates, 4 tram
A tram (called a streetcar or trolley in North America) is a rail vehicle that travels on tramway tracks on public urban streets; some include segments on segregated right-of-way. The tramlines or networks operated as public transport are ...
facilities, 3 theatres, 2 market halls, the zoo, the waterworks, and 5 other cultural buildings were also destroyed. Almost 200 factories were damaged, 136 seriously (including several of the Zeiss Ikon precision optical engineering works), 28 with medium to serious damage, and 35 with light damage.
An RAF assessment showed that 23 per cent of the industrial buildings and 56 per cent of the non-industrial buildings, not counting residential buildings, had been seriously damaged. Around 78,000 dwellings had been completely destroyed; 27,700 were uninhabitable, and 64,500 damaged but readily repairable.[
During his post-war interrogation, Albert Speer, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, said that Dresden's industrial recovery from the bombings was rapid.
]
Fatalities
According to the official German report ''Tagesbefehl'' (Order of the Day) no. 47 ("TB47") issued on 22 March, the number of dead recovered by that date was 20,204, including 6,865 who were cremated on the ''Altmarkt'' square, and they expected the total number of deaths to be about 25,000. Another report on 3 April put the number of corpses recovered at 22,096. Three municipal and 17 rural cemeteries outside Dresden recorded up to 30 April 1945 a total of at least 21,895 buried bodies from the Dresden raids, including those cremated on the ''Altmarkt''.
Between 100,000 and 200,000 refugees fleeing westward from advancing Soviet forces were in the city at the time of the bombing. Exact figures are unknown, but reliable estimates were calculated based on train arrivals, foot traffic, and the extent to which emergency accommodation had to be organised.[.] The city authorities did not distinguish between residents and refugees when establishing casualty numbers and "took great pains to count all the dead, identified and unidentified". This was largely achievable because most of the dead succumbed to suffocation; in only four places were recovered remains so badly burned that it was impossible to ascertain the number of victims. The uncertainty this introduced is thought to amount to no more than 100 people. 35,000 people were registered with the authorities as missing after the raids, around 10,000 of whom were later found alive.
A further 1,858 bodies were discovered during the reconstruction of Dresden between the end of the war and 1966. Since 1989, despite extensive excavation for new buildings, no new war-related bodies have been found. Seeking to establish a definitive casualty figure, in part to address propagandisation of the bombing by far-right groups, the Dresden city council in 2005 authorised an independent Historians' Commission (''Historikerkommission'') to conduct a new, thorough investigation, collecting and evaluating available sources. The results were published in 2010 and stated that between 22,700 and 25,000 people had been killed.
Wartime political responses
German
Development of a German political response to the raid took several turns. Initially, some of the leadership, especially Robert Ley
Robert Ley (; 15 February 1890 – 25 October 1945) was a German politician and labour union leader during the Nazi era; Ley headed the German Labour Front from 1933 to 1945. He also held many other high positions in the Party, including ''Gaul ...
and Joseph Goebbels, wanted to use it as a pretext for abandonment of the Geneva Conventions
upright=1.15, Original document in single pages, 1864
The Geneva Conventions are four treaties, and three additional protocols, that establish international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war. The singular term ''Geneva Conve ...
on the Western Front. In the end, the only political action the German government took was to exploit it for propaganda purposes. Goebbels is reported to have wept with rage for twenty minutes after he heard the news of the catastrophe, before launching into a bitter attack on Hermann Göring
Hermann Wilhelm Göring (or Goering; ; 12 January 1893 – 15 October 1946) was a German politician, military leader and convicted war criminal. He was one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1 ...
, the commander of the Luftwaffe: "If I had the power I would drag this cowardly good-for-nothing, this Reich marshal, before a court. ... How much guilt does this parasite not bear for all this, which we owe to his indolence and love of his own comforts....".
On 16 February, the Propaganda Ministry issued a press release that claimed that Dresden had no war industries; it was a city of culture.
On 25 February, a new leaflet with photographs of two burned children was released under the title "Dresden—Massacre of Refugees", stating that 200,000 had died. Since no official estimate had been developed, the numbers were speculative, but newspapers such as the Stockholm ''Svenska Morgonbladet'' used phrases such as "privately from Berlin," to explain where they had obtained the figures. Frederick Taylor states that "there is good reason to believe that later in March copies of—or extracts from—n official police report
N, or n, is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''.
History
...
were leaked to the neutral press by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry ... doctored with an extra zero to increase he total dead from the raidto 202,040". On 4 March, '' Das Reich'', a weekly newspaper founded by Goebbels, published a lengthy article emphasising the suffering and destruction of a cultural icon, without mentioning damage to the German war effort.
Taylor writes that this propaganda was effective, as it not only influenced attitudes in neutral countries at the time, but also reached the House of Commons
The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. T ...
, when Richard Stokes Richard or Dick Stokes may refer to:
* Richard Stokes (politician), British soldier and politician
* Richard Stokes (producer), British television producer
* Richard Stokes (priest), English Anglican priest
* Dick Stokes (hurler), Irish hurler
* Dic ...
, a Labour
Labour or labor may refer to:
* Childbirth, the delivery of a baby
* Labour (human activity), or work
** Manual labour, physical work
** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer
** Organized labour and the labour ...
Member of Parliament
A member of parliament (MP) is the representative in parliament of the people who live in their electoral district. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, this term refers only to members of the lower house since upper house members o ...
, and a long term opponent of area-bombing, quoted information from the German Press Agency (controlled by the Propaganda Ministry). It was Stokes's questions in the House of Commons that were in large part responsible for the shift in British opinion against this type of raid. Taylor suggests that, although the destruction of Dresden would have affected people's support for the Allies regardless of German propaganda, at least some of the outrage did depend on Goebbels' falsification of the casualty figures.
British
The destruction of the city provoked unease in intellectual circles in Britain. According to Max Hastings
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings (; born 28 December 1945) is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of ''The Daily Telegraph'', and editor of the ''Evening Standard'' ...
, by February 1945, attacks upon German cities had become largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war and the name of Dresden resonated with cultured people all over Europe—"the home of so much charm and beauty, a refuge for Trollope's heroines, a landmark of the Grand Tour
The Grand Tour was the principally 17th- to early 19th-century custom of a traditional trip through Europe, with Italy as a key destination, undertaken by upper-class young European men of sufficient means and rank (typically accompanied by a tut ...
." He writes that the bombing was the first time the public in Allied countries seriously questioned the military actions used to defeat the Germans.
The unease was made worse by an Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. ne ...
story that the Allies had resorted to terror bombing
Strategic bombing is a military strategy used in total war with the goal of defeating the enemy by destroying its morale, its economic ability to produce and transport materiel to the theatres of military operations, or both. It is a systematica ...
. At a press briefing held by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force two days after the raids, British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson told journalists:
One of the journalists asked whether the principal aim of bombing Dresden would be to cause confusion among the refugees or to blast communications carrying military supplies. Grierson answered that the primary aim was to attack communications to prevent the Germans from moving military supplies, and to stop movement in all directions if possible. He then added in an offhand remark that the raid also helped destroy "what is left of German morale." Howard Cowan, an Associated Press war correspondent, subsequently filed a story claiming that the Allies had resorted to terror bombing. There were follow-up newspaper editorials on the issue and a longtime opponent of strategic bombing, Richard Stokes MP, asked questions in the House of Commons on 6 March.
Churchill subsequently re-evaluated the goals of the bombing campaigns, to focus less on strategic targets, and more toward targets of tactical significance.["The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany" (SOA), HMSO (1961) vol 3 pp. 117–9.] On 28 March, in a memo sent by telegram to General Ismay for the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff, he wrote:
Having been given a paraphrased version of Churchill's memo by Bottomley, on 29 March, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris wrote to the Air Ministry:
The phrase "worth the bones of one British grenadier" echoed Otto von Bismarck's: "The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomerania
Pomerania ( pl, Pomorze; german: Pommern; Kashubian: ''Pòmòrskô''; sv, Pommern) is a historical region on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea in Central Europe, split between Poland and Germany. The western part of Pomerania belongs to ...
n grenadier". Under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff and in response to the views expressed by Portal and Harris among others, Churchill withdrew his memo and issued a new one. This was completed on 1 April 1945:
American
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006), also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through t ...
was among those in the Roosevelt administration who had qualms about the bombing. As one of the directors of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) was a written report created by a board of experts assembled to produce an impartial assessment of the effects of the Anglo-American strategic bombing of Nazi Germany during the European theatre o ...
, formed late in the war by the American Office of Strategic Services to assess the results of the aerial bombardments of Nazi Germany, he wrote: "The incredible cruelty of the attack on Dresden when the war had already been won—and the death of children, women, and civilians—that was extremely weighty and of no avail". The Survey's majority view on the Allies' bombing of German cities, however, concluded:
Timeline
Reconstruction and reconciliation
After the war, and again after German reunification, great efforts were made to rebuild some of Dresden's former landmarks, such as the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper
The Semperoper () is the opera house of the Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden (Saxon State Opera) and the concert hall of the Staatskapelle Dresden (Saxon State Orchestra). It is also home to the Semperoper Ballett. The building is located on the ...
(the Saxony state opera house) and the Zwinger Palace
The Zwinger (german: Dresdner Zwinger, ) is a palatial complex with gardens in Dresden, Germany. Designed by architect Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann, it is one of the most important buildings of the Baroque period in Germany. Along with the ...
(the latter two were rebuilt before reunification).
In 1956, Dresden entered a twin-town relationship with Coventry
Coventry ( or ) is a city in the West Midlands, England. It is on the River Sherbourne. Coventry has been a large settlement for centuries, although it was not founded and given its city status until the Middle Ages. The city is governed b ...
. As a centre of military and munitions production, Coventry suffered some of the worst attacks on any British city at the hands of the Luftwaffe during the Coventry Blitz
The Coventry Blitz ( blitz: from the German word ''Blitzkrieg'' meaning "lightning war" ) or Coventration of the city was a series of bombing raids that took place on the British city of Coventry. The city was bombed many times during the Sec ...
es of 1940 and 1941, which killed over 1,200 civilians and destroyed its cathedral
A cathedral is a church that contains the '' cathedra'' () of a bishop, thus serving as the central church of a diocese, conference, or episcopate. Churches with the function of "cathedral" are usually specific to those Christian denominatio ...
.
In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall
The fall of the Berlin Wall (german: Mauerfall) on 9 November 1989, during the Peaceful Revolution, was a pivotal event in world history which marked the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the figurative Iron Curtain and one of the series of eve ...
, a group of prominent Dresdeners formed an international appeal known as the "Call from Dresden" to request help in rebuilding the Lutheran
Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism, identifying primarily with the theology of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German monk and Protestant Reformers, reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Cathol ...
Frauenkirche, the destruction of which had over the years become a symbol of the bombing.[Boobbyer, Philip]
"Answering Dresden's Call"
''For a Change'', August–September 2006. The baroque Church of Our Lady (completed in 1743) had initially appeared to survive the raids, but collapsed a few days later, and the ruins were left in place by later Communist governments as an anti-war memorial.
A British charity, the Dresden Trust, was formed in 1993 to raise funds in response to the call for help, raising £600,000 from 2,000 people and 100 companies and trusts in Britain. One of the gifts they made to the project was an eight-metre high orb and cross made in London by goldsmiths Gant MacDonald, using medieval nails recovered from the ruins of the roof of Coventry Cathedral, and crafted in part by Alan Smith, the son of a pilot who took part in the raid.[Furlong, Ray]
Dresden ruins finally restored
, BBC News, 22 June 2004.
The new Frauenkirche was reconstructed over seven years by architects using 3D computer technology to analyse old photographs and every piece of rubble that had been kept and was formally consecrated on 30 October 2005, in a service attended by some 1,800 guests, including Germany's president, Horst Köhler
Horst Köhler (; born 22 February 1943) is a German politician who served as President of Germany from 2004 to 2010. As the candidate of the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the CDU (of which he is a member) and the CSU, as well as the ...
, previous chancellors, Gerhard Schröder
Gerhard Fritz Kurt "Gerd" Schröder (; born 7 April 1944) is a German lobbyist and former politician, who served as the chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. From 1999 to 2004, he was also the Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germa ...
and Angela Merkel
Angela Dorothea Merkel (; ; born 17 July 1954) is a German former politician and scientist who served as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. A member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she previously served as Leader of the Opp ...
, and the Duke of Kent
Duke of Kent is a title that has been created several times in the peerages of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, most recently as a royal dukedom for the fourth son of King George V. Since 1942, the title has been held by Prince Edwar ...
.[Harding, Luke]
Cathedral hit by RAF is rebuilt
''The Guardian'', 31 October 2005.
A further development towards the reconstruction of Dresden's historical core came in 1999 when the Dresden Historical Neumarkt Society
Dresden Historical Neumarkt Society e. V. (GHND) (German: Gesellschaft Historischer Neumarkt Dresden e. V.) is an association founded in 1999, which is committed to reconstructing the historic city centre of the German city of Dresden as much as ...
was founded. The society is committed to reconstructing the historic city centre as much as possible. When plans for the rebuilding of Dresden's Frauenkirche became certain, the (GHND) began calls for the reconstruction of the historic buildings that surrounded it.
In 2003, a petition in support of reconstructing the Neumarkt area was signed by nearly 68,000 people, amounting to 15% of the entire electorate. This had ground breaking results because it demonstrated a broad support for the aims of the initiative and a widespread appreciation for historical Dresden. This led to the city councils decision to rebuild a large amount of baroque buildings in accordance to historical designs, but with modern buildings in between them.
The reconstruction of the surrounding Neumarkt buildings continues to this day.
Post-war debate
The bombing of Dresden remains controversial and is subject to an ongoing debate by historians and scholars regarding the moral and military justifications surrounding the event.[.] British historian Frederick Taylor wrote of the attacks: "The destruction of Dresden has an epically tragic quality to it. It was a wonderfully beautiful city and a symbol of baroque humanism and all that was best in Germany. It also contained all of the worst from Germany during the Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
period. In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th century warfare and a symbol of destruction".[Hawley, Charles]
"Dresden Bombing Is To Be Regretted Enormously"
, interview with Frederick Taylor, ''Spiegel Online'', 11 February 2005.
Several factors have made the bombing a unique point of contention and debate. First among these are the Nazi government's exaggerated claims immediately afterwards, which drew upon the beauty of the city, its importance as a cultural icon; the deliberate creation of a firestorm; the number of victims; the extent to which it was a necessary military target; and the fact that it was attacked toward the end of the war, raising the question of whether the bombing was needed to hasten the end.
Legal considerations
The Hague Conventions, addressing the codes of wartime conduct on land and at sea, were adopted before the rise of air power. Despite repeated diplomatic attempts to update international humanitarian law
International humanitarian law (IHL), also referred to as the laws of armed conflict, is the law that regulates the conduct of war ('' jus in bello''). It is a branch of international law that seeks to limit the effects of armed conflict by pro ...
to include aerial warfare, it was not updated before the outbreak of World War II. The absence of specific international humanitarian law does not mean that the laws of war
The law of war is the component of international law that regulates the conditions for initiating war (''jus ad bellum'') and the conduct of warring parties (''jus in bello''). Laws of war define sovereignty and nationhood, states and territor ...
did not cover aerial warfare, but the existing laws remained open to interpretation.[Gómez, Javier Guisández]
"The Law of Air Warfare"
, ''International Review of the Red Cross
The ''International Review of the Red Cross'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed international humanitarian law journal published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The journal provides a "forum fo ...
'', nº 323, 20 June 1998, pp. 347–63. Specifically, whether the attack can be considered a war crime depends on whether the city was defended and whether resistance was offered against an approaching enemy. Allied arguments centre around the existence of a local air defence system and additional ground defences the Germans were constructing in anticipation of Soviet advances.[
]
Falsification of evidence
The bombing of Dresden has been used by Holocaust deniers
Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that falsely asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a myth, fabrication, or exaggeration. Holocaust deniers make one or more of the following false statements:
* ...
and pro-Nazi polemicists—most notably by British writer David Irving
David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author and Holocaust denier who has written on the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. His works include '' The Destruction of Dresden'' (1 ...
—in an attempt to establish a moral equivalence between the war crimes committed by the Nazi government and the killing of German civilians by Allied bombing raids. As such, "grossly inflated" casualty figures have been promulgated over the years, many based on a figure of over 200,000 deaths quoted in a forged version of the casualty report, ''Tagesbefehl'' No. 47, that originated with Hitler
Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
's Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
Marshall inquiry
An inquiry conducted at the behest of U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall
George Catlett Marshall Jr. (December 31, 1880 – October 16, 1959) was an American army officer and statesman. He rose through the United States Army to become Chief of Staff of the US Army under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry ...
, stated the raid was justified by the available intelligence. The inquiry declared the elimination of the German ability to reinforce a counter-attack against Marshal Konev's extended line or, alternatively, to retreat and regroup using Dresden as a base of operations, were important military objectives. As Dresden had been largely untouched during the war due to its location, it was one of the few remaining functional rail and communications centres. A secondary objective was to disrupt the industrial use of Dresden for munitions manufacture, which American intelligence believed was the case. The shock to military planners and to the Allied civilian populations of the German counterattack known as the Battle of the Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II. The battle lasted from 16 December 1944 to 28 January 1945, towards the end of the war in ...
had ended speculation that the war was almost over, and may have contributed to the decision to continue with the aerial bombardment of German cities.
The inquiry concluded that by the presence of active German military units nearby, and the presence of fighters and anti-aircraft within an effective range, Dresden qualified as "defended".[ By this stage in the war both the British and the Germans had integrated air defences at the national level. The German national air-defence system could be used to argue—as the tribunal did—that no German city was "undefended".
Marshall's tribunal declared that no extraordinary decision was made to single out Dresden (for instance, to take advantage of a large number of refugees, or purposely terrorise the German populace). It was argued that the area bombing was intended to disrupt communications and destroy industrial production. The American inquiry established that the Soviets, under allied agreements for the United States and the United Kingdom to provide air support for the Soviet offensive toward Berlin, had requested area bombing of Dresden to prevent a counterattack through Dresden, or the use of Dresden as a regrouping point following a German strategic retreat.]USAF
The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Aerial warfare, air military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part ...
, II. Section ANALYSIS: Dresden as a Military Target, ¶ 33, 34.
U.S. Air Force Historical Division report
A report by the U.S. Air Force Historical Division (USAFHD) analysed the circumstances of the raid and concluded that it was militarily necessary and justified, based on the following points:[
# The raid had legitimate military ends, brought about by exigent military circumstances.
# Military units and anti-aircraft defences were sufficiently close that it was not valid to consider the city "undefended."
# The raid did not use extraordinary means but was comparable to other raids used against comparable targets.
# The raid was carried out through the normal chain of command, pursuant to directives and agreements then in force.
# The raid achieved the military objective, without excessive loss of civilian life.
The first point regarding the legitimacy of the raid depends on two claims: first, that the railyards subjected to American precision bombing were an important logistical target, and that the city was also an important industrial centre.][ Even after the main firebombing, there were two further raids on the Dresden railway yards by the USAAF. The first was on 2 March 1945, by 406 B-17s, which dropped 940 tons of high-explosive bombs and 141 tons of incendiaries. The second was on 17 April, when 580 B-17s dropped 1,554 tons of high-explosive bombs and 165 tons of incendiaries.][
As far as Dresden being a militarily significant industrial centre, an official 1942 guide described the German city as "...one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich," and in 1944, the German Army High Command's Weapons Office listed 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops that supplied materiel to the military. Dresden was the seventh largest German city, and by far the largest un-bombed built-up area left, and thus was contributing to the defence of Germany itself.
According to the USAFHD, there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers supporting the German war effort in Dresden at the time of the raid.][ These factories manufactured fuses and bombsights (at Zeiss Ikon A.G.), aircraft components, ]anti-aircraft guns
Anti-aircraft warfare, counter-air or air defence forces is the battlespace response to aerial warfare, defined by NATO as "all measures designed to nullify or reduce the effectiveness of hostile air action".AAP-6 It includes surface based, ...
, field guns, and small arms, poison gas
Many gases have toxic properties, which are often assessed using the LC50 (median lethal dose) measure. In the United States, many of these gases have been assigned an NFPA 704 health rating of 4 (may be fatal) or 3 (may cause serious or perman ...
, gear
A gear is a rotating circular machine part having cut teeth or, in the case of a cogwheel or gearwheel, inserted teeth (called ''cogs''), which mesh with another (compatible) toothed part to transmit (convert) torque and speed. The basic ...
s and differentials, electrical and X-ray apparatus, electric gauges, gas masks, Junkers aircraft engines, and Messerschmitt fighter cockpit parts.[
The second of the five points addresses the prohibition in the Hague Conventions, of "attack or bombardment" of "undefended" towns. The USAFHD report states that Dresden was protected by anti-aircraft defences, antiaircraft guns, and searchlights, under the Combined Dresden (Corps Area IV) and Berlin (Corps Area III) Air Service Commands.][
The third and fourth points say that the size of the Dresden raid—in terms of numbers, types of bombs and the means of delivery—were commensurate with the military objective and similar to other Allied bombings. On 23 February 1945, the Allies bombed Pforzheim and caused an estimated 20,000 civilian fatalities. The most devastating raid on any city was on Tokyo on 9–10 March (the ''Meetinghouse'' raid) which caused over 100,000 casualties, many civilian. The tonnage and types of bombs listed in the service records of the Dresden raid were comparable to (or less than) throw weights of bombs dropped in other air attacks carried out in 1945. In the case of Dresden, as in many other similar attacks, the hour break in between the RAF raids was a deliberate ploy to attack the fire fighters, medical teams, and military units.
In late July 1943, the city of ]Hamburg
(male), (female) en, Hamburger(s),
Hamburgian(s)
, timezone1 = Central (CET)
, utc_offset1 = +1
, timezone1_DST = Central (CEST)
, utc_offset1_DST = +2
, postal ...
was bombed during Operation Gomorrah
The Allied bombing of Hamburg during World War II included numerous attacks on civilians and civic infrastructure. As a large city and industrial centre, Hamburg's shipyards, U-boat pens, and the Hamburg-Harburg area oil refineries were attack ...
by combined RAF and USAAF strategic bomber forces. Four major raids were carried out in the span of 10 days, of which the most notable, on the night of 27–28 July, created a devastating firestorm
A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. It is most commonly a natural phenomenon, created during some of the largest bushfires and wildfires. Although the term has been used ...
effect similar to Dresden's, killing an estimated 18,474 people. The death toll for that night is included in the overall estimated total of 37,000 for the series of raids. Two-thirds of the remaining population reportedly fled the city after the raids.
The fifth point is that the firebombing achieved the intended effect of disabling the industry in Dresden. It was estimated that at least 23 per cent of the city's industrial buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. The damage to other infrastructure and communications was immense, which would have severely limited the potential use of Dresden to stop the Soviet advance. The report concludes with:
Arguments against justification
Military reasons
The journalist Alexander McKee
Alexander McKee ( – 15 January 1799) was an American-born military officer and colonial official in the British Indian Department during the French and Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, and the Northwest Indian War. He achieved the ...
cast doubt on the meaningfulness of the list of targets mentioned in the 1953 USAF report, pointing out that the military barracks listed as a target were a long way out of the city and were not targeted during the raid. The "hutted camps" mentioned in the report as military targets were also not military but were camps for refugees. It is also stated that the important Autobahn bridge to the west of the city was not targeted or attacked, and that no railway stations were on the British target maps, nor any bridges, such as the railway bridge spanning the Elbe River. Commenting on this, McKee says: "The standard whitewash gambit, both British and American, is to mention that Dresden contained targets X, Y and Z, and to let the innocent reader assume that these targets were attacked, whereas in fact the bombing plan totally omitted them and thus, except for one or two mere accidents, they escaped". McKee further asserts "The bomber commanders were not really interested in any purely military or economic targets, which was just as well, for they knew very little about Dresden; the RAF even lacked proper maps of the city. What they were looking for was a big built-up area which they could burn, and that Dresden possessed in full measure."
According to historian Sönke Neitzel
Sönke Neitzel (born 26 June 1968) is a German historian who has written extensively about the Second World War. He is editor of the journal ''German History in the 20th Century'' and has written several books such as ''Soldaten: On Fighting, Ki ...
, "it is difficult to find any evidence in German documents that the destruction of Dresden had any consequences worth mentioning on the Eastern Front. The industrial plants of Dresden played no significant role in German industry at this stage in the war". Wing Commander H. R. Allen said, "The final phase of Bomber Command's operations was far and away the worst. Traditional British chivalry and the use of minimum force in war was to become a mockery and the outrages perpetrated by the bombers will be remembered a thousand years hence".
As an immoral act, but not a war crime
Frederick Taylor told '' Der Spiegel'', "I personally find the attack on Dresden horrific. It was overdone, it was excessive and is to be regretted enormously," but, "A war crime is a very specific thing which international lawyers argue about all the time and I would not be prepared to commit myself nor do I see why I should. I'm a historian."[ Similarly, British philosopher A. C. Grayling has described RAF area bombardment as an "immoral act" and "moral crime" because "destroying everything... contravenes every moral and humanitarian principle debated in connection with the just conduct of war", though Grayling insisted that it "is not strictly correct to describe area bombing as a 'war crime'."
]
As a war crime
According to Dr. Gregory Stanton
Gregory H. Stanton is the former Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. He is best known for his work in the area of genocide studies. He is the founder a ...
, lawyer and president of Genocide Watch
Gregory H. Stanton is the former Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. He is best known for his work in the area of genocide studies. He is the founder a ...
:
Historian Donald Bloxham
Donald Bloxham FRHistS is a Professor of Modern History, specialising in genocide, war crimes and other mass atrocities studies. He is the editor of the ''Journal of Holocaust Education''.
He completed his undergraduate studies at Keele and pos ...
states, "The bombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 was a war crime". He further argues there was a strong '' prima facie'' case for trying Winston Churchill among others and a theoretical case Churchill could have been found guilty. "This should be a sobering thought. If, however it is also a startling one, this is probably less the result of widespread understanding of the nuance of international law and more because in the popular mind 'war criminal', like 'paedophile' or 'terrorist', has developed into a moral rather than a legal categorisation".
German author Günter Grass is one of several intellectuals and commentators who have also called the bombing a war crime.[Elliott, Michael]
Europe: Then And Now
, ''Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...
'' Europe, 10 August 2003. Retrieved 26 February 2005.
Proponents of this position argue that the devastation from firebombing was greater than anything that could be justified by military necessity
Military necessity, along with distinction, and proportionality, are three important principles of international humanitarian law governing the legal use of force in an armed conflict.
Attacks
Military necessity is governed by several constra ...
alone, and this establishes a '' prima facie'' case. The Allies were aware of the effects of firebombing, as British cities had been subject to them during the Blitz
The Blitz was a German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom in 1940 and 1941, during the Second World War. The term was first used by the British press and originated from the term , the German word meaning 'lightning war'.
The Germa ...
. Proponents disagree that Dresden had a military garrison and claim that most of the industry was in the outskirts and not in the targeted city centre,[Gerda Gericke (lucas]
The Destruction of Dresden's Frauenkirche
'' Deutsche Welle'', 26 October 2005. and that the cultural significance of the city should have precluded the Allies from bombing it.
British historian Antony Beevor
Sir Antony James Beevor, (born 14 December 1946) is a British military historian. He has published several popular historical works on the Second World War and the Spanish Civil War.
Early life
Born in Kensington, Beevor was educated at tw ...
wrote that Dresden was considered relatively safe, having been spared previous RAF night attacks, and that at the time of the raids there were up to 300,000 refugees in the area seeking sanctuary from the advancing Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, afte ...
from the Eastern Front. In ''Fire Sites'', German historian Jörg Friedrich says that the RAF's bombing campaign against German cities in the last months of the war served no military purpose. He claims that Winston Churchill's decision to bomb a shattered Germany between January and May 1945 was a war crime. According to him, 600,000 civilians died during the allied bombing of German cities, including 72,000 children. He claimed some 45,000 people died on one night during the firestorms that engulfed Hamburg in July 1943.[Harding, Luke]
German historian provokes row over war photos
''The Guardian'', 21 October 2003.
Political response in Germany
Far-right politicians in Germany have sparked a great deal of controversy by promoting the term "''Bombenholocaust''" ("holocaust by bomb") to describe the raids.[Volkery, Carsten]
"War of Words"
, ''Der Spiegel'', 2 February 2005
Leading article, ''The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'', 12 February 2005. ''Der Spiegel'' writes that, for decades, the Communist government of East Germany promoted the bombing as an example of "Anglo-American terror," and now the same rhetoric is being used by the far right.[ An example can be found in the extremist nationalist party '']Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands
The National Democratic Party of Germany (german: Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands or NPD) is a far-right Neo-Nazi and ultranationalist political party in Germany.
The party was founded in 1964 as successor to the German Reich Part ...
'' (NPD). A party's representative, Jürgen Gansel, described the Dresden raids as "mass murder," and "Dresden's holocaust of bombs".[Germany Seeks Tighter Curbs on Protests by Neo-Nazi Party](_blank)
, ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'', 12 February 2005. This provoked an outrage in the German parliament and triggered responses from the media. Prosecutors said that it was illegal to call the bombing a holocaust.[Cleaver, Hannah]
"German ruling says Dresden was a holocaust"
, ''The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally.
It was f ...
'', 12 April 2005. In 2010, several demonstrations by organisations opposing the far-right blocked a demonstration of far-right organisations.
Phrase
In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consi ...
s like "Bomber-Harris, do it again!", "Bomber-Harris Superstar – Thanks from the red Antifa", and ''"Deutsche Täter sind keine Opfer!"'' ("German perpetrators are no victims!") are popular slogans among the so-called " Anti-Germans"—a small radical left-wing political movement in Germany and Austria. In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing, Anti-Germans praised the bombing on the grounds that so many of the city's civilians had supported Nazism. Similar rallies take place every year.
In art and popular culture
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and ...
's novel '' Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death'' (1969) used some elements from his experiences as a prisoner of war
A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610.
Belligerents hold prisoners of w ...
at Dresden during the bombing. The story itself is told through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a clear stand-in for Vonnegut himself. His account relates that over 135,000 were killed during the firebombings. Vonnegut recalled "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." The Germans put him and other POWs to work gathering bodies for mass burial. "But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes".
In the special introduction to the 1976 Franklin Library
The Franklin Mint is a private mint founded by Joseph Segel in 1964 in Wawa, Pennsylvania. The building is in Middletown Township.
The brand name was previously owned by Sequential Brands Group headquartered in New York City, New York. It is ...
edition of the novel, he wrote:
The firebombing of Dresden was depicted in George Roy Hill
George Roy Hill (December 20, 1921 – December 27, 2002) was an American film director. He is most noted for directing such films as ''Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'' (1969) and ''The Sting'' (1973), both starring Paul Newman and Robert Re ...
's 1972 movie adaptation of Vonnegut's novel.
Vonnegut's experiences in Dresden were also used in several of his other books and are included in his posthumously published writings in ''Armageddon in Retrospect
''Armageddon in Retrospect'' is a collection of short stories and essays about war and peace written by Kurt Vonnegut. It is the first posthumous collection of his previously unpublished writings. The book includes an introduction by Mark Vonnegut, ...
''. In one of those essays, Vonnegut paraphrased leaflets dropped by the Allies in the days after the bombings as saying: To the people of Dresden: We were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traffic your railroad facilities have been carrying. We realize that we haven't always hit our objectives. Destruction of anything other than military objectives was unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war.
Vonnegut notes that many of those railroad facilities were not actually bombed, and those that were hit were restored to operation within several days.
The death toll of 135,000 given by Vonnegut was taken from '' The Destruction of Dresden'', a 1963 book by David Irving
David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author and Holocaust denier who has written on the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. His works include '' The Destruction of Dresden'' (1 ...
. In a 1965 letter to ''The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'', Irving later adjusted his estimates even higher, "almost certainly between 100,000 and 250,000", but all these figures were shortly found to be inflated: Irving finally published a correction in ''The Times'' in a 1966 letter to the editor lowering it to 25,000, in line with subsequent scholarship. Despite Irving's eventual much lower numbers, and later accusations of generally poor scholarship, the figure popularised by Vonnegut remains in general circulation.
Freeman Dyson
Freeman John Dyson (15 December 1923 – 28 February 2020) was an English-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum m ...
, a British-American physicist who had worked as a young man with RAF Bomber Command from July 1943 to the end of the war, wrote in later years:
Dyson later goes on to say: "Since the beginning of the war I had been retreating step by step from one moral position to another, until at the end I had no moral position at all".
Other
*Henny Brenner (nee Wolf) wrote about the bombing in her memoir, ''The Song is Over: Survival of a Jewish Girl in Dresden'' about how it allowed her and her parents to flee into hiding and avoid reporting pursuant to orders to show up for resettlement to a new "work assignment" on February 16, 1945, thus saving their lives.
*The German diarist Victor Klemperer
Victor Klemperer (9 October 188111 February 1960) was a German scholar who also became known as a diarist. His journals, published in Germany in 1995, detailed his life under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Germa ...
includes a first-hand account of the firestorm in his published works.
*The main action of the novel ''Closely Observed Trains
''Closely Watched Trains'' ( cs, Ostře sledované vlaky) is a 1966 Czechoslovak film directed by Jiří Menzel and is one of the best-known products of the Czechoslovak New Wave. It was released in the United Kingdom as ''Closely Observed Trains ...
'', by Czech author Bohumil Hrabal
Bohumil Hrabal (; 28 March 1914 – 3 February 1997) was a Czech writer, often named among the best Czech writers of the 20th century.
Early life
Hrabal was born in Židenice (suburb of Brno) on 28 March 1914, in what was then the province ...
, takes place on the night of the first raid.
*In the 1983 Pink Floyd album '' The Final Cut'', " The Hero's Return", the protagonist lives his years after World War II tormented by "desperate memories", part of him still flying "over Dresden at angels 1–5" (fifteen-thousand feet).
*In the song "Tailgunner", Iron Maiden
Iron Maiden are an English heavy metal band formed in Leyton, East London, in 1975 by bassist and primary songwriter Steve Harris. While fluid in the early years of the band, the lineup for most of the band's history has consisted of Harri ...
starts with "Trace your way back 50 Years / To the glow of Dresden – blood and tears".
*Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer (; born February 21, 1977) is an American novelist. He is known for his novels ''Everything Is Illuminated'' (2002), ''Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close'' (2005), ''Here I Am (novel), Here I Am'' (2016), and for his non-fict ...
's novel ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
''Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close'' is a 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.
The book's narrator is a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. In the story, Oskar discovers a key in a vase that belonged to his father, a year after he is killed in ...
'' (2005) incorporates the bombings into essential parts of the story.
*String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110 (Dmitri Shostakovich) was written in 1960 as a dedication to the bombing of Dresden. This piece is also believed to been written as a suicide note of D. Shostakovich, hence its extremely dark and depressing nature.
*The bombings are a central theme in the 2006 German TV production ''Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...
'' by director Roland Suso Richter. Along with the romantic plot between a British bomber pilot and a German nurse, the movie attempts to reconstruct the facts surrounding the Dresden bombings from both the perspective of the RAF pilots and the Germans in Dresden at the time.
*The bombing is featured in the 1992 Vincent Ward film, ''Map of the Human Heart
''Map of the Human Heart'' (also called ''Carte du Tendre'' and ''La Carte du Tendre''; released in the Philippines as ''War Dragon'') is a 1992 film by New Zealand director Vincent Ward. The script for ''Map of the Human Heart'' was written by ...
'', with the hero, Avik, forced to bail out of his bomber and parachute down into the inferno.
*The devastation of Dresden was recorded in the woodcuts of Wilhelm Rudolph, an artist born in the city who resided there until his death in 1982, and was 55 at the time of the bombing. His studio having burned in the attack with his life's work, Rudolph immediately set out to record the destruction, systematically drawing block after block, often repeatedly to show the progress of clearing or chaos that ensued in the ruins. Although the city had been sealed off by the Wehrmacht to prevent looting, Rudolph was granted a special permit to enter and carry out his work, as he would be during the Russian occupation as well. By the end of 1945 he had completed almost 200 drawings, which he transferred to woodcuts following the war. He organised these as discrete series that he would always show as a whole, from the 52 woodcuts of ''Aus'' (Out, or Gone) in 1948, the 35 woodcuts ''Dresden 1945–After the Catastrophe'' in 1949, and the 15 woodcuts and 5 lithographs of ''Dresden 1945'' in 1955. Of this work, Rudolph later described himself as gripped by an "obsessive-compulsive state," under the preternatural spell of war, which revealed to him that "the utterly fantastic is the reality. ... Beside that, every human invention remains feeble."
*In David Alan Mack
David Alan Mack is a writer best known for his freelance ''Star Trek'' novels. Mack also has had a ''Star Trek'' script produced, and worked on a ''Star Trek'' comic book.
Early career
Mack attended New York University Tisch School of the Art ...
's ''The Midnight Front'', first book of his secret history historical fantasy
Historical fantasy is a category of fantasy and genre of historical fiction that incorporates fantastic elements (such as magic) into a more "realistic" narrative. There is much crossover with other subgenres of fantasy; those classed as Arthu ...
series ''The Dark Arts'', the bombing was a concentrated effort by the British, Soviet, and American forces to kill all of the known karcists (sorcerers) in the world in one fell swoop, allied or not, out of fear of their power.
*The bombing is featured in the 2018 German film, ''Never Look Away
''Never Look Away'' (german: Werk ohne Autor, lit=Work Without Author) is a 2018 German epic coming-of-age romantic drama film written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. It was nominated for a Golden Lion at the 75th Venice Inte ...
''.
*In the movie '' Airplane II: The Sequel'', Sonny Bono
Salvatore Phillip "Sonny" Bono (; February 16, 1935 – January 5, 1998) was an American singer, actor, and politician who came to fame in partnership with his second wife Cher as the popular singing duo Sonny & Cher. A member of the Republica ...
's character as the terrorist bomber aboard the space shuttle clutches a briefcase affixed with colorful travel stickers including the Dresden Grand Hotel, Pearl Harbor, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima.
*The tragedy of Dresden, as seen through the eyes of Polish forced laborers, was presented by Polish director Jan Rybkowski in the 1961 movie ''Tonight a City Will Die
''Tonight a City Will Die'' ( pl, Dziś w nocy umrze miasto) is a 1961 Polish drama film directed by Jan Rybkowski. It was entered into the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival where Boguslaw Lambach won the Silver Prize for Director of Photo ...
''.
*The 1978 piece for wind ensemble, ''Symphony I: In Memoriam, Dresden Germany, 1945'' by composer Daniel Bukvich retells the bombing of Dresden through four intense movements depicting the emotion and stages before, during, and after the bombing.
See also
* Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
* Bombing of Chongqing, 1938–43 – the five years of massive terror-bombings and air battles over the Chinese wartime capital
* Bombing of Tokyo (10 March 1945), the firebombing raid on Tokyo codenamed ''Operation Meetinghouse'' on 9/10 March 1945
*The Blitz
The Blitz was a German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom in 1940 and 1941, during the Second World War. The term was first used by the British press and originated from the term , the German word meaning 'lightning war'.
The Germa ...
– German air raids on British cities in which at least 40,000 died, including 57 consecutive nights of air raids just over London
*Baedeker Blitz
The Baedeker Blitz or Baedeker raids were a series of aerial attacks in April and May 1942 by the German ''Luftwaffe'' on English cities during the Second World War. The name derives from Baedeker, a series of German tourist guide books, inclu ...
– Air raids on English cities of cultural/historical importance, rather than military significance
* Bombing of Guernica – German/Italian air raid that sparked international outrage
* Carpet bombing - also called "Saturation bombing"
Notes
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
*
*
*
online
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
online
*
*
* Musgrove, Frank. ''Dresden and the heavy bombers: An RAF Navigator's Perspective'' (2005
online
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*.
*
* Wilson, Kevin. ''Journey's end : Bomber Command's battle from Arnhem to Dresden and beyond'' (2010
online
Further reading
*
External links
Video: "Bombing raids on Dresden and Berlin 1945"
Official Memorial
*
US Air Force Historical Support Division – description, photos
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bombing of Dresden in World War Ii
1945 in Germany
1945 in military history
Explosions in 1945
History of Dresden
Firebombings
History of the Royal Air Force during World War II
United States Army Air Forces
Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...
Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...
February 1945 events in Europe
Germany–United Kingdom military relations
Germany–United States military relations