Bombing of Dresden

The bombing of Dresden led by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and involving the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) between February 13 and February 15, 1945 remains one of the more controversial Allied actions of World War II. Historian Frederick Taylor says:

"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 period. In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th Century warfare…"

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Image of the destroyed city centre shortly after the attacks

photo of Dresden before its destruction

Reasons for the attack

Early in 1945, the Allies' political-military leadership started to consider how they might aid the Soviets with the use of the strategic bomber force. The plan was to bomb Berlin and several other eastern cities in conjunction with the Soviet advance. In the summer of 1944, plans for a large and intense offensive targeting these cities had been discussed under the code name Operation Thunderclap, but then shelved on August 16. These were re-examined, but the decision was made to draw up a more limited plan. Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, noted on January 26 1945, that "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". However, 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. Sir Norman Bottomley, the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff requested Arthur "Bomber" Harris, Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command to undertake attacks on Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz as soon as moon and weather conditions allowed, "with the particular object of exploiting the confused conditions which are likely to exist in the above mentioned cities during the successful Russian advance".

Winston Churchill approved the bombing of Dresden

On the same day, Winston Churchill pressed the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair: "I asked [yesterday] whether 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". On January 27 Sinclair replied:

"The Air Staff have now arranged that, subject to the overriding claims of attacks on enemy oil production and other approved target systems within the current directive, available effort should be directed against Berlin, Dresden, Chemnitz and Leipzig or against other cities where severe bombing would not only destroy communications vital to the evacuation from the east, but would also hamper the movement of troops from the west."

The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had come to the conclusion that the Germans could reinforce their eastern front with up to 42 divisions (half a million men) from other fronts and that, if the Soviet advance could be helped by hindering that movement, it could shorten the war. They thought that the Germans could complete the reinforcement by March 1945. The JIC's analysis was backed up by Ultra Enigma-code intercepts, which confirmed that the Germans had such plans. Their recommendation was:

"We consider, therefore, that the assistance which might be given to the Russians during the next few weeks by the British and American strategic bomber forces justifies an urgent review of their employment to this end. …Attacks against oil targets should continue to take precedence over everything else,…"

The Soviets had several discussions with the Allies on how the strategic bomber force could help their ground offensives once the eastern front line approached Germany. The US ambassador to Russia, W. Averell Harriman, discussed it with Joseph Stalin as did General Eisenhower's deputy at SHAEF, British Air Marshal Arthur W. Tedder in January 1945, when he explained how the strategic bomber could support the Soviet attack as Germany began to shuffle forces between the fronts. On January 31 after studying the JIC recommendation which was contained in a document entitled "Strategic Bombing in Relation to the Present Russian Offensive" and consulting with the Soviets, Tedder and his air staff concurred and issued a recommendation that Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, and associated cities should be attacked. The intention to use the strategic bomber forces in a tactical air-support role was similar to that for which Eisenhower had employed them before the Normandy invasion in 1944. He was counting on strategic airpower in 1945 to "prevent the enemy from switching forces back and forth at will" from one front to the other.

When the Allies met at the Yalta Conference on February 4, the Western Allies had already decided to target Dresden. The Deputy Chief of the Soviet General Staff, General Aleksei Antonov raised two issues at the conference relating to the Western Allied strategic bomber force. The first was the demarcation of a bomb-line running north to south where to avoid accidentally bombing Soviet forces, Western Allied aircraft would not bomb east of the line without specific Soviet permission. The second was to hamper the movement of troops from the western front, Norway and Italy, in particular by paralysing the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig with aerial bombardment. In response to the Soviet requests, Portal (who was in Yalta) sent a request to Bottomley to send him a list of objectives which could be discussed with the Soviets. The list sent back to him included oil plants, tank and aircraft factories and the cities of Berlin and Dresden. In the discussions which followed, the Western Allies pointed out that unless Dresden was bombed as well, the Germans could route rail traffic through Dresden to compensate for any damage caused to Berlin and Leipzig. Antonov agreed and requested that Dresden be added to his list of requests. Once the targets had been agreed at Yalta, the Combined Strategic Targets Committee, SHAEF (Air), informed the USAAF and the RAF Bomber commands that Dresden was among the targets selected to degrade German lines of communication. Their authority to do this came directly from the Western Allies' Combined Chiefs of Staff.

RAF Air Staff documents state that it was their intention to use RAF bomber command to "destroy communications" to hinder the eastward deployment of German troops, and to hamper evacuation, not to kill the evacuees. The priority list drafted by Bottomley for Portal, so that he could discuss targets with the Soviets at Yalta, included only two eastern cities with a high enough priority to fit into the RAF targeting list as both transportation and industrial areas. These were Berlin and Dresden. Both were bombed after Yalta.

Soviet military intelligence asserted that trains stuck in the main station were troop trains passing through Dresden to the front. This proved incorrect, as they were trains evacuating refugees from the east. RAF briefing notes mentioned a desire to show "the Russians, when they arrive, what Bomber Command can do." The specific intent of this statement is now unclear, and there are different possible interpretations: a statement of pride in the RAF's abilities; or to show the Soviets that the Western Allies were doing all they could to aid the Soviet advance; or an early cold war warning.

The attacks

RAF Lancaster bombers

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Dresden from the air during the night attack

The railway yards, near the centre of Dresden, had been targeted and bombed twice before the night of February 13 by the USAAF Eighth Air Force in daytime raids: on October 7 1944 with 70 tons of high-explosive bombs, and then again with 133 bombers on January 16, 1945 during which 279 tons of high-explosives and 41 tons of incendiaries were dropped.

The firebombing campaign was supposed to begin with an USAAF Eighth Air Force raid on Dresden on February 13 but bad weather over Europe prevented any American operations. So it fell to RAF Bomber Command to carry out the first raid. During the evening of February 13 796 Avro Lancasters and 9 De Havilland Mosquitoes were dispatched in two separate waves and dropped 1,478 tons of high explosive and 1,182 tons of incendiary bombs by the early hours of February 14. The first attack was carried out entirely by No. 5 Group, using their own low-level marking methods, which allowed the first bombs to be released over Dresden at 22:14 (CET^?) with all but one bomber releasing all their bombs within two minutes. This last Lancaster bomber of No 5 group dropped its bombs at 22:22. A band of cloud still remained in the area and this attack, in which 244 Lancasters dropped more than 800 tons of bombs, was only moderately successful.

The second attack, 3 hours later, was an all-Lancaster attack by aircraft of 1, 3, 6 and 8 Groups, with 8 Group providing standard Pathfinder marking. The weather had by then cleared and 529 Lancasters dropped more than 1,800 tons of bombs with great accuracy between 01:21 and 01:45. RAF casualties on the two raids were 6 Lancasters lost, with 2 more crashed in France and 1 in England.

Later on the 14th from 12:17 until 12:30 311 American B-17s dropped 771 tons of bombs on Dresden, with the railway yards as their aiming point. "Part of the American Mustang-fighter escort was ordered to strafe traffic on the roads around Dresden to increase the chaos". There are reports that civilians fleeing the firestorm engulfing Dresden in February 1945 were strafed by American aircraft, but these claims have been refuted by recent work by the historian Götz Bergander. During this raid there was a brief, but possibly intense dogfight between American and German fighters around Dresden, some rounds may have struck the ground and been mistaken for strafing fire. The Americans continued the bombing on February 15 dropping 466 tons of bombs. During these four raids a total of around 3,900 tons of bombs were dropped.

The firebombing consisted of by-then standard methods; dropping large amounts of high-explosive to blow off the roofs to expose the timbers within buildings, followed by incendiary devices (fire-sticks) to ignite them and then more high-explosives to hamper the efforts of the fire services. The consequences of these standard methods were particularly effective in Dresden: the bombings eventually created a self-sustaining firestorm with temperatures peaking at over 1500 °C. After a wide area caught fire, the air above the bombed area became extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground level from outside, and people were sucked into the fire.

After the main firebombing campaign between 13th and 15th, there were two further raids on the Dresden railway yards by the USAAF. The first was on March 2 by 406 B-17s which dropped 940 tons of high-explosive bombs and 141 tons of incendiaries. The second was on April 17 when 580 B-17s dropped 1,554 tons of high-explosive bombs and 165 tons of incendiaries.

Impact of the attack

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The former city plan of Dresden with the amount of destruction rendered
Black, total destruction; checkered, partially damaged

Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed. An area of 15 square kilometres was totally destroyed, among that: 14,000 homes, 72 schools, 22 hospitals, 18 churches, 5 theatres, 50 banks and insurance companies, 31 department stores, 31 large hotels, 62 administration buildings as well as factories such as the Ihagee camera works. In total there were 222,000 apartments in the city. 75,000 of them were totally destroyed, 11,000 severely damaged, 7,000 damaged, 81,000 slightly damaged. The city was around 300 square kilometres in area in those days. Although the main railway station was destroyed completely, the railway was working again within a few days.

The precise number of dead is difficult to ascertain and is not known. Estimates are made difficult by the fact that the city and surrounding suburbs which had a population of 642,000 in 1939 was crowded at that time with up to 200,000 refugees, and some thousands of wounded soldiers. The fate of some of the refugees is not known as they may have been killed and incinerated beyond recognition in the fire-storm, or they may have left Dresden for other places without informing the authorities. Earlier reputable estimates varied from 25,000 to more than 60,000, but historians now view around 25,000–35,000 as the likely range with the latest (1994) research by the Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert pointing toward the lower part of this range. It would appear from such estimates that the casualties suffered in the Dresden bombings were not out of proportion to those suffered in other German cities which were subject to firebombing attacks during area bombardment.

Contemporary official German records give a number of 21,271 registered burials, including 6,865 who were cremated on the Altmarkt. There were around 25,000 officially buried dead by March 22 1945, war related or not, according to official German report Tagesbefehl (Order of the Day) no. 47 ("TB47"). There was no registration of burials between May and September 1945. War-related dead found in later years, from October 1945 to September 1957, are given as 1,557; from May 1945 until 1966, 1,858 bodies were recovered. None were found during the period 1990–1994, even though there was a lot of construction and excavation during that period. The number of people registered with the authorities as missing was 35,000; around 10,000 of those were later found to be alive. In recent years, the estimates have become a little higher in Germany and lower in Britain; earlier it was the opposite.

There have been higher estimates for the number of dead, ranging as high as 300,000. They are from disputed and unreliable sources, such as the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels, Soviet historians, and David Irving, the once popular, but now discredited self-taught historian who retracted his higher estimates. Both the Columbia Encyclopedia and Encarta Encyclopedia list the number as "from 35,000 to more than 135,000 dead", the higher figure of which is in line with Irving's incorrect retracted estimates.

The Nazis made use of Dresden in their propaganda efforts and promised swift retaliation. The Soviets also made propaganda use of the Dresden bombing in the early years of the Cold War to alienate the East Germans from the Americans and British.

The destruction of Dresden was comparable to that of many other German cities, with the tonnage of bombs dropped lower than in many other areas. However, ideal weather conditions at the target site, the wooden-framed buildings, and "breakthroughs" linking the cellars of contiguous buildings and the lack of preparation for the effects of air-raids by Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann, conspired to make the attack particularly devastating. For these reasons the loss of life in Dresden was higher than many other bombing raids during World War II. For example Coventry, the English city which is now twinned with Dresden, and is often compared and contrasted with it, lost 1,236 in two separate raids in 1940. In late 2004, an RAF man involved in the raid said in an interview on the BBC's Radio 4 that another factor was the lower-than-expected level of anti-aircraft fire, which allowed a high degree of accuracy on the part of the bombers.

Overall, Anglo-American bombing of German cities claimed between 305,000 and 600,000 civilian lives. Whether these attacks hastened the end of the war is a controversial question.

Responses to the bombing

German

Development of a German political response to the raid took several turns. Initially some of the leadership, especially Robert Ley and Joseph Goebbels, wanted to use it as a pretext for abandonment of the Geneva Conventions on the Western Front. In the end, the only political action the German government took was to exploit it for propaganda purposes.

Goebbels inflated the numbers of the dead by a factor of ten, and German diplomats circulated the figures, along with photographs of the destruction, the dead, and badly burned children, in neutral countries. By coincidence, the day before the Dresden raid, a German foreign affairs paper had been circulated to neutral countries describing Arthur Harris as "the arch enemy of Europe" and a leading proponent of "Terror Bombing".

On February 16 the Propaganda Ministry issued a press release which outlined the Nazi line: Dresden had no war industries, it was a place of culture and clinics. On February 25 a new leaflet with photographs of two burned children was released under the title "Dresden – Massacre of Refugees" and stating that not 100,000 but 200,000 had died. Since no official estimate had yet been developed, the numbers were speculative, but foreign journals such as the Stockholm Svenska Morgonbladet used phrases like "privately from Berlin" . Frederick Taylor states that "there is good reason to believe that later in March copies of — or extracts from — [an official police report] were leaked to the neutral press by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry… doctored with an extra zero to make [the total dead from the raid] 202,040". On March 4, Das Reich, a weekly general newspaper founded by Goebbels, published a lengthy article emphasising the suffering and the destruction of a cultural icon without mentioning any damage the attacks had caused to the German war effort.

Taylor observes that this propaganda was quite effective, as it not only influenced attitudes in neutral countries at the time but even reached the British House of Commons when Richard Stokes quoted information from the German Press Agency (controlled by the Propaganda Ministry). Taylor suggests that, although the destruction of Dresden would have affected people's perception of the Allies' claim to absolute moral superiority in any event, part of the outrage involves Goebbels's master stroke of propaganda .

British

According to the Oxford Companion to the Second World War, at an off-the-record press briefing held by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force two days after the raids, British Air Commodore Grierson told journalists that the aim of Operation Thunderclap had been to bomb large population centres and prevent relief supplies from getting through. Howard Cowan, an Associated Press war correspondent, subsequently filed a story saying that the Allies had resorted to terror bombing. There were follow up newspaper editorials on the issue and a long time opponent of strategic bombing, Richard Stokes MP, asked questions in the House of commons.

The destruction of the city provoked unease in intellectual circles in Britain. According to Max Hastings, by February 1945, attacks upon German cities had become largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war and the name of Dresden possessed a resonance for 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." He argues that the bombing of Dresden was the first time Allied populations questioned the military actions used to defeat the Nazis.

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Churchill's letter

Churchill, who approved of the targeting of Dresden and supported the bombing prior to the event, distanced himself from it. On March 28, in a memo sent by telegram to General Ismay for the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff he wrote:

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than that of the enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive."

Having been given a paraphrased version of Churchill's draft memo by Bottomley, on March 29, Harris wrote to the Air Ministry :

"I […] assume that the view under consideration is something like this: no doubt in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things." (the phrase "worth the bones of one British grenadier" was a deliberate echo of a famous sentence used by Bismarck "The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.")

On reflection, 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 final version of the memo completed on April 1 1945, stated:

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so called 'area-bombing' of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests. If we come into control of an entirely ruined land, there will be a great shortage of accommodation for ourselves and our allies… We must see to it that our attacks do no more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the enemy's war effort."

Points of view

Was the bombing a war crime?

The Altmarkt (old market) square before its destruction

The nature of the bombing of Dresden has made it a unique point of contention and debate. Critics of the attack come from across the political spectrum, from far left to far right. Günter Grass, the German novelist and Nobel laureate for literature, and Simon Jenkins, the former editor of The Times, have both referred to the Dresden bombing as a "war crime" . The historian Max Hastings said in an article subtitled 'the Allied Bombing of Dresden' "I believe it is wrong to describe strategic bombing as a 'war crime', for this might be held to suggest some moral equivalence with the deeds of the Nazis. Bombing represented a sincere, albeit mistaken, attempt to bring about Germany's military defeat". Harald Jaehner, a German literary critic stated: "Look at the bombing of Dresden, which was really an assault on the civilian population."

Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, wrote: "The Nazi Holocaust was among the most evil genocides in history. But the Allies' firebombing of Dresden and nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also war crimes — and as Leo Kuper and Eric Markusen have argued, also acts of genocide". Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn write in their book "The History and Sociology of Genocide" (page 24) that "[the] definition of genocide also excludes civilian victims of aerial bombardment in belligerent states. In this we differ from Jean-Paul Sartre and Leo Kuper."

Far right politicians in Germany also use Dresden as a symbol, holding rallies on the anniversary of the bombing, and arguing that Dresden represents moral parity between the allies and the Axis. They promote the term Bombing Holocaust for the Allied aerial bombings, especially for the Dresden raids. By using this term in a speech to the parliament of Saxony on January 22, 2005, Udo Voigt, the chairman of the National Democratic Party of Germany sparked a new public discussion about how to deal with the right wing extremists. Many German mainstream politicians consider their use of firebombing as an attempt to advance neo-Nazi causes by exploiting the intense sentiment surrounding the bombing: not only to win votes, but also as propaganda to place Nazi crimes in a more relativist context, especially the Holocaust. Some Germans consider the term a violation of German law which forbids Holocaust denial, but in April 2005 the Hamburg public prosecutor's office decided that Udo Voigt's description of the 1945 RAF bombing of Dresden as a "holocaust" was a constitutionally protected exercise of free speech since defamation was not the prime aim of the argument.

The case for the bombing as a war crime

It is widely considered that the bombing of Dresden was excessive or at the very least regrettable. There is less support for the view that the bombing was a war crime or a crime against humanity. Those who support this view often refer to the cultural significance of Dresden, a factor expressly included in the Hague Conventions. Others state simply that such a large-scale direct assault of civilians constitutes a crime against humanity. Public declarations in support began shortly after the nature and scale of the attack became known.

Before the bombing, Dresden was regarded as a beautiful city and a cultural centre, and was sometimes known as Elbflorenz, or Florence on the Elbe. Its notable architecture included the Zwinger Palace, the Dresden State Opera House, and the Dresden Frauenkirche, its historic cathedral. Before the war, the city's main industries had been the production of porcelain, cups and saucers, and tobacco products. British historian Anthony Beevor 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 city seeking sanctuary from the fighting on the Eastern Front.

The absence of a direct military presence in the centre of the city, and the devastation known to be caused by firebombing, is regarded by supporters of the war crime position as establishing their case on a prima facie basis. They contend that these points are sufficient in themselves, without considering the absence of military necessity, the civilian death toll, and Dresden's cultural significance.

Der Brand, the controversial work by independent German historian Jörg Friedrich, considers the available evidence in support of the view that the bombing (the "Bombenkrieg") was a war crime. According to Friedrich, this is the case: German forces were in full retreat by February 1945, and the impact on civilians was out of all proportion to the military goal. He argues that the bombing was a war crime even under the legal standards of the time, because the Allies intended to cause as many civilian casualties as possible.

Friedrich also contends that the outcome of previous bombing attacks demonstrate that the Allied forces were aware of the destruction caused by incendiary bombs, and that due to the collapse of German air defense and improvements in bombing accuracy, future attacks were likely to cause ever increasing numbers of civilian deaths. Der Brand also documents in detail the oral history of local people as to what happened and how they felt, along with city records from the time.

However, some historians, including those who regard the bombing as at least "regrettable", dispute the state of the German army in February 1945. Others find fault in his willingness to place credibility on the post-war narrative of Dresdeners, especially due to a lack of information regarding past and present sympathies toward to the National Socialists. Still, the Allies also utilized personal accounts when crafting their own interpretation of the war, especially in regards to our understanding of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Joerg Arnold of the University of Southampton claims that Friedrich's work is "seriously deficient" as an analytical text. However, Arnold states that Der Brand is a valuable work for its success in documenting the German experience of the air war.

Friedrich is careful to distance himself from Neo-Nazi sympathizers, saying that the use of the word "holocaust" to describe the bombing is wrong because it blurs the distinction between total warfare and outright genocide.

Nazi Germany would have been defeated without the aerial bombardment of historic inner cities, and this destruction may have complicated the ultimately necessary reconciliation with the people of the Federal Republic of Germany, established in 1949. While Europe has remained relatively peaceful since 1945 and Germany has been an important factor in fostering this peace, this may be taken out of context. The repentance that has generally typified postwar (or at least post-1968) German discourse about World War II is not a reaction to the destruction of German cities but is based on the popular assessment that, for twelve years, Germany disastrously lost its way.

The case against the bombing as a war crime

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Ruins of the Frauenkirche in 1991

For details on the treaty obligations of the Allies see aerial area bombardment and international law in 1945

"In examining these events in the light of international humanitarian law, it should be borne in mind that during the Second World War there was no agreement, treaty, convention or any other instrument governing the protection of the civilian population or civilian property, as the Conventions then in force dealt only with the protection of the wounded and the sick on the battlefield and in naval warfare, hospital ships, the laws and customs of war and the protection of prisoners of war".

The United States military contended that the bombing of Dresden did not constitute a war crime, based on the following claims:

1. The raid had legitimate military ends, brought about by exigent military circumstances.
2. Military units and anti-aircraft defenses were sufficiently close that it was valid not to consider the city "undefended".
3. The raid did not use extraordinary means, but was comparable to other raids used against comparable targets.
4. The raid was carried out through the normal chain of command, pursuant to directives and agreements then in force.
5. The raid achieved the military objective, without "excessive" loss of civilian life.

The first declaration regarding the legitimacy of the raid based on military circumstances depends on two claims; first, that the railyards subjected to American precision bombing were an important logistical target, functioning beyond their ordinary value as a communication centre. Secondly, it was suggested that the city was also an important industrial centre.

In reference to the first claim, an inquiry conducted at the behest of the US Secretary of War, General George C. Marshall, found that the raid was justified by the available intelligence. The inquiry declared that elimination of German ability to reinforce a counter-attack against Marshall Konev's extended line or, alternatively, to retreat and regroup using Dresden as a base of operations, was an important military objective. As Dresden had been largely untouched during the war, 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 to be the case. The fear of a Nazi breakout, such as had so nearly succeeded during the Battle of the Bulge, which ran from December 16 1944 to January 25 1945, less than three weeks before the bombing of Dresden, may have weighed on the minds of Allied planners.

The second claim was that Dresden was 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 which supplied the army with materiel.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey listed at least 110 factories and industries in Dresden, albeit mainly in the outskirts, which were far less affected by the February 1945 raid. The city contained the Zeiss-Ikon optical factory and the Siemens glass factory, both of which, according to the Allies, were entirely devoted to manufacturing military gunsights. The immediate suburbs contained factories building radar and electronics components, and fuses for anti-aircraft shells. Other factories produced gas masks, engines for Junkers aircraft and cockpit parts for Messerschmitt fighters.

Because of the concentration of undamaged industry, unusual in Germany at the time of the raids , the Allied planners had reason to believe that Dresden was a crucial to the effort to supply materiel for the defense of Germany itself.

The second of the five points addresses the prohibition, in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, of "attack or bombardment" of "undefended" towns. The Hague Conventions were adopted before the rise of air power and whether their prohibitions applied to air attacks had not yet been clarified in any ratified convention (in part, because of German opposition to the draft Amsterdam convention of 1938). However, the inquiry concluded that the presence of active German military units nearby, and the presence of fighters and anti-aircraft within an effective range, were sufficient to qualify Dresden as "defended" under the second Hague Convention. By this stage in the war both the British and the Germans had integrated air defences at the national level. Both countries stationed air-defences as far forward as possible to intercept hostile aircraft before they reached their targets. For example, the British countermeasures for the V-1 flying bomb involved moving anti-aircraft guns from London to the North Downs and the coast. Consequently there were fewer anti-aircraft guns in the capital, but the guns still defended London. Similarly the Germans integrated their air defences in a national air-defence system known as the Kammhuber Line, so an absence of local air-defence assets did not mean that a German city was "undefended".

The third and fourth points claim 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 bombings. On February 3 1945, the Allies bombed Berlin and caused an estimated 25,000 civil fatalities; other raids in Japan caused civilian casualties over 100,000. 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 early 1945. Thus, it was decided that no extraordinary decision was made to single out Dresden, take advantage of the large number of refugees, or purposely terrorize the German populace. In spite of the consequences, the intent of area bombing was to disrupt industrial production, not to kill dislocated civilians. The American inquiry established that the Soviets, pursuant to 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 in order to prevent a counter attack through Dresden, or the use of Dresden as a regrouping point after a strategic retreat.

The fifth point is that the firebombing achieved the intended effect of disabling a substantial fraction of industry in what was one of Germany's last centres of industrial production. It was estimated that over 25% of industrial capacity was disabled or destroyed, eliminating potential use of Dresden by the Germany military to launch counterstrikes to check the Soviet advance.

Dresden and the Holocaust

During February 1945 several hundred remaining Jews still resident in Dresden were destined to be sent to their deaths in concentration camps. The chaos following the bombing provided many a chance to escape, while others were put to work in rebuilding the city, thus the bombing may have saved several hundred potential Holocaust victims.

An account in the diary of Victor Klemperer supports this. On February 12 1945, the order was given to deliver call-up letters to virtually all of the remaining handful of Jews in Dresden to be deported, but the bombing the next night destroyed much of the train station and threw much of the city into chaos. Victor Klemperer and his wife, Eva, fled amid the chaos. He removed the "J" and yellow Star of David from his jacket and they began heading south. By walking, riding on carts, trucks and trains they eventually reached Bavaria. They had picked up temporary identification papers, which did not show his Jewish origins.

Today, a placard at the Dresden Main Station memorializes the Jewish citizens of Dresden who were sent from there to the concentration camps.

Post-war reconstruction and reconciliation

Reconstructed Frauenkirche 2005

After the war, and especially after German reunification, great efforts were made to rebuild some of Dresden's former landmarks, such as the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper, and the Zwinger. A new synagogue was also built. Despite its location in the Soviet occupation zone (subsequently the DDR), in 1956 Dresden entered a twin-town relationship with Coventry, which had suffered the worst destruction of any English city at the hands of the Luftwaffe, including the destruction of its cathedral (the official death toll in Coventry, an important center of aeroplane and vehicle manufacturing, was 1,236). Groups from both cities were involved in moving demonstrations of post-war reconciliation. During her visit to Germany in November 2004, Queen Elizabeth II hosted a concert in Berlin to raise money for the reconstruction of the Dresden Frauenkirche. The visit was accompanied by speculation in the British and German press, fuelled mostly by the tabloids, over a possible apology for the attacks, which did not occur. On February 13, 2005, a cross made by Alan Smith, the son of one of the bombers, from medieval nails recovered from the ruins of the roof of Coventry cathedral in 1940, was presented to the Lutheran Bishop of Saxony. On Sunday 30 October 2005 the Frauenkirche was rededicated, some 1,800 guests including the Duke of Kent, Germany's president, Horst Köhler, and the previous and current chancellors, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, attended the service.

Influences on art and culture

• Author Kurt Vonnegut had been captured during the Battle of the Bulge and was a prisoner of war held in Dresden during the bombing. He later wrote about his experiences and feelings in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Critics have pointed out Dresden's influence in each of his first six novels.
• Science fiction novelists Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle placed the general who ordered the bombing of Dresden in Hell in their novel Inferno.
• British comedy troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus created a sketch in 1972 depicting a boxing match between Harry the Reaper and Harry the Bomber.
• Since 1990, the bombing of Dresden has become an increasingly popular theme in German culture, becoming the subject of many books and documentaries (like that of Guido Knopp).
• In Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the firebombing of Dresden is one of two traumatic events -- the other being the September 11th attacks -- that define the narrator's family history.
• The "cabaret punk" group The Dresden Dolls also take their name from a picture taken of a destroyed doll factory following the bombing.
• Australian pub-rock group Cold Chisel wrote a song about the firebombings on their 1979 album Breakfast At Sweethearts, named "Dresden".
• Lamb and Lynx Gaede of the white nationalist duo Prussian Blue, have a younger sister named Dresden who was named in memory of the city's bombing.
• In horror novelist Brian Hodge's book Hellboy: On Earth As It Is In Hell B.P.R.D.correspondent Dr. Kate Corrigan proposes the controversial theory that Dresden was destroyed by Seraphim, just like Sodom and Gomorrah.

See also

• The Destruction of Dresden, a book by David Irving.
• Bombing of Prague
• Bombing of Rotterdam
• Rules of air warfare

Bibliography

1. Taylor, Frederick. Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. By Frederick Taylor;
   • US review, Pub (NY): HarperCollins, ISBN 0060006765.
   • UK review, Pub (Lon): Bloomsbury. ISBN 0747570787.
2. "The Bombers" by Norman Longmate, Hutchins & Co, (1983), ISBN 0091515087,
3. Götz Bergander, Dresden im Luftkrieg: Vorgeschichte-Zerstörung-Folgen (Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich, 1977)
4. Antony Beevor, Berlin: the Downfall, 1945. ISBN 0670886955

Further reading

• US Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (European War) September 30, 1945
• RAF Museum 1945 Page:"13-14 February"
• Quotes from accounts and sources regarding the bombing (Spartacus site)
• Alan Forbes on wartime atrocities, Boston Review, October/November 1995
• Reconstruction of the Frauenkirche in Dresden
• Horrific fire-bombing images published, BBC News
• In German, but with many pictures of modern buildings, easy to understand
• The legacy of Dresden
• "Surviving the Firestorm" (Excert from the diary of Victor Klemperer describing the bombing of Dresden)
• The Fire-bombing of Dresden — An eye-witness account
• Machine-gunning civilian refugees
• The 'Bomber Harris Trust' Homepage
• Necessary or not, Dresden remains a topic of anguish By John Keegan Daily Telegraph 31 October 2005
• Winston Churchill and the Bombing of Dresden UK online material from the National Archives.
• Website of the film Asche-1945 with a different (german nationalist) point of view.