The bombing of Dresden was a British/American
aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden,
the capital of the German state of Saxony,
during World War II in the European Theatre.
In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945,
722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air
Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army
Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900
tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary
devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting
firestorm destroyed over 1,600 acres (6.5
km2) of the city centre. An estimated 22,700
to 25,000 people were killed, although larger
casualty figures have been claimed. 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.
Immediate German propaganda claims following
the attacks and post-war discussions on whether
the attacks were justified have led to the
bombing becoming one of the moral causes célèbres
of the war. A 1953 United States Air Force
report 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 claim not all of the communications
infrastructure, such as the bridges, were
targeted, nor were the extensive industrial
areas outside the city center. Critics of
the bombing have claimed that Dresden was
a cultural landmark of little or no strategic
significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate
area bombing and not proportionate to the
military gains. Some in the German far-right
refer to the bombing as a mass murder calling
it "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs".Large variations
in the claimed death toll have fuelled the
controversy. In March 1945, the German government
ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty
figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids, and
death toll estimates as high as 500,000 have
been given. 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.
== Background ==
Early in 1945, the German offensive known
as the Battle of the Bulge had been exhausted,
as was the disastrous attack by the Luftwaffe
on New Year's Day involving elements of eleven
combat wings of the Luftwaffe's day fighter
force. The Red Army had launched their Silesian
Offensives 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 70 km from Berlin. A special
British Joint Intelligence Subcommittee report
titled German Strategy and Capacity to Resist,
prepared for Winston Churchill'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. Hence, any assistance provided to
the Soviets on the Eastern Front could shorten
the war.Plans for a large and intense aerial
bombing of Berlin and the other eastern cities
had been discussed under the code name Operation
Thunderclap in mid-1944, but had been shelved
on 16 August. These were now re-examined,
and the decision was made to plan a more limited
operation.On 22 January 1945, the RAF director
of bomber operations, Air Commodore Sydney
Bufton, sent a memorandum to the Deputy Chief
of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley,
suggesting that what appeared to be a coordinated
air attack by the RAF to aid the current Soviet
offensive would have a detrimental effect
on German morale. On 25 January, the Joint
Intelligence Committee supported the idea,
as it tied in with the Ultra-based intelligence
that dozens of German divisions deployed in
the west were moving to reinforce the Eastern
Front, and that interdiction of these troop
movements should be a "high priority." Arthur
Harris, AOC Bomber Command, nicknamed "Bomber"
Harris in the British press, and known as
an ardent supporter of area bombing, was asked
for his view, and he proposed a simultaneous
attack on Chemnitz, Leipzig and Dresden. That
evening Churchill asked the Secretary of State
for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, what plans
had been drawn up to carry out these proposals.
He passed on the request to Sir Charles Portal,
the Chief of the Air Staff, who answered that
"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
[last night] 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".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 activity 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, 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 a message to Portal 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 by Sir Douglas Evill
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 located, would result in
"chaos." Ostensibly, Britain had learned this
after the Coventry Blitz, when loss of this
crucial infrastructure had supposedly longer-lasting
effects than attacks on war plants.During
the Yalta Conference on 4 February, the Deputy
Chief of the Soviet General Staff, General
Aleksei Antonov, raised the issue of hampering
the reinforcement of German troops from the
western front by paralysing the junctions
of Berlin and Leipzig with aerial bombardment.
In response, Chief of the British Air Staff
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. A British
interpreter later claimed that Antonov and
Joseph Stalin asked for the bombing of Dresden,
but there is no mention of these requests
in the official record of the conference and
the claim was assessed as possible Cold War
propaganda.
=== Military and industrial profile ===
Dresden was Germany's seventh-largest city
and, according to the RAF at the time, 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" 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. 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 – the report remained classified
until December 1978. This 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 factory (Chemische Fabrik Goye
and Company); an anti-aircraft and field gun
factory (Lehman); an optical goods factory
(Zeiss Ikon AG); as well as factories producing
electrical and X-ray apparatus (Koch & Sterzel
AG); gears and differentials (Saxoniswerke);
and electric gauges (Gebrüder Bassler). It
also said there were barracks, hutted camps,
and a munitions storage depot.The USAF report
also states that two of Dresden's traffic
routes were of military importance: north-south
from Germany to Czechoslovakia, and east-west
along the central European uplands. The city
was at the junction of the Berlin-Prague-Vienna
railway line, as well as the Munich-Breslau,
and Hamburg-Leipzig 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 towards the east to meet
the Russians".An RAF memo issued to airmen
on the night of the attack indicated that
a secondary purpose of the raid was to "show
the Russians when they arrive [at Dresden]
what [the British] Bomber Command can do."
The memo stated:
Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany
and not much smaller than Manchester is also
the largest unbombed builtup area the enemy
has got. In the midst of winter with refugees
pouring westward and troops to be rested,
roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter
to workers, refugees, and troops alike, but
to house the administrative services displaced
from other areas. At one time well known for
its china, Dresden has developed into an industrial
city of first-class importance ... The intentions
of the attack are to hit the enemy where he
will feel it most, behind an already partially
collapsed front ... and incidentally to show
the Russians when they arrive what Bomber
Command can do.
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".
== The attacks ==
=== 
Night of 13/14 February ===
The Dresden attack was to have begun with
a USAAF 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
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.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. 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, 60 miles (97 km) from Dresden,
while de Havilland Mosquito medium bombers
attacked Magdeburg, Bonn, Misburg near Hanover
and Nuremberg.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 for the 700-mile
(1,100 km) 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 parachute flares, known to the Germans
as "Christmas trees", to light up the area
for the bombers. The next set of aircraft
to leave England were twin-engined Mosquito
marker planes, which would identify target
areas and drop 1,000-pound target indicators
(TIs)" that created a red glow for the bombers
to aim at. The attack was to centre on the
Ostragehege 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 ("fire
bombs"). There were 200,000 incendiaries in
all, with the high-explosive bombs ranging
in weight from 500 pounds to 4,000 pounds—the
so-called 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 create an air
flow to feed the fires caused by the incendiaries
that followed.The Lancasters crossed into
French airspace near the Somme, then into
Germany just north of Cologne. 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). Wing Commander 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 1.25 miles (2.01 km) long,
and at its extreme about 1.75 miles (2.82
km) 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 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, 8 Group being the Pathfinders.
By now, the thousands of fires from the burning
city could be seen more than 60 miles (97
km) away on the ground, and 500 miles (800
km) away in the air, with smoke rising to
15,000 feet (4,600 m). The Pathfinders therefore
decided to expand the target, dropping flares
on either side of the firestorm, including
the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station,
and the Großer Garten, 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 bombers
of the 1st Bombardment Division of the United
States VIII Bomber Command were scheduled
to bomb Dresden at around midday, and the
3rd Bombardment Division were to follow the
1st and bomb Chemnitz, while the 2nd Bombardment
Division would bomb a synthetic oil plant
in Magdeburg. The bomber groups would be protected
by the 784 North American P-51 Mustangs of
VIII Fighter Command, which meant that there
would be almost 2,100 aircraft of the United
States Eighth Air Force over Saxony during
14 February.There is some confusion in the
primary sources over what was the target in
Dresden, whether it was the marshalling yards
near the centre, 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. The mix
of bombs for the Dresden raid was about 40%
incendiaries—much closer to the RAF city
busting mix than that which the USAAF usually
used in precision bombardment. Taylor compares
this 40% mix with the raid on Berlin on 3
February, where the ratio was 10% incendiaries.
This was a common mix when the USAAF anticipated
cloudy conditions over the target.316 B-17
Flying Fortresses bombed Dresden, dropping
771 tons of bombs. The rest misidentified
their targets. Sixty bombed Prague, dropping
153 tons of bombs on the Czech city while
others bombed 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 2 minutes after
the 379th found that their view was obscured
by clouds so they bombed Dresden using H2X
radar to target this location. The groups
that followed the 303rd, (92nd, 306th, 379th,
384th and 457th) also found Dresden obscured
by clouds and they too used H2X to locate
the target. H2X aiming caused the groups to
bomb with a wide dispersal over the Dresden
area. The last group to bomb Dresden was the
306th and they had finished by 12:30.Strafing
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 that this had occurred.
Historian Götz Bergander, who was an eyewitness
of the raids, found no reports on strafing
for 13–15 February, neither by any of the
pilots nor by the German military and police.
He asserted in Dresden im Luftkrieg (1977)
that only a few tales of civilians being strafed
were reliable in details, 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 being deliberately
aimed at people on the ground. In 2000, historian
Helmut Schnatz found that there was 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 an aerial dog fight 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 synthetic oil
plant near Leipzig—was obscured by cloud,
so the Division's 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. 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 on 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 heavy flak
battery in January 1945. By this point in
the war, the Luftwaffe was seriously hampered
by a shortage of both pilots and aircraft
fuel; the German radar system had also been
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 a total of 796 British
bombers that participated in the raid, six
bombers were lost, three of those hit by bombs
dropped by aircraft flying over them. On the
following day, 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 ===
It is not possible to describe! Explosion
after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse
than the blackest nightmare. So many people
were horribly burnt and injured. It became
more and more difficult to breathe. It was
dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar
with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people
were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched
up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket
with our twins covered with wet cloths was
snatched up out of my mother's hands and we
were pushed upstairs by the people behind
us. We saw the burning street, the falling
ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother
covered us with wet blankets and coats she
found in a water tub.
We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk
to the size of small children, pieces of arms
and legs, dead people, whole families burnt
to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt
coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead
rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and
looking for their children and families, and
fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all
the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw
people back into the burning houses they were
trying to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible details. I
can never forget them.
The sirens had 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. Taylor writes
the city was largely undefended; a night fighter
force of ten Messerschmitt Bf 110Gs 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".
To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see
her to this day and shall never forget it.
She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a
baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies
in an arc into the fire.
Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front
of me. They scream and gesticulate with their
hands, and then—to my utter horror and amazement—I
see how one after the other they simply seem
to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today
I know that these unfortunate people were
the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted
and then burnt to cinders.
Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat
one simple sentence to myself continuously:
"I don't want to burn to death". I do not
know how many people I fell over. I know only
one thing: that I must not burn.
There were very few public air raid shelters—the
largest, underneath the main railway station,
was housing 6,000 refugees. As a result, most
people took shelter in their cellars, but
one of the air raid precautions the city had
taken was to remove the 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 using the basement as a shelter could
knock the walls down and run 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 end 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 24 banks, 26 insurance
buildings, 31 stores and retail houses, 640
shops, 64 warehouses, 2 market halls, 31 large
hotels, 26 public houses, 63 administrative
buildings, 3 theatres, 18 cinemas, 11 churches,
6 chapels; 5 other cultural buildings, 19
hospitals including auxiliary, overflow hospitals,
and private clinics, 39 schools, 5 consulates,
the zoo, the waterworks, the railways, 19
postal facilities, 4 tram facilities, and
19 ships and barges. The Wehrmacht's main
command post in the Taschenbergpalais, 19
military hospitals and a number of less significant
military facilities were also destroyed. Almost
200 factories were damaged, 136 seriously
damaged (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 percent
of the industrial buildings, and 56 percent
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,
Minister of Armaments and War Production for
the Third Reich, indicated that Dresden's
industrial recovery from the bombings was
rapid.
=== Fatalities ===
According to 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 that the total number of deaths
would 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 of
the Dresden raids, including those cremated
on the Altmarkt.Between 100,000 and 200,000
refugees fleeing westwards 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 proved impossible to ascertain
the number of victims. The uncertainty introduced
by this is thought to amount to a total of
no more than 100. 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
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 authorized an independent
Historian's Commission (Historikerkommission)
to conduct a new, thorough investigation,
collecting and evaluating available sources.
The results were published in 2010 and stated
that a minimum of 22,700 and a maximum of
25,000 people were 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 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 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, 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 stated 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—[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 4 March, Das Reich,
a weekly newspaper founded by Goebbels, published
a lengthy article emphasizing the suffering
and destruction of a cultural icon, without
mentioning any damage the attacks had caused
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 British
House of Commons when Richard Stokes, a Labour
Party Member of Parliament (MP), a long term
opponent of area-bombing, quoted information
from the German Press Agency (controlled by
the Propaganda Ministry). It was Stokes' questions
in the House of Commons that were in large
part responsible for the shift in the UK 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' massaging
of the casualty figures.
=== British ===
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 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." 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
story that the Allies had resorted to terror
bombing. 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:
First of all they (Dresden and similar towns)
are the centres to which evacuees are being
moved. They are centres of communications
through which traffic is moving across to
the Russian Front, and from the Western Front
to the East, and they are sufficiently close
to the Russian Front for the Russians to continue
the successful prosecution of their battle.
I think these three reasons probably cover
the bombing.
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 saying 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 distanced himself from the bombing.
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:
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 memo by Bottomley, on 29 March,
Air Chief Marshal Arthur 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" echoed a famous sentence used by
Otto von Bismarck: "The whole of the Balkans
is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian
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:
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.
== 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 Saxony state opera house)
and the Zwinger Palace (the latter two were
rebuilt before reunification).
In 1956, Dresden entered a twin-town relationship
with Coventry. 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
Blitzes of 1940 and 1941, which killed over
1,200 civilians and destroyed its cathedral.The
Dresden synagogue, which was burned during
Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, was rebuilt
in 2001 and opened for worship on 9 November
and is called the New Synagogue. The original
synagogue's Star of David was installed above
the entrance of the new building—Alfred
Neugebauer, a local firefighter, saved it
from the fire and hid it in his home until
the end of the war. Dresden's Jewish population
declined from 4675 in 1933, to 1265 in 1941
(the eve of the implementation of the Nazis'
extermination programme), to just a handful
after almost all of those who had remained
were forcibly sent to Riga Ghetto and Auschwitz
and Theresienstadt concentration camps between
1941 and 1945. On the morning of 13 February
1945, the Jews remaining in Dresden were ordered
to report for deportation on 16 February.
But as one of them, Victor Klemperer, recorded
in his diaries: "... on the evening of this
13 February the catastrophe overtook Dresden:
the bombs fell, the houses collapsed, the
phosphorus flowed, the burning beams crashed
on to the heads of Aryans and non-Aryans alike
and Jew and Christian met death in the same
firestorm; whoever of the [Jews] was spared
by this night was delivered, for in the general
chaos he could escape the Gestapo". But in
recent years the Jewish population has increased
in Dresden, as it has elsewhere in Germany.
Paul Spiegel, the then head of Central Council
of Jews in Germany, called the new synagogue
a concrete expression of the Jewish community's
desire to stay.
In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
a group of prominent Dresdeners formed an
international appeal known as the "Call from
Dresden" to request help in rebuilding the
Lutheran Frauenkirche, the destruction of
which had over the years become a symbol of
the bombing. 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.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; previous and current
chancellors, Gerhard Schröder and Angela
Merkel; and the Duke of Kent.
== 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 period. In that sense it is an absolutely
exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th
century warfare and a symbol of destruction".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 to include aerial warfare,
it was not updated before the outbreak of
World War II. The absence of positive international
humanitarian law does not mean that the laws
of war did not cover aerial warfare, but there
was no general agreement of how to interpret
those laws.
=== Falsification of evidence ===
The bombing of Dresden has been used by Holocaust
deniers and pro-Nazi polemicists—most notably
by the British writer David Irving in his
book The Destruction of Dresden—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'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,
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
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 (e.g.
to take advantage of the large number of refugees,
or purposely terrorize the German populace).
It was argued that the intent of area bombing
was to disrupt communications and destroy
industrial production. 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 to prevent
a counterattack through Dresden, or the use
of Dresden as a regrouping point after a strategic
retreat.
==== U.S. Air Force Historical Division report
====
A report by the U.S. Air Force Historical
Division (USAFHD) analyzed 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, field
guns, and small arms, poison gas, gears 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) Luftwaffe Administration 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) caused
over 100,000 civilian casualties. 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
was bombed in Operation Gomorrah 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 27–28
July, created a devastating firestorm effect
similar to Dresden's, killing at least 45,000
people. 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% 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: The specific
forces and means employed in the Dresden bombings
were in keeping with the forces and means
employed by the Allies in other aerial attacks
on comparable targets in Germany. The Dresden
bombings achieved the strategic objectives
that underlay the attack and were of mutual
importance to the Allies and the Russians.
=== Arguments against justification ===
==== 
Military reasons ====
The journalist Alexander McKee 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 in fact 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 the historian Sönke Neitzel, "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".
===== Military facilities in the north =====
The Albertstadt, in the north of Dresden,
had remarkable military facilities that the
bombings failed to hit. Today they are officer's
schools ("Offiziersschule des Heeres") for
the Bundeswehr and its military history museum
(from prehistoric to modern times).
==== As an immoral act, but not a war crime
====
... ever since the deliberate mass bombing
of civilians in the second world war, and
as a direct response to it, the international
community has outlawed the practice. It first
tried to do so in the Fourth Geneva Convention
of 1949, but the UK and the US would not agree,
since to do so would have been an admission
of guilt for their systematic "area bombing"
of German and Japanese civilians.
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 British 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,"
but, "It is not strictly correct to describe
area bombing as a 'war crime'."
==== As a war crime ====
Though no one involved in the bombing of Dresden
was ever charged with a war crime, some hold
the opinion that the bombing was one.
According to Dr. Gregory Stanton, lawyer and
president of Genocide Watch:
... every human being having the capacity
for both good and evil. 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. We are all capable of evil and must
be restrained by law from committing it.
Historian Donald Bloxham 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.Proponents of this position
argue that the devastation from firebombing
was greater than anything that could be justified
by military necessity 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. 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, and that the
cultural significance of the city should have
precluded the Allies from bombing it.
British historian Antony 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 area seeking sanctuary
from the advancing Red Army 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.
Some 45,000 people died on one night during
the firestorms that engulfed Hamburg in July
1943.
==== 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. 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 (NPD). A party's representative,
Jürgen Gansel, described the Dresden raids
as "mass murder," and "Dresden's holocaust
of bombs". 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. In
2010, several demonstrations by organizations
opposing the far-right blocked a demonstration
of far-right organizations.
Phrases 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'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 at Dresden during the
bombing. 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 edition of the novel,
he wrote:
The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive
and meticulously planned, was so meaningless,
finally, that only one person on the entire
planet got any benefit from it. I am that
person. I wrote this book, which earned a
lot of money for me and made my reputation,
such as it is. One way or another, I got two
or three dollars for every person killed.
Some business I'm in.
This experience was also used in several of
his other books and is included in his posthumously
published stories: Armageddon in Retrospect.
The firebombing of Dresden was depicted in
George Roy Hill's 1972 movie adaptation of
Vonnegut's novel.
The death toll of 135,000 given by Vonnegut
was taken from The Destruction of Dresden,
a 1963 book by David Irving. In a 1965 letter
to The Guardian, 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 popularized by Vonnegut remains
in general circulation.
Freeman Dyson, a British (and later 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: "For many
years I had intended to write a book on the
bombing. Now I do not need to write it, because
Vonnegut has written it much better than I
could. He was in Dresden at the time and saw
what happened. His book is not only good literature.
It is also truthful. The only inaccuracy that
I found in it is that it does not say that
the night attack which produced the holocaust
was a British affair. The Americans only came
the following day to plow over the rubble.
Vonnegut, being American, did not want to
write his account in such a way that the whole
thing could be blamed on the British. Apart
from that, everything he says is true." 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 ===
The German diarist Victor Klemperer includes
a first-hand account of the firestorm in his
published works.
The main action of the novel Closely Observed
Trains, by Czech author Bohumil Hrabal, 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 starts
with "Trace your way back 50 Years / To the
glow of Dresden – blood and tears".
Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud
and Incredibly Close (2005) incorporates the
bombings into essential parts of the story.
The bombings are a central theme in the 2006
German TV production Dresden 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, with the
hero, Avik, forced to bale 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 organized 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."
== 
See also ==
Bombing of Tokyo (10 March 1945), the codenamed-Operation
Meetinghouse firebombing raid on Tokyo on
March 9/10, 1945
The Blitz – German air raids on British
cities in which at least 40,000 died, including
57 consecutive nights of air raids just over
London
Bombing of Guernica – German/Italian air
raid that sparked international outrage
