Bombing of Dresden

The bombing of Dresden, led by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and followed by the United States Army Air Force (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...^[1]

File:Dresd 4.jpg

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.^[2] 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".^[3] 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 and an ardent supporter of area bombing, 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".^[4]

On the same day, Winston Churchill pressed the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair: "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".^[4][3] 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.^[3][5]

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, ....^[6]

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.^[7][8]

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 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.^[9] 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 a demonstration of western strength as a warning or threat to the Soviets in the lead-up to the Cold War.

File:Dresden Aerial View - February 13 14 1945.jpg

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.^[10] The firebombing campaign was to have begun with a USAAF Eighth Air Force raid on Dresden on February 13, but bad weather over Europe prevented any USAAF operations. Due to the conditions, RAF Bomber Command carried 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.^[11]

The second attack, 3 hours later, was by Lancaster 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.^[11]

Later on February 14, from 12:17 until 12:30 311 USAAF 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 and disruption to the important transportation network in the region".^[11] There are reports that civilians fleeing the firestorm engulfing Dresden in February 1945 were strafed by American aircraft, but these claims have been disputed by the historian Götz Bergander.^[12][13] During this raid there was a brief, but possibly intense dogfight between American and German fighters around Dresden; some rounds may have been mistaken for strafing fire when they struck the ground.^[14] 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 the by-then standard methods,^[15][16] of 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 (2700°F). 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 the 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.^[17]

File:Dresden1945-3.jpg

A Dresden police report written shortly after the attacks stated that the old town and the inner eastern suburbs had been engulfed in a single fire which had destroyed almost 12,000 dwellings including residential barracks. The report also said that the raid had destroyed "24 banks; 26 insurance buildings; 31 stores and retail houses; 6470 shops; 640 warehouses; 256 market halls; 31 large hotels; 26 public houses; 63 administrative buildings; 3 theatres; 18 cinemas; 11 churches; 60 chapels; 50 cultural-historical buildings; 19 hospitals including auxiliary, overflow hospitals, and private clinics; 39 schools; 5 consulates; 1 zoological garden; 1 waterworks, 1 railway facility; 19 postal facilities; 4 tram facilities; 19 ships and barges." The report also mentioned that the Wehrmacht's main command post in the Tauschenberg Palace, 19 military hospitals and a number of less significant military facilities were destroyed.^[18] Almost 200 factories were damaged, 136 seriously (including several of the Zeiss Ikon precision optical engineering works), 28 with medium to serious damage, and 35 with light damage.^[19]

"British assessments ... concluded that 23 percent of the city’s industrial buildings were seriously damaged and that 56 per cent of the non-industrial buildings (exclusive of dwellings) had been heavily damaged. Of the total number of dwelling units in the city proper, 78,000 were regarded as demolished, 27,700 temporarily uninhabitable but ultimately repairable, and 64,500 readily repairable from minor damage. This later assessment indicated that 80 per cent of the city’s housing units had undergone some degree of damage and that 50 per cent of the dwellings had been demolished or seriously damaged." and that the USAAF "raids against the city’s railway facilities on 14 and 15 February resulted in severe and extensive damage that entirely paralyzed communications.…" and that "The railway bridges over the Elbe river — vital to incoming and outgoing traffic — were rendered unusable and remained closed to traffic for many weeks after the raids."^[20]

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^[21] was crowded at that time with up to 200,000 refugees,^[22] 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^[23][24] with the latest (1994) research by the Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert pointing toward the lower part of this range.^[25] It would appear from such estimates that the casualties suffered in the Dresden bombings were similar to those suffered in other German cities which were subject to firebombing attacks during area bombardment.^[26]

Contemporary official German records give a number of 21,271 registered burials, including 6,865 who were cremated on the Altmarkt.^[27] 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.^[28] 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 was 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.^[24] 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-styled 'historian'^[29] who retracted his higher estimates.^[30] 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 tonnage of bombs dropped on Dresden was actually lower than in many other areas.^[31] 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,^[32] 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.^[33] Whether these attacks hastened the end of the war is a controversial question.

There are a number of first hand accounts documenting the civilian experience amidst the firebombing. One survivor, Margaret Freyer, recalled:

The firestorm [was] incredible, there [were] calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around [was] one single inferno… suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream[ed] and gesticulate[d] with their hands, and then — to my utter horror and amazement — I [saw] 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.^[34]

Another survivor, Lothar Metzger, provides an equally vivid account:

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 from, 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.^[35]

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.^[36]

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".^[37]

On February 16, the Propaganda Ministry issued a press release that outlined the Nazi line: Dresden had no war industries, it was a place of culture and clinics.^[37] 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 Morgenbladet used phrases like "privately from Berlin".^[38] 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.^[39]

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.^[40]

At a press briefing held by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force two days after the raids, British Air Commodore 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."^[41] One of the journalists asked whether the principal aim of bombing of Dresden would be to cause confusion among the refugees or to blast communications carrying military supplies. Grierson answered that the primary aim was communications to prevent them moving military supplies, and to stop movement in all directions if possible. He then added in an offhand remark that the raid also helped destroying "what is left of German morale."^[41] 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.^[42]

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.^[43]

File:Dresden,Churchillletter.jpg

Churchill, who approved of the targeting of Dresden and supported the bombing prior to the event, subsequently distanced himself from it.^[44][45][46] 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.^[47][48]

Having been given a paraphrased version of Churchill's draft memo by Bottomley, on March 29, Harris wrote to the Air Ministry:^[49]

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.^[50] (the phrase "worth the bones of one British grenadier" was a deliberate echo of a famous sentence used by Otto von Bismarck "The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.")^[49]

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.^[50][51] 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.^[50][49]

The nature of the bombing of Dresden has made it a unique point of contention and debate. Arguments for and against the bombing being a war crime come from all across the political spectrum and are supported in a variety of ways.

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.^[52][53] 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.^[54]

Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, wrote: 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.^[55] 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.^[56]

Neo-Nazi politicians in Germany promote the term "Bombenholocaust" ("bombing holocaust") to describe the Allied aerial bombings, especially for the Dresden raids.^[57][58] Holger Apfel is the leader of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (German acronym NPD) in Saxony and a member of the Saxon Landtag. In a speech there on January 22, 2005 he said that Allied bombing of Dresden was a "Holocaust of Germans". This was said under parliamentary immunity but Udo Voigt, the chairman of the NPD, repeated the allegations outside the parliament where he was not protected by parliamentary immunity.^[59][60] Many German mainstream politicians consider the NPD's 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 and show a moral parity between the Allies of World War II and the Axis. Some Germans had considered the term a violation of German law which forbids Holocaust denial, but in April 2005 the Hamburg public prosecutor's office decided that Voigt's statement was a constitutionally protected exercise of free speech since defamation was not the prime aim of the argument. Hannah Cleaver writing in the Daily Telegraph makes the point that Strictly speaking, the word 'holocaust', which comes from the ancient Greek for 'burnt', might seem apt for Dresden, much of it immolated by the fires started by the RAF's incendiary bombs. But its primary meaning is now so closely linked to the Nazis' treatment of the Jews that such etymology appears to be in bad taste.^[60]

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.^[61] For details on the obligations of the belligerents of World War II engaged in aerial bombardment see aerial area bombardment and international law in 1945.

Regarding the Allied decision to target Dresden, some proponents of the war crime position argue that an awareness of the devastation known to be caused by firebombing and the effect on the civilian population below^[62] was greater than that justified by military necessity and establishes their case on a prima facie basis. This goes without even mentioning that Dresden did not have a military garrison, that most of the industry was in the outskirts and not in the targeted city centre,^[63] and the cultural significance of the city.

In addition to Stanton, the aforementioned president of Genocide Watch, Simon Jenkins contends that a mass assault against civilians simply constitutes a crime against humanity.^[64]

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. 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.^[65]

The author, journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens is of the opinion that many small German residential districts were destroyed for no reason other than as live target practice for new bomber crews, and that the Allies incinerated German cities in 1944 and 1945 simply because they could.^[66] The Allies were aware of the effects of firebombing as British cities had been subject to them during the Blitz.^[67]

In Fire Sites, German revisionist historian Jörg Friedrich posits that Winston Churchill's decision to bomb Germany between January and March 1945 constitutes a war crime, because he claims that the RAF's relentless bombing campaign against German cities in the last months of the war served no military purpose.^[68]

Countering the claim that Dresden was a significant military target, Friedrich's earlier book, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 focuses on the evidence showing that the German forces were in full retreat by February 1945. He argues that the impact on civilians was out of all proportion to the military goal, reiterating the argument that the Allied forces were aware of the destruction caused by incendiary bombs. Friedrich also argues that the Allies had known that future attacks were likely to cause ever increasing numbers of civilian deaths.^[69]

In Der Brand, Friedrich also suggests that by 1945, the German air defense had collapsed. As for the counter claim that the nationalization of the air-defense system, the Kammhuber Line, meant Dresden was defended, and therefore, a permissible military target, a closer examination is necessary. Given the state of the Luftwaffe after December 1944, the ability for routine air patrols was severely reduced due to fuel shortages.^[70] Furthermore, the Allies were completely in control of the air,^[70] and Germany had committed all of its fighters originally dedicated to air defense at the Battle of the Bulge^[71] Concerning grounded anti-aircraft capacity, it took an average of 16,000 88 mm Flak shells to bring down a single Allied heavy bomber.^[72][73] Thus, the meaning of "defended" is disputable — much like the phrase "war crime."

File:Frauenkirche Dresden 1991.jpg

The Military of the United States contended that the bombing of Dresden did not constitute a war crime based on the following claims:^[74]

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 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.^[75]

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 the elimination of the 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, 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 to be the case. The shock to military planners and to the Allied civilian populations of the Nazi counter attack 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 area bombardment of German cities.^[76]

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 which supplied the army with material.^[77] Dresden was the seventh largest German city and by far the largest unbombed built-up area left and thus was contributing to the defense of Germany itself.^[78] The United States Strategic Bombing Survey listed at least 110 factories and industries in Dresden,^[75] albeit mainly in the outskirts, which were far less affected by the February 1945 raid. This reflects on a trend in late war German industrial production, as many industries began moved their manufacturing operations into the suburbs or even underground.^{[citation needed]} Nevertheless, the city still 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.^[8]

The second of the five points addresses the prohibition in the Hague Conventions, of "attack or bombardment" of "undefended" towns. Marshall's inquiry concluded that the presence of active German military units nearby, and the presence of fighters and anti-aircraft within an effective range, Dresden qualified as "defended".^[79] By this stage in the war both the British and the Germans had integrated air defences at the national level. The Germans national air-defence system could be used to argue — as the tribunal did — that no 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 Allied bombings. On February 23, 1945, the Allies bombed Pforzheim and caused an estimated 20,000 civilian fatalities; a raid on Tokyo on March 9–10 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 1945. One contributing factor to the large loss of life in Dresden was the lack of preparation for the effects of air-raids by Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann, as the city did not expect to be bombed.^[80] When Braunschweig was bombed on nights of October 14 and 15 1944, hochbunkers and well trained fire fighters saved 23,000 people from death in a firestorm. 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 and rescue crews.^[81]

Marshall's tribunal declared that no extraordinary decision was made to single out Dresden, (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 in order to prevent a counter attack through Dresden, or the use of Dresden as a regrouping point after a strategic retreat.^[82]

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."^[83]

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 GDR), 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 in a single attack, including the destruction of its cathedral. 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.^[84]

• In his 1945 diary, Erich Kästner — a native of Dresden — describes his shock at arriving at the city shortly after its bombing and finding it a pile of ruins, so much so that he could recognise none of the streets and landmarks among which he had spent his childhood and youth.
• Kästner's autobiographical book When I was a Little Child begins with a lament for Dresden: "I was born in the most beautiful city in the world. Even if your father, child, was the richest man in the world, he could not take you to see it, because it does not exist any more. …In a thousand years was her beauty built, in one night was it utterly destroyed".
• Translations of Kästner's book into numerous languagues had the effect of making children aware of the Dresden bombing in countries where this aspect of the Second World War was obscured in school curricula.
• The very popular baroque instrumental piece, the Adagio in G minor, was arranged by Remo Giazotto from fragments of a Sonata in G minor for strings and pipe organ, by Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni, which Giazotto found in 1947 while sifting through the ruins of Dresden's Saxon State Library, destroyed in the firebombing.
• Author Kurt Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and was a prisoner of war held in Dresden during the bombing. He later wrote about his experience in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Critics have also highlighted Dresden's influence in each of Vonnegut's first six novels.
• In the book Closing Time by Joseph Heller the character Lewis Rabinowitz meets a character named Kurt Vonnegut in a Dresden POW camp.
• Science fiction novelists Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle placed the general who ordered the bombing of Dresden in Hell in their novel Inferno.
• 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 11 attacks — that define the narrator's family history.
• The name of the Saddle Creek band Sorry About Dresden is a reference to this event.
• 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".
• British heavy-metal group Iron Maiden also wrote a song about the firebombings on their 1990 album No Prayer for the Dying, named "Tailgunner".
• 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.
• The 2006 ZDF film Dresden starring Felicitas Woll and John Light is set in Dresden at the time of the February 13–14, 1945 raids.
• The composition "Symphony No. 1 (In Memoriam, Dresden, 1945)," by Daniel Bukvich.
• Post apocalyptic folk rock singer songerwriter Stuart Davis wrote a song called "Dresden" about the influence of the firebombing of the city

• Beevor, Antony; Berlin: the Downfall, 1945. ISBN 0-670-88695-5.
• Bergander, Götz , Dresden im Luftkrieg: Vorgeschichte-Zerstörung-Folgen. Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1977.
• Grant, Rebecca; The Dresden Legend (PDF version), Air Force Magazine (Online), October 2004, Vol. 87, Nº 10.
• Longmate, Norman; "The Bombers", Hutchins & Co, (1983), ISBN 0-09-151508-7.
• Taylor, Frederick; Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945; US review, NY: HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-000676-5; UK review, London: Bloomsbury, ISBN 0-7475-7078-7.
• USAF Historical Division Research Studies Institute Air University Historical Analysis of the 14–15 February 1945 Bombings of Dresden.

• Grayling, A. C. (2006). Among the Dead Cities. New York: Walker Publishing Company Inc. ISBN 0-8027-1471-4.
• Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang (editors); Firestorm: the Bombing of Dresden; Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006.
• „Der neue Plan von Dresden mit besonderer Kennzeichnung der total zerstörten Gebiete“ (The New City Map of Dresden with the completely destroyed areas marked). Stadtplan von 1947. Fotothek der SLUB-Dresden.
• US Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (European War) September 30, 1945.
• British Military Aviation in 1945 - Part 1: "13–14 February" RAF Museum.
• Quotes from accounts and sources regarding the bombing (Spartacus site).
• Forbes, Alan; Atrocities: Dresden; 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'.
• 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.
• German website with a large photo gallery of the bombing.
• Williamson Murray The meaning of World War II (PDF) pp. 1, 5–6.
• Symphony No. 1 (In Memoriam, Dresden, 1945) by Daniel Bukvich on his official site.

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