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Bombing of Dresden

The bombing of Dresden was a joint British and American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during World War II. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the 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.[3] The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre.[4] Up to 25,000 people were killed.[1][2][a] Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March aimed at the city's railway marshalling yard and one smaller raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas.

Postwar discussions about whether the attacks were justified made the event a moral cause célèbre of the war.[6] Nazi Germany's desperate struggle to maintain resistance in the closing months of the war is widely understood today, but Allied intelligence assessments at the time painted a different picture. There was uncertainty over whether the Soviets could sustain its advance on Germany, and rumours of the establishment of a Nazi redoubt in Southern Germany were taken too seriously.[7]


The Allies saw the Dresden operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which United States Air Force reports, declassified decades later, noted as a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers supporting the German war effort.[8][9] Several researchers later asserted that not all communications infrastructure was targeted, and neither were the extensive industrial areas located outside the city centre.[10] Critics of the bombing argue that Dresden was a cultural landmark with little strategic significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and were not proportionate to military gains.[11][12][13] Some claim that the raid was a war crime.[14] Nazi propaganda exaggerated the death toll of the bombing and its status as mass murder, and many in the German far-right have referred to it as "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs".[15][16]


In the decades since the war, large variations in the claimed death toll have led to controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians.[17] City authorities at the time estimated that there were as many as 25,000 victims, a figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council.[2][18] In March 1945, the German government ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000, and death tolls as high as 500,000 have been claimed.[19][20][21] These inflated figures were disseminated in the West for decades, notably by David Irving, a Holocaust denier, who in 1966 announced that the documentation he had worked from had been forged and that the real figures supported the 25,000 number.[22]

Wartime political responses[edit]

German[edit]

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 the raid 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 the bombing for propaganda purposes.[103] 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. ...".[104] On 16 February, the Propaganda Ministry issued a press release that claimed that Dresden had no war industries; it was a city of culture.[105] 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.[106] 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 increase [the total dead from the raid] to 202,040".[20] On 4 March, Das Reich, a weekly newspaper founded by Goebbels, published a lengthy article emphasising the suffering and destruction of a cultural icon, without mentioning damage to the German war effort.[107][108]


Taylor writes that this propaganda was effective, as it not only influenced attitudes in neutral countries at the time, but also reached the House of Commons, when Richard Stokes, a Labour Member of Parliament, and a long term opponent of area-bombing,[109] quoted information from the German Press Agency (controlled by the Propaganda Ministry). It was Stokes's questions in the House of Commons that were in large part responsible for the shift in British opinion against this type of raid. Taylor suggests that, although the destruction of Dresden would have affected people's support for the Allies regardless of German propaganda, at least some of the outrage did depend on Goebbels' falsification of the casualty figures.[110]

In literature and the arts[edit]

Kurt Vonnegut[edit]

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. The death toll of 135,000 given by Vonnegut was taken from The Destruction of Dresden, a 1963 book by Holocaust denier 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 these figures were inflated; Irving finally published a correction in The Times in a 1966 letter to the editor[173] lowering it to 25,000, in line with subsequent scholarship. Despite Irving's eventual much lower numbers, and later accusations of generally poor scholarship, the figure popularised by Vonnegut remains in general circulation.


In a 2006 Rolling Stone article, Vonnegut is quoted recalling "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."[174][175]


In the special introduction to the 1976 Franklin Library edition of the novel, he wrote:

Testing site to optimize incendiary bombs on worker housing

German Village (Dugway, UT)

(August 1945)

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

(1938–1943) – the five years of massive terror-bombings and air battles over the Chinese wartime capital

Bombing of Chongqing

the firebombing raid on Tokyo codenamed Operation Meetinghouse on 9/10 March 1945

Bombing of Tokyo (10 March 1945)

(1940 and 1941) – German air raids on British cities in which at least 40,000 died, including 57 consecutive nights of air raids just over London

The Blitz

(April and May 1942) – Air raids on English cities of cultural/historical importance, rather than military significance

Baedeker Blitz

(26 April 1937) – German/Italian air raid that sparked international outrage

Bombing of Guernica

– also called "Saturation bombing"

Carpet bombing

Biddle, Tami Davis (2009). Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945. Princeton Studies in International History and Politics.  9780691120102.

ISBN

Furlong, Ray (22 October 2003). . BBC News.

"Horrific fire-bombing images published"

(2004). Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–45. New York: Penguin.

Hastings, Max

Joel, Tony (2013). The Dresden firebombing : memory and the politics of commemorating destruction. London: I.B. Tauris.  978-1780763583.

ISBN

(31 October 2005). "Necessary or not, Dresden remains a topic of anguish". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 11 January 2022.

Keegan, Sir John

McKay, Sinclair (2020). . New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1250258014.

The Fire and the Darkness: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945

Video: "Bombing raids on Dresden and Berlin 1945"

Official Memorial

on YouTube

United Newsreel on the bombing of Dresden

US Air Force Historical Support Division – description, photos