dresden before and after bombingdresden before and after bombing

The death toll for that night is included in the overall estimated total of 37,000 for the series of raids. Looking at photographs of Dresden after the attack, in which the few buildings still standing are completely gutted, it seems improbable that only 35,000 of the million or so WebThe 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. Bombing of Dresden in World War II At 21:59 the Local Air Raid Leadership confirmed that the bombers were in the area of Dresden-Pirna. 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. [98] 35,000 people were registered with the authorities as missing after the raids, around 10,000 of whom were later found alive.[98]. Dresden: The World War The bombing killed more than25,000. 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. [27] That evening Churchill asked the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, what plans had been drawn up to carry out these proposals. Far more than any other military action that preceded the actual occupation of Germany itself, these attacks left the German people with a solid lesson in the disadvantages of war. We strive for accuracy and fairness. Web1955 A view from city hall over the cleared former city center. A few months before the end of Second World War, the city of Dresden was bombed. 1179. 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. "Timewitnesses", moderated by Tom Halloway, Margaret Freyer, survivor, cited in Cary, John. [9], The second of the five points addresses the prohibition in the Hague Conventions, of "attack or bombardment" of "undefended" towns. On 13-14 February, Dresden commemorates the 70th anniversary of the 1945 Allied firebombing, which left the vast majority of the city devastated. "The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany" (SOA), HMSO (1961) vol 3 pp. Updated August 19, 2022 Less than three months before Germany surrendered in World War II, the Allies' four-day firebombing of Dresden leveled the city center and killed 25,000 people, mostly civilians. Dresden [9], 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. [117][118], 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:[119]. 8, Op. It also contained all of the worst from Germany during the Nazi period. WebBrowse 1,574 dresden bombing photos and images available, or search for world war ii to find more great photos and pictures. Alternatively, the report warned that the Germans might hold out until November if they could prevent the Soviets from taking Silesia. Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself continuously: "I don't want to burn to death". Dresden Bombing 06/18/2023. Dresden: The World War [60], The sirens started sounding in Dresden at 21:51 (CET). I think these three reasons probably cover the bombing. [16][17], In the decades since the war, large variations in the claimed death toll have fuelled the controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. 5 Group flying over the head of the fan (Ostragehege stadium) on prearranged compass bearings and releasing their bombs at different prearranged times.[63][64]. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. The shape and total devastation of the area was created by the bombers of No. The firebombing of Dresden was depicted in George Roy Hill's 1972 movie adaptation of Vonnegut's novel. Dresden Bottomley's list included oil plants, tank and aircraft factories and the cities of Berlin and Dresden. In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th century warfare and a symbol of destruction".[137]. ", "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. You dont need to be a history hunt to know about the most obscure and surprise bombing of the WWII in the capital of the German state of Saxony-Dresden. German guards moved them two stories down into a meat locker. Before And After But his assertion that Dresden was the Hiroshima of Germany quickly drew serious criticism, not just for its lack of evidence, but also for ignoring the Holocaust. A grandmother from Ukraine has visited her daughter, grandchildren and son-in-law in Sussex, escaping the bombing of her native city for a few precious weeks. If both were obscured, they would bomb the centre of Dresden using H2X radar. 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. During the Second World War, Britain was on summer time and. It was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Get HISTORYs most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week. Bombing of Dresden [76] In 2000, historian Helmut Schnatz found an explicit order to RAF pilots not to strafe civilians on the way back from Dresden. Leo McKinstry, "Attlee and Churchill: Allies in War, Adversaries in Peace", Atlantic Books, 2019, Ch 22. It was a terrible lesson; conceivably that lesson, both in Germany and abroad, could be the most lasting single effect of the air war.[126]. Look at Dresden Before the Bombing 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. Dresden Then came the 1969 publication of a science fiction novel called Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Web1955 A view from city hall over the cleared former city center. [9] Even after the main firebombing, there were two further raids on the Dresden railway yards by the USAAF. bomb ("German perpetrators are no victims!") 06/18/2023. February 1945. "This should be a sobering thought. [128] 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. 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. The German army was retreating on all fronts, but still resisting strongly. [135][136], 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. 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. [78] The official historical commission collected 103 detailed eyewitness accounts and let the local bomb disposal services search according to their assertions. Some business I'm in.[175]. The uncertainty this introduced is thought to amount to no more than 100 people. This led to the city council's decision to rebuild a large amount of baroque buildings in accordance to historical designs, but with modern buildings in between them. As shocking as such an enormous number of dead is, it did not stand out in the wars history of strategic bombing of cities. [125] The Survey's majority view on the Allies' bombing of German cities, however, concluded: The city area raids have left their mark on the German people as well as on their cities. [151] The "hutted camps" mentioned in the report as military targets were also not military but were camps for refugees. [d] Historian Gtz Bergander, an eyewitness to the raids, found no reports on strafing for 1315 February by any pilots or the German military and police. On the ground, however, the scale of death and devastation seemed beyond compare to witnesses like Vonnegut. Despite Irving's eventual much lower numbers, and later accusations of generally poor scholarship, the figure popularised by Vonnegut remains in general circulation. H2X aiming caused the groups to bomb with a wide dispersal over the Dresden area. [9] These factories manufactured fuses and bombsights (at Zeiss Ikon A.G.),[146] 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. [11] 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". Harris quotes as his source the Public Records Office ATH/DO/4B quoted by Lord Zuckerman "From Apes to Warlords" p. 352. Far-right politicians in Germany have sparked a great deal of controversy by promoting the term "Bombenholocaust" ("holocaust by bomb") to describe the raids. On February 13-14, 1945, American and British forces began a massive bombing in Dresden that continues to be a controversial subject to this day. (Fred Ramage, Keystone). A few months before the end of Second World War, the city of Dresden was bombed. Updated August 19, 2022 Less than three months before Germany surrendered in World War II, the Allies' four-day firebombing of Dresden leveled the city center and killed 25,000 people, mostly civilians. WebThe 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. [152] 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". But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. [70] Taylor compares this 40 per cent mix with the raid on Berlin on 3 February, where the ratio was 10 per cent incendiaries. Bombing of Dresden in World War II HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. On 23 February 1945, the Allies bombed Pforzheim and caused an estimated 20,000 civilian fatalities. 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. Pictures of Dresden Before and After the Inside The Dresden Bombing And The Apocalyptic Firestorm That Turned The City Into A Wasteland View Gallery The main attack formation followed: over 500 heavy Lancaster bombers loaded with explosives and incendiaries. Assigned to a sanitary clean-up crew after the bombing, POW Vonnegut had to dig into shelters and basements which looked like a streetcar full of people who simultaneously had heart failure. Over 1,200 heavy bombers were used in the attack. The industrial plants of Dresden played no significant role in German industry at this stage in the war". [57], The main bomber force, called Plate Rack, took off shortly after the Pathfinders. [39], According to the RAF at the time, Dresden was Germany's seventh-largest city and the largest remaining unbombed built-up area. [20][21][22] One of the main authors responsible for inflated figures being disseminated in the West was Holocaust denier David Irving, who subsequently announced that he had discovered that the documentation he had worked from had been forged, and the real figures supported the 25,000 number. 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. As the working day began early for the free citizens of Dresden, so too were their children making their way to their schools, finding out whether they were open that day, assiduous about studies even in the increasing chaos around them. [129], 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 Khler, previous chancellors, Gerhard Schrder and Angela Merkel, and the Duke of Kent. [32] This allowed Sinclair to inform Churchill on 27 January of the Air Staff's agreement that, "subject to the overriding claims" on other targets under the Pointblank Directive, strikes against communications in these cities to disrupt civilian evacuation from the east and troop movement from the west would be made. As the working day began early for the free citizens of Dresden, so too were their children making their way to their schools, finding out whether they were open that day, assiduous about studies even in the increasing chaos around them. 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. By this point in the war, the Luftwaffe was severely hampered by a shortage of both pilots and aircraft fuel; the German radar system was also degraded, lowering the warning time to prepare for air attacks. In the background is the dome of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.  Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window), Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window), Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window), Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window), Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window), Deutsche Fotothek/Picture Alliance/Getty Images, were killed in Germany's last-ditch offensive, https://www.history.com/news/dresden-bombing-wwii-allies. [155] Wing Commander H. R. Allen said, "The final phase of Bomber Command's operations was far and away the worst. Dresden Bombing United Newsreel on the bombing of Dresden, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Aerial bombardment and international law International law up to 1945, firestorms that engulfed Hamburg in July 1943, Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, blocked a demonstration of far-right organisations, Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Operation Gomorrah campaign against Hamburg, "Why Dresden was bombed - a review of the reasons and reactions". There were 200,000 incendiaries in all, with the high-explosive bombs ranging in weight from 500 to 4,000lb (230 to 1,810kg) the two-ton "cookies",[57] also known as "blockbusters", because they could destroy an entire large building or street. [169][170] 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. in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. [45], The USAF report also states that two of Dresden's traffic routes were of military importance: north-south from Germany to Czechoslovakia, and eastwest along the central European uplands. This group of 254 Lancasters carried 500 tons of high explosives and 375 tons of incendiaries ("fire bombs"). [149] Two-thirds of the remaining population reportedly fled the city after the raids.[150]. Then, visual marker aircraft swooped low to drop thousands of flares and fire-target markers. The Red Army had launched its Silesian Offensives into pre-war German territory. Then came the 1969 publication of a science fiction novel called Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Apocalypse in Dresden, February 1945 A grandmother from Ukraine has visited her daughter, grandchildren and son-in-law in Sussex, escaping the bombing of her native city for a few precious weeks. [105] Frederick Taylor states that "there is good reason to believe that later in March copies ofor 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". [106][107], 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,[108] quoted information from the German Press Agency (controlled by the Propaganda Ministry). The next set of aircraft to leave England were twin-engined Mosquito marker planes, which would identify target areas and drop 1,000-pound (450kg) target indicators (TIs)[55] that marked the target for the bombers to aim at. Dresden Bombing Germany would be forced to surrender three months later. Several researchers assert that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas which were located outside the city centre. He had witnessed the bombing as an American POW, and survived by taking shelter in a meat locker in the historic German city. [88] As a result, most people took shelter in cellars, but one of the air raid precautions the city had taken was to remove thick cellar walls between rows of buildings and replace them with thin partitions that could be knocked through in an emergency. [62] 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. John Kenneth Galbraith was among those in the Roosevelt administration who had qualms about the bombing. His enquiry reflected the importance that the Soviet Union attached to an attack on the city, following intelligence reports that Germany was moving large numbers of troops towards the Breslau Front. (Fred Ramage, Keystone). The 800-bomber raid dropped some 2,700 tons of explosives and incendiaries and decimated the German city. The American inquiry established that the Soviets, under allied agreements for the United States and the United Kingdom to provide air support for the Soviet offensive toward Berlin, had requested area bombing of Dresden to prevent a counterattack through Dresden, or the use of Dresden as a regrouping point following a German strategic retreat. The first was on 2 March 1945, by 406 B-17s, which dropped 940 tons of high-explosive bombs and 141 tons of incendiaries. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. 2023, A&E Television Networks, LLC. 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. [119] 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. [40] 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. The last group to attack Dresden was the 306th, and they finished by 12:30. 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". Around 78,000 dwellings had been completely destroyed; 27,700 were uninhabitable, and 64,500 damaged but readily repairable. [68], Primary sources disagree as to whether the aiming point was the marshalling yards near the centre of the city or the centre of the built-up urban area. [138], The bombing of Dresden has been used by Holocaust deniers and pro-Nazi polemicistsmost notably by British writer David Irvingin 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. "The Bombing of Dresden," in. [66] The German sirens sounded again at 01:05, but these were small hand-held sirens that were heard within only a block. They had heard the whump a whump of distant aerial bombings many times before. Apr 9, 2016 Ian Smith The bombing of Dresden was a British/American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, that took place during the Second World War in the European Theatre. ", "I cannot forget these terrible details. The ruins of Dresden Frauenkirche, a Lutheran church. The modern image shows the same area on February 12, 2015 (Sean Gallup). [2] An estimated 22,700[3] to 35,000[4] people were killed. Inside The Dresden Bombing And The Apocalyptic Firestorm That Turned The City Into A Wasteland View Gallery Observers noted early on that the bombing of Dresden did not only mean the death of civilians, but the destruction of a center of European culture and Baroque splendor. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. I am that person. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. The raid did not use extraordinary means but was comparable to other raids used against comparable targets. Looking at photographs of Dresden after the attack, in which the few buildings still standing are completely gutted, it seems improbable that only 35,000 of the million or so The largest, beneath the main railway station, housed 6,000 refugees. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. He claims that Winston Churchill's decision to bomb a shattered Germany between January and May 1945 was a war crime. I do not know how many people I fell over. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images They had heard the whump a whump of distant aerial bombings many times before.