“The bombing attacks on Essen, Cologne, Mannheim, Lubeck, Hamburg, Pforzheim: should they all be classified as war crimes as well? Or were they legitimate targets? If so, why then was Dresden exceptional?”
By Sinclair McKay
WAS THE BOMBING of Dresden in 1945 a war crime? Seventy-five years after the Allied attack that made this city – deep in eastern Germany – a by-word for annihilation, the question has lost none of its heat or bitterness.
As the author of a new book on the subject, I have been made excruciatingly aware both through research and from critical reaction just how much passion the arguments still generate. Here was a city of beautiful baroque architecture and art, of pretty lanes and squares, of cathedrals and galleries and streets suffused with music; Dresden had been described as “The Florence of the Elbe.”
In the years and decades before the war, the city had always welcomed substantial numbers of American and English residents; and it was partly for this reason that even throughout the darkness of Nazism, Dresdeners imagined that the Allies would never have wanted to target a city that had been so historically cherished.
Indeed, the city authorities never bothered constructing purpose-built bomb shelters. Instead, when the air raid sirens howled – falsely and neurotically most nights – large numbers of citizens trooped down to brick cellars, which had been knocked through and joined to form one dense maze or warren under the streets. There were women with small children; and the arthritic elderly.
In February 1945, the city was also teeming with rural refugees, who had fled from the eastern onslaught from the Red Army. Moving in the opposite direction were Wehrmacht troops and materiel.
Feb. 13, 1945 was Shrove Tuesday, a day of carnival for the city’s children. They dressed up in a variety of colourful costumes, bringing a little cheer to adults who lived in daily fear of the approaching Soviets. Yet the horror that came that night 1945 was not in any way anticipated.
The air raid sirens started at 9:40 p.m. Thousands of people made their way down to those sparse cellars – having hauled their children from their beds.
One witness remembered the deep musical note of the approaching planes. The RAF filled the skies with 796 bombers, which flew over in two waves. The first bombardment took a little over 25 minutes, and was hideously effective – smashing buildings and sparking wild conflagrations.
On the crisp still night, the fires took a hold and flame quickly joined with flame, building by building, street by street. With the first wave gone, Dresdeners assumed that the attack was over; but even as they tried fruitlessly to fight the fast spreading inferno, there was disbelief as the alarms sounded once more – and at 1 a.m., a fresh wave of bombers unleashed incendiaries that further stoked a monstrous firestorm. A tower of searing light reaching high up into the dark.
Anyone on the melting streets near this terrifying freak of physics found themselves being tugged into the maw of a fire tornado that rose a mile into the sky. And those in those cramped brick cellars beneath were either gradually poisoned by seeping carbon monoxide, crushed by falling masonry, or simply baked. In the course of one night, 25,000 people were killed. Countless others were hideously wounded and burned. Extraordinarily, the hospitals stayed open.
Those who survived wandered dazed the following day amid the seething rubble of the vanished city. So deep in shock were they that some barely registered yet another raid – this time from American bombers, targeting the railways, but in that murky twilight sky of ash, hitting targets elsewhere too.
Kurt Vonnegut, a young prisoner-of-war forced in the aftermath to excavate seared and mummified corpses from those brick tombs, gave the subject literary immortality some 25 years later in his novel Slaughterhouse Five.
The suggestion that the attack on Dresden was ‘terror bombing’ originated with a U.S. reporter two days later, who used the phrase uncritically. The idea very quickly took root; and even Winston Churchill wrote an anguished memo to Bomber Command, as if he had somehow not been privy to its plans.
Meanwhile, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, announced that the death toll was 250,000; the clear implication was that the Allies were every bit as steeped in innocent blood as the Nazis. For many in Britain and America today, when it comes to Dresden, that idea still holds firm. The city was essentially defenceless and full of refugees; how could the bombing be anything other than a crime?
But the term ‘war crime’ has a legal precision, and there are layers of complexity. For a start, Dresden really did have military significance. The city was filled with as many as 200 factories that were engaged in skilled precision work on optical instruments and weaponry: vital work. It was also a serious transport hub, both road and rail, and vast numbers of German soldiers were moving through on their way to the eastern front.
The bombers had their targets; and these were indeed industrial. Moreover: there were observers at the Yalta Conference days beforehand who were there when Stalin specifically requested that Dresden be targeted, in order to aid Soviet forces.
The Nazis, although flailing, were still fighting with real venom. It seemed as though they might never give up. One of the reasons for such a heavy attack was the hope that it would help extinguish morale throughout the nation; and bring the war to a speedier conclusion.
That the bombing of Dresden was an atrocity is unquestionable. The planners in Britain’s War Office knew of the huge numbers of refugees. Their idea was to create chaos in the streets, thus disrupting troop movements. The coldness of the idea – terrorizing the most vulnerable of citizens – is utterly repellent.
But all area bombing is repellent. The curious thing about Dresden having become a metonym for the bombing war is that it has drawn attention away from other devastated German cities. The bombing attacks on Essen, Cologne, Mannheim, Lubeck, Hamburg, Pforzheim, throughout the conflict: should they all be classified as war crimes as well? Or were they legitimate targets? If so, why then was Dresden exceptional?
The February raids were not the last time Dresden was targeted. There were further American missions in March and April 1945. These were not malicious or vengeful; they – like the previous raids – were aimed at crippling transport.
All of this matters because remembrance in Dresden is itself a constant battlefield, even now. In the city these days, there is concern about right-wing extremists’ claims that the nightmare of the bombing was equivalent to the Holocaust; Dresdeners themselves want no part of that argument.
The city has been exquisitely rebuilt; the 18th century Frauenkirche, a baroque masterpiece comprehensively demolished, now stands proudly again, perfectly reproduced in every detail. Every year, the events of Feb. 13 1945 are commemorated across the city, with performances of the Dresden Requiem, and the city’s church bells ringing out. Candles are lit for the dead. Those who gather to remember do so because by keeping the memory burning, they might help ensure that no such horror can happen again. The accent is on reconciliation. Dresden is a perfect example of why history is not some dusty academic exercise but is instead electrically alive and vitally important for all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sinclair McKay is the bestselling author of The Secret Lives of Codebreakers and The Secret Listeners for Aurum, as well as several other books. Sinclair is a literary critic for the Telegraph and The Spectator and for three years was a judge of the Encore Prize, awarded annually for best second novel. He lives in the shadow of Canary Wharf in east London. His new book, The Fire and The Darkness: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, will be published by St. Martin’s Press on Feb. 4, 2020.
