Dresden was bombed at the request of the Soviet command. Bombing of Dresden - Memories of Hell

On this topic: To the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden

Why bombed Dresden?
Crime or necessity?

On the night of February 14, 1945, an air raid was carried out on one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, German Dresden, which practically wiped out half of the city. The city, sung by German poets, once bore the title of "Florence on the Elbe".

~~~~~~~~~~~

Before attempting to establish the significance of this air attack on the scale of history, it is necessary to understand a little about the political situation at the beginning of 1945. As you know, this year marks the end of World War II. Despite the fact that the final surrender of Germany took place only in May, at the beginning of 1945, the outcome of the largest military conflict was already becoming apparent. After the opening of the Normandy Second Front in the summer of 1944 by the Allied forces (Great Britain + USA + others) German troops lost any chance of winning. The only question that remained open was when the final surrender of Germany would come.
German position

During the fighting, Dresden was not considered a valuable city from a military point of view. By the beginning of World War II, the population of Dresden numbered 642 thousand people. By 1945, more than 200 thousand refugees and soldiers were added to this figure. There were no significant industrial enterprises on the territory of Dresden, with the exception of the largest optical plant in Germany, Zeiss Ikon A.G. and a couple of military plants (an aircraft plant and a chemical weapons plant). However, in relation to such powerful industrial cities in Germany as Cologne and Hamburg, the city did not have a great importance for the economy of the Third Reich.

Dresden was of much greater value as the cultural center of Germany. The architecturally rich capital of Saxony is filled with buildings made in the Baroque style and bearing a fraction of German history. The Zwinger Palace Ensemble and the Sammer Opera House are striking examples of luxurious architecture of the 17th and 18th centuries. Unfortunately, these and other equally valuable sights (Dresden Residence Palace, Frauenkirche, etc.), located in the city center, were practically destroyed by the carpet bombardment of the Allied troops. "Florence on the Elbe" was on fire, engulfed in a fiery tornado that sucked people into itself and was distinguishable at a distance of 200 miles.

Palace Ensemble Zwinger

Allied aviation took care of the cruelty of this raid separately. The bombing was carried out according to a clear algorithm developed by the British air force throughout the war. The first wave of aircraft carried high-explosive bombs, which were used to destroy buildings, knock out windows and destroy roofs. The second wave carried incendiary bombs that were devastating to the defenseless population. Of course, there were bomb shelters, but few managed to hide from a deadly attack there. The fire tornado burned the oxygen in the rooms, and many people simply suffocated in their traps. Those who tried to hide in the city wells were simply boiled alive. The third wave again dealt a high-explosive strike so that the fire brigades could not get close to the hearths and cope with the conflagration. The city turned into a real hell, in which people burned seconds before ash in a flame with a temperature of 1500 °.
Tragically, it was the status of the city-museum that in many ways became the cause of the catastrophe for its inhabitants. The military command of the German state decided to leave the city practically defenseless, transferring most of the air defense systems to protect strategically important fuel plants. Thus, the Allied troops did not meet significant resistance on the night of February 14th. There is evidence that American fighter jets were chasing civilians trying to save their lives. It is also said that the British used napalm, which is now on the list of prohibited weapons because of the deadly ability to maintain a flame for a long time.
The total number of victims has not yet been established. The modern official estimate is close to 25,000 victims, taking into account the bodies found and people burned to the ground in a fiery tornado. However, not everyone agrees with these data. Fascist propaganda master Joseph Goebbels, in order to multiply the scale of the catastrophe, cited his figure of 250,000 deaths. Since then, disputes on this topic have not ended to this day, and the number of deaths in different sources varies from 25,000 to half a million. It is noteworthy that one of the survivors of that night is the American writer Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote his most famous book “Slaughterhouse Number 5, or Crusade children."

- Many believe that the destruction of Dresden is the minimum revenge for the people who died in concentration camps. Maybe. But to death penalty absolutely everyone who was in the city at that time was sentenced - children, old people, animals, Nazis, me and my friend Bernard.
K. Vonnegut, American writer

Allied point of view

By February 1945, the minds of the Allies were no longer so much concerned with an early victory over Hitler as passive rivalry with the USSR. They saw their task as containing the Soviet machine, in which the leaders of Great Britain and the United States saw their potential rival in the post-war world. The destruction of half a peaceful city seemed like the perfect demonstration to the rest of the world of the fact that Britain and the United States would stop at nothing to achieve their goals.

What motivated the actions of the allies? To begin with, it is worth noting that, despite the lack of significant industrial power, Dresden was the most important transport hub, where 3 railway lines converged. The destruction of such a transport point was supposed to significantly tie down the remnants of the German army, depriving them of the possibility of an early transfer of reinforcements from one front to another. With a similar request, the USSR turned to the allies at the Yalta Conference shortly before the air raid on Dresden. But it is worth noting that the Soviet side only mentioned the bombing of Berlin and Leipzig.

- Attacks on cities, like any other act of war, are intolerable until they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified, since they aim to hasten the end of the war and save the lives of the Allied soldiers ... Personally, I believe that all the cities remaining in Germany are worth the life of one British grenadier.
A. Harris, British Strategic Air Commander

Perhaps furious with the bombing of English cities in the early years of World War II, the British wanted to get even with the Nazis to the end. Due to its island location, from the very beginning of hostilities, Great Britain was subjected to massive bombardments, and this was the hour of reckoning for them.
On the other hand, the numbers speak in favor of the allies. For example, Munich, which outnumbers Dresden by 200,000 people, had four times as many bombs dropped during the war. In the same Hamburg, which was subjected to no less monstrous bombardment, during the raid, about 42,000 inhabitants were killed out of a population of 1,700,000 people. Thus, it cannot be decisively asserted that the scale of the air attack was so huge. Fascist propaganda and the destruction of many world famous monuments culture. An important detail that justifies the British pilots (but by no means the leadership of the Air Force) is the fact that before the flight, the pilots received a briefing from above, which stated that their target was the headquarters of the German army, and Dresden itself was almost Germany's largest industrial city. Years later, all these pilots, with the exception of Commander-in-Chief Arthur Harris, repented of their actions, and the British side had a hand in the revival of Florence on the Elbe.
After 70 years

The bombing of Dresden, which shook Germany on February 14, 1945, has not been forgotten to this day. Together, Dresden was rebuilt, and the destroyed monuments of antiquity were restored. Is it possible to say that Dresden has finally revived? Certainly not. If you break a vase into small fragments and then glue it together, it will still not be the same. There are many voices these days calling for the bombing of Dresden to be a war crime. Perhaps this is true, the only thing I would like is that the death of 25,000 civilians is not used as a toy in the hands of modern political forces. After 70 years, we cannot bring innocent people back to life, we cannot recreate the works of art burned in the Dresden Gallery, we cannot finally return the city to its former appearance. We can only keep this lesson in mind and do our best to keep the skies over our cities peaceful.

For several decades there have been calls in Europe to give the bombing ancient city Dresden status of a war crime and genocide of the inhabitants. Recently a German writer, laureate Nobel Prize in Literature Günther Grass and the former editor of the British newspaper The Times, Simon Jenkins, again demanded that this be done.

They are supported by the American journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens, who said that the bombing of many German cities was carried out solely so that new aircraft crews could work out the practice of bombing.

The German historian Yorck Friedrich in his book noted that the bombing of cities was a war crime, since in the last months of the war they were not dictated by military necessity: "... it was an absolutely unnecessary bombardment in the military sense."

The number of victims of the terrible bombing that took place from February 13 to 15, 1945, is from 25,000 to 30,000 people (many sources claim more). The city was destroyed almost completely.

After the end of World War II, the ruins of residential buildings, palaces and churches were dismantled and taken out of the city. On the site of Dresden, a site was formed with marked boundaries of former streets and buildings.

The restoration of the center lasted about 40 years. The rest of the city was built much faster.

To this day, the restoration of historic buildings on Neumarkt Square is underway.

The fiery tornado drew people in ...

Before the war, Dresden was considered one of the most beautiful cities Europe. Tourist guides called it Florence on the Elbe. The famous Dresden Gallery, the second largest porcelain museum in the world, the most beautiful Zwinger palace ensemble, Opera theatre, which competed in acoustics with the La Scala theater, many churches built in the Baroque style.

Russian composers Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Alexander Scriabin often stayed in Dresden, and Sergei Rachmaninov prepared here for his world tours. The writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, who worked on the novel "Demons", lived in the city for a long time. Here his daughter Lyubasha was born.

At the end of World War II, the locals were confident that Dresden would not be bombed. It did not have military factories. There were rumors that after the war the Allies would make Dresden the capital of a new Germany.

There was practically no air defense here, so the air raid signal sounded just a few minutes before the start of the bombing.

At 22:03 on February 13, the inhabitants of the outskirts heard the rumble of approaching aircraft. At 22 hours 13 minutes 244 heavy bomber The Lancaster of the British Royal Air Force dropped the first high-explosive bombs on the city.

Within minutes, the city was engulfed in flames. The light from the giant fire was visible for 150 kilometers.

One of the pilots of the British Royal Air Force later recalled: “The fantastic light around became brighter as we approached the target. At an altitude of 6000 meters, we could distinguish in an unearthly bright glow details of the terrain that we had never seen before; For the first time in many operations, I felt sorry for the people downstairs.”

The navigator-bomber of one of the bombers testified: “I confess, I glanced down when the bombs were falling, and with my own eyes I saw a shocking panorama of the city, blazing from one end to the other. Thick smoke was visible, carried by the wind from Dresden. A panorama of a brightly sparkling city opened up. The first reaction was the thought that shocked me about the coincidence of the massacre taking place below with the warnings of the evangelists in the sermons before the war.

The plan to bombard Dresden included the creation of a fiery tornado on its streets. Such a tornado appears when the scattered fires that have arisen are combined into one huge bonfire. The air above it heats up, its density decreases and it rises.

The British historian David Irving describes the fire tornado created in Dresden by pilots of the British Royal Air Force as follows: “... the resulting fire tornado, judging by the survey, absorbed more than 75 percent of the destruction area ... Giant trees were uprooted or half broken. Crowds of fleeing people were unexpectedly caught up by a tornado, dragged through the streets and thrown directly into the fire; ripped off roofs and furniture… were thrown into the center of the burning old part of the city.

The fiery tornado reached its peak in the three-hour interval between raids, precisely at the time when the inhabitants of the city who had taken refuge in underground corridors had to flee to its outskirts.

A railroad worker who was hiding near Postal Square watched as a woman with a baby carriage was dragged through the streets and thrown into the flames. Others fleeing along the railroad embankment, which seemed to be the only escape route not littered with rubble, told how the railroad cars on open sections of the track were blown away by a storm.

Asphalt melted on the streets, and people, falling into it, merged with the road surface.

The telephone operator of the Central Telegraph left the following memories of the bombing of the city: “Some girls suggested that we go out into the street and run home. The stairs led from the basement of the telephone center building to a quadrangular courtyard under a glass roof. They wanted to get out through the main gate of the courtyard to Postal Square. I didn't like this idea; suddenly, just as 12 or 13 girls were running across the yard and fumbling with the gate, trying to open it, the red-hot roof collapsed, burying them all under it.

In a gynecological clinic, after being hit by a bomb, 45 pregnant women died. On Altmarkt Square, several hundred people who sought salvation in ancient wells were boiled alive, and the water from the wells evaporated by half.

During the bombing, approximately 2,000 refugees from Silesia and East Prussia were in the basement of the Central Station. Underground passages for their temporary residence were equipped by the authorities long before the bombing of the city. The refugees were cared for by representatives of the Red Cross, women's service units under the state labor service and employees of the National Socialist welfare service. In another city in Germany, the accumulation of such a large number of people in rooms decorated with flammable materials would not be allowed. But the Dresden authorities were sure that the city would not be bombed.

Refugees were also on the stairs leading to the platforms and on the platforms themselves. Shortly before the raid on the city by British bombers, two trains with children arrived at the station from Koenigsbrück, which was approached by the Red Army.

A refugee from Silesia recalled: “Thousands of people crowded shoulder to shoulder in the square ... Fire raged above them. At the entrances to the station, the corpses of dead children lay, they were already stacked on top of each other and taken out of the station.

According to the air defense chief of the Central Station, out of 2,000 refugees who were in the tunnel, 100 were burned alive, another 500 people suffocated in the smoke.

During the first attack on Dresden, the British Lancasters dropped 800 tons of bombs. Three hours later, 529 Lancasters dropped 1,800 tons of bombs. The losses of the Royal Air Force during the two raids amounted to 6 aircraft, 2 more aircraft crashed in France and 1 in the UK.

On February 14, 311 American bombers dropped 771 tons of bombs on the city. On February 15, American aircraft dropped 466 tons of bombs. Part of the American P-51 fighters were ordered to attack targets moving along the roads in order to increase chaos and destruction on the region's important transport network.

The commander of the Dresden rescue squad recalled: “At the beginning of the second attack, many were still crowded in the tunnels and basements, waiting for the end of the fires ... The detonation hit the basement windows. To the roar of explosions was added some new strange sound which got uglier and uglier. Something resembling the rumble of a waterfall - it was the howl of a tornado that started in the city.

Many who were in underground shelters instantly burned out as soon as the surrounding heat suddenly increased dramatically. They either turned to ashes, or melted ... "

The bodies of other dead, found in the basements, shrunken from the nightmarish heat to one meter in length.

British planes also dropped canisters filled with a mixture of rubber and white phosphorus on the city. The canisters broke on the ground, the phosphorus ignited, the viscous mass fell on the skin of people and stuck tightly. It was impossible to redeem...

One of the inhabitants of Dresden said: “The tram depot had a public toilet made of corrugated iron. At the entrance, with her face buried in a fur coat, lay a woman of about thirty, completely naked. A few yards away lay two boys, about eight or ten years old. They lay down, hugging each other tightly. Also naked... Everywhere, where the eye reached, people lay suffocated from lack of oxygen. Apparently, they tore off all their clothes, trying to make it look like an oxygen mask ... ".

After the raids, a three-mile column of yellow-brown smoke rose into the sky. A mass of ash floated, covering the ruins, towards Czechoslovakia.

In some parts of the old city, such heat was created that even a few days after the bombing it was impossible to enter the streets between the ruins of houses.

According to the report of the Dresden police, compiled after the raids, 12,000 buildings burned down in the city, “... 24 banks, 26 buildings of insurance companies, 31 trading shops, 6470 shops, 640 warehouses, 256 trading floors, 31 hotels, 26 brothels, 63 administrative buildings, 3 theaters, 18 cinemas, 11 churches, 60 chapels, 50 cultural and historical buildings, 19 hospitals (including auxiliary and private clinics), 39 schools, 5 consulates, 1 zoological garden, 1 waterworks, 1 railway depot, 19 post offices, 4 tram depots, 19 ships and barges.

On March 22, 1945, the municipal authorities of Dresden issued an official report, according to which the number of deaths recorded by that date was 20,204, and the total number of deaths during the bombing was expected to be about 25,000 people.

In 1953, in the work of the German authors “Results of the Second World War”, Major General of the Fire Service Hans Rumpf wrote: “The number of victims in Dresden cannot be calculated. According to the State Department, 250,000 people died in this city, but the actual figure of losses, of course, is much less; but even 60-100 thousand civilians who died in the fire in one night hardly fit in the human mind.

In 2008, a commission of 13 German historians commissioned by the city of Dresden concluded that approximately 25,000 people died during the bombings.

“And at the same time show the Russians…”

On January 26, 1945, Air Force Secretary Archibald Sinclair suggested bombing Dresden to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in response to his dispatch with the question: “What can be done to properly finish off the Germans during their retreat from Breslau (this city is located 200 kilometers from Dresden. "SP")?

On February 8, the High Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe informed the RAF and the US Air Force that Dresden was included in the list of targets for bombing. On the same day, the US military mission in Moscow sent an official notification to the Soviet side about the inclusion of Dresden in the list of targets.

An RAF memorandum given to British pilots the night before the attack stated: “Dresden, the 7th largest city in Germany… is by far the largest enemy area still un-bombed. In the middle of winter, with refugees heading west and troops having to be quartered somewhere, housing is in short supply as workers, refugees and troops need to be accommodated, as well as government offices evacuated from other areas. At one time widely known for its production of porcelain, Dresden has developed into a major industrial center ... The purpose of the attack is to strike the enemy where he feels it the most, behind a partially collapsed front ... and at the same time show the Russians when they arrive in the city what they are capable of Royal Air Force".

- If we talk about war crimes and genocide, then many cities in Germany were bombed. The Americans and the British developed a plan: mercilessly bomb the cities in order to a short time break the spirit of the German civilian population. But the country lived and worked under bombs,” says Vladimir Beshanov, author of books on the history of World War II. - I believe that not only the barbaric bombing of Dresden, but also the bombing of other German cities, as well as Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should be recognized as war crimes.

In Dresden, residential buildings and architectural monuments were destroyed. Large marshalling yards received almost no damage. The railway bridge over the Elbe and the military airfield, located in the vicinity of the city, remained intact.

After Dresden, the British managed to bomb the medieval cities of Bayreuth, Würzburg, Zoest, Rothenburg, Pforzheim and Welm. Only in Pforzheim, where 60,000 people lived, a third of the inhabitants died.

What will come out of another attempt to give the monstrous event the status of a war crime is unknown. So far, every year on February 13, the inhabitants of Dresden commemorate fellow citizens who died in a fiery tornado.

Vitaly Slovetsky, Free Press.

Is the largest bombing of World War II recognized as a war crime?

For several decades, calls have been heard in Europe to make the bombing of the ancient city of Dresden the status of a war crime and genocide of the inhabitants. Recently, the German writer and Nobel Prize winner in literature Günter Grass and the former editor of the British newspaper The Times Simon Jenkins again demanded this.
They are supported by the American journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens, who said that the bombing of many German cities was carried out solely so that new aircraft crews could work out the practice of bombing.
The German historian Yorck Friedrich in his book noted that the bombing of cities was a war crime, since in the last months of the war they were not dictated by military necessity: "... it was an absolutely unnecessary bombardment in the military sense."
The number of victims of the terrible bombing that took place from February 13 to 15, 1945, is from 25,000 to 30,000 people (many sources claim more). The city was destroyed almost completely.
After the end of World War II, the ruins of residential buildings, palaces and churches were dismantled and taken out of the city. On the site of Dresden, a site was formed with marked boundaries of former streets and buildings.
The restoration of the center lasted about 40 years. The rest of the city was built much faster.
To this day, the restoration of historic buildings on Neumarkt Square is underway.

The fiery tornado drew people in ...
Before the war, Dresden was considered one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Tourist guides called it Florence on the Elbe. The famous Dresden Gallery, the second largest porcelain museum in the world, the most beautiful Zwinger palace ensemble, the Opera House, which competed in acoustics with the La Scala Theater, and many churches built in the Baroque style, were located here.
Russian composers Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Alexander Scriabin often stayed in Dresden, and Sergei Rachmaninov prepared here for his world tours. The writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, who worked on the novel "Demons", lived in the city for a long time. Here his daughter Lyubasha was born.
At the end of World War II, the locals were confident that Dresden would not be bombed. It did not have military factories. There were rumors that after the war the Allies would make Dresden the capital of a new Germany.
There was practically no air defense here, so the air raid signal sounded just a few minutes before the start of the bombing.
At 22:03 on February 13, the inhabitants of the outskirts heard the rumble of approaching aircraft. At 10:13 p.m., 244 RAF Lancaster heavy bombers dropped the first high-explosive bombs on the city.
Within minutes, the city was engulfed in flames. The light from the giant fire was visible for 150 kilometers.
One of the pilots of the British Royal Air Force later recalled: “The fantastic light around became brighter as we approached the target. At an altitude of 6000 meters, we could distinguish in an unearthly bright glow details of the terrain that we had never seen before; For the first time in many operations, I felt sorry for the people downstairs.”
The navigator-bomber of one of the bombers testified: “I confess, I glanced down when the bombs were falling, and with my own eyes I saw a shocking panorama of the city, blazing from one end to the other. Thick smoke was visible, carried by the wind from Dresden. A panorama of a brightly sparkling city opened up. The first reaction was the thought that shocked me about the coincidence of the massacre taking place below with the warnings of the evangelists in the sermons before the war.
The plan to bombard Dresden included the creation of a fiery tornado on its streets. Such a tornado appears when the scattered fires that have arisen are combined into one huge bonfire. The air above it heats up, its density decreases and it rises.
The British historian David Irving describes the firestorm created in Dresden by the British Royal Air Force pilots as follows: “... the resulting firestorm, judging by the survey, absorbed more than 75 percent of the destruction area ... Giant trees were uprooted or half broken. Crowds of fleeing people were unexpectedly caught up by a tornado, dragged through the streets and thrown directly into the fire; ripped off roofs and furniture… were thrown into the center of the burning old part of the city.
The fiery tornado reached its peak in the three-hour interval between raids, precisely at the time when the inhabitants of the city who had taken refuge in underground corridors had to flee to its outskirts.
A railroad worker who was hiding near Postal Square watched as a woman with a baby carriage was dragged through the streets and thrown into the flames. Others fleeing along the railroad embankment, which seemed to be the only way of escape not littered with debris, told how the railroad cars on the open sections of the track were blown away by a storm.
Asphalt melted on the streets, and people, falling into it, merged with the road surface.
The telephone operator of the Central Telegraph left the following memories of the bombing of the city: “Some girls suggested that we go out into the street and run home. The stairs led from the basement of the telephone center building to a quadrangular courtyard under a glass roof. They wanted to get out through the main gate of the courtyard to Postal Square. I didn't like this idea; suddenly, just as 12 or 13 girls were running across the yard and fumbling with the gate, trying to open it, the red-hot roof collapsed, burying them all under it.
In a gynecological clinic, after being hit by a bomb, 45 pregnant women died. On Altmarkt Square, several hundred people who sought salvation in ancient wells were boiled alive, and the water from the wells evaporated by half.
During the bombing, approximately 2,000 refugees from Silesia and East Prussia were in the basement of the Central Station. Underground passages for their temporary residence were equipped by the authorities long before the bombing of the city. The refugees were cared for by representatives of the Red Cross, women's service units under the state labor service and employees of the National Socialist welfare service. In another city in Germany, the accumulation of such a large number of people in rooms decorated with flammable materials would not be allowed. But the Dresden authorities were sure that the city would not be bombed.
Refugees were also on the stairs leading to the platforms and on the platforms themselves. Shortly before the raid on the city by British bombers, two trains with children arrived at the station from Koenigsbrück, which was approached by the Red Army.
A refugee from Silesia recalled: “Thousands of people crowded shoulder to shoulder in the square ... Fire raged above them. At the entrances to the station, the corpses of dead children lay, they were already stacked on top of each other and taken out of the station.
According to the air defense chief of the Central Station, out of 2,000 refugees who were in the tunnel, 100 were burned alive, another 500 people suffocated in the smoke.

"The number of victims in Dresden is impossible to count"
During the first attack on Dresden, the British Lancasters dropped 800 tons of bombs. Three hours later, 529 Lancasters dropped 1,800 tons of bombs. The losses of the Royal Air Force during the two raids amounted to 6 aircraft, 2 more aircraft crashed in France and 1 in the UK.
On February 14, 311 American bombers dropped 771 tons of bombs on the city. On February 15, American aircraft dropped 466 tons of bombs. Part of the American P-51 fighters were ordered to attack targets moving along the roads in order to increase chaos and destruction on the region's important transport network.
The commander of the Dresden rescue squad recalled: “At the beginning of the second attack, many were still crowded in the tunnels and basements, waiting for the end of the fires ... The detonation hit the basement windows. Some new, strange sound was added to the roar of explosions, which became more and more muffled. Something resembling the rumble of a waterfall - it was the howl of a tornado that started in the city.
Many who were in underground shelters instantly burned out as soon as the surrounding heat suddenly increased dramatically. They either turned to ashes or melted…”
The bodies of other dead, found in the basements, shrunken from the nightmarish heat to one meter in length.
British planes also dropped canisters filled with a mixture of rubber and white phosphorus on the city. The canisters broke on the ground, the phosphorus ignited, the viscous mass fell on the skin of people and stuck tightly. It was impossible to redeem...
One of the inhabitants of Dresden said: “The tram depot had a public toilet made of corrugated iron. At the entrance, with her face buried in a fur coat, lay a woman of about thirty, completely naked. A few yards away lay two boys, about eight or ten years old. They lay down, hugging each other tightly. Also naked... Everywhere, where the eye reached, people lay suffocated from lack of oxygen. Apparently, they tore off all their clothes, trying to make it look like an oxygen mask ... ".
After the raids, a three-mile column of yellow-brown smoke rose into the sky. A mass of ash floated, covering the ruins, towards Czechoslovakia.
In some parts of the old city, such heat was created that even a few days after the bombing it was impossible to enter the streets between the ruins of houses.
According to the report of the Dresden police, compiled after the raids, 12,000 buildings burned down in the city, “... 24 banks, 26 buildings of insurance companies, 31 trading shops, 6470 shops, 640 warehouses, 256 trading floors, 31 hotels, 26 brothels, 63 administrative buildings, 3 theaters, 18 cinemas, 11 churches, 60 chapels, 50 cultural and historical buildings, 19 hospitals (including auxiliary and private clinics), 39 schools, 5 consulates, 1 zoological garden, 1 waterworks, 1 railway depot, 19 post offices, 4 tram depots, 19 ships and barges.
On March 22, 1945, the municipal authorities of Dresden issued an official report, according to which the number of deaths recorded by this date was 20,204, and the total number of deaths during the bombing was expected to be about 25,000 people.
In 1953, in the work of the German authors “Results of the Second World War”, Major General of the Fire Service Hans Rumpf wrote: “The number of victims in Dresden cannot be calculated. According to the State Department, 250,000 people died in this city, but the actual figure of losses, of course, is much less; but even 60-100 thousand people of the civilian population, who died in the fire in one night, hardly fit in the human mind.
In 2008, a commission of 13 German historians commissioned by the city of Dresden concluded that approximately 25,000 people died during the bombings.

“And at the same time show the Russians…”
On January 26, 1945, Air Force Secretary Archibald Sinclair suggested bombing Dresden to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in response to his dispatch with the question: “What can be done to properly finish off the Germans during their retreat from Breslau (this city is located 200 kilometers from Dresden. "SP")?
On February 8, the High Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe informed the RAF and the US Air Force that Dresden was included in the list of targets for bombing. On the same day, the US military mission in Moscow sent an official notification to the Soviet side about the inclusion of Dresden in the list of targets.
An RAF memorandum given to British pilots the night before the attack stated: “Dresden, the 7th largest city in Germany… is by far the largest enemy area still un-bombed. In the middle of winter, with refugees heading west and troops having to be quartered somewhere, housing is in short supply as workers, refugees and troops need to be accommodated, as well as government offices evacuated from other areas. At one time widely known for its production of porcelain, Dresden has developed into a major industrial center ... The purpose of the attack is to strike the enemy where he feels it the most, behind a partially collapsed front ... and at the same time show the Russians when they arrive in the city what they are capable of Royal Air Force".
- If we talk about war crimes and genocide, then many German cities were bombed. The Americans and the British developed a plan: mercilessly bomb the cities in order to break the spirit of the German civilian population in a short time. But the country lived and worked under bombs,” says Vladimir Beshanov, author of books on the history of World War II. - I believe that not only the barbaric bombing of Dresden, but also the bombing of other German cities, as well as Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should be recognized as war crimes.
In Dresden, residential buildings and architectural monuments were destroyed. Large marshalling yards received almost no damage. The railway bridge over the Elbe and the military airfield, located in the vicinity of the city, remained intact.
After Dresden, the British managed to bomb the medieval cities of Bayreuth, Würzburg, Zoest, Rothenburg, Pforzheim and Welm. Only in Pforzheim, where 60,000 people lived, a third of the inhabitants died.
What will come out of another attempt to give the monstrous event the status of a war crime is unknown. So far, every year on February 13, the inhabitants of Dresden commemorate fellow citizens who died in a fiery tornado.

On February 13-15, 1945, one of the worst crimes in the entire Second World War was committed. world war. Terrible primarily for their senseless cruelty. The whole city was literally burned out. Hiroshima and Nagasaki after that were only a natural continuation of barbarism, and not recognized as a crime against humanity. This city turned out to be Dresden, the cultural center of Germany, which did not have military production and was guilty of only one thing - the Russians approached it. Only one squadron of the Luftwaffe was located for some time in this city of artists and artisans, but even that was gone by 1945, when the end of Nazi Germany was a foregone conclusion. The British Royal Air Force and the US Air Force wanted to find out if they could create a fire wave ... The victims of the experiment were the inhabitants of Dresden.
"Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany, is not much smaller than Manchester. It is the largest enemy center that has not yet been bombed. In the middle of winter, when refugees are streaming west and troops need houses to stay and rest, every roof counts. Target attacks - to hit the enemy in the most sensitive place, behind the line of the already broken front, and prevent the use of the city in the future; and at the same time show the Russians, when they come to Dresden, what Bomber Command is capable of."
From an RAF memorandum for official use, January 1945.

Thousands of buildings were destroyed in the city, tens of thousands of inhabitants died. These raids have gained an enduring reputation as "the largest ever mass destruction by military equipment the raid that destroyed almost the entire old center of the architectural pearl of Europe, still remains one of the most controversial pages in the history of the Second World War. What was it: a war crime against humanity or a natural act of retaliation against the Nazis? But then it would be more logical to bomb Berlin.

“We will bomb Germany, one city after another. We will bombard you harder and harder until you stop waging war. This is our goal. We will pursue her relentlessly. City after city: Lübeck, Rostock, Cologne, Emden, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Duisburg, Hamburg - and this list will only grow, ”the British bomber commander Arthur Harris addressed the people of Germany with these words. It was this text that was distributed on the pages of millions of leaflets scattered over Germany.

The words of Marshal Harris were invariably put into practice. Day after day, newspapers issued statistical reports. Bingen - 96% destroyed. Dessau - 80% destroyed. Chemnitz - 75% destroyed. Small and large, industrial and university, full of refugees or clogged with military industry - German cities, as the British marshal promised, one after another turned into smoldering ruins. Stuttgart - 65% destroyed. Magdeburg - 90% destroyed. Cologne - 65% destroyed. Hamburg - 45% destroyed. By the beginning of 1945, the news that another German city had ceased to exist was already perceived as commonplace.

“This is the principle of torture: the victim is tortured until she does what is asked of her. The Germans were required to throw off the Nazis. The fact that the expected effect was not achieved and the uprising did not happen was explained only by the fact that such operations had never been carried out before. No one could have imagined that the civilian population would choose bombing. It’s just that, despite the monstrous scale of destruction, the probability of dying under bombs until the very end of the war remained lower than the probability of dying at the hands of an executioner if a citizen showed dissatisfaction with the regime, ”reflects the Berlin historian Jörg Friedrich.

The carpet bombing of German cities was neither an accident nor the whim of individual pyromaniac fanatics in the British or American military. The concept of a bomb war against the civilian population, successfully used against Nazi Germany, was only a development of the doctrine of the British Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, developed by him during the First World War.

According to Trenchard, in the course of an industrial war, residential areas of the enemy should become natural targets, since the industrial worker is just as much a participant in the hostilities as a soldier at the front.

Such a concept was in rather obvious contradiction with international law in force at that time. Thus, articles 24-27 of the 1907 Hague Convention expressly prohibited the bombing and shelling of undefended cities, the destruction of cultural property, as well as private property. In addition, the belligerent side was instructed to, if possible, warn the enemy about the beginning of the shelling. However, the convention did not clearly spell out a ban on the destruction or terrorization of the civilian population, apparently, they simply did not think about this method of waging war.

An attempt to prohibit the conduct of hostilities by aviation against the civilian population was made in 1922 in the draft of the Hague Declaration on the Rules of Air Warfare, but failed due to unwillingness European countries join the strict terms of the contract. Nevertheless, already on September 1, 1939, US President Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the heads of states that entered the war with a call to prevent “shocking violations of humanity” in the form of “deaths of defenseless men, women and children” and “never, under any circumstances, bombard from the air of the civilian population of undefended cities. The fact that "Her Majesty's Government will never attack civilians" was announced in early 1940 by the then British Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain.

Joerg Friedrich explains: “Throughout the first years of the war, there was a bitter struggle among the Allied generals between the proponents of point bombing and carpet bombing. The first believed that it was necessary to strike at the most vulnerable points: factories, power plants, fuel depots. The latter believed that the damage from pinpoint strikes could be easily compensated, and relied on the carpet destruction of cities, on the terrorization of the population.

The concept of carpet bombing looked very advantageous in light of the fact that it was for such a war that Britain had been preparing for the entire pre-war decade. Lancaster bombers were designed specifically to attack cities. Especially under the doctrine of total bombing in Great Britain, the most perfect production of incendiary bombs among the warring powers was created. Having established their production in 1936, by the beginning of the war, the British Air Force had a stock of five million of these bombs. This arsenal had to be dropped on someone's head - and it is not surprising that already on February 14, 1942, the British Air Force received the so-called "Area Bombing Directive".

The document, which granted then Bomber Commander Arthur Harris unlimited rights to use bombers to suppress German cities, said in part: “From now on, operations should be focused on suppressing the morale of the enemy civilian population - in particular, industrial workers.”

On February 15, RAF Commander Sir Charles Portal was even less ambiguous in a note to Harris: that the targets should be housing estates, not shipyards or aircraft factories." However, it was not worth convincing Harris of the benefits of carpet bombing. As early as the 1920s, while commanding British air power in Pakistan and then in Iraq, he gave orders to firebomb unruly villages. Now the bombing general, who received the nickname of the Butcher from his subordinates, had to run the machine of aerial killing not on the Arabs and Kurds, but on the Europeans.

In fact, the only opponents of the raids on cities in 1942-1943 were the Americans. Compared to the British bombers, their planes were better armored, had more machine guns and could fly farther, so the American command believed that they were able to solve military problems without the massacre of the civilian population. “American attitudes changed dramatically after the raid on the well-defended Darmstadt, as well as on the bearing factories in Schweinfurt and Regensburg,” says Joerg Friedrich. — You see, there were only two bearing production centers in Germany. And the Americans, of course, thought that they could strip the Germans of all their bearings with one blow and win the war. But these factories were so well protected that during a raid in the summer of 1943, the Americans lost a third of the machines. After that, they simply did not bomb anything for six months. The problem was not even that they could not produce new bombers, but that the pilots refused to fly. A general who loses more than twenty percent of his personnel in a single sortie begins to experience problems with the morale of the pilots. This is how the school of area bombing began to win." The victory of the school of total bomb war meant the rise of the star of Marshal Arthur Harris. Among his subordinates, there was a popular story that once the car of Harris, who was driving at an excess of speed, was stopped by a policeman and advised to observe the speed limit: “Otherwise you can accidentally kill someone.” “Young man, I kill hundreds of people every night,” Harris allegedly replied to the policeman.

Obsessed with the idea of ​​bombing Germany out of the war, Harris spent days and nights in the Air Ministry, ignoring his ulcer. For all the years of the war, he was only on vacation for two weeks. Even the monstrous losses of his own pilots - during the war years, the loss of British bomber aircraft amounted to 60% - could not make him retreat from the idefix that had engulfed him.

“It is ridiculous to believe that the largest industrial power in Europe can be brought to its knees by such a ridiculous tool as six hundred or seven hundred bombers. But give me thirty thousand strategic bombers and the war will end tomorrow morning,” he told Prime Minister Winston Churchill, reporting on the success of another bombing. Harris did not receive thirty thousand bombers, and he had to develop a fundamentally new way of destroying cities - the "firestorm" technology.

“Theorists of the bomb war have come to the conclusion that the enemy city is a weapon in itself - a structure with a gigantic potential for self-destruction, you just need to put the weapon into action. It is necessary to bring the wick to this barrel of gunpowder, says Jörg Friedrich. German cities were extremely susceptible to fire. The houses were mostly wooden, the attic floors were dry beams ready to catch fire. If you set fire to the attic in such a house and knock out the windows, then the fire that has arisen in the attic will be fueled by oxygen penetrating into the building through the broken windows - the house will turn into a huge fireplace. You see, every house in every city was potentially a fireplace - you just had to help it turn into a fireplace.
The optimal technology for creating a "firestorm" was as follows. The first wave of bombers dropped so-called air mines on the city - special type high-explosive bombs, the main task of which was to create ideal conditions for saturating the city with incendiary bombs. The first air mines used by the British weighed 790 kilograms and carried 650 kilograms of explosives. The following modifications were much more powerful - already in 1943, the British used mines that carried 2.5 and even 4 tons of explosives. Huge cylinders three and a half meters long poured onto the city and exploded on contact with the ground, tearing tiles from the roofs, as well as knocking out windows and doors within a radius of up to a kilometer. "Loosened" in this way, the city became defenseless against a hail of incendiary bombs that fell on it immediately after being treated with air mines. With sufficient saturation of the city with incendiary bombs (in some cases, square kilometre up to 100 thousand incendiary bombs were dropped) tens of thousands of fires broke out simultaneously in the city. Medieval urban development with its narrow streets helped the fire to spread from one house to another. The movement of fire brigades in the conditions of a general fire was extremely difficult. Particularly well engaged were cities in which there were no parks or lakes, but only dense wooden buildings dried up for centuries. Simultaneous fires of hundreds of houses created a thrust of unprecedented force over an area of ​​several square kilometers. The whole city turned into a furnace of unprecedented dimensions, sucking in oxygen from the surroundings. The resulting thrust, directed towards the fire, caused a wind blowing at a speed of 200-250 kilometers per hour, a giant fire sucked oxygen from bomb shelters, dooming even those people who were spared by the bombs to death.

Ironically, the concept of "firestorm" Harris peeped from the Germans, Jörg Friedrich continues to tell with sadness. “In the autumn of 1940, the Germans bombed Coventry, a small medieval town. During the raid, they covered the city center with incendiary bombs. The calculation was that the fire would spread to the motor factories located on the outskirts. In addition, fire trucks were not supposed to be able to drive through the burning city center. Harris took this bombing as an extremely interesting innovation. He studied its results for several months in a row. No one had carried out such bombings before. Instead of bombarding the city with land mines and blowing it up, the Germans carried out only a preliminary bombardment with land mines, and the main blow was inflicted with incendiary bombs - and achieved fantastic success. Encouraged by the new technique, Harris attempted a completely similar raid on Lübeck, a city almost the same as Coventry. Small medieval town,” says Friedrich.

It was Lübeck that was destined to become the first German city to experience the "firestorm" technology. On the night of Palm Sunday 1942, 150 tons of high-explosive bombs were poured into Lübeck, cracking the tiled roofs of medieval gingerbread houses, after which 25,000 incendiary bombs rained down on the city. The Lübeck firefighters, who understood the scale of the disaster in time, tried to call for reinforcements from neighboring Kiel, but to no avail. By morning the center of the city was a smoking ashes. Harris was triumphant: the technology he had developed had borne fruit.

The logic of the bomb war, like the logic of any terror, required constant increase the number of victims. If until the beginning of 1943 the bombing of cities did not take away more than 100-600 people, then by the summer of 1943 the operations began to sharply radicalize.

In May 1943, four thousand people died during the bombing of Wuppertal. Just two months later, during the bombing of Hamburg, the number of victims crept up to 40 thousand. The chances for city dwellers to perish in the fiery nightmare increased at an alarming rate. If earlier people preferred to hide from the bombings in the basements, now, with the sounds of air raids, they increasingly ran to the bunkers built to protect the population, but in few cities the bunkers could accommodate more than 10% of the population. As a result, people fought in front of bomb shelters not for life, but for death, and those killed by the bombs were added to those crushed by the crowd.

The fear of being bombed reached its peak in April-May 1945, when the bombings reached their peak intensity. By this time, it was already obvious that Germany had lost the war and was on the verge of surrender, but it was during these weeks that the most bombs fell on German cities, and the number of deaths among the civilian population in these two months amounted to an unprecedented figure - 130 thousand people.

The most famous episode of the bombing tragedy in the spring of 1945 was the destruction of Dresden. At the time of the bombing on February 13, 1945, there were about 100,000 refugees in the city with a population of 640 thousand people.

Other big cities in Germany were terribly bombed and burned. In Dresden, not even a single glass had cracked before. Every day, sirens howled like hell, people went into the basements and listened to the radio there. But the planes always went to other places - Leipzig, Chemnitz, Plauen and all sorts of other points.
The steam heating in Dresden was still whistling merrily. The trams rang. The lights came on when the switches were flipped. There were restaurants and theaters. The zoo was open. The city mainly produced drugs, canned food and cigarettes.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five.

“Most Americans have heard a lot about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but few know that more people died in Dresden than were destroyed in any of these cities. Dresden was an Allied “experiment”. They wanted to find out if it was possible to create a firestorm by dropping thousands of incendiary bombs on the city center. Dresden was a city of priceless cultural treasures that were untouched until this point in the war. The bombardment set the entire city on fire, creating hurricane winds that fanned the flames even more. The asphalt melted and floated through the streets like lava. When the air attack was over, it was found that about 100,000 people had died. To prevent the spread of disease, the authorities burned the remains of tens of thousands of people in grotesque funeral pyres. Dresden had no military significance, and when it was bombarded, the war was almost already won. The bombing was only strengthened the opposition to Germany and cost more the lives of allies. I sincerely ask myself, was the bombing of Dresden a war crime? Was it a crime against humanity? What were ... guilty of the children who died the most terrible of deaths - burning alive.
David Duke, American historian.

The victims of the barbaric bombardments were by no means only and not so much Wehrmacht soldiers, not SS troops, not NSDAP activists, but women and children. By the way, Dresden at that time was flooded with refugees from eastern parts Germany, which had already been captured by units of the Red Army. People who feared the “barbarism of the Russians” rushed west, relying on the humanism of the other members anti-Hitler coalition. And they died under the bombs of the allies. If it was still possible to calculate the number of Dresdeners killed during the bombing with relative accuracy, based on the records of house books and passport offices, then it was not at all possible to identify the refugees and find out their names after the raids, which led to great discrepancies. An international research group of historians in 2006-2008 was the last to conduct a "verification of numbers". According to the data they published, as a result of the bombings of February 13-14, 1945, 25 thousand people died, of which about 8 thousand were refugees. More than 30,000 people received injuries and burns of varying severity.

According to Allied intelligence, by February 1945, 110 Dresden enterprises served the needs of the Wehrmacht, thus being legitimate military targets that were to be destroyed. More than 50 thousand people worked for them. Among these goals are various enterprises for the production of components for the aircraft industry, a poison gas factory (Hemische fab Goye), a Lehmann anti-aircraft and field guns plant, Zeiss Ikon, the largest optical-mechanical enterprise in Germany, as well as enterprises that produced X-ray machines and electrical equipment (“ Koch and Sterzel"), gearboxes and electrical measuring instruments.

The operation to destroy Dresden was to begin with an air raid by the 8th US Air Force on 13 February, but bad weather over Europe prevented American aircraft from participating. In this regard, the first blow was delivered by British aircraft.

On the evening of February 13, 796 Lancaster aircraft and nine Haviland Mosquitos bombed in two waves, dropping 1,478 tons of high-explosive and 1,182 tons of incendiary bombs. The first attack was carried out by the 5th RAF Group. The guidance planes marked the orientation point - the football stadium - with burning checkers. All bombers flew through this point, then fanned out along predetermined trajectories and dropped bombs after a certain time. The first bombs fell on the city at 22.14 CET. Three hours later, a second attack took place, carried out by the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 8th groups of the British Air Force. The weather had improved by then, and 529 Lancasters dropped 1,800 tons of bombs between 1:21 and 1:45. Smoke and flames filled our basement, the lights went out, the wounded screamed terribly. Overwhelmed by fear, we began to make our way to the exit. Mom and older sister were carrying a large basket with twins. I held my younger sister with one hand, grabbed my mother's coat with the other ... It was impossible to recognize our street. Everywhere you look, fire is raging. The fourth floor where we lived was no more. The ruins of our house were burning with might and main. In the streets, refugees with carts, some other people, horses rushed past burning cars, and everyone was screaming. Everyone was afraid to die. I saw wounded women, children and old people who were trying to get out of the fire and rubble ... We burst into some kind of basement, chock-full of wounded and simply terrified women and children. They moaned, wept, they prayed. And then the second raid began,” recalls Lothar Metzger, who turned 12 on the day of the bombing of Dresden.

On February 14, from 12.17 to 12.30, 311 American Boeing B-17 bombers dropped 771 tons of bombs, targeting railroad depots. On February 15, another 466 tons of American bombs fell on Dresden. But this was not the end. On March 2, 406 B-17 bombers dropped 940 tons of explosive and 141 tons of incendiary bombs. On April 17, 580 B-17 bombers dropped 1,554 tons of explosive and 165 tons of incendiary bombs.

“Moans and cries for help were heard in the firestorm. Everything around turned into a continuous hell. I see a woman - she is still before my eyes. In her hands is a bundle. This is a child. She runs, falls, and the baby, having described an arc, disappears in a flame. Suddenly, two people appear right in front of me. They shout, wave their hands, and suddenly, to my horror, I see how one by one these people fall to the ground (today I know that the unfortunate ones became victims of lack of oxygen). They lose consciousness and turn to ash. Crazy fear seizes me, and I keep repeating: "I do not want to burn alive!" I don't know how many other people got in my way. I know only one thing: I must not burn out, ”these are the memories of Margaret Freyer, a resident of Dresden. From the heavy fire that raged in the rooms and courtyards, glass burst, copper melted, marble turned into lime chips. People in houses and a few bomb shelters, in basements died of suffocation, burned alive. While dismantling the ruins that smoldered even a few days after the raids, rescuers here and there stumbled upon “mummified” corpses, which crumbled to dust when touched. Melted metal structures retained dents, contours reminiscent of human bodies.

Those who managed to escape from the multi-kilometer fire engulfed in flames rushed to the Elbe, to the water, to coastal meadows. “Sounds like the clatter of giants were heard above. It exploded multi-ton bombs. The giants stomped and stomped... A fiery hurricane raged above. Dresden has become a complete conflagration. The flame devoured all living things and in general everything that could burn ... The sky was completely covered with black smoke. The angry sun looked like a nail head. Dresden was like the moon - only minerals. The stones were hot. Death was all around. Everywhere lay something that looked like short logs. These were people caught in a fiery hurricane... It was assumed that the entire population of the city, without any exception, should be destroyed. Anyone who dared to stay alive spoiled the case ... The fighters emerged from the smoke to see if anything was moving below. The planes saw that some people were moving along the river bank. They poured them with machine guns... All this was conceived to end the war as soon as possible," Kurt Vonnegut describes the events of February 13-14, 1945 in Slaughterhouse Five.

This documentary and largely autobiographical novel (Vonnegut, who fought in american army, was in a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, from where he was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945) in the USA long time not published in its entirety, being censored.

According to a Dresden police report compiled shortly after the raids, 12,000 buildings burned down in the city. The report stated that "24 banks, 26 insurance company buildings, 31 trading shops, 6470 stores, 640 warehouses, 256 trading floors, 31 hotels, 63 administrative buildings, three theaters, 18 cinemas, 11 churches, 60 chapels, 50 cultural and historical buildings, 19 hospitals, 39 schools, one railway depot, 19 ships and barges. In addition, the destruction of military targets was reported: the command post at the Taschenberg Palace, 19 military hospitals and many less significant military buildings. Almost 200 factories suffered damage, of which 136 suffered serious damage (including several Zeiss enterprises), 28 medium damage and 35 minor damage.

The US Air Force documents say: “23% industrial buildings and 56% non-industrial buildings (excluding residential). From total number 78 thousand residential buildings are considered destroyed, 27.7 thousand are considered uninhabitable, but repairable ... 80% of city buildings were destroyed to varying degrees and 50% of residential buildings were destroyed or seriously damaged ... "As a result of raids on The city's railway infrastructure suffered heavy damage, which completely paralyzed communications, railway bridges across the Elbe, vital for the transfer of troops, remained inaccessible for several weeks after the raid, official allied reports state.

The old market square, over the centuries former place trade and mass celebrations, then became a giant crematorium. There was no time and no one to bury and identify the dead, besides, the threat of an epidemic was high. Therefore, the remains were burned using flamethrowers. The city was covered with ashes, like snow. "Hoarfrost" lay on gentle banks, he sailed on the waters of the magnificent Elbe. Every year, since 1946, on February 13, throughout East and Central Germany, they called in memory of the victims of Dresden church bells. The chime lasted 20 minutes - exactly the same as the first attack on the city lasted. This tradition soon spread to West Germany, the zone of occupation of the Allies. In an attempt to reduce the undesirable morale effect of these actions, On February 11, 1953, the US State Department issued a report that the bombing of Dresden was allegedly undertaken in response to persistent requests from the Soviet side. during the Yalta Conference. (The Conference of the Allied Powers was held on February 4-11, 1945 - the second of three meetings of the leaders of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, the USSR, the USA and Great Britain, dedicated to the establishment of the post-war world order. At it, a fundamental decision was made to divide Germany into occupation zones.) Assume that the action, which has no analogues in terms of power and quantity of equipment, requiring the most precise coordination and careful planning, was an “improvisation” born during the Yalta negotiations and implemented in a few days, only a biased amateur can.

The decision to carpet bomb Dresden was made in December 1944. (In general, coordinated Allied raids were planned in advance, with all the details discussed.) The USSR did not ask the Anglo-American allies to bomb Dresden. This is evidenced by the declassified minutes of the meetings of the Yalta Conference, demonstrated in documentary"Dresden. Chronicle of the Tragedy", filmed in 2005 - on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the capital of Saxony by the Rossiya TV channel. In the minutes of the conference, Dresden is mentioned only once - and then in connection with the drawing of a dividing line between the Anglo-American and Soviet troops. And here what the Soviet command really asked for was to strike at the railway junctions of Berlin and Leipzig due to the fact that the Germans had already transferred against the Red Army from western front about 20 divisions and were going to transfer about 30 more. It was this request that was presented in writing to Roosevelt and Churchill. At the conference in Yalta, the Soviet side asked to bomb railway junctions, not residential areas. This operation was not even coordinated with the Soviet command, whose forward units were in the immediate vicinity of the city.

"It is characteristic that in school textbooks The GDR and the FRG presented the "Dresden theme" in different ways. IN West Germany the fact of the destruction of the Saxon capital by Allied air raids is presented in the general context of the history of the Second World War and is interpreted as an inevitable consequence of the struggle against National Socialism and did not stand out, so to speak, in a special page in the study of this period of the war...”, - says the expert of the Ministry of Culture and Science of Saxony Dr. Norbert Haase.

There is no single monument in the historical center of Dresden, dedicated to events February 13-14, 1945. But many of the restored buildings have plaques and other “identification marks” telling about what happened. The restoration of the ensemble of old Dresden began shortly after the war with the active participation of Soviet specialists and partly with Soviet money . “The Dresden Opera House, the Dresden Gallery - Zwinger, the famous Brühl Terrace, the Albertinum and dozens of other architectural monuments have risen from the ruins. It can be said that the most important historical buildings on the banks of the Elbe and in the Old Town were built anew during the existence of the GDR. Restoration continues to this day,” says Norbert Haase.

Dresden was destroyed by Anglo-American aircraft.
The first bombs were dropped by British planes on February 13, 1945 at 22:14 CET. On February 14, new air strikes were carried out. As a result of the bombardments, alternately high-explosive and incendiary bombs, a giant fiery tornado was formed, the temperature in which reached 1500 ° C.
By February 15, "Florence on the Elbe" turned into a city of ruins, sharing the sad fate of hundreds of Soviet, Polish and German cities.

Dresden shared, one of the most recent, the fate of all the large and medium-sized cities in Germany that came under carpet bombing. But it was the name "Dresden" that became a household name for the senseless destruction of civilians and cultural values, just as "Hiroshima" is forever associated with the atomic apocalypse.
Why Dresden? Obviously, as the most egregious example: the very end of the war, a hospital city, a huge number of civilian casualties, and also because Dresden is one of the cultural symbols of Europe. "Florence on the Elbe", the brilliant capital of the Saxon kingdom, sung in the paintings of Bellotto. Everything that had been built there for centuries was erased in a few hours of targeted bombing.

For those who need more details, there is a very informative Wikipedia article on "Dresden Bombing".

The Allies almost did not bomb industrial facilities, and those minor damages that were almost accidentally inflicted on some factories were quickly eliminated, workers were replaced by prisoners of war if necessary, thus the military industry functioned surprisingly successfully. “We were furious,” recalls Forte, “when, after the bombing, we came out of the cellars into the ruins of the streets and saw that the factories where tanks and guns were produced remained untouched. In this state they remained until the very surrender.

Therein lies a mystery that we, perhaps, will never discover - why the Anglo-American aircraft for a long time refused to strike at the Nazi Reich in its most vulnerable place - to bomb the equipment of the oil industry, which supplies fuel to the hordes of German tanks driving across the Russian expanses. Until May 1944, only 1.1 percent of all bombing fell on these targets. The clue may be the fact that these facilities were built with Anglo-American funds, capital was involved in the construction Standard Oil of New Jersey and English Royal Dutch Shell . Not least of all was the interest of the Western Allies, who wanted to provide the German tanks with enough fuel to keep the Russians away from their borders long enough.

Main station, 1944

Frauenkirche, the bell church, a baroque masterpiece, a symbol of the city. Around 1940-44:

She also:



1943, Hofkirche:

1940s:

1944 The owner of the slide scratched Nazi symbols from the flags:




Old Market (Altmarkt):

Dresden Castle:

Another view of the castle through the Zwinger:

New City Hall:

View of the city from the Elbe:



Dresden tram line 25:

All this lived out its last days ...

*****
... At the beginning of 1945, Allied aircraft sowed fromdeath and destruction over all of Germany - but the old Saxon Dresden remained an island of calm amidst this nightmare.

Famous as a cultural center that did not have military production, it was virtually unprotected from strikes from the sky. Only one squadron was located at one time in this city of artists and artisans, but even that was gone by 1945. Outwardly, one could get the impression that all the belligerents gave Dresden the status of " open city"according to some kind of gentlemen's agreement.

By Thursday, February 13, the influx of refugees fleeing the advance of the Red Army, which was already 60 miles away, had increased the city's population to more than a million. Some of the refugees went through all sorts of horrors and were brought to a near death, which forced later researchers to think about the proportions of what Stalin knew and was subject to, and what was done without his knowledge or against his will.

There was a carnival. Usually these days the carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden. This time the atmosphere was rather gloomy. Refugees arrived every hour, and thousands of people were camped right on the streets, barely covered in rags and shivering from the cold.

However, people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was gloomy, circus performers gave performances in crowded halls, where thousands of unfortunate people came to forget for a while about the horrors of war. Groups of well-dressed girls tried to strengthen the spirit of the exhausted with songs and poems. They were greeted with half-sad smiles, but the mood rose ...

No one at that moment could have imagined that in less than a day these innocent children would be burned alive in a fiery tornado created by "civilized" Anglo-Americans.

When the first alarm signals marked the beginning of the 14-hour hell, the Dresdeners obediently dispersed to their shelters. But - without any enthusiasm, believing that the alarm is false. Their city had never before been attacked from the air. Many would never have believed that a great Democrat like Winston Churchill, along with another great Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would decide to execute Dresden with an all-out bombing.

this is what Dresden looked like shortly after the bombing.

1946:

Altstadt, the old town, has become like this...

The ruins of the famous Frauenkirche in 1946:

After the bombing, the huge church-bell still stood for several hours, radiating unbearable heat for dozens of meters around it. But then it still collapsed.

The GDR authorities acted very wisely by conserving these ruins as a monument to the victims of the war.

When the time came, this symbol of the city was restored, yes,
that every surviving stone returned to its place.
Although the monument is 80% recreated from new materials, its language does not dare to call it a "remake".

All the ruins, except for valuable architectural monuments, were dismantled in the 1950s.




Surprisingly, in the most destroyed cities of Europe, ancient temples turned out to be the most intact. Probably, then they built stronger. It seems to be the Hofkirche tower:




The whole castle burned out and these ruins began to be restored, it seems, only in the late 1980s:




A tram among the ruins, very reminiscent of the post-war Koenigsberg-Kaliningrad:

Railway station:




Vienna Square:

These ruins will stand for a long time yet:

The restoration of the historic center of Dresden has been going on for more than 60 years
and will probably take several more decades.
In the 2000s, the authorities moved from the restoration of individual monuments to the reconstruction of entire neighborhoods. The largest project was the construction "from scratch"
the historic district of the New Market (Neumarkt) around the restored Frauenkirche.