Dresden, Area Bombing, German Militarism And 70 Years Of Peace

This weekend 70 years ago the south eastern German city of Dresden was firebombed by the British RAF and the American USAAF killing an estimated 25,000 people. The cynical Nazis added an extra zero to the death toll, a propaganda trick that still fools many people to this very day.

Dresden was crowded with refugees fleeing from East Prussia which was at the time was being overrun by the Soviet Army while the city was also a transport hub for Wehrmacht troops and war material heading to the front. There were a number of important war industries in the area especially lens making which was vital for a range of purposes.

While the Allies claimed they could land their bombs in a pickle barrel the reality was that to have any hope of hitting an industrial area of a city the entire city would have to be carpet bombed by wave after wave of bombers to have any hope of success.

Eventually the commander of Bomber Command Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris and his American counterpart Carl Andrew Spaatz in charge of the American 8th Air Force decided that the full fury of air attacks should be directed at relentlessly leveling every major urban area in the Third Reich to target industrial workers who were the backbone of the German armaments industry and to make millions of Germans homeless to bring about societal collapse and break the national morale of the German people.

In Christmas 1944 the "defeated" Germans had launched their last major offensive in the West sending the US Army reeling until the Battle of Bulge was ended in late January costing the Americans tens of thousands of dead and wounded. Bypassed French ports remained in Germans until the end of the war and the fighting dragged on in the Italian mountains to the south while Scandinavia remained in Nazi hands. Meanwhile he Red Army had punched through Poland liberating the death camp at Auschwitz and captured Warsaw and were rolling toward the Oder and ultimately Berlin. City after city fell with horrendous losses with division after division of the Red Army being decimated by a fanatical Nazi resistance who often fought to the last round of ammo and the last inch of ground.

The high hopes of the Allies the previous summer and autumn after D-Day and the fall of Paris were dashed by the failure of the plot to kill Hitler in July and the catastrophic failure of the Market Garden operation which could have brought about a crossing of the Rhine and collapse of the Germans in the West. No full scale crossing of the Rhine would occur until March 1945 when luck and fluke led to American troops captured the bridge at Remagen intact.

In February war weary Americans and the almost bankrupt British bewildered by continued hopeless Nazi resistance were desperate to finish the war in Europe and the Pacific while Stalin knew the Russian people could only accept appalling losses on the battlefield for so long before his leadership would be in jeopardy. The continued mass deaths of civilians and continued suffering of those imprisoned by the Nazis especially slave laborers, POWs and those surviving Jews who were being marched into the heart of the Reich by the retreating SS morally cried out for a swift end to the war.

Many believed that if carpet bombing of German cities, knowing that innocent German civilians would perish by the thousand, could hastened the collapse of the Third Reich then so be it to bring an end to the brutal slog on the ground. "Bomber" Harris infamously declared that the Germans had "sown the wind and have reaped the whirlwind."

Dresden which had long been out of range of Allied bombers in the early years of the war and had not suffered the horrors suffered by Hamburg and Berlin and other metropolises, was a beautiful city famed for its grand baroque architecture as well as its lovingly preserved medieval wooden buildings and its high culture including porcelain. The inept local Nazis in charge of the city unlike the authorities in Berlin where vast concrete bunkers saved thousands made pitiful preparations for air attack. Top Nazi officials could retreat under feet of reinforced concrete while ordinary residents made do with cellars and basements.

On the nights of 13-15 February the Allied planes unloaded enormous quantities of high explosives bombs and incendiaries. The explosive bombs leveled many buildings but more importantly blew up out windows of neighboring structures so that when the more numerous incendiaries caused countless individual fires to break out. The perfect conditions were present for a firestorm. As blazes burned out of control whole streets and entire city blocks became intense infernos consuming oxygen and causing hurricane force winds. Thousands of victims, mostly the elderly, mothers and children suffocated in the basements and cellars while people fleeing through the streets were literally roasted alive and incinerated as the flames overtook them. Some survivors were later dug out of cavities in the rubble. Many people were lifted off their feet and sucked into burning buildings. Others were caught in the melting road surface were turned into human torches and died where their contorted carbonized remains were later found. Survivors took to the river Elbe in their desperation to escape and many drowned.

When the fires died down the majority of the city was a smoking pile of rubble. Landmarks like the Dresden Frauenkirche and the Church of the Holy Trinity and the Zwinger Palace and the ancient center of the city were erased from the map but were rebuilt later when Dresden became part of Soviet controlled Eastern Europe. The expertise of the SS in incinerating bodies of Jews was utilized by Nazi officials to dispose of mounds of dead bodies. Grids of railway sleepers and vast quantities of fuel stacked with layers of the dead created Dantesque funeral pyres.

In subsequent decades the desperation of the last months of World War 2 was forgotten or overlooked by an increasingly pacifist post colonial Europe. Bomber Harris and Bomber Command became scapegoats for the "excesses" of the Allies toward the German people. The new Germany had to be rapidly rebuilt and many former Nazis who had committed atrocious crimes as well as millions of Germans who were directly or indirectly involved in the conquest of the European continent were rehabilitated.

The long tradition of Prussian militarism since the 18th century and the Nazi aggression of the 1930s and 1940s was literally burned away by the hellish bombardment of German cities which reduced an arrogantly imperialist people to the status of hobos by May 1945. Chastened by their punishment and their collective guilt for the Holocaust and the deaths of tens of millions of their victims, the German people were reborn as a highly pacifist race with progressive ideals eager to prove to the world they would never be mass murderers again. After the fall of the Berlin Wall survivors of Dresden who may have been ardent Nazis before and during the war taught their children and grandchildren to embrace liberal western tolerant values of multiculturalism which is today the ideology of the modern unified Germany.

As a result the sacrifices of 50,000 dead Allied bomber crewmen had been cruelly forgotten and denigrated. At a terrible price these young men braved flak and German Luftwaffe fighters to pound German cities, the only means to attack the Reich in the early years of the war when the German front lines were deep in Russia and later when the Germans stubbornly resisted from behind the Rhine in the West even though the war was surely lost. Bomber veterans did not receive the glory bestowed on their naval and army counterparts and it was not until 2012 until a memorial to Bomber Command crews was unveiled in London by the Queen.

The ultimate responsibility for the horrors of Dresden were Hitler and his Nazi henchmen and the German people themselves who supported him forcing the Allies to do what would have been unthinkable a few short years before. Revolting as area bombing was it cannot be disputed by any reasonable person that the horrors unleashed by the Nazis necessitated the purgatory of Dresden and other cities which resulted in an unprecedented and prosperous peace in Europe for the past 70 years.