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WHY DRESDEN?
“Other British newspapers reported similarly. In none of them was any attempt made to explain why Dresden should have been selected as the target for such a terrific concentration of force. Reference to a guide book will provide no clue. The modern city of Dresden has grown up round the medieval town, now known as the Altstadt which lies at the southern end of the bridge crossing the Elbe. In the eighteenth century Dresden became one of the great show cities of the world through the construction of a number of magnificent public buildings, all of which were erected in the Altstadt district of the city. Within a radius of half a mile from the southern end of the Augustus Bridge was built a unique group of palaces, art galleries, museums and churches—the Schloss, containing the famous Grünes Gewölbe with its priceless art treasures; the beautiful Brühl Terrasse extending along the left bank of the Elbe; the beautiful Catholic Cathedral; the domed Frauen Kirche; the Opera House; the Johanneum Museum and, above all, the famous Zwinger Museum containing one of the finest collections of pictures in the world, including among its many treasures Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, purchased by the Elector, Augustus II, in 1745, for 20,000 ducats. Within this small area, so well known to British and American travellers on the continent, there were, and could be, no munition factories or, in fact, industries of any kind. The resident population of this district was small. The main railway station of Dresden is situated a mile away to the South and the railway bridge which carries the main line to Berlin is half a mile away down the river.
The following brief details of this raid, which are now well established, are added in amplification of the contemporary report from The Times set out above.
“On the morning of the fateful February 13, 1945, fast enemy reconnaissance planes were observed flying over the city. The inhabitants of Dresden had had no experience of modern air warfare and the appearance of these planes aroused curiosity rather than apprehension. Having been for so long outside any theatre of war, the city lacked anti-aircraft defences and these planes were able to observe in complete safety all that they desired. No doubt, they observed and reported that all the roads through and around Dresden were filled with dense throngs moving westward. It is impossible, however, that these throngs could have been mistaken for troop concentrations. It was common knowledge that the German High Command had thrown in its last reserves to reinforce the crumbling battlefronts and consequently there existed no troops which could possibly be massing so far from any fighting. It was also common knowledge that a frantic orgy of murder, rape and arson was taking place in those districts of Silesia which had been overrun by the Soviet hordes. It should not have been difficult to deduce in these circumstances that many people in districts threatened by the Russian advance would decide to try to escape westwards.
“Some hours after night had fallen, about 9.30 p.m., the first wave of attacking planes passed over Dresden. The focus of the attack was the Altstadt. Terrific fires soon broke out which were still blazing when the second wave of attackers arrived shortly after midnight. The resulting slaughter was appalling, since the normal population of the city of some 600,000 had been recently swollen by a multitude of refugees, mostly women and children, their menfolk having remained behind to defend their homes. Every house in Dresden was filled with these unfortunates, every public building was crowded with them, many were camping in the streets. Estimates of their number vary between 300,000 and 500,000. There were no air raid shelters. There were, in fact no air raid defences of any kind, unless we so regard the enormous cloud of stifling black smoke which, after the first attack, covered the city and into which the second and third waves of attackers dropped their bombs. Adding a unique touch to the general horror, the wild animals in the zoological gardens, rendered frantic by the noise and glare, broke loose; it is said that these animals and terrified groups of refugees were machine-gunned as they tried to escape across the Grosser Garten by low-flying planes and that many bodies riddled by bullets were found later in this park.
“Long after the bombing crews had comfortably eaten their breakfasts and retired to rest, having carried out their orders without the loss of a single plane, Dresden remained completely hidden by a vast cloud of black smoke. Parts of the city continued to burn for days. Not one of the famous buildings in the Altstadt mentioned above escaped destruction. Fortunately some time before the raid the priceless art treasures in the Zwinger Museum, including Raphael’s masterpiece of the Virgin and Child, had been removed and hidden in a place of safety.
“A few weeks after the raid the Russian forces occupied the ruins of Dresden. It is possible to claim that this raid achieved the result of accelerating by a few days the progress of the Russian advance. This is satisfactory to some since, otherwise, the painful admission would be unavoidable that the raid had no influence whatever on the contemporary course of events.
The number of casualties will probably always remain a subject for speculation. Most of the victims were refugee women and children escaping from Silesia. The homes which they left behind them have since been confiscated and are now occupied by foreign squatters. The circumstances made it impossible for the authorities to undertake the task of trying to identify the victims. So enormous were the number of bodies that nothing could be done but to pile them on timber collected from the ruins and there to burn them.
“In the Altmarkt one funeral pyre after another disposed of five hundred bodies or parts of bodies at a time. This gruesome work went on for weeks. Estimates as to the total number of casualties vary between very wide limits. Some put the figure as high as a quarter of a million, and this figure was put forward as the probable total at the Manstein Trial in 1949, when the court was solemnly considering the charges of inhumanity brought against the German Field Marshal. The Swiss paper, Flugwehr und Technik, writes, ‘In the three great attacks on Dresden the number of dead from reliable sources is reported at 100,000.’ Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby in his preface to David Irving’s above-mentioned book accepts the estimate of 135,000. Having regard to the fact that there were at the time over a million people crowded into the city and to the complete lack of air raid shelters, this would appear an absurdly conservative estimate. General Major Hans Rumpf mentions an estimate of 250,000, but says that ‘we do not know and never shall know how many perished.’ At that time hundreds of thousands of families living in Silesia and Pomerania disappeared without trace and are no doubt dead, but it is impossible to say whether they were massacred in their homes by the advancing Red Army, were butchered on their flight by the Polish and Czech partisans operating behind the German lines, or were slaughtered in Dresden by the bombs of the R.A.F.’
“The late Father Ronald Knox once confessed himself somewhat disturbed by the thought that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima sent thousands to their death without an opportunity to offer a prayer. To the secular mind it may seem that the best that can be said for the dropping of the first atomic bomb is that sudden death literally fell from a blue sky on the doomed city. What took place there may seem far less ‘disturbing’ than what had taken place a few months before in Dresden, when dense crowds of homeless women and children had surged this way and that for hours in search of a place of safety in a strange city amid bursting bombs, burning phosphorus and falling buildings.
“In his above cited [in the 1968 edition of Veale's book] preface to David Irving’s book Air Marshal Saundby writes, ‘I am still not satisfied that I fully understand why it happened.… That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny; that it was really a military necessity few, after reading this book, will believe. It was one of those terrible things that sometimes happen in wartime, brought about by an unfortunate combination of circumstances. Those who approved it were neither wicked nor cruel, though it may well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand fully the appalling destructive power of air bombardment in the Spring of 1945.’