On the night of Februrary 13, 1945 the first wave of RAF planes began the firebombing of Dresden. The was followed the next two days by waves of American bombers. The raids left tens of thousands of people dead and turned what had been a baroque masterpiece into a raging inferno. Now, sixty years later, Germany is divided on how to respond to this historical event. It is interesting that the UK press is following the commemorative events very closely, but there is scarcely any coverage in the US press – even though this had been a joint British-American campaign.
I’ve read two interviews that are representative of the different viewpoints. The right-wing paper Junge Freiheit comes close to endorsing the NPD’s characterization of the bombing as a "bombing holocaust". Doris Neujahr lashes out against historians that rationalize the bombing as a response to the "collective guilt" of the German nation; she accuses them of glossing over the "barbarism" of the bombing. In the interview with historian Wolfgang Schaarschmidt the view is advanced that Dresden had zero strategic value from a military standpoint, and the bombing was meant to terrorize the German people, who were entirely innocent.
Ziel waren nicht militärische oder kriegsrelevante
Einrichtungen und Soldaten, sondern die Stadt selbst, ihre zivilen Einwohner und
die Flüchtlinge, die sich in Dresden stauten. Der Feuersturm, in dem die ganze
Stadt mit Mann und Maus verbrennen sollte, war kein „Kollateralschaden“,
sondern der Zweck des Angriffs. Warum in den Medien immer wieder, zum Beispiel
zuletzt vom Spiegel, in Zusammenhang mit der Debatte um das Wort „Bombenholocaust“
von einem „konventionellen Bombenangriff“ die Rede ist, ist mir
schleierhaft.
It is hard to access material on the Junge Freiheit Web site, since they remove it after a couple of days. But the paper also maintains a Web site – Bombenkrieg.Net – that has some interesting photographs and material. The interview with Schaarschmidt can also be found here.
Meanwhile, taz has an interesting interview with British historian Frederick Taylor that has a different perspective. Dresden did indeed have a military significance and there were forced labor factories producing ammunition.
Es gab hunderte von kriegswichtigen Firmen in Dresden. Ich habe nicht
alle untersucht, das hätte zu lange gedauert. Aber ich wollte in meinem
Buch das Bild von Dresden, der unschuldigen Stadt, in der nur
kulturvolle Schöngeister lebten, korrigieren. Denn dort wurden Kugeln
und Patronen produziert. Von Zwangsarbeitern. Ich habe eine Jüdin
interviewt, die heute in Israel wohnt und damals dort arbeiten musste.
Sie können die Perspektive dieser Frau nicht ausklammern.
Taylor does talk about the "pathological" determination of RAF strategist Arthur Harris to disrupt normal life for urban dwellers in Germany and demoralize the nation trhough relentless bomging – believing that bombing alone would win the war. Tayor also makes this provocative observation: "The British were dogmatic and the Germans pragmatic in their conduct of the air war."
One of the more thoughtful pieces on the topic is by Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal, who reflects on the horror of the bombing and weight on history on the conscience of Germany while walking through Dresden today. His own thoughts are conflicted:
don’t think any decent, civilized person can look at pictures of
Dresden after the bombing without being overcome by a sense of shock.
The jagged ruins of walls emerging from fields of rubble, as far as the
eye can see or the camera record, are a testament, of a kind, to human
ingenuity. Only the long development of science and knowledge could
have achieved this. As for the funeral pyres of bodies, piled up with
their legs and arms emerging from the mass, or the corpses of the
people boiled alive in the fountains in which they had taken refuge . .
. one averts not only one’s eyes, but one’s thoughts.Yet the idea sometimes propounded by those who seek to condemn the
bombing as an atrocity equal to, and counterbalancing, Nazi
atrocities—that Dresden was some kind of city of the innocents,
concerned only with the arts and having nothing to do with the war
effort, cut off from and morally superior to the rest of Nazi
Germany—is clearly absurd. It is in the nature of totalitarian regimes
that no such innocence should persist anywhere; and it certainly didn’t
in Dresden in 1945. For example, the Zeiss-Ikon optical group alone
employed 10,000 workers (and some forced labor), all engaged—of
course—in war work. Nor had Dresden’s record been very different from
the rest of Germany’s. Its synagogue was burned down during the
orchestrated Kristallnacht of November 1938; the Gauleiter of Saxony,
who had his seat in Dresden, was the notoriously brutal and corrupt
Martin Mutschmann. The bombing saved the life of at least one man, the
famous diarist Victor Klemperer, one of the 197 Jews still alive in the
city (out of a former population of several thousand). He and the
handful of remaining Jews had been marked down for deportation and
death two days after the bombing; in the chaos after the bombing, he
was able to escape and tear the yellow star from his coat.
