Bombing of Dresden

thumb|Dresden viewed from the Rathaus (city hall) in 1945, showing destructionIn four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the German city of Dresden. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than of the city centre. Up to 25,000 people were killed. Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March aimed at the city's railway marshalling yard and one smaller raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas.

Postwar discussions about whether the attacks were justified made the event a moral cause célèbre of the war. Nazi Germany's desperate struggle to maintain resistance in the closing months of the war is widely understood today, but Allied intelligence assessments at the time painted a different picture. There was uncertainty over whether the Soviets could sustain their advance on Germany, and rumours of the establishment of a Nazi redoubt in Southern Germany were taken too seriously.

The Allies saw the Dresden operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which United States Army Air Force reports, declassified decades later, noted as a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers supporting the German war effort. Several researchers later asserted that not all communications infrastructure was targeted, and neither were the extensive industrial areas located outside the city centre. Critics of the bombing argue that Dresden was a cultural landmark with little strategic significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and were not proportionate to military gains, thus amounting to a war crime.

The death toll of the bombing has been exaggerated by both Nazi and Soviet propaganda, with the post-war East German communist government presenting it as an example of "Anglo-American barbarism".

In the decades following the war, large variations in the claimed death tolls have led to controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. City authorities at the time estimated that there were as many as 25,000 victims, a figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council. In March 1945, the German government ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000, and death tolls as high as 500,000 have been claimed. These inflated figures were disseminated in the West for decades, notably by David Irving, a Holocaust denier.

Background

thumb|upright=1.35|Colourised photograph of Dresden during the 1890s with [[Dresden Frauenkirche, Augustus Bridge, and the visible]]

thumb|upright=1.35|The () in 1910 from the town hall

Early in 1945, the German offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge had been exhausted, as was the Luftwaffe's failed New Year's Day attack. The Red Army had launched its Silesian Offensives into pre-war German territory. The German army was retreating on all fronts, but still resisting. On 8 February 1945, the Red Army crossed the Oder River, with positions just from Berlin. A special British Joint Intelligence Subcommittee report, German Strategy and Capacity to Resist, prepared for Winston Churchill's eyes only, predicted that Germany might collapse as early as mid-April if the Soviets overran its eastern defences. Alternatively, the report warned that the Germans might hold out until November if they could prevent the Soviets from taking Silesia. Despite the postwar assessment, there were serious doubts in Allied intelligence as to how well the war was going for them, with fears of a "Nazi redoubt" being established, or of the Russian advance faltering. Hence, any assistance to the Soviets on the Eastern Front could shorten the war.

A large-scale aerial attack on Berlin and other eastern cities was considered under the code name Operation Thunderclap in mid-1944 but was shelved on 16 August. This was later reexamined, and the decision was made to pursue a more limited operation. The Soviet Army continued its push towards the Reich despite severe losses, which they sought to minimize in the final phase of the war. On 5 January 1945, two North American B-25 Mitchell bombers dropped 300,000 leaflets over Dresden with the "Appeal of 50 German generals to the German army and people".

On 22 January 1945, the RAF director of bomber operations, Air Commodore Sydney Bufton, sent Deputy Chief of the Air Staff Air Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley a minute suggesting that if Thunderclap was timed so that it appeared to be a coordinated air attack to aid the current Soviet offensive, then the effect of the bombing on German morale would be increased. On 25 January, the Joint Intelligence Committee supported the idea, as Ultra-based intelligence had indicated that dozens of German divisions deployed in the west were moving to reinforce the Eastern Front, and that interdiction of these troop movements should be a "high priority". Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, AOC-in-C Bomber Command, nicknamed "Bomber Harris", was known as an ardent supporter of area bombing; when asked for his view, he proposed a simultaneous attack on Chemnitz, Leipzig and Dresden. That evening, Churchill asked the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, what plans had been drawn up to carry out these proposals. Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, answered: "We should use available effort in one big attack on Berlin and attacks on Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz, or any other cities where a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the East, but will also hamper the movement of troops from the West." He mentioned that aircraft diverted to such raids should not be taken away from the current primary tasks of destroying oil production facilities, jet aircraft factories, and submarine yards.

Churchill was not satisfied with this answer and on 26 January pressed Sinclair for a plan of operations: "I asked [last night] whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in east Germany, should not now be considered especially attractive targets ... Pray, report to me tomorrow what is going to be done".

In response to Churchill's inquiry, Sinclair approached Bottomley, who asked Harris to undertake attacks on Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz as soon as moonlight and weather permitted, "with the particular object of exploiting the confused conditions which are likely to exist in the above-mentioned cities during the successful Russian advance". This allowed Sinclair to inform Churchill on 27 January of the Air Staff's agreement that, "subject to the overriding claims" on other targets under the Pointblank Directive, strikes against communications in these cities to disrupt civilian evacuation from the east and troop movement from the west would be made.

On 31 January, Bottomley sent Portal a message saying a heavy attack on Dresden and other cities "will cause great confusion in civilian evacuation from the east and hamper movement of reinforcements from other fronts". British historian Frederick Taylor mentions a further memo sent to the Chiefs of Staff Committee by Air Marshal Sir Douglas Evill on 1 February, in which Evill states interfering with mass civilian movements was a key factor in the decision to bomb the city centre. Attacking main railway junctions, telephone systems, city administration and utilities would result in "chaos". Britain had ostensibly learned this after the Coventry Blitz, when loss of this crucial infrastructure had supposedly longer-lasting effects than attacks on war plants.

During the Yalta Conference on 4 February, the Deputy Chief of the Soviet General Staff, General Aleksei Antonov, raised the issue of hampering the reinforcement of German troops from the Western Front by paralyzing the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig with aerial bombardment. In response, Portal, who was in Yalta, asked Bottomley to send him a list of objectives to discuss with the Soviets. Bottomley's list included oil plants, tank and aircraft factories and the cities of Berlin and Dresden. However, according to Richard Overy, the discussion with Antonov, recorded in the minutes, only mentions the bombing of Berlin and Leipzig. The bombing of Dresden was a Western plan, but the Soviets were told in advance about the operation.

An alternative account, by historian Martin Gilbert, is that Bletchley Park codebreaking had shown the Germans ordering large bodies of troops to move towards Breslau. When the Soviet Union were advised of this, they requested bombing raids to prevent this movement. This was received whilst Portal and Churchill were travelling to the Yalta conference. The raids were therefore authorised by Clement Attlee, the Deputy Prime Minister, and by Portal's deputy.

Military and industrial profile

thumb|European front lines during Dresden raids.

According to the RAF at the time, Dresden was Germany's seventh-largest city and the largest remaining unbombed, built-up area. Taylor writes that an official 1942 guide to the city described it as "one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich", and in 1944, the German Army High Command's Weapons Office listed 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops that were supplying the army with matériel. Nonetheless, according to some historians, the contribution of Dresden to the German war effort may not have been as significant as the planners thought.

The US Air Force Historical Division wrote a report, which remained classified until December 1978, in response to international concern about the bombing. It said that there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers in the city supporting the German war effort at the time of the raid. According to the report, there were aircraft components factories; a poison gas factory (Chemische Fabrik Goye and Company); an anti-aircraft and field gun factory (Lehman); an optical goods factory (Zeiss Ikon AG); and factories producing electrical and X-ray apparatus ( AG); gears and differentials (Saxoniswerke); and electric gauges (Gebrüder Bassler). The report also mentioned barracks, hutted camps, and a munitions storage depot.

The USAF report also states that two of Dresden's traffic routes were of military importance: north–south from Germany to Czechoslovakia, and east–west along the central European uplands. The city was at the junction of the Berlin–Prague–Vienna railway line, as well as the Munich–Breslau, and Hamburg–Leipzig lines.

The attacks

Night of 13/14 February

thumb|[[de Havilland Mosquito|Mosquito marker aircraft dropped target indicators, which glowed red and green to guide the bomber stream.]]

The Dresden attack was to have begun with a USAAF Eighth Air Force bombing raid on 13 February 1945. The Eighth Air Force had already bombed the railway yards near the centre of the city twice in daytime raids: once on 7 October 1944 with 70 tons of high-explosive bombs killing more than 400, then again with 133 bombers on 16 January 1945, dropping 279 tons of high-explosives and 41 tons of incendiaries.

thumb|left|A [[Avro Lancaster|Lancaster bomber releases a HC "cookie" and 108 "J" incendiaries over Duisburg 1944.]]

The first of the British aircraft took off at around 17:20 hours CET for the journey. This was a group of Lancasters from Bomber Command's 83 Squadron, No. 5 Group, acting as the Pathfinders, or flare force, whose job it was to find Dresden and drop magnesium parachute flares, known to the Germans as "Christmas trees", to mark and light up Dresden for the aircraft that would mark the target itself. The next set of aircraft to leave England were twin-engined Mosquito marker planes, which would identify target areas and drop target indicators (TIs) that marked the target for the bombers to aim at. The attack was to centre on the Ostragehege sports stadium, next to the city's medieval Altstadt (old town), with its congested and highly combustible timbered buildings.

The main bomber force, called Plate Rack, took off shortly after the Pathfinders. This group of 254 Lancasters carried 500 tons of high explosives and 375 tons of incendiaries ("firebombs"). There were 200,000 incendiaries in all, with the high-explosive bombs ranging in weight from the two-ton "cookies", also known as blockbusters because they could destroy The high explosives were intended to rupture water mains and blow off roofs, doors, and windows to expose the interiors of the buildings and create an air flow to feed the fires caused by the incendiaries that followed.

The Lancasters crossed into France near the Somme, then into Germany just north of Cologne. At 22:00 hours, the force heading for Böhlen split away from Plate Rack, which turned south-east toward the Elbe. By this time, ten of the Lancasters were out of service, leaving 244 to continue to Dresden.

The sirens started sounding in Dresden at 21:51 (CET). The 'Master Bomber' Wing Commander Maurice Smith, flying in a Mosquito, gave the order to the Lancasters: "Controller to Plate Rack Force: Come in and bomb glow of red target indicators as planned. Bomb the glow of red TIs as planned".

In the first attack, the first bombs were released at 22:13, the last at 22:28. The Lancasters delivered 881.1 tons of bombs, of which 57% were high explosive and 43% incendiary. The fan-shaped area that was bombed was long, and at its extreme about wide. The shape and total devastation of the area was created by the bombers of No. 5 Group flying over the head of the fan (Ostragehege stadium) on prearranged compass bearings and releasing their bombs at different prearranged times.

The second attack, three hours later, was by Lancaster aircraft of 1, 3, 6 and 8 Groups, 8 Group being the Pathfinders. By now, the thousands of fires from the burning city could be seen more than away on the ground. From the air, the second wave of bombers sighted the fires from a distance of over . The Pathfinders therefore decided to expand the target, dropping flares on either side of the firestorm, including the , the main train station, and the , a large park, both undamaged by the first raid. The German sirens sounded again at 01:05, but these were small handheld sirens that were heard within only a block. Between 01:21 and 01:45, 529 Lancasters dropped more than 1,800 tons of bombs.

14–15 February

On the morning of 14 February, 431 United States Army Air Force bombers of the Eighth Air Force's 1st Bombardment Division were scheduled to bomb Dresden near midday, and the 457 aircraft of 3rd Bombardment Division were to follow to bomb Chemnitz, while the 375 bombers of the 2nd Bombardment Division would bomb a synthetic oil plant in Magdeburg. Another 84 bombers would attack Wesel. The bomber groups were protected by 784 North American P-51 Mustangs of the Eighth Air Force's VIII Fighter Command, 316 of which covered the Dresden attack – a total of almost 2,100 Eighth Army Air Force aircraft over Saxony during 14 February. The smoke plume over Dresden by now reached and was plainly visible to the approaching raid.

thumb|USAAF [[Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers over Europe]]

Primary sources disagree as to whether the aiming point was the marshalling yards near the centre of the city or the centre of the built-up urban area. The report by the 1st Bombardment Division's commander to his commander states that the targeting sequence was the centre of the built-up area in Dresden if the weather was clear. If clouds obscured Dresden but Chemnitz was clear, Chemnitz would be targeted. If both were obscured, they were to bomb the centre of Dresden using H2X radar. The mix of bombs for the Dresden raid was about 40 per cent incendiaries—much closer to the RAF city-busting mix than the USAAF usually used in precision bombardment. Taylor compares this 40 per cent mix with the raid on Berlin on 3 February, where the ratio was 10 per cent incendiaries. This was a common mix when the USAAF anticipated cloudy conditions over the target.

thumb|B-17s similar to some of the Dresden raiders, with [[H2X radars extended from the belly where a turret would normally have been. Other B-17s relied on signals from those with radar.]]

Three hundred sixteen B-17 Flying Fortresses bombed Dresden, dropping 771 tons of bombs. The remaining 115 bombers from the stream of 431 misidentified their targets. Sixty bombed Prague, dropping 153 tons of bombs, while others bombed Brüx and Pilsen. The 379th bombardment group started to bomb Dresden at 12:17, aiming at marshalling yards in the Friedrichstadt district west of the city centre, as the area was unobscured by smoke or cloud. The 303rd group arrived over Dresden two minutes after the 379th and found their view obscured by clouds, so they bombed Dresden using H2X radar. The groups that followed the 303rd (92nd, 306th, 379th, 384th and 457th) also found Dresden obscured by clouds, and they too used H2X. H2X aiming caused the groups to bomb with a wide dispersal over the Dresden area. The last group to attack Dresden was the 306th, and they finished by 12:30.

No evidence of strafing of civilians has ever been found, although a March 1945 article in the Nazi-run weekly newspaper Das Reich claimed this had occurred. Historian Götz Bergander, an eyewitness to the raids, found no reports on strafing for 13–15 February by any pilots or the German military and police. He asserted in Dresden im Luftkrieg (1977) that only a few tales of civilians being strafed were reliable in detail, and all were related to the daylight attack on 14 February. He concluded that some memory of eyewitnesses was real, but that it had misinterpreted the firing in a dogfight as deliberately aimed at people on the ground. In 2000, historian Helmut Schnatz found an explicit order to RAF pilots not to strafe civilians on the way back from Dresden. He also reconstructed timelines with the result that strafing would have been almost impossible due to lack of time and fuel. Frederick Taylor in Dresden (2004), basing most of his analysis on the work of Bergander and Schnatz, concludes that no strafing took place, although some stray bullets from aerial dogfights may have hit the ground and been mistaken for strafing by those in the vicinity. The official historical commission collected 103 detailed eyewitness accounts and let the local bomb disposal services search according to their assertions. They found no bullets or fragments that would have been used by planes of the Dresden raids.

On 15 February, the 1st Bombardment Division's primary target—the Böhlen synthetic oil plant near Leipzig—was obscured by clouds, so its groups diverted to their secondary target, Dresden. Dresden was also obscured by clouds, so the groups targeted the city using H2X. The first group to arrive over the target was the 401st, but it missed the city centre and bombed Dresden's southeastern suburbs, with bombs also landing on the nearby towns of Meissen and Pirna. The other groups all bombed Dresden between 12:00 and 12:10. They failed to hit the marshalling yards in the Friedrichstadt district and, as in the previous raid, ordnance was scattered over a wide area. Railroad operations at Dresden resumed within three days.

German defensive action

Dresden's air defences had been depleted as anti-aircraft guns were requisitioned for use against the Red Army in the east, and the city lost its last massive flak battery in January 1945. The Luftwaffe was largely ineffective, with planes that were unsafe to fly due to lack of parts and maintenance and a critical shortage of aviation fuel. The German radar system was also degraded, lowering the warning time to prepare for air attacks. The RAF also had an advantage over the Germans in the field of electronic radar countermeasures. The lack of opposition meant that, unlike defended targets, where typically only 40% of bombs were dropped within the target area, in this case, every bomb fell within the city.

Of 796 British bombers that participated, six were lost, three of those hit by bombs dropped by aircraft flying over them. The following day, only a single US bomber was shot down, as the large escort force was able to prevent Luftwaffe day fighters from disrupting the attack.

On the ground

thumb|Bodies, including a mother and children

The sirens started sounding in Dresden at 21:51 (CET). Frederick Taylor writes that the Germans could see that a large enemy bomber formation—or what they called "" (lit: a fat dog, a "major thing")—was approaching somewhere in the east. At 21:39, the Reich Air Defence Leadership issued an enemy aircraft warning for Dresden, although at that point, it was thought Leipzig might be the target. At 21:59, the Local Air Raid Leadership confirmed that the bombers were in the area of Dresden-Pirna. Taylor writes the city was largely undefended; a night fighter force of ten Messerschmitt Bf 110Gs at Klotzsche airfield was scrambled, but it took them half an hour to get into an attack position. At 22:03, the Local Air Raid Leadership issued the first definitive warning: "Warning! Warning! Warning! The lead aircraft of the major enemy bomber forces have changed course and are now approaching the city area". Some 10,000 fled to the great open space of the Großer Garten, the royal park of Dresden, nearly in all. Here, they were caught by the second raid, which started without an air-raid warning, at 1:22 a.m. At 11:30 a.m., the third wave of bombers, the two hundred and eleven American Flying Fortresses, began their attack.

thumb|Over ninety per cent of the city centre was destroyed.

thumb|left|Statue of [[Martin Luther with ruined Frauenkirche]]

There were few public air raid shelters. The largest, beneath the main railway station, housed 6,000 refugees. As a result, most people took shelter in cellars, but one of the air raid precautions the city had taken was to remove thick cellar walls between rows of buildings and replace them with thin partitions that could be knocked through in an emergency. The idea was that, as one building collapsed or filled with smoke, those sheltering in the basements could knock walls down and move into adjoining buildings. With the city on fire everywhere, those fleeing from one burning cellar simply ran into another, with the result that thousands of bodies were found piled up in houses at the ends of city blocks.

A Dresden police report written shortly after the attacks reported that the old town and the inner eastern suburbs had been engulfed in a single fire that had destroyed almost 12,000 dwellings. The same report said that the raids had destroyed the Wehrmacht's main command post in the Taschenbergpalais, 63 administration buildings, the railways, 19 military hospitals, 19 ships and barges, and a number of less significant military facilities. The destruction also encompassed 640 shops, 64 warehouses, 39 schools, 31 stores, 31 large hotels, 26 public houses/bars, 26 insurance buildings, 24 banks, 19 postal facilities, 19 hospitals and private clinics including auxiliary, overflow hospitals, 18 cinemas, 11 churches and six chapels, five consulates, four tram facilities, three theatres, two market halls, the zoo, the waterworks, and five other cultural buildings. Almost 200 factories were damaged, 136 seriously (including several of the Zeiss Ikon precision optical engineering works), 28 with medium to serious damage, and 35 with light damage.

An RAF assessment showed that 23 per cent of the industrial buildings and 56 per cent of the non-industrial buildings, not counting residential buildings, had been seriously damaged. Around 78,000 dwellings had been completely destroyed; 27,700 were uninhabitable, and 64,500 damaged but readily repairable.

Fatalities

thumb|Bodies awaiting cremation

According to the official German report (Order of the Day) no. 47 ("TB47") issued on 22 March, the number of dead recovered by that date was 20,204, including 6,865 who were cremated on the Altmarkt square, and they expected the total number of deaths to be about 25,000. Another report on 3 April put the number of corpses recovered at 22,096. Three municipal and 17 rural cemeteries outside Dresden recorded up to 30 April 1945 a total of at least 21,895 buried bodies from the Dresden raids, including those cremated on the Altmarkt.

Between 100,000 and 200,000 refugees fleeing westward from advancing Soviet forces were in the city at the time of the bombing. Exact figures are unknown, but reliable estimates were calculated based on train arrivals, foot traffic, and the extent to which emergency accommodation had to be organised. The city authorities did not distinguish between residents and refugees when establishing casualty numbers and "took great pains to count all the dead, identified and unidentified". and 25,000 people had been killed.

Wartime political responses

German

Development of a German political response to the raid took several turns. Initially, some of the leadership, especially Robert Ley and Joseph Goebbels, wanted to use the raid as a pretext for abandonment of the Geneva Conventions on the Western Front. In the end, the only political action the German government took was to exploit the bombing for propaganda purposes. Goebbels is reported to have wept with rage for twenty minutes after he heard the news of the catastrophe, before launching into a bitter attack on Hermann Göring, the commander of the Luftwaffe: "If I had the power I would drag this cowardly good-for-nothing, this Reich marshal, before a court. ... How much guilt does this parasite not bear for all this, which we owe to his indolence and love of his own comforts....". On 16 February, the Propaganda Ministry issued a press release that claimed that Dresden had no war industries; it was a city of culture. On 25 February, a new leaflet with photographs of two burned children was released under the title "Dresden—Massacre of Refugees", stating that 200,000 had died. Since no official estimate had been developed, the numbers were speculative, but newspapers such as the Stockholm Svenska Morgonbladet used phrases such as "privately from Berlin", to explain where they had obtained the figures. Frederick Taylor states that "there is good reason to believe that later in March copies of—or extracts from—[an official police report] were leaked to the neutral press by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry ... doctored with an extra zero to increase [the total dead from the raid] to 202,040". On 4 March, Das Reich, a weekly newspaper founded by Goebbels, published a lengthy article emphasising the suffering and destruction of a cultural icon, without mentioning damage to the German war effort.

Taylor writes that this propaganda was effective, as it not only influenced attitudes in neutral countries at the time, but also reached the House of Commons, when Richard Stokes, a Labour Member of Parliament, and a long-term opponent of area bombing, quoted information from the German Press Agency (controlled by the Propaganda Ministry). It was Stokes's questions in the House of Commons that were in large part responsible for the shift in British opinion against this type of raid. Taylor suggests that, although the destruction of Dresden would have affected people's support for the Allies regardless of German propaganda, at least some of the outrage did depend on Goebbels' falsification of the casualty figures.

British

thumb|upright|[[Winston Churchill|Churchill, who after Dresden spoke of fewer attacks affecting civilians]]

The destruction of the city provoked unease in intellectual circles in Britain. According to Max Hastings, by February 1945, attacks upon German cities had become largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war and the name of Dresden resonated with cultured people all over Europe—"the home of so much charm and beauty, a refuge for Trollope's heroines, a landmark of the Grand Tour." He writes that the bombing was the first time the public in Allied countries seriously questioned the military actions used to defeat the Germans.

The unease was made worse by an Associated Press story that the Allies had resorted to terror bombing. At a press briefing held by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force two days after the raids, British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson told journalists:

One of the journalists asked whether the principal aim of bombing Dresden would be to cause confusion among the refugees or to blast communications carrying military supplies. Grierson answered that the primary aim was to attack communications to prevent the Germans from moving military supplies, and to stop movement in all directions if possible. He then added in an offhand remark that the raid also helped destroy "what is left of German morale". Howard Cowan, an Associated Press war correspondent, subsequently filed a story claiming that the Allies had resorted to terror bombing. There were follow-up newspaper editorials on the issue and Richard Stokes MP, longtime opponent of strategic bombing, asked questions in the House of Commons on 6 March.

Churchill subsequently re-evaluated the goals of the bombing campaigns, to focus less on strategic targets, and more toward targets of tactical significance. On 28 March, in a draft of a memo for General Ismay and the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff, he wrote: