WW2, The Allied Bombing of Dresden, Germany, Feb. 13, 1945: Legitimate Target or War Crime? DW News

- Deutsche Welle (DW) News, Feb. 13, 2020. 75 years ago, in the final months of World War II, British & American aircraft began carpet bombing the German city of Dresden. In the days that followed, warplanes dropped incendiary bombs that killed thousands of people. Many of them were women and children fleeing the Soviet army's advance in the East. There has been much debate about whether the bombing was a justifiable military attack, an unnecessary tragedy, or a war crime. We met with one of the survivors in the now rebuilt city. He was baptized in the city's iconic Frauenkirche, which was destroyed by the bombs and has been rebuilt in its former glory.
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- Why Was Dresden So Heavily Bombed? By the end of the 3 -day Allied bombing attack, the German city had been leveled and tens of thousands were dead. Feb. 12, 2020. Ed.

They had heard the “whump a whump” of distant aerial bombings many times before. But on February 13, 1945, the American prisoners of war heard Dresden’s fire sirens howl right above their heads. German guards moved them two stories down into a meat locker. When they came back to the surface, “the city was gone,” remembered writer and social critic Kurt Vonnegut—one of the American POWs who witnessed the bombing of Dresden. The punishing, 3 -day Allied bombing attack on Dresden from February 13 to 15 in the final months of World War II became among the most controversial Allied actions of the war.

The 800-bomber raid dropped some 2,700 tons of explosives and incendiaries and decimated the German city. As a major center for Nazi Germany’s rail and road network, Dresden’s destruction was intended to overwhelm German authorities and services and clog all transportation routes with throngs of refugees. The Allied assault came a less than a month after some 19,000 U.S. troops were killed in Germany's last-ditch offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, and three weeks after the grim discovery of the atrocities committed by Nazi forces at Auschwitz.

In an effort to force a surrender, the Dresden bombing was intended to terrorize the civilian population locally and nationwide. It certainly had that effect.

.. In part to prevent right-wing ideologues from exploiting wide-spread speculations about the death toll, the city of Dresden set up an historical commission in 2004 to produce more precise data. In 2010, it published a revised estimate of 22,700 to 25,000 dead. As shocking as such an enormous number of dead is, it did not stand out in the war’s history of “strategic bombing” of cities. Most German cities had been flattened by 1945, and many left higher proportionate death rates and degrees of destruction. The bombing of Hamburg in July 1943 generated the first large firestorm and killed more than 30,000 civilians. And while the German Blitz over England became the subject of many books and movies, the Luftwaffen raids on Eastern European cities such as Belgrade (more than 17,000 dead) or Warsaw (up to 25,000 dead) were far more deadly—to say nothing of non-nuclear city bombings in Japan.

On the ground, however, the scale of death and devastation seemed beyond compare to witnesses like Vonnegut. POW Vonnegut had to dig into shelters and basements which “looked like a streetcar full of people who simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting in their chairs, all dead,”—robbed of oxygen by the all-consuming firestorm. Observers noted early on that the bombing of Dresden did not only mean the death of civilians, but the destruction of a center of European culture and Baroque splendor. Many Germans perceived a particular injustice in the late bombing of Dresden. For most of them, the end of the war looked near and inevitable and a full-scale attack unnecessary. Allied strategists, however, were afraid of allowing the Wehrmacht to regroup within Germany’s border if they eased on their pressure. The U.S. Army alone had suffered almost 140,000 casualties from December to January 1945 and 27,000 in the week prior to the Dresden bombing alone—the heaviest losses in the Western Allies’ war against Hitler...
https://www.history.com/news/dresden-bombing-wwii-allies



- Dresden Bombed To Atoms: World War II (1945) | British Pathé. RAF heavy bombers are seen dropping bombs over Dresden, Germany toward the end of World War II in this remarkable archive footage from 1945.