Feb. 15, 1945— Dresden, so renowned for
culture that it was known as the “Florence of the Elbe,” staggered out after 48
hours of aerial bombing by British and American forces to find the city center
in ruins and countless charred bodies.
The residents of the capital of the German state of
Saxony would never be able to erase from their memory what they had seen here.
Neither would a 22-year-old American, Kurt Vonnegut, prisoner-of-war, who,
by a sheer fluke, survived the firestorm with other prisoners of war by being
confined in a converted compound where animals were killed and processed for
human consumption.
In 1969, Vonnegut gave the title of this holding pen to his
bestselling novel about the horror: Slaughterhouse-Five.
Fury over the Vietnam War finally enabled Vonnegut
to write about what he had seen two decades previously. “We could finally talk
about something bad that we did to the worst people imaginable, the Nazis,” he recalled.
“And what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly. You know the
truth can be really powerful stuff. You’re not expecting it.”
How bad was the bombing that precipitated the
horror? Even at the time, the number of casualties created a metaphorical
firestorm of controversy that mirrored the literal firestorm that took place in
the proud old city.
Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels,
wildly exaggerated the casualties to 200,000. In 1963, a young scholar not yet
infamous as a Holocaust denier, David Irving, claimed, in The Destruction of
Dresden, that the bombing was “the biggest single massacre in European
history,” putting the death toll from 150,000 to 200,000.
Irving’s thesis was just one element of a postwar
political climate when the truth itself about the aerial assault’s impact
became a casualty:
“In West
Germany, rightwing forces have continuously presented German suffering under
the bombs as atonement for the crimes committed under National Socialism,”
observed Susanne Vees-Gulani in her essay “The Experience of Destruction: W.G.
Sebald, the Airwar, and Literature,” in W. G. Sebald: History - Memory –Trauma (2006). “Whether justified or not, writing about the bombings is
thus always under suspicion of trying to revise history in a way that could
show Germans in a more favorable light or as victims themselves.”
So many arguments ensued over the body count that in
2004, Dresden created an historical commission that combed through historical,
military, forensic and archeological research for a more precise count. Six
years later, it offered a much-reduced estimate: 22,700 to 25,000 dead.
That has not stopped the far-right Alternative for
Germany from labeling the bombing “a war crime,” even as the party has
consistently criticize the nation’s attempt to atone for Nazi atrocities.
The fact is that the tangible physical tumult
associated with the bombing was horrible enough that even Winston Churchill,
who did not blanch at efforts to bring the war home to the enemy, began to
reconsider the military’s bombing policy. "It seems to me that the moment
has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of
increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed,"
he wrote in a memo.
Vonnegut depicted the horror unforgettably in Slaughterhouse-Five:
"Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic,
everything that would burn." And, in the immediate aftermath, the city was
"like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody
else in the neighborhood was dead."
Another POW, British rifleman Victor Gregg, was also
haunted by what he witnessed, as he related in a reminiscence for the British newspaper The Independent five years ago:
“When the raid ended, we continued with the cellars,
prising them open with pickaxes and crowbars. Inside, we found the victims'
bodies, usually shrivelled to half their normal size or worse. (Children under
the age of three or four had simply melted.) But most looked like they had died
peacefully, through lack of oxygen, losing consciousness in the process.
“We dragged their remains into the open, where they
were examined for identifying marks and then piled up to await cremation – and
this turned out to be the easy bit. Even the hardest of us would flinch as we
got nearer to the site of the raid's centre, where fierce fires still raged…
“On the third day, everywhere I looked I could see
men working in dozen-strong gangs and now, as we approached the city centre,
the most terrible task began. Some of the corpses were so brittle that they
crumbled into clouds of ash and dried flesh. Yet so methodical were the Germans
that we were ordered to stuff any identifiable parts of these corpses into
sacks.”
In addition to the charred bodies left by the
firestorm, there was a spiritual void that lasted for years: Dresden's
Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) imploded when temperatures from the firestorm
exceeded the 800C (1470F) at which sandstone melts. It was not until the 1990s,
after German reunification, that a campaign was mounted to reconstruct the
Baroque structure, and not until over a decade later that it reopened.
The legacy of Dresden is profoundly unsettling, not
just for the damage it caused but for the excuse it afforded far-right
nationalists to ignore the city’s own deep responsibility for Nazism and the
Holocaust.
“Whoever pits the dead of Dresden against the dead
of Auschwitz, whoever seeks to talk down German wrongs, whoever falsifies
improved knowledge and historical facts,” German President Frank-Walter
Steinmeier said, at the official ceremony commemorating the attack, “we as
democrats must loudly and clearly contradict them. We must defy them.”
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