From 13 to 15 February 1945, the British and American Air Forces carried out a series of devastating bombing raids on Dresden. The city was almost completely destroyed.Before presenting you with a selection of photographs, my friends, I would like to acquaint you with a publication and a documentary that reveals little-known facts about this event.

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Destruction of Dresden, 1945

The Second World War left many unfortunate and terrible pages of human cruelty in world history. It was during this war that the tactics of carpet bombing of cities became widespread. As the famous proverb says, he who sows the wind will reap the storm. This is exactly what happened with Hitlerite Germany. Starting in 1937 with the bombing of Spanish Guernica by the Condor legion, continuing with raids on Warsaw, London, Moscow and Stalingrad, from 1943 Germany itself began to be subjected to Allied air strikes, which were many times greater in power than the raids carried out by the Luftwaffe in the initial period of the war. ... So one of the symbols of the tragedy of the German people was the allied air raid on the large city of Dresden in February 1945, which led to huge destruction of the residential infrastructure of the city and large casualties among the civilian population.

Even after the end of the war for more than 60 years, there are calls in Europe to recognize the destruction of the ancient city of Dresden as a war crime and genocide against its inhabitants. Many in Europe and the United States are of the opinion that the bombing of German cities in the final months of the war was no longer dictated by military necessity and was unnecessary in military terms. The Nobel Prize in Literature, German writer Gunther Grass and former editor of the English newspaper The Times, Simon Jenkins, are currently demanding that the bombing of Dresden be a war crime. They are also supported by the American journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens, who believes that the bombing of the last months of the war was carried out only with the aim of practicing bombing techniques by young pilots.

The number of victims of the bombing, which the city was subjected to from 13 to 15 February 1945, is estimated at 25,000 - 30,000 people, with many of the estimates exceeding the 100,000 mark. During the bombing, the city was almost completely destroyed. The area of \u200b\u200bthe zone of complete destruction in the city was 4 times the area of \u200b\u200bthe zone of total destruction in Nagasaki. After the end of the war, the ruins of churches, palaces and residential buildings were dismantled and taken out of the city, in the place of Dresden there was only a site with marked boundaries of the streets and buildings that used to be here. The restoration of the city center took 40 years, the rest of the parts were restored earlier. At the same time, a number of historical buildings of the city located on the Neumarkt square are being restored to this day.

Formally, the Allies had reason to bombard the city. The United States and Britain agreed with the USSR to bomb Berlin and Leipzig, there was no talk of Dresden.But this major 7th largest city in Germany was indeed a major transportation hub. And the allies said that they bombed the city in order to make it impossible for traffic to bypass these cities. According to the American side, the bombing of Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden was of great importance and contributed to the disabling of these transport hubs. Indirectly, the effectiveness of the bombing was confirmed precisely by the fact that on April 25, near Leipzig, in Torgau, the advanced units of the allied forces met, cutting Germany in two.

However, even the memorandum, which was read to the British pilots before the bombing flight on February 13, revealed the true meaning of this military operation:

Dresden, the 7th largest city in Germany ... by far the largest enemy area still not bombed. In the middle of winter, with streams of refugees heading west and troops to be quartered somewhere, living quarters are in short supply as not only workers, refugees and troops need to be accommodated, but also government offices evacuated from other areas. At one time, widely known for its porcelain production, Dresden has developed into a major industrial center ... The aim of the attack is to strike the enemy where he feels it most strongly, behind a partially collapsed front ... and at the same time show the Russians when they arrive in town what the RAF is capable of.

Dresden. Chronicle of the tragedy.

The film by Alexei Denisov is dedicated to the events of February 13, 1945 - the bombing of Dresden by the Anglo-American aircraft during the Second World War. This action was interpreted by the Allies as an act of aid to Soviet troops advancing from the east, allegedly in support of the Yalta agreements.
The implementation of the barbaric bombardment took place in three visits by forces of almost three thousand aircraft. Its result is the death of more than 135 thousand people and the destruction of about 35 470 buildings.
One of the main questions that the filmmakers tried to answer is whether there really was such a request from the Soviet side and why to this day the former allies from England and America are persistently trying to shift the blame for the senseless bombing of one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, which, moreover, does not have military significance to Russia.
German and Russian historians, American pilots and eyewitnesses of this tragedy take part in the film.

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1. View from the city hall of Dresden on the ruins of the city after the Anglo-American bombing in February 1945. Right, sculpture by August Schreitmüller - "Good".

3. View from the city hall of Dresden on the ruins of the city after the Anglo-American bombing in February 1945.

4. Ruined Dresden. 1945 year

5. Frauenkirche Cathedral, one of the most significant churches in Dresden, and the monument to Martin Luther, destroyed by the bombing of the city on February 13, 1945.

6. Analysis of debris in the area of \u200b\u200bthe ruins of the Frauenkirche Cathedral in Dresden.

The aircraft of the Western Allies launched a series of bombing strikes on the capital of Saxony, Dresden, which was almost completely destroyed as a result.

The raid on Dresden became part of the Anglo-American strategic bombing program, launched after the meeting of the heads of state of the United States and Great Britain in Casablanca in January 1943.

Dresden is the seventh largest city in pre-war Germany with a population of 647 thousand people. Due to the abundance of historical and cultural monuments, it was often called "Florence on the Elbe". There were no significant military installations there.

By February 1945, the city was overflowing with wounded and refugees fleeing the advancing units of the Red Army. Together with them in Dresden, there were, according to estimates, up to a million, and according to some sources, up to 1.3 million people.

The date of the raid on Dresden was determined by the weather: a clear sky was expected over the city.

During the first raid in the evening, 244 British Lancaster heavy bombers dropped 507 tons of high-explosive and 374 tons of incendiary bombs. During the second raid at night, which lasted half an hour and was twice as powerful as the first, 529 aircraft dropped 965 tons of high-explosive and over 800 tons of incendiary bombs on the city.

On the morning of February 14, the city was bombed by 311 American B-17s. They dropped more than 780 tons of bombs into the raging sea of \u200b\u200bfire below them. In the afternoon of February 15, 210 American B-17s completed the rout, dropping another 462 tons of bombs on the city.

It was the most destructive bombing strike in Europe in all the years of World War II.

The area of \u200b\u200bthe zone of continuous destruction in Dresden was four times that of Nagasaki after the nuclear bombing by the Americans on August 9, 1945.

In most of the urban development, destruction exceeded 75-80%. Among the irreplaceable cultural losses are the old Frauenkirche, the Hofkirche, the famous Opera and the world-famous Zwinger palace ensemble. At the same time, the damage caused to industrial enterprises was insignificant. The railroad network also suffered little damage. The marshalling yards and even one bridge over the Elbe were not damaged, and traffic through the Dresden junction resumed a few days later.

Determining the exact number of victims of the bombing of Dresden is complicated by the fact that at that time there were several dozen military hospitals and hundreds of thousands of refugees in the city. Many were buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings or burned up in a fire tornado.

The death toll is estimated in various sources from 25-50 thousand to 135 thousand people or more. According to an analysis prepared by the Historical Department of the United States Air Force, 25,000 people died, according to official figures from the Historical Department of the British Royal Air Force, more than 50,000 people.

Later, the Western allies argued that the raid on Dresden was a response to the request of the Soviet command to strike at the city's railway junction, allegedly made at the Yalta conference in 1945.

As the declassified minutes of the Yalta conference, shown in the documentary film Dresden. Chronicle of the Tragedy (2006) directed by Alexei Denisov, testify that the USSR never asked the Anglo-American allies to bomb Dresden during World War II. What the Soviet command really asked for was to strike at the railway junctions of Berlin and Leipzig due to the fact that the Germans had already transferred about 20 divisions from the western front to the eastern front and were going to transfer about 30 more. It was this request that was presented in writing. the sight of Roosevelt and Churchill.

From the point of view of Russian historians, the bombing of Dresden pursued, rather, a political goal. They associate the bombing of the Saxon capital with the desire of the Western Allies to demonstrate their air power to the advancing Red Army.

After the end of the war, the ruins of churches, palaces and residential buildings were dismantled and taken out of the city, in the place of Dresden there was only a site with marked boundaries of the streets and buildings that used to be here. The restoration of the city center took 40 years, the rest of the parts were restored earlier. At the same time, a number of historical buildings of the city located on the Neumarkt square are being restored to this day.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources

The bloody massacre in Dresden: burning women, ruins, children wandering among corpses in search of parents - the first act of genocide of the future NATO (PHOTOS)

14.02.2016 - 19:00

On the anniversary of the barbaric bombing of the US and British Air Forces of the German city of Dresden, reader of "Russian Spring" luhansk resident Sergei Vasilevsky described in detail the nightmare of those days, relying on historical sources.

We have learned a lot about NATO and its satellites (I try not to use the word "sixes"). You don't have to tell us anything.

What I would like to recall once again is that shelling and bombing of residential areas is not a novelty. This is the original method of waging war and introducing "values" into enemy territory.

The existence of NATO can be judged by what NATO has been doing since its inception. And that's not all - NATO emerged as a union of states that had their own history at the time of creation.

Therefore, in order to more fully understand the essence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it is necessary to consider the history of the states that created the Organization. As the Gospel says, "a good tree does not bear bad fruit." What were the roots of NATO?

The fact that is discussed in this article is the bombing of Dresden by the air forces of the United States and England on February 13-14, 1945. Due to the small size of the newspaper article, only some data will be provided, everyone can find more detailed information on their own.

SITUATION AT THE START OF BOMBING:

From about mid-1944, the Allied Air Force, unable to cope with the task of destroying the military and transport potential of Germany, switched to massive bombing of the civilian population.

Essen in East Frisia was one of the most significant episodes. On September 30, 1944, due to bad weather, American bombers were unable to reach their target - a military plant. On the way back, the pilots saw a city under them and, in order not to return with a bomb load, they decided to drop it on the city. The bombs hit the school, burying 120 children under the ruins - half of the children in the city.

“The enemy sees your light! Disguise yourself! " German war poster. "

Compare the emblem on the plane with the emblem on the trail. picture.

As one German fighter pilot recalled: “… At that time there was a popular anecdote: who can be considered a coward? Answer: a resident of Berlin who volunteered for the front ... "

By order of the commander-in-chief of British bombers, Arthur Harris, leaflets were dropped on German cities with the following content:

“Why are we doing this? Not out of a desire to take revenge, although we have not forgotten Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade (hereinafter referred to as Belgrade - S.V.), London, Plymouth, Coventry.

We are bombing Germany, city after city, more and more to make it impossible for you to continue the war. "

Roosevelt's phrase about the planned bombing of the civilian population of Germany: “... We must be cruel towards the Germans, I mean the Germans as a nation, and not just the Nazis.

Either we have to castrate the German people, or treat them in such a way so that they do not produce offspring that can continue to behave as in the past ... ”.

The only thing they can do.

A Lancaster bomber drops bombs on civilians.

A phrase from the justification of the Dresden operation: “... The main purpose of such bombings is primarily directed against the morality of the ordinary population and serves psychological purposes. It is very important that the entire operation starts with this very purpose ... ”.

"CITY OF REFUGEES"

At the beginning of 1945, Dresden became a “city of refugees”, in which hospitals and evacuation points were concentrated. At the time of the bombing, there were up to 600,000 refugees in the city fleeing the alleged "atrocities" of the Soviet Army.

Dresden was practically unprotected by anti-aircraft artillery and was covered by only one squadron of fighters (one cannot but take into account the lack of aviation fuel).

On February 13, 1945, 245 Lancaster bombers took off from British airfields, they carried out the first bombing. At midnight, another 550 bombers took off and carried out a second bombing.

During two night raids on Dresden, 1,400 tons of high-explosive bombs and 1,100 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped (2.5 kilotons - the terminology of the nuclear age).

When all the fires merged into one, a firestorm began. The air sucked into the funnel created a giant tornado that lifted people into the air and threw them into the fire.

The fires that engulfed the city were so intense that the asphalt melted and flowed through the streets. The people hiding underground were suffocating - the oxygen burned out in the fires. The heat reached such an intensity that human flesh melted, and a stain remained from the person.

When the tornado gained strength, the heat increased dramatically. Those who hid in shelters died relatively easily: they turned into ash or melted, soaking the ground for a meter and a half.

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Facts and myths about the Dresden bombing

75 years ago, British and US aircraft dealt a devastating blow to Dresden. Its consequences are still felt today.

Tokyo, Rotterdam, Liverpool, Helsinki, London, Hamburg ... Civilian infrastructure outside the war zone has been targeted by targeted air strikes before. But it was during the Second World War that strategic bombing of cities took on an unprecedented scale. Massive air strikes were launched not only to destroy the enemy's military industry and arsenals in the city. The bombing was also an attempt to demoralize the civilian population and break their will to resist. Three months before the end of World War II, the turn came to Dresden, which until then had practically not been exposed to air strikes and fancied itself a lucky one who was spared by the war.

Dresden: four aerial attacks and a firestorm

On February 13, 1945, at 21:45, an air raid signal alerted Dresden of an impending deadly threat. The night attack was carried out by the Royal Air Force of Great Britain. The bombers passed through the point above the stadium marked by the guidance planes, fanned out along predetermined trajectories, and dropped bombs on the city at predetermined intervals. First, land mines that destroyed roofs, exposing the wooden structures of buildings. Then the incendiary bombs. And again land mines. After 15 minutes, the air attack ended. The city was on fire. But that was only the beginning. Three hours later, British bombers reappeared in the sky. The historic center of Dresden, with its dense residential development and famous Baroque architecture, was engulfed in a tornado of fire.

German military historian Rolf-Dieter Müller considers the second RAF attack "especially treacherous". He headed a commission convened in 2004 at the initiative of the city authorities of Dresden to conduct a scientific investigation into the bombing of the city. “At the time of the second attack, firefighters and residents were already trying to extinguish the burning houses. And then they were suddenly overtaken by another blow from the air,” the historian explains in the Focus weekly.

Detonating bombs, crumbling buildings and carpet fires with temperatures up to 1000 degrees left no chance of salvation. People were burned to death in the streets, suffocated in basements and underground tunnels leading from one house to another to move from a burning building to safety. On the night of February 13-14, all houses were on fire. Underground corridors, conceived as escape from fire, became a death trap for many thousands.

On February 14 and 15, Dresden was bombed by US Air Force planes in the daytime. The attacks were carried out mainly on industrial targets and transport facilities. But bombs also fell on what little remained of residential areas within the city.

A total of 4,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on the city during the four February raids on Dresden, involving some 1,300 British and American aircraft. The bombing in the city, according to a Dresden police report drawn up shortly after the raids, killed 25,000 people and burned down 12,000 buildings. US Air Force documents say that 80 percent of city buildings have suffered varying degrees of destruction and 50 percent of residential buildings have been destroyed or severely damaged.

Symbolic Dresden

In terms of the scale of destruction and the number of victims, Dresden is far from the leader among the cities that became the target of strategic bombing during the Second World War. In Tokyo, 100,000 people were killed in one day of American bombing. Cologne was bombed 262 times by the Allies. Pforzheim lost a fifth of its population and 98 percent of urban infrastructure in just 22 minutes. But it is Dresden that is associated in the collective consciousness, by the way, not only of Germans, with the suffering of the civilian population during the war. It is Dresden that is cited as an example when Germans are spoken of not as criminals, but as victims.

"Dresden is today perceived around the world as a symbol of the destructive power of modern air warfare, similar to Hiroshima," says Gorch Pieken, leading researcher at the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden in Foсus. Why is this so? Several factors played a role here, about which historians, politicians, publicists and demagogues of all stripes have argued and argue: the number of victims, the expediency of the bombing and its justification.

Manipulation of data on victims of bombing

It all started with Nazi propaganda. Immediately after the raids on Dresden, Goebbels attributed zero to the number of victims of the bombing. Thus was born the legend of hundreds of thousands of victims, which will allow future right and left demagogues to put Dresden on a par with Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In addition, in the Nazi propaganda, Dresden appeared as an "innocent city of culture", "Florence on the Elbe", which the Allies destroyed, despite the almost won war. Goebbels personally coined the term "Anglo-American Air Gangsters."

Subsequently, the rhetoric of the Nazis was almost literally repeated by communist propaganda to mobilize the masses against the "Western imperialists." British Holocaust denier David Irving, in turn, popularized the death toll of 135,000. Other estimates even went up to 500 thousand. An end to this myth-making was put in 2010 by a commission of 13 German historians who worked for the city of Dresden. The commission checked all available documents and facts that could shed light on the death toll in Dresden, and issued a conclusion: a maximum of 25 thousand people. This is the same figure as the police report sent from Dresden to Berlin immediately after the raids.

Dresden stylization as an "innocent city of culture"

British historian Frederick Taylor notes in an interview with Spiegel Online: “The destruction of Dresden is of epic tragic quality. It was an amazingly beautiful city, a symbol of Baroque humanism and all the best that was in Germany. But it also had all the worst of Nazi Germany. In this sense, it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy, showing the horrors of war in the 20th century and a symbol of destruction. "

In fact, one can hardly speak of the "innocence" of Dresden during the "Third Reich". In addition to the fact that he was one of the main bastions of the NSDAP, he was one of the key staging points in Germany, through which echelons with soldiers and equipment went. Dresden was also one of the leading military-industrial centers and a garrison city. German historian Moritz Hoffmann recalls in this regard: "Dresden was an important military post with significant administrative structures. The city hosted an often forgotten 12,000 troops."

In the list of German cities to be destroyed by the British military command, Dresden was ranked 22nd out of 140. The British had not bombed the city before because of its inaccessibility for aircraft, like other East German cities. The Nazis also understood Dresden's attractiveness and vulnerability from the very beginning of the war. Nevertheless, the historian Gorch Piken stresses, "many Dresden residents believed that with each new day of war they were closer to peace than to fighting. In fact, everything was the other way around."

Allied fear of "German Stalingrad"

Can we talk about the strategic necessity of bombing Dresden at the beginning of 1945, when the outcome of the war was already predetermined? According to Moritz Hoffman, historians today have every reason to assert that Hitler's Germany lost the war three years before Dresden, when the German offensive stopped near Moscow. But at the beginning of 1945, the Allies could not know what other "miracle weapon" the Nazis could bring to light. The "wunderfaff" rumors, as Moritz Hoffman notes, were loud words to bolster German morale, but they were also heard abroad. In addition, recalls a historian in Spiegel Online, four weeks before the bombing of Dresden, the Germans launched an offensive in the Ardennes that no one expected: "If the Allies really knew that Germany had no chance, then they could lay down their arms and just wait." ...

And then the situation looked somewhat different. The Wehrmacht at the beginning of 1945 won a respite and was able to send reinforcements to the Eastern Front, which could drag out the war for many more months. And the allies did not need "German Stalingrad" at all. Therefore, the decision to bomb Dresden was also dictated by the desire to help the Red Army. Churchill and Stalin had previously exchanged information about the bombing of German cities. At the Yalta conference with the participation of the leaders of the three countries of the anti-Hitler coalition - the USSR, the USA and the UK - Dresden was named by the British as a possible target of the upcoming raid. And he fully justified himself, says the German military historian Rolf-Dieter Müller. Not only because an important transport and administrative center was paralyzed. The strategy of suppressing morale, which the British called "moral bombing", also paid off. After Dresden, according to Rolf-Dieter Müller, German cities no longer offered any resistance to the advancing Allied forces.

Dresden's tragic but not unique fate

Dresden was not the first city to receive devastating bombing raids during World War II, nor the last. The bombing of Dresden was a tragedy. But not exceptional. And one of many. "Of course, the Allied aviation did not accomplish the feat there. But it was, as horrible as it sounds, a normal military act - as far as one can speak of normality in relation to this horrible war," summarizes the German historian Moritz Hoffmann. This opinion is shared by many historians today.

Is the bombing of Dresden a "war crime"? Jens Wehner, curator of the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden, in an interview with the dpa news agency, in particular, says: “Dresden must be seen in the context of the whole war. If Dresden was a war crime, then many other aerial bombings were World War - both from the Germans and the Allies. "

The uniqueness of Dresden lies in the fact that its inhabitants really believed that culture would save them, and that the tragedy of Dresden was subsequently used for their own purposes by all and sundry, from the Nazis and communists to the current left and right radicals. "The handling of the Dresden bombing is a particularly clear example of how difficult it is to overcome the German past today," says Johannes Kiess, a sociologist at the University of Siegen in Focus.

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Well, for comparison - Air Force material ...

75 years of the bombing of Dresden. Why was this city destroyed in 1945?

Toby Luckhurst BBC

"This fiery tornado is overwhelming ...Insane fear grips me, and I start repeating to myself one simple phrase: "I do not wantaliveburn out. ”I don’t know how longabout people I stepped over. I only know one thing: I must not burn out. "

On February 13, 1945, British aircraft struck Dresden. Within a few days, the British, along with their American allies, dropped 4,000 tons of bombs on the city.

The raging fire killed 25 thousand people, burned or suffocated from lack of oxygen in this devastated city.

Dresden was not an isolated case. The Allies dropped bombs on Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin, killing tens of thousands of people and burning large areas to the ground. Japanese cities such as Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also bombed.

However, it was this bombing that became the most controversial act of the Allies during the Second World War. Questions were raised about the military significance of Dresden. Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill expressed doubts about the necessity of bombing immediately after the air attack.

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of intimidation, albeit under different pretexts, must be revised," he wrote in a memo. "The destruction of Dresden remains a serious argument against Allied bombing."

This material contains shocking images

Dresden is the capital of Saxony. Before the war, this city was called Florence on the Elbe and the jewelry box - for the local climate and architecture.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Color image of Dresden was taken in 1900, showing buildings destroyed by bombing

By February 1945, Dresden was only 250 km from the Eastern Front, where Nazi Germany was still holding off the advancing Soviet forces. The last months of the war passed.

Dresden was then a major industrial and transport hub. Many factories and plants located here produced ammunition, parts for aircraft and other equipment for the Nazi troops.

Troops, tanks and artillery passed through Dresden, both by land and by rail. Hundreds of thousands of German refugees fleeing the fighting also ended up in this city.

At that time, according to the command of the British Royal Air Force, Dresden remained the largest city in Germany, which had not yet been bombed.

The Allied Air Force Command decided that an air strike on Dresden could help the Allied Red Army by stopping the movement of Nazi troops and preventing the evacuation of the Germans from the east.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Planes dropped both high-explosive and incendiary bombs

During the five years of the war, British Air Force bombers' raids on German cities became more frequent and more powerful. The planes dropped both high-explosive and incendiary bombs: the former blew up buildings, the latter set off fires, causing further destruction.

Previous air raids completely razed some cities in Germany. In 1943, hundreds of British bombers took part in the bombing of Hamburg, known as Operation Gomorrah.

Due to the dry, hot weather, this raid caused a firestorm of such intensity that the city was almost completely destroyed.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Most of Dresden was destroyed during the Allied bombing

The air strike on Dresden began on 13 February. About 800 bombers, led by targeting aircraft, which dropped signal flares, marking the site for an attack in the area of \u200b\u200bthe Ostragege sports stadium, reached Dresden that night.

In just 25 minutes, British aircraft dropped over 1,800 tons of bombs.

As was customary during the Second World War, American aviation followed the British in the daytime.

More than 520 US Air Force aircraft participated in these airstrikes over the course of two days. Their targets were railway yards, but in fact they were striking a large part of the city center.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Tens of thousands of residents died in Dresden from fire and carbon monoxide Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Many historic buildings were destroyed

The civilians of the city were seized with horror. Many, having heard the sounds of sirens, took refuge in shelters.

However, the first strike deprived the city of electricity, and people began to go to the surface just before the second wave of bombing began.

Many, saving from the fire, fell dead from lack of oxygen. An eyewitness to those events, Margaret Freyer, described a woman with a child who was fleeing: "She runs, falls, and her child, describing an arc, flies straight into the fire ... The woman remains on the ground, completely motionless."

The American writer Kurt Vonnegut was then a prisoner of war, he survived the bombing of Dresden.

"Dresden turned into a continuous conflagration. The flame devoured all living things and in general everything that could burn," he wrote in his book "Slaughterhouse Number Five".

He compares the bombed-out Dresden with the lunar landscape: "Dresden was like the Moon - only minerals. The stones were hot. There was death around."

In total, during this operation, the British lost six bombers, three of them - as a result of the fact that they were accidentally hit by bombs dropped by their own. The Americans lost one plane.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Dresden lay in ruins for several more years. Photo of 1946. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption It took years to clear the rubble Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Many parts of Dresden were not restored during the GDR years. Dresden Castle in 1969

Nazi Germany immediately took advantage of this bombing to launch a propaganda blow against the Allies. The Propaganda Ministry stated that there was no war industry in Dresden, that it was just a cultural center.

And despite the fact that the city authorities reported 25 thousand deaths (modern historians also agree with this figure), the Nazis claimed that 200 thousand civilians died in Dresden.

In Britain, Dresden was known as a tourist attraction, so many MPs and public figures questioned whether the airstrike was worth it.

However, American and British military strategists insisted that the operation was necessary, as were the bombings of other German cities, as they destroyed industrial infrastructure, transportation systems and the homes of workers employed on military installations.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The Church of Our Lady, or Frauenkirche, having served as a war memorial for decades, has been rebuilt with donations collected in the UK and the USA, photo 2004. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Dresden grew out of the rubble, but traces of the same bombing are still visible in it, photo from 2015.

A 1953 American account of this historical episode states that 23% of the city's industrial buildings and at least 50% of the housing stock were destroyed or severely damaged in the bombing.

Nonetheless, the report said, Dresden was "a legitimate military target," and this airstrike was no different from "the accepted bombing policy."

Disputes over allied air operations and specifically the bombing of Dresden are still ongoing. Historians ask the question: did they really prevent the Nazis from their offensive, or did they simply cause the death of civilians, especially meaningless towards the end of the war?

In this case - unlike amphibious operations such as the Normandy landings - it is more difficult to understand how much this helped the Allies win the war.

Some argue that this is a clear moral miscalculation by the Allies, if not a war crime. Others, however, say the bombing was a necessary part of the war to destroy Nazi Germany.

This piece of history was adopted by various conspiracy theorists, extreme rightists and extremists, including those who deny the Holocaust. They cite the data of the victims in their Nazi interpretation and mark the bombing of Dresden as a tragic date.

75 years have passed, but this event still causes a lot of emotion and controversy.

For several decades, calls have been heard in Europe to give the bombing of the ancient city of Dresden the status of a war crime and genocide of its inhabitants. Recently, German writer, Nobel Prize laureate for Literature Gunther Grass and former editor of the British newspaper The Times, Simon Jenkins, again demanded that this be done.

They are supported by the American journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens, who said that the bombing of many German cities was carried out solely so that new aircraft crews could practice the practice of bombing.

The German historian York Friedrich noted in his book that the bombing of cities was a war crime, since in the last months of the war they were not dictated by military necessity: "... it was absolutely unnecessary bombing in the military sense."

The death toll of the terrible bombing that took place from 13 to 15 February 1945 ranges from 25,000 to 30,000 (many sources claim a higher number). The city was almost completely destroyed.

After the end of World War II, the ruins of residential buildings, palaces and churches were dismantled and taken out of the city. On the site of Dresden, a site was formed with marked boundaries of former streets and buildings.

The restoration of the center took about 40 years. The rest of the city was built up much faster.

To this day, the restoration of historic buildings on the Neumarkt square is underway.

The fiery tornado was drawing people in ...

Before the war, Dresden was considered one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Tourist guides called it Florence on the Elbe. The famous Dresden Gallery, the world's second largest porcelain museum, the most beautiful palace ensemble of the Zwinger, the opera house, which rivaled La Scala in acoustics, and many baroque churches were located here.

Russian composers Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Alexander Scriabin often stayed in Dresden, and Sergei Rachmaninoff was preparing here for his world tour. The writer Fyodor Dostoevsky lived in the city for a long time, working on the novel "Demons". Here his daughter Lyubasha was born.

At the end of World War II, local residents were confident that Dresden would not be bombed. There were no military factories in it. It was rumored that after the war the Allies would make Dresden the capital of the new Germany.

There was practically no air defense here, so the air raid signal sounded just a few minutes before the bombing began.

At 22:03 on February 13, residents of the outskirts heard the roar of approaching aircraft. At 2213 hours 244 Lancaster heavy bombers from the British Royal Air Force dropped the first high-explosive bombs on the city.

In a matter of minutes, the city was engulfed in flames. The light from the giant fire could be seen 150 kilometers away.

One of the British Royal Air Force pilots later recalled: “The fantastic light around became brighter as we approached the target. At an altitude of 6,000 meters, we could discern in the unearthly bright radiance details of the terrain that had never been seen before; for the first time in many operations, I felt sorry for the inhabitants below. "

The bomber-navigator of one of the bombers testified: “I confess, I glanced down when the bombs were falling, and with my own eyes I saw a shocking panorama of the city blazing from one end to the other. Thick smoke was visible, blown away by the wind from Dresden. A panorama of a brightly sparkling city opened up. The first reaction was the thought, which shocked me, about the coincidence of the massacre taking place below with the warnings of the evangelists in the sermons before the war. "

The plan to bombard Dresden included the creation of a fiery whirlwind on its streets. Such a tornado appears when the scattered fires that have arisen are combined into one huge bonfire. The air above it heats up, its density decreases and it rises up.

British historian David Irving describes the fire tornado created in Dresden by the pilots of the British Royal Air Force: “... the resulting fire tornado, according to the survey, consumed more than 75 percent of the territory of destruction ... Giant trees were uprooted or half broken. Crowds of fleeing people were suddenly caught up by a tornado, dragged through the streets and thrown directly into the fire; torn off roofs and furniture ... were thrown into the center of the blazing old part of the city.

The fire tornado reached its peak in the three-hour interval between the raids, precisely at the time when the inhabitants of the city, who had taken refuge in the underground corridors, should have fled to its outskirts.

A railroad worker hiding near Pochtovaya Square watched as a woman with a baby carriage was dragged through the streets and thrown into the flames. Other people fleeing along the railway embankment, which seemed to be the only escape route not covered with debris, described how railway cars in open sections of the track were blown away by a storm. "

The asphalt melted on the streets, and people, falling into it, merged with the road surface.

The telephone operator of the Central Telegraph left the following memories of the bombing of the city: “Some girls offered to go outside and run home. A staircase led from the basement of the telephone exchange building into a quadrangular courtyard under a glass roof. They wanted to get out through the main gate of the courtyard to Pochtovaya Square. I didn't like this idea; unexpectedly, just as 12 or 13 girls were running across the yard and fiddling with the gates, trying to open them, the red-hot roof collapsed, burying them all under it.

In a gynecological clinic, after being hit by a bomb, 45 pregnant women were killed. On the Altmarkt square, several hundred people, seeking salvation in ancient wells, were boiled alive, and the water from the wells evaporated by half.

During the bombing, approximately 2,000 refugees from Silesia and East Prussia were in the basement of the Central Station. The authorities equipped the underground passages for their temporary residence long before the bombing of the city. The refugees were cared for by representatives of the Red Cross, the women's service units within the framework of the state labor service, and the employees of the National Socialist Social Security Service. In another city in Germany, the gathering of such a number of people in rooms decorated with flammable materials would not be allowed. But the Dresden authorities were confident that the city would not be bombed.

Refugees were found both on the stairs leading to the platforms and on the platforms themselves. Shortly before the British bombers raid on the city, two trains with children arrived at the station from Königsbrück, which was being approached by the Red Army.

A refugee from Silesia recalled: “Thousands of people crowded in the square shoulder to shoulder ... Fire raged over them. The corpses of dead children lay at the entrances to the station, they were already piled on top of each other and taken out of the station.

According to the head of the air defense of the Central Station, out of 2,000 refugees who were in the tunnel, 100 were burned alive, and another 500 were suffocated in the smoke.

During the first attack on Dresden, the British Lancasters dropped 800 tons of bombs. Three hours later, 529 Lancasters dropped 1,800 tons of bombs. The losses of the RAF during two raids amounted to 6 aircraft, 2 more aircraft crashed in France and 1 in Great Britain.

On February 14, 311 American bombers dropped 771 tons of bombs on the city. On February 15, American aircraft dropped 466 tons of bombs. Some of the American P-51 fighters were ordered to attack targets moving along the roads in order to increase chaos and destruction on the important transport network of the region.

The commander of the Dresden rescue squad recalled: “At the beginning of the second attack, many were still crowded in the tunnels and basements, waiting for the end of the fires ... Detonation hit the glass of the cellars. Some new, strange sound was mixed with the roar of explosions, which became more and more muffled. Something reminiscent of the hum of a waterfall was the howl of a tornado that began in the city.

Many who were in underground shelters instantly burned out as soon as the surrounding heat suddenly increased sharply. They either turned to ash, or melted ... "

The bodies of other victims, found in the basements, shriveled from the horrible heat to one meter in length.

British planes dropped canisters filled with a mixture of rubber and white phosphorus on the city. The canisters broke on the ground, the phosphorus ignited, the viscous mass fell on people's skin and stuck tightly. It was impossible to repay it ...

One of the residents of Dresden said: “The tram depot had a public latrine made of corrugated iron. At the entrance, her face buried in a fur coat, lay a woman of about thirty, completely naked. A few yards away were two boys, about eight or ten years old. They lay, hugging each other tightly. They were also naked ... Everywhere, wherever the gaze reached, there were people suffocated from lack of oxygen. Apparently, they stripped off all their clothes, trying to make it look like an oxygen mask ... ”.

After the raids, a three-mile column of yellow-brown smoke rose into the sky. A mass of ash floated, covering the ruins, towards Czechoslovakia.

In some parts of the old city, such a heat developed that even a few days after the bombing it was impossible to enter the streets between the ruins of houses.

According to a report by the Dresden police, compiled after the raids, 12,000 buildings were burned down in the city, “... 24 banks, 26 buildings of insurance companies, 31 retail stores, 6470 stores, 640 warehouses, 256 sales rooms, 31 hotels, 26 brothels, 63 administrative buildings, 3 theaters, 18 cinemas, 11 churches, 60 chapels, 50 cultural and historical buildings, 19 hospitals (including auxiliary and private clinics), 39 schools, 5 consulates, 1 zoological garden, 1 waterworks, 1 railway depot, 19 post offices, 4 tram depots, 19 ships and barges ”.

On March 22, 1945, the municipal authorities of Dresden issued an official report, according to which the number of deaths recorded by that date was 20,204, and the total number of deaths in the bombing was expected to be about 25,000.

In 1953, in the work of German authors "Results of the Second World War," Major General of the Fire Service Hans Rumpf wrote: “The number of victims in Dresden cannot be counted. According to the State Department, 250,000 people died in this city, but the actual number of losses, of course, is much lower; but even 60-100 thousand civilians who died in the fire in one night alone can hardly fit into the human mind. "

In 2008, a commission of 13 German historians, commissioned by the city of Dresden, concluded that approximately 25,000 people were killed in the bombing.

"And at the same time show the Russians ..."

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was proposed to bomb Dresden on January 26, 1945 by Air Force Minister Archibald Sinclair in response to his dispatch with the question: “What can be done to properly finish off the Germans when they retreat from Breslau (this city is located 200 kilometers from Dresden. "SP")? "

On 8 February, Allied Expeditionary Force High Headquarters in Europe notified the British and US Air Forces that Dresden was included in the list of bombing targets. On the same day, the US military mission in Moscow sent an official notification to the Soviet side about the inclusion of Dresden in the list of targets.

The RAF memorandum, which the British pilots were consulted on the night before the attack, stated: “Dresden, the 7th largest city in Germany… by far the largest enemy area still not bombed. In the middle of winter, with streams of refugees heading west and troops to be quartered somewhere, housing is in short supply as not only workers, refugees and troops need to be accommodated, but also government offices evacuated from other areas. At one time, widely known for its porcelain production, Dresden has developed into a major industrial center ... The purpose of the attack is to strike the enemy where he feels it most strongly, behind a partially collapsed front ... and at the same time to show the Russians when they arrive in the city what they are capable of Royal Air Force ".

- If we talk about war crimes and genocide, many cities in Germany were bombed. The Americans and the British devised a plan: to ruthlessly bomb the cities in order to break the spirit of the German civilian population in a short time. But the country lived and worked under bombs, - says Vladimir Beshanov, author of books on the history of World War II. - I believe that not only the barbaric bombing of Dresden, but also the bombing of other German cities, as well as Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, must be recognized as war crimes.

In Dresden, residential buildings and architectural monuments were destroyed. The large marshalling yards were barely damaged. The railway bridge across the Elbe and the military airfield located in the vicinity of the city remained intact.

After Dresden, the British managed to bomb the medieval cities of Bayreuth, Würzburg, Zoest, Rothenburg, Pforzheim and Waelm. In Pforzheim alone, where 60,000 people lived, a third of the inhabitants died.

What will come of the next attempt to give the monstrous event the status of a war crime is unknown. So far, every year on February 13, the inhabitants of Dresden commemorate their fellow citizens who died in a firestorm.

The aircraft of the Western Allies launched a series of bombing strikes on the capital of Saxony, Dresden, which was almost completely destroyed as a result.

The raid on Dresden became part of the Anglo-American strategic bombing program, launched after the meeting of the heads of state of the United States and Great Britain in Casablanca in January 1943.

Dresden is the seventh largest city in pre-war Germany with a population of 647 thousand people. Due to the abundance of historical and cultural monuments, it was often called "Florence on the Elbe". There were no significant military installations there.

By February 1945, the city was overflowing with wounded and refugees fleeing the advancing units of the Red Army. Together with them in Dresden, there were, according to estimates, up to a million, and according to some sources, up to 1.3 million people.

The date of the raid on Dresden was determined by the weather: a clear sky was expected over the city.

During the first raid in the evening, 244 British Lancaster heavy bombers dropped 507 tons of high-explosive and 374 tons of incendiary bombs. During the second raid at night, which lasted half an hour and was twice as powerful as the first, 529 aircraft dropped 965 tons of high-explosive and over 800 tons of incendiary bombs on the city.

On the morning of February 14, the city was bombed by 311 American B-17s. They dropped more than 780 tons of bombs into the raging sea of \u200b\u200bfire below them. In the afternoon of February 15, 210 American B-17s completed the rout, dropping another 462 tons of bombs on the city.

It was the most destructive bombing strike in Europe in all the years of World War II.

The area of \u200b\u200bthe zone of continuous destruction in Dresden was four times that of Nagasaki after the nuclear bombing by the Americans on August 9, 1945.

In most of the urban development, destruction exceeded 75-80%. Among the irreplaceable cultural losses are the old Frauenkirche, the Hofkirche, the famous Opera and the world-famous Zwinger palace ensemble. At the same time, the damage caused to industrial enterprises was insignificant. The railroad network also suffered little damage. The marshalling yards and even one bridge over the Elbe were not damaged, and traffic through the Dresden junction resumed a few days later.

Determining the exact number of victims of the bombing of Dresden is complicated by the fact that at that time there were several dozen military hospitals and hundreds of thousands of refugees in the city. Many were buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings or burned up in a fire tornado.

The death toll is estimated in various sources from 25-50 thousand to 135 thousand people or more. According to an analysis prepared by the Historical Department of the United States Air Force, 25,000 people died, according to official figures from the Historical Department of the British Royal Air Force, more than 50,000 people.

Later, the Western allies argued that the raid on Dresden was a response to the request of the Soviet command to strike at the city's railway junction, allegedly made at the Yalta conference in 1945.

As the declassified minutes of the Yalta conference, shown in the documentary film Dresden. Chronicle of the Tragedy (2006) directed by Alexei Denisov, testify that the USSR never asked the Anglo-American allies to bomb Dresden during World War II. What the Soviet command really asked for was to strike at the railway junctions of Berlin and Leipzig due to the fact that the Germans had already transferred about 20 divisions from the western front to the eastern front and were going to transfer about 30 more. It was this request that was presented in writing. the sight of Roosevelt and Churchill.

From the point of view of Russian historians, the bombing of Dresden pursued, rather, a political goal. They associate the bombing of the Saxon capital with the desire of the Western Allies to demonstrate their air power to the advancing Red Army.

After the end of the war, the ruins of churches, palaces and residential buildings were dismantled and taken out of the city, in the place of Dresden there was only a site with marked boundaries of the streets and buildings that used to be here. The restoration of the city center took 40 years, the rest of the parts were restored earlier. At the same time, a number of historical buildings of the city located on the Neumarkt square are being restored to this day.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources