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Dresden, 1945, view from the city hall (Rathaus) over the destroyed city
Immediate German propaganda claims following the attacks and post-war discussions on whether the attacks were justified have led to the bombing becoming one of the moral
causes célèbres of the war. A 1953
United States Air Force
report defended the operation as the justified bombing of a strategic
target, which they noted was a major rail transport and communication
centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the
German war effort.
Several researchers claim not all of the communications infrastructure,
such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were the extensive industrial
areas outside the city center.
Critics of the bombing have claimed that Dresden was a cultural
landmark of little or no strategic significance, and that the attacks
were indiscriminate
area bombing and not
proportionate to the
military gains. Some in the German far-right refer to the bombing as a
mass murder, calling it "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs".
Large variations in the claimed death toll have fuelled the
controversy. In March 1945, the German government ordered its press to
publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids,
and death toll estimates as high as 500,000 have been given.
The city authorities at the time estimated up to 25,000 victims, a
figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study
commissioned by the city council.
Background
A view from the town hall over the Altstadt (old town), 1910
Early in 1945, the German offensive known as the
Battle of the Bulge had been exhausted, as was the disastrous attack by the
Luftwaffe on New Year's Day involving elements of eleven combat wings of the Luftwaffe's day fighter force. The
Red Army had launched their
Silesian Offensives into pre-war German territory. The
German army was retreating on all fronts, but still resisting strongly. On 8 February 1945, the Red Army crossed the
Oder River, with positions just 70 km from
Berlin. A special British Joint Intelligence Subcommittee report titled
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. Hence, any assistance provided to the Soviets on the Eastern Front could shorten the war.
Plans for a large and intense aerial bombing of Berlin and the other eastern cities had been discussed under the code name
Operation Thunderclap in mid-1944, but had been shelved on 16 August. These were now re-examined, and the decision was made to plan a more limited operation.
On 22 January 1945, the RAF director of bomber operations,
Air Commodore Sydney Bufton, sent a memorandum to the
Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir
Norman Bottomley,
suggesting that what appeared to be a coordinated air attack by the RAF
to aid the current Soviet offensive would have a detrimental effect on
German morale. On 25 January, the Joint Intelligence Committee supported the idea, as it tied in with the
Ultra-based intelligence 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."
Arthur Harris,
AOC Bomber Command, nicknamed "Bomber" Harris in the British press, and known as an ardent supporter of
area bombing, was asked for his view, and 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. He passed on the request to Sir
Charles Portal, the
Chief of the Air Staff,
who answered that "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 activity 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 a message to Portal 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 Sir
Douglas Evill
on 1 February, in which Evill states interfering with mass civilian
movements was a major, even key, factor in the decision to bomb the city
centre. Attacks there, where main railway junctions, telephone systems,
city administration and utilities were located, would result in
"chaos." Ostensibly, Britain had 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 paralysing the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig with
aerial bombardment. In response,
Chief of the British Air Staff 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. A British interpreter later claimed that Antonov and
Joseph Stalin
asked for the bombing of Dresden, but there is no mention of these
requests in the official record of the conference and the claim was
assessed as possible
Cold War propaganda.
Military and industrial profile
Front
lines in Europe during the Dresden bombings. White areas were held by
Germany, pink ones by the Allies, and red denotes recent Allied advances
around the periphery of a still largely unoccupied Germany. Grey areas
were neutral.
Dresden was Germany's seventh-largest city and, according to the RAF at the time, 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
materiel.
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 in response to the international concern about the bombing – the report remained
classified until December 1978.
This 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); as well as factories producing electrical and X-ray apparatus (
Koch & Sterzel [de]
AG); gears and differentials (Saxoniswerke); and electric gauges
(Gebrüder Bassler). It also said there were 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. Colonel Harold E. Cook, a US
POW held in the
Friedrichstadt
marshaling yard the night before the attacks, later said that "I saw
with my own eyes that Dresden was an armed camp: thousands of German
troops, tanks and artillery and miles of freight cars loaded with
supplies supporting and transporting German
logistics towards the east to meet the Russians".
An RAF memo issued to airmen on the night of the attack indicated
that a secondary purpose of the raid was to "show the Russians when
they arrive [at Dresden] what [the British]
Bomber Command can do." The memo stated:
Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester is also the largest unbombed builtup area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees
pouring westward and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not
only to give shelter to workers, refugees, and troops alike, but to
house the administrative services displaced from other areas. At one
time well known for its china,
Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance
... The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will
feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front ... and
incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.
In the raid, major industrial areas in the suburbs, which stretched for miles, were not targeted. According to historian
Donald Miller,
"the economic disruption would have been far greater had Bomber Command
targeted the suburban areas where most of Dresden's manufacturing might
was concentrated".
The attacks
Night of 13/14 February
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.
On 13 February 1945, bad weather over Europe prevented any USAAF operations, and it was left to
RAF Bomber Command
to carry out the first raid. It had been decided that the raid would be
a double strike, in which a second wave of bombers would attack three
hours after the first, just as the rescue teams were trying to put out
the fires. Other raids were carried out that night to confuse
German air defences. Three hundred and sixty heavy bombers (
Lancasters and
Halifaxes) bombed a synthetic oil plant in
Böhlen, 60 miles (97 km) from Dresden, while
de Havilland Mosquito medium bombers attacked
Magdeburg,
Bonn, Misburg near
Hanover and
Nuremberg.
When Polish crews of the designated squadrons were preparing for
the mission, the terms of the Yalta agreement were made known to them.
There was a huge uproar, since the Yalta agreement handed parts of
Poland over to the Soviet Union. There was talk of mutiny among the
Polish pilots, and their British officers removed their side arms. The
Polish Government ordered the pilots to follow their orders and fly
their missions over Dresden, which they did.
A Lancaster releases the main part of its load, a 4,000 lb (1,800 kg) HC "cookie" and 108 30 lb (14 kg) "J" incendiaries. (over Duisburg 1944)
The first of the British aircraft took off at around 17:20 hours
CET for the 700-mile (1,100 km) 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 light
up the area for the bombers. The next set of aircraft to leave England
were twin-engined
Mosquito marker planes, which would identify target areas and drop 1,000-pound
target indicators (TIs)" that created a red glow 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
("fire bombs"). There were 200,000 incendiaries in all, with the
high-explosive bombs ranging in weight from 500 pounds to 4,000
pounds—the so-called two-ton
cookies,
also known as "blockbusters," because they could destroy an entire
large building or street. The high explosives were intended to rupture
water mains and blow off roofs, doors, and windows to create an air flow
to feed the fires caused by the incendiaries that followed.
The Lancasters crossed into French
airspace 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).
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."
The first bombs were released at 22:13, the last at 22:28, the
Lancasters delivering 881.1 tons of bombs, 57% high explosive, 43%
incendiaries. The fan-shaped area that was bombed was 1.25 miles
(2.01 km) long, and at its extreme about 1.75 miles (2.82 km) 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 60 miles (97 km) away on the
ground, and 500 miles (800 km) away in the air, with smoke rising to
15,000 feet (4,600 m). The Pathfinders therefore decided to expand the target, dropping flares on either side of the firestorm, including the
Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, and the
Großer Garten,
a large park, both of which had escaped damage during the first raid.
The German sirens sounded again at 01:05, but as there was practically
no electricity, these were small hand-held 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
There is some confusion in the primary sources over what was the target in Dresden, whether it was the
marshalling yards
near the centre 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 was the target. If both were obscured, they would bomb
the centre of Dresden using
H2X radar.
The mix of bombs for the Dresden raid was about 40% incendiaries—much
closer to the RAF city-busting mix than that which the USAAF usually
used in precision bombardment. Taylor compares this 40% mix with the
raid on Berlin
on 3 February, where the ratio was 10% incendiaries. This was a common
mix when the USAAF anticipated cloudy conditions over the target.
316
B-17 Flying Fortresses bombed Dresden, dropping 771 tons of bombs. The rest misidentified their targets. Sixty
bombed Prague, dropping 153 tons of bombs on the Czech city, while others bombed
Brux 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 not obscured by smoke and cloud. The 303rd group
arrived over Dresden 2 minutes after the 379th found that their view
was obscured by clouds, so they bombed Dresden using H2X radar to target
this location. The groups that followed the 303rd, (92nd, 306th, 379th,
384th and 457th) also found Dresden obscured by clouds, and they too
used H2X to locate the target. H2X aiming caused the groups to bomb with
a wide dispersal over the Dresden area. The last group to bomb Dresden
was the 306th, and they had finished by 12:30.
Strafing
of civilians has become a traditional part of the oral history of the
raids, since a March 1945 article in the Nazi-run weekly newspaper
Das Reich claimed that this had occurred.
Historian Götz Bergander, who was an eyewitness of the raids, found no
reports on strafing for 13–15 February, neither by any of the pilots nor
by the German military and police. He asserted in
Dresden im Luftkrieg
(1977) that only a few tales of civilians being strafed were reliable
in details, 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 being deliberately aimed at
people on the ground.
In 2000, historian Helmut Schnatz found that there was 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 an aerial dog fight 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 cloud, so the Division's 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 on the previous raid, their ordnance was scattered over a wide area.
German defensive action
Dresden's
air defences had been depleted by the need for more weaponry to fight
the Red Army, and the city lost its last heavy flak battery in January
1945. By this point in the war, the Luftwaffe was seriously hampered by a
shortage of both pilots and aircraft fuel; the German radar system had
also been 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.
Of a total of 796 British bombers that participated in the raid,
six bombers were lost, three of those hit by bombs dropped by aircraft
flying over them. On the following day, 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
Bodies of civilian casualties
It is not possible to describe!
Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest
nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. It became
more and more difficult to breathe. It was dark and all of us tried to
leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were
trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by
rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched
up out of my mother's hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people
behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible
firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found
in a water tub.
We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of
small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families
burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with
civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and
looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere
fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back
into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.
— Lothar Metzger, survivor.
The sirens had 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
"ein dicker Hund"
(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".
Over ninety percent of the city centre was destroyed.
To my left I suddenly see a woman. I
can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle
in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in
an arc into the fire.
Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream
and gesticulate with their hands, and then—to my utter horror and
amazement—I see how one after the other they simply seem to let
themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate
people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt
to cinders.
Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to
myself continuously: "I don't want to burn to death". I do not know how
many people I fell over. I know only one thing: that I must not burn.
— Margaret Freyer, survivor.
Frauenkirche ruins with a figure of Martin Luther that survived the bombings
There were very few public
air raid shelters—the largest, underneath the main railway station, was housing 6,000 refugees.
As a result, most people took shelter in their cellars, but one of the
air raid precautions the city had taken was to remove the 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 using the basement as a
shelter could knock the walls down and run 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 end of city blocks.
Body of a woman who died in an air-raid shelter
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 24 banks, 26
insurance buildings, 31 stores and retail houses, 640 shops, 64
warehouses, 2 market halls, 31 large hotels, 26 public houses, 63
administrative buildings, 3 theatres, 18 cinemas, 11 churches, 6
chapels; 5 other cultural buildings, 19 hospitals including auxiliary,
overflow hospitals, and private clinics, 39 schools, 5 consulates, the
zoo, the waterworks, the railways, 19 postal facilities, 4
tram facilities, and 19 ships and barges. The
Wehrmacht's main command post in the
Taschenbergpalais, 19 military hospitals and a number of less significant military facilities were also destroyed.
Almost 200 factories were damaged, 136 seriously damaged (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 percent of the industrial
buildings, and 56 percent 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.
During his post-war interrogation,
Albert Speer,
Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich, indicated
that Dresden's industrial recovery from the bombings was rapid.
Fatalities
A pile of bodies before cremation
According to official German report Tagesbefehl (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 that the total number of deaths would 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 of the Dresden
raids, including those cremated on the Altmarkt.
Between 100,000 and 200,000 refugees
fleeing westwards 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".
This was largely achievable because most of the dead succumbed to
suffocation; in only four places were recovered remains so badly burned
that it proved impossible to ascertain the number of victims. The
uncertainty introduced by this is thought to amount to a total of no
more than 100. 35,000 people were registered with the authorities as missing after the raids, around 10,000 of whom were later found alive.
A further 1,858 bodies were discovered during the reconstruction of Dresden between the end of the war and 1966. Since 1989, despite extensive excavation for new buildings, no war-related bodies have been found.
Seeking to establish a definitive casualty figure, in part to address
propagandisation of the bombing by far-right groups, the Dresden city
council in 2005 authorized an independent Historian's Commission
(Historikerkommission) to conduct a new, thorough investigation,
collecting and evaluating available sources. The results were published
in 2010 and stated that a minimum of 22,700 and a maximum of 25,000 people were 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 it 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 it 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 stated 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 make [the total dead from the raid]
202,040". On 4 March,
Das Reich,
a weekly newspaper founded by Goebbels, published a lengthy article
emphasizing the suffering and destruction of a cultural icon, without
mentioning any damage the attacks had caused 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
British House of Commons when
Richard Stokes, a
Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP), a long term opponent of area-bombing,
quoted information from the German Press Agency (controlled by the
Propaganda Ministry). It was Stokes' questions in the House of Commons
that were in large part responsible for the shift in the UK 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'
massaging of the casualty figures.
British
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was ultimately responsible for the bombing, even though he later tried to distance himself from it.
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.
First of all they (Dresden and
similar towns) are the centres to which evacuees are being moved. They
are centres of communications through which traffic is moving across to
the Russian Front, and from the Western Front to the East, and they are
sufficiently close to the Russian Front for the Russians to continue the
successful prosecution of their battle. I think these three reasons
probably cover the bombing.
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 saying that the
Allies had resorted to terror bombing. There were follow-up newspaper
editorials on the issue and a longtime opponent of strategic bombing,
Richard Stokes
MP, asked questions in the House of Commons on 6 March.
Churchill subsequently distanced himself from the bombing. On 28 March, in a memo sent by telegram to
General Ismay for the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff, he wrote:
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. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land
... The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the
conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives
must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than
that of the enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I
feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives
such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather
than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.
Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command,
strongly objected to Churchill's comparison of the raid to an "act of
terror," a comment Churchill withdrew in the face of Harris's protest.
Having been given a paraphrased version of Churchill's memo by Bottomley, on 29 March, Air Chief Marshal
Arthur Harris wrote to the Air Ministry:
I ... assume that the view under
consideration is something like this: no doubt in the past we were
justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant
and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from
proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never
subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable
unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically
justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the
lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give
them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do
not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as
worth the bones of one British Grenadier.
The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily
explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and
Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works,
an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East.
It is now none of these things.
The phrase "worth the bones of one British grenadier" echoed a famous sentence used by
Otto von Bismarck: "The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier".
Under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff and in response to the views
expressed by Portal and Harris among others, Churchill withdrew his memo
and issued a new one. This was completed on 1 April 1945:
It seems to me that the moment has
come when the question of the so called 'area-bombing' of German cities
should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests. If we
come into control of an entirely ruined land, there will be a great
shortage of accommodation for ourselves and our allies. ... We must see
to it that our attacks do no more harm to ourselves in the long run than
they do to the enemy's war effort.
Reconstruction and reconciliation
The Semperoper,
the Dresden state opera house, in 2007. It was destroyed during the
bombing, and was rebuilt in 1985. It opened exactly 40 years after the
bombing on 13 February with the same opera that was last performed
before its destruction, Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber.
In 1956, Dresden entered a twin-town relationship with
Coventry.
As a centre of military and munitions production, Coventry suffered
some of the worst attacks on any British city at the hands of the
Luftwaffe during the
Coventry Blitzes of 1940 and 1941, which killed over 1,200 civilians and destroyed its
cathedral.
In 1990, after the
fall of the Berlin Wall,
a group of prominent Dresdeners formed an international appeal known as
the "Call from Dresden" to request help in rebuilding the
Lutheran Frauenkirche, the destruction of which had over the years become a symbol of the bombing.
The baroque Church of Our Lady (completed in 1743) had initially
appeared to survive the raids, but collapsed a few days later, and the
ruins were left in place by later Communist governments as an anti-war
memorial.
The reconstructed Frauenkirche is again a part of the baroque skyline of Dresden.
A British charity, the Dresden Trust, was formed in 1993 to raise
funds in response to the call for help, raising £600,000 from 2,000
people and 100 companies and trusts in Britain. One of the gifts they
made to the project was an eight-metre high orb and cross made in London
by goldsmiths Gant MacDonald, using medieval nails recovered from the
ruins of the roof of
Coventry Cathedral, and crafted in part by Alan Smith, the son of a pilot who took part in the raid.
The new Frauenkirche was reconstructed over seven years by
architects using 3D computer technology to analyse old photographs and
every piece of rubble that had been kept and was formally
consecrated on 30 October 2005, in a service attended by some 1,800 guests, including Germany's president,
Horst Köhler; previous and current chancellors,
Gerhard Schröder and
Angela Merkel; and
the Duke of Kent.
Post-war debate
Memorial to the victims of the bombing of Dresden
The bombing of Dresden remains controversial and is subject to an
ongoing debate by historians and scholars regarding the moral and
military justifications surrounding the event. British historian
Frederick Taylor
wrote of the attacks: "The destruction of Dresden has an epically
tragic quality to it. It was a wonderfully beautiful city and a symbol
of baroque humanism and all that was best in Germany. It also contained
all of the worst from Germany during the
Nazi
period. In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the
horrors of 20th century warfare and a symbol of destruction".
Several factors have made the bombing a unique point of
contention and debate. First among these are the Nazi government's
exaggerated claims immediately afterwards,
which drew upon the beauty of the city, its importance as a cultural
icon; the deliberate creation of a firestorm; the number of victims; the
extent to which it was a necessary military target; and the fact that
it was attacked toward the end of the war, raising the question of
whether the bombing was needed to hasten the end.
Legal considerations
The
Hague Conventions,
addressing the codes of wartime conduct on land and at sea, were
adopted before the rise of air power. Despite repeated diplomatic
attempts to update
international humanitarian law
to include aerial warfare, it was not updated before the outbreak of
World War II. The absence of positive international humanitarian law
does not mean that the
laws of war did not cover aerial warfare, but there was no general agreement of how to interpret those laws.
Falsification of evidence
The bombing of Dresden has been used by
Holocaust deniers and pro-Nazi polemicists—most notably by the British writer
David Irving in his book
The Destruction of Dresden—in
an attempt to establish a moral equivalence between the war crimes
committed by the Nazi government and the killing of German civilians by
Allied bombing raids. As such, "grossly inflated"
casualty figures have been promulgated over the years, many based on a
figure of over 200,000 deaths quoted in a forged version of the casualty
report,
Tagesbefehl No. 47, that originated with
Hitler's Reich Minister of Propaganda
Joseph Goebbels.
Marshall inquiry
An inquiry conducted at the behest of U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General
George C. Marshall,
stated the raid was justified by the available intelligence. The
inquiry declared the elimination of the German ability to reinforce a
counter-attack against Marshal Konev's extended line or, alternatively,
to retreat and regroup using Dresden as a base of operations, were
important military objectives. As Dresden had been largely untouched
during the war due to its location, it was one of the few remaining
functional rail and communications centres. A secondary objective was to
disrupt the industrial use of Dresden for munitions manufacture, which
American intelligence believed was the case. The shock to military
planners and to the Allied civilian populations of the German
counterattack known as the
Battle of the Bulge
had ended speculation that the war was almost over, and may have
contributed to the decision to continue with the aerial bombardment of
German cities.
The inquiry concluded that by the presence of active German
military units nearby, and the presence of fighters and anti-aircraft
within an effective range, Dresden qualified as "defended".
By this stage in the war both the British and the Germans had
integrated air defences at the national level. The German national
air-defence system could be used to argue—as the tribunal did—that no
German city was "undefended".
Marshall's tribunal declared that no extraordinary decision was
made to single out Dresden (e.g. to take advantage of the large number
of refugees, or purposely terrorize the German populace). It was argued
that the intent of area bombing was to disrupt communications and
destroy industrial production. The American inquiry established that the
Soviets, pursuant to allied agreements for the United States and the
United Kingdom to provide air support for the Soviet offensive toward
Berlin, had requested area bombing of Dresden to prevent a counterattack
through Dresden, or the use of Dresden as a regrouping point after a
strategic retreat.
U.S. Air Force Historical Division report
A U.S. Air Force table showing the tonnage of bombs dropped by the Allies on Germany's seven largest cities during the war
| City
|
Population
(1939)
|
Tonnage
|
| American
|
British
|
Total
|
| Berlin
|
4,339,000
|
22,090
|
45,517
|
67,607
|
| Hamburg
|
1,129,000
|
17,104
|
22,583
|
39,687
|
| Munich
|
841,000
|
11,471
|
7,858
|
19,329
|
| Cologne
|
772,000
|
10,211
|
34,712
|
44,923
|
| Leipzig
|
707,000
|
5,410
|
6,206
|
11,616
|
| Essen
|
667,000
|
1,518
|
36,420
|
37,938
|
| Dresden
|
642,000
|
4,441
|
2,659
|
7,100
|
A report by the U.S. Air Force Historical Division (USAFHD) analyzed
the circumstances of the raid and concluded that it was militarily
necessary and justified, based on the following points:
- The raid had legitimate military ends, brought about by exigent military circumstances.
- Military units and anti-aircraft defences were sufficiently close that it was not valid to consider the city "undefended."
- The raid did not use extraordinary means but was comparable to other raids used against comparable targets.
- The raid was carried out through the normal chain of command, pursuant to directives and agreements then in force.
- The raid achieved the military objective, without excessive loss of civilian life.
The first point regarding the legitimacy of the raid depends on two
claims: first, that the railyards subjected to American precision
bombing were an important logistical target, and that the city was also
an important industrial centre.
Even after the main firebombing, there were two further raids on the
Dresden railway yards by the USAAF. The first was on 2 March 1945, by
406 B-17s, which dropped 940 tons of high-explosive bombs and 141 tons
of incendiaries. The second was on 17 April, when 580 B-17s dropped
1,554 tons of high-explosive bombs and 165 tons of incendiaries.
As far as Dresden being a militarily significant industrial centre, an official 1942 guide described the German city 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 supplied materiel to the military.
Dresden was the seventh largest German city, and by far the largest
un-bombed built-up area left, and thus was contributing to the defence
of Germany itself.
According to the USAFHD, there were 110 factories and 50,000
workers supporting the German war effort in Dresden at the time of the
raid. These factories manufactured fuses and bombsights (at Zeiss Ikon A.G.), aircraft components,
anti-aircraft guns,
field guns, and
small arms,
poison gas,
gears and
differentials, electrical and X-ray apparatus, electric gauges,
gas masks,
Junkers aircraft engines, and
Messerschmitt fighter cockpit parts.
The second of the five points addresses the prohibition in the
Hague Conventions,
of "attack or bombardment" of "undefended" towns. The USAFHD report
states that Dresden was protected by anti-aircraft defences,
antiaircraft guns, and searchlights, under the Combined Dresden (Corps
Area IV) and Berlin (Corps Area III) Luftwaffe Administration Commands.
The third and fourth points say that the size of the Dresden
raid—in terms of numbers, types of bombs and the means of delivery—were
commensurate with the military objective and similar to other Allied
bombings. On 23 February 1945, the Allies
bombed Pforzheim and caused an estimated 20,000 civilian fatalities; the most devastating raid on any city was on
Tokyo on 9–10 March (the
Meetinghouse raid)
caused over 100,000 civilian casualties. The tonnage and types of bombs
listed in the service records of the Dresden raid were comparable to
(or less than)
throw weights
of bombs dropped in other air attacks carried out in 1945. In the case
of Dresden, as in many other similar attacks, the hour break in between
the RAF raids was a deliberate ploy to attack the fire fighters, medical
teams, and military units.
In late July 1943, the city of
Hamburg was bombed in
Operation Gomorrah
by combined RAF and USAAF strategic bomber forces. Four major raids
were carried out in the span of 10 days, of which the most notable, on
27–28 July, created a devastating
firestorm effect similar to Dresden's, killing at least 45,000 people. Two-thirds of the remaining population reportedly fled the city after the raids.
The fifth point is that the firebombing achieved the intended effect of
disabling the industry in Dresden. It was estimated that at least 23% of
the city's industrial buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. The
damage to other infrastructure and communications was immense, which
would have severely limited the potential use of Dresden to stop the
Soviet advance. The report concludes with:
The
specific forces and means employed in the Dresden bombings were in
keeping with the forces and means employed by the Allies in other aerial
attacks on comparable targets in Germany. The Dresden bombings achieved
the strategic objectives that underlay the attack and were of mutual
importance to the Allies and the Russians.
Arguments against justification
Military reasons
The journalist
Alexander McKee
cast doubt on the meaningfulness of the list of targets mentioned in
the 1953 USAF report, pointing out that the military barracks listed as a
target were a long way out of the city and were not in fact targeted
during the raid. The "hutted camps" mentioned in the report as military targets were also not military but were camps for refugees.
It is also stated that the important Autobahn bridge to the west of the
city was not targeted or attacked, and that no railway stations were on
the British target maps, nor any bridges, such as the railway bridge
spanning the Elbe River.
Commenting on this, McKee says: "The standard whitewash gambit, both
British and American, is to mention that Dresden contained targets X, Y
and Z, and to let the innocent reader assume that these targets were
attacked, whereas in fact the bombing plan totally omitted them and
thus, except for one or two mere accidents, they escaped".
McKee further asserts "The bomber commanders were not really interested
in any purely military or economic targets, which was just as well, for
they knew very little about Dresden; the RAF even lacked proper maps of
the city. What they were looking for was a big built up area which they
could burn, and that Dresden possessed in full measure."
According to the historian
Sönke Neitzel,
"it is difficult to find any evidence in German documents that the
destruction of Dresden had any consequences worth mentioning on the
Eastern Front. The industrial plants of Dresden played no significant
role in German industry at this stage in the war". Wing Commander
H. R. Allen
said, "The final phase of Bomber Command's operations was far and away
the worst. Traditional British chivalry and the use of minimum force in
war was to become a mockery and the outrages perpetrated by the bombers
will be remembered a thousand years hence".
A memorial at cemetery Heidefriedhof in Dresden. It reads: "Wieviele
starben? Wer kennt die Zahl? An deinen Wunden sieht man die Qual der
Namenlosen, die hier verbrannt, im Höllenfeuer aus Menschenhand."
("How many died? Who knows the count? In your wounds one sees the agony
of the nameless, who in here were conflagrated, in the hellfire made by
hands of man.")
Military facilities in the north
The
Albertstadt,
in the north of Dresden, had remarkable military facilities that the
bombings failed to hit. Today they are officer's schools
("Offiziersschule des Heeres") for the
Bundeswehr and its
military history museum (from prehistoric to modern times).
As an immoral act, but not a war crime
...
ever since the deliberate mass bombing of civilians in the second world
war, and as a direct response to it, the international community has
outlawed the practice. It first tried to do so in the Fourth Geneva Convention
of 1949, but the UK and the US would not agree, since to do so would
have been an admission of guilt for their systematic "area bombing" of
German and Japanese civilians.
Frederick Taylor told
Der Spiegel,
"I personally find the attack on Dresden horrific. It was overdone, it
was excessive and is to be regretted enormously," but, "A
war crime
is a very specific thing which international lawyers argue about all
the time and I would not be prepared to commit myself nor do I see why I
should. I'm a historian." Similarly, British philosopher
A. C. Grayling
has described British area bombardment as an "immoral act" and "moral
crime" because "destroying everything ... contravenes every moral and
humanitarian principle debated in connection with
the just conduct of war," but, "It is not strictly correct to describe area bombing as a 'war crime'."
As a war crime
Though no one involved in the bombing of Dresden was ever charged
with a war crime, some hold the opinion that the bombing was one.
... every human being having the
capacity for both good and evil. The Nazi Holocaust was among the most
evil genocides in history. But the Allies' firebombing of Dresden and
nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also war crimes – and
as Leo Kuper and Eric Markusen have argued, also acts of genocide. We are all capable of evil and must be restrained by law from committing it.
Historian
Donald Bloxham states, "The bombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 was a war crime". He further argues there was a strong
prima facie
case for trying Winston Churchill among others and a theoretical case
Churchill could have been found guilty. "This should be a sobering
thought. If, however it is also a startling one, this is probably less
the result of widespread understanding of the nuance of international
law and more because in the popular mind 'war criminal', like
'paedophile' or 'terrorist', has developed into a moral rather than a
legal categorisation".
German author
Günter Grass is one of several intellectuals and commentators who have also called the bombing a war crime.
Proponents of this position argue that the devastation from firebombing was greater than anything that could be justified by
military necessity alone, and this establishes a
prima facie case. The Allies were aware of the effects of firebombing, as British cities had been subject to them during
the Blitz.
Proponents disagree that Dresden had a military garrison and claim that
most of the industry was in the outskirts and not in the targeted city
centre, and that the cultural significance of the city should have precluded the Allies from bombing it.
British historian
Antony Beevor
wrote that Dresden was considered relatively safe, having been spared
previous RAF night attacks, and that at the time of the raids there were
up to 300,000 refugees in the area
seeking sanctuary from the advancing
Red Army from the
Eastern Front. In
Fire Sites, German historian
Jörg Friedrich
says that the RAF's bombing campaign against German cities in the last
months of the war served no military purpose. He claims that Winston
Churchill's decision to bomb a shattered Germany between January and May
1945 was a war crime. According to him, 600,000 civilians died during
the allied bombing of German cities, including 72,000 children. Some
45,000 people died on one night during the firestorms that engulfed
Hamburg in July 1943.
Political response in Germany
Banner expressing support for Arthur Harris and the Allied fight against fascism
Far-right politicians in Germany have sparked a great deal of controversy by promoting the term "
Bombenholocaust" ("holocaust by bomb") to describe the raids.
Der Spiegel
writes that, for decades, the Communist government of East Germany
promoted the bombing as an example of "Anglo-American terror," and now
the same rhetoric is being used by the far right. An example can be found in the extremist nationalist party
Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD). A party's representative,
Jürgen Gansel, described the Dresden raids as "mass murder," and "Dresden's holocaust of bombs".
This provoked an outrage in the German parliament and triggered
responses from the media. Prosecutors said that it was illegal to call
the bombing a holocaust. In 2010, several demonstrations by organizations opposing the far-right
blocked a demonstration of far-right organizations.
Phrases like "Bomber-Harris, do it again!", "Bomber-Harris Superstar – Thanks from the red
Antifa", and
"Deutsche Täter sind keine Opfer!" ("German perpetrators are no victims!") are popular
slogans among the so-called "
Anti-Germans"—a small radical left-wing political movement in Germany and Austria.
In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing, Anti-Germans praised
the bombing on the grounds that so many of the city's civilians had
supported Nazism. Similar rallies take place every year.
In art and popular culture
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut's novel
Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) used some elements from his experiences as a
prisoner of war
at Dresden during the bombing. His account relates that over 135,000
were killed during the firebombings. Vonnegut recalled "utter
destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." The Germans put him and other
POWs to work gathering bodies for mass burial. "But there were too many
corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with
flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes".
In the special introduction to the 1976
Franklin Library edition of the novel, he wrote:
The Dresden atrocity, tremendously
expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that
only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that
person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made
my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three
dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.
The death toll of 135,000 given by Vonnegut was taken from
The Destruction of Dresden, a 1963 book by
David Irving. In a 1965 letter to
The Guardian,
Irving later adjusted his estimates even higher, "almost certainly
between 100,000 and 250,000", but all these figures were shortly found
to be inflated: Irving finally published a correction in The Times in a
1966 letter to the editor
lowering it to 25,000, in line with subsequent scholarship. Despite
Irving's eventual much lower numbers, and later accusations of generally
poor scholarship, the figure popularized by Vonnegut remains in general
circulation.
Freeman Dyson, a British (and later American) physicist who had worked as a young man with
RAF Bomber Command from July 1943 to the end of the war,
wrote in later years: "For many years I had intended to write a book on
the bombing. Now I do not need to write it, because Vonnegut has
written it much better than I could. He was in Dresden at the time and
saw what happened. His book is not only good literature. It is also
truthful. The only inaccuracy that I found in it is that it does not say
that the night attack which produced the holocaust was a British
affair. The Americans only came the following day to plow over the
rubble. Vonnegut, being American, did not want to write his account in
such a way that the whole thing could be blamed on the British. Apart
from that, everything he says is true."
Dyson later goes on to say: "Since the beginning of the war I had been
retreating step by step from one moral position to another, until at the
end I had no moral position at all".
Other
- The German diarist Victor Klemperer includes a first-hand account of the firestorm in his published works.
- The main action of the novel Closely Observed Trains, by Czech author Bohumil Hrabal, takes place on the night of the first raid.
- In the 1983 Pink Floyd album The Final Cut, "The Hero's Return",
the protagonist lives his years after World War II tormented by
"desperate memories", part of him still flying "over Dresden at angels
1–5" (fifteen-thousand feet).
- In the song "Tailgunner", Iron Maiden starts with "Trace your way back 50 Years / To the glow of Dresden – blood and tears".
- Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) incorporates the bombings into essential parts of the story.
- The bombings are a central theme in the 2006 German TV production Dresden
by director Roland Suso Richter. Along with the romantic plot between a
British bomber pilot and a German nurse, the movie attempts to
reconstruct the facts surrounding the Dresden bombings from both the
perspective of the RAF pilots and the Germans in Dresden at the time.
- The bombing is featured in the 1992 Vincent Ward film, Map of the Human Heart, with the hero, Avik, forced to bale out of his bomber and parachute down into the inferno.
- The devastation of Dresden was recorded in the woodcuts of Wilhelm
Rudolph, an artist born in the city who resided there until his death in
1982, and was 55 at the time of the bombing. His studio having burned
in the attack with his life's work, Rudolph immediately set out to
record the destruction, systematically drawing block after block, often
repeatedly to show the progress of clearing or chaos that ensued in the
ruins. Although the city had been sealed off by the Wehrmacht to prevent
looting, Rudolph was granted a special permit to enter and carry out
his work, as he would be during the Russian occupation as well. By the
end of 1945 he had completed almost 200 drawings, which he transferred
to woodcuts following the war. He organized these as discrete series
that he would always show as a whole, from the 52 woodcuts of Aus (Out, or Gone) in 1948, the 35 woodcuts Dresden 1945–After the Catastrophe in 1949, and the 15 woodcuts and 5 lithographs of Dresden 1945
in 1955. Of this work, Rudolph later described himself as gripped by an
"obsessive-compulsive state," under the preternatural spell of war,
which revealed to him that "the utterly fantastic is the reality. ...
Beside that, every human invention remains feeble."
