Introduction
At a conference of allied air commanders on 1 March 1945, the Commander-in-chief of RAF Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, remarked that Bomber Command had so far destroyed 63 German cities. [i] He made no specific reference to the bombing of Dresden, which had taken place on 13-14 February, but he probably knew that it was already causing rumblings of controversy. Of all the 63 cities devastated by Bomber Command, Dresden has become the most deeply ingrained in our collective memory of the war. References are often made to the fate of Cologne, Hamburg or Berlin, but Dresden remains the most powerful symbol and the most controversial instance of the issues involved in the strategic air offensive against Germany.
Why of all the cities attacked by Bomber Command did it come to acquire such exceptional significance? Common sense may suggest that the facts speak for themselves. The bombing of Dresden, it can be argued, was even by the standards of area bombing an exceptionally ruthless and devastating affair, a massacre from the air. Then again there is the fact that it occurred so late in the war, at a moment when it was obvious (or so it appeared in hindsight) that Nazi Germany was defeated, and another great assault from the air appeared to have no justification. Finally there was Dresden’s international fame as a city of the arts, which conferred on it an aura of sanctity together with some claim to immunity from destruction.
While all these factors contributed to the notoriety of the Dresden raids they are not a sufficient explanation. By any reckoning the horrors of Dresden were great but over the decades a myth was fostered in which the bombing of Dresden was represented as a unique atrocity and, in some accounts, the moral equivalent of Nazi crimes against humanity. The myth was fostered by a remarkable convergence of ideological currents in which Nazis and neo-Nazis, Communists, and western liberals, all singled out the bombing of Dresden as a blot on the record of the western allies. Here were three competing ideologies with conflicting interpretations of the Second World War attached. But all contributed to a version of history in which the British and the Americans were the guilty parties, and the people of Dresden their victims.
The Dresden Raids
In January 1945 the British and American forces in the west, and Soviet forces in the east, were poised for the final assault on Germany. In the west, however, no British or American soldier had yet crossed the Rhine. There was every sign that the Germans intended to wage a long and ferocious rearguard action, with the aid of their new jet fighters and possibly of secret weapons which had yet to be revealed. In the east Soviet troops were battling their way into Germany, with masses of refugees, mainly women and children, fleeing before them. Dresden, the capital of Saxony, was acting as a temporary shelter for tens of thousands of refugees as they escaped to the west. Meanwhile trains loaded with troops and tanks were rumbling through Dresden in the opposite direction, to reinforce the eastern front. The Russians, in the shape of Marshal Koniev’s First Ukrainian Army, were only seventy miles away.
In both London and Washington there were fears that Nazi Germany might succeed in prolonging the war throughout 1945. The British Joint Intelligence Committee proposed a revival of Operation Thunderclap, a plan for massive air attacks on Berlin and other targets with the aim of destroying Germany’s will to resist. The Air Staff rejected Thunderclap as impractical and would probably have concentrated on the bombing of oil targets but for the intervention of Churchill, who as usual was impatient for action and calling for another round of city bombing. The Air Staff therefore came up with an alternative plan which, they argued, would assist the advance of the Red Army and thereby shorten the war. Bomber Command were instructed to carry out heavy raids on Dresden, Chemnitz, Leipzig and other cities. The aim was to destroy Germany’s lines of communication by disrupting both the movement of refugees from east to west, and the supply of men and equipment from west to east. By 31 January the Air Staff had obtained the approval and support of General Carl Spaatz, the Commander of the US Strategic Air Force, and General Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the US Army.
It was, therefore, the British and the Americans who took the decision to bomb Dresden. They were acting independently of the Soviet Union and would almost certainly have gone ahead without Soviet endorsement, but Stalin was morally implicated in the decision. At the first plenary session of the Yalta conference on 4 February, the Soviet military representative, General Antonov, asked the western allies to bomb rail centres in eastern Germany in order to hinder the despatch of German troops to the eastern front. According to the conference records the only targets he specified were Leipzig and Berlin. Many years later the British interpreter at the conference insisted that both Antonov and Stalin had also referred specifically to Dresden.[ii]
On the night of 13-14 February 1945 Bomber Command mounted two separate attacks on Dresden in the course of which 768 Lancaster bombers dropped 2,646 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiaries. In a technical sense they were spectacularly successful. The first of the attacks created a gigantic firestorm which destroyed the old city, a densely populated residential area which also contained the historic buildings for which the city had long been celebrated: among them the Lutheran cathedral or Frauenkirche, the Zwinger, the Semper Gallery and the Semper Opera. The second attack spread the firestorm to the inner suburbs. Shortly after noon the following day a fleet of 316 B-17 American bombers arrived over the city, which was largely invisible due to smoke from the fires that were still burning. They dropped another 782 tons of bombs and incendiaries. As a result of the raids some thirteen square miles of the city were completely destroyed.
The total population of Dresden in peacetime was about 640,000. No one can be sure what it was in February 1945 but there may have been somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 refugees in the town and it is unlikely that the total population was below the pre-war level. Shortly after the raid the Dresden chief of police drew up a report estimating the number of people killed in the raids at about 25,000. A commission appointed by the city in 1946 suggested a figure of 35,000, but on the basis of cemetery records discovered in the 1990s estimates were again revised downwards to 25,000.[iii] On any estimate the figures were horrific: much higher than for most other cities, though roughly comparable with the figures for Hamburg.[iv] The explanation lay partly in the skill and accuracy with which an all-consuming firestorm was created, and partly in the fact that the people of Dresden were almost completely defenceless. Nearby fighter aircraft were grounded for lack of fuel. The anti-aircraft batteries had all been transferred to the eastern front. Worst of all Dresden, unlike some other major German cities, lacked purpose built air raid shelters. The Gauleiter of Saxony had insisted on the construction of a bunker in his own back garden while the rest of the population were expected to take shelter in cellars beneath street level. Tragically the cellars offered little protection from the effects of the firestorm. Those who sheltered in them were overcome by smoke or asphyxiated as the fires sucked the oxygen out of the atmosphere. If they tried to escape into they were likely to be engulfed by flame as they fled through the streets.
As far as the general public in Britain were concerned reports of heavy raids on German cities were almost a daily routine and there was little at first to suggest that Dresden was in any way unusual, but the seeds of a mythology were already being sown. German propagandists had frequently accused the allies of ‘terror bombing’, that is bombing calculated to terrorise innocent civilians, but they had also sought to minimise accounts of the damage inflicted on Germany. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, now changed tactics and began to circulate grossly exaggerated estimates of the death toll in Dresden. To the police chief’s estimate of 25,000 dead he simply added a nought. Within a few days German diplomats were informing the correspondents of neutral countries that a quarter of a million people had perished. The figures percolated through to the United States and Britain via reports in the Swiss and Swedish press. In May 1945 the Washington Post reported that 300,000 had died in what was ‘probably the most destructive series of raids in history in terms of human life.’ [v] A bestselling memoir of the raid, published in West Germany in 1952, again put the death toll at 300,000. [vi]
Reports of the bombing produced a ripple of controversy in Whitehall, of which something will be said later, but the news from Dresden was swiftly engulfed by scores of other spectacular and horrific stories including the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In post-war Germany the Cold War, and the consequent division of the country in 1949 into the Federal Republic of West Germany and the German Democratic Republic, resulted in competing accounts of the past. In West Germany some criticism of Britain and the United States for the bombing of German cities was expressed in the course of the Nuremberg trials, but it was muffled by official acceptance of German responsibility for war crimes, and the need to maintain good relations with occupying powers who then became allies in the Cold War. Nor, since Dresden was behind the Iron Curtain, was the city a convenient platform for nationalist or neo-Nazi propaganda. Ironically it was the Soviet authorities who first put Dresden on the historical map as the site of an allied atrocity against German civilians.
The Communist Version
In the late 1940s Germany was the epicentre of the Cold War. Though it necessitated some blatant rewriting of history the fate of Dresden was seized upon by Soviet and east German Communists as a weapon in a propaganda offensive intended to alienate the population of the GRD from the West. As the historian Thomas Fox has demonstrated, the authorities in the German Democratic Republic converted the annual commemoration of the bombing of the city, which began as a purely local affair, into an international platform for anti-American propaganda. The fact that the Americans had played a comparatively minor role in support of a British operation was no obstacle. On the fifth anniversary of the bombing Dresden was hung with slogans which read: ‘We hate the American warmongers, the murderers of Dresden’, and ‘Here American bombers destroyed a city of culture.’ Accompanying literature alleged that the allies had destroyed Dresden as an anti-communist act, in the knowledge that it would be located after the war in the Soviet zone of occupation.[vii] In short, the bombing of Dresden was a manifestation of the very same forces of capitalism and imperialism which had found expression in Nazism.
Among the citizens of post-war Dresden was Victor Klemperer, a German Jew whose diaries of life in the city under Nazi rule provide us with a chilling account of what it was like to be the subject of steadily growing persecution.[viii] Klemperer had cause to be grateful for the bombing, which in the ensuing chaos had saved him, and several of his fellow Jews, from deportation to the gas chambers. But after the war he became a Communist who denounced the bombing in conformity with the party line:
‘This American misdeed matches in terms of barbarism the methods of the Nazi Luftwaffe which are condemned by all the world. Militarily the bomb attack on Dresden was senseless and useless because the resistance of the Hitlerite Wehrmacht was already broken. It was undertaken for two reasons:
Firstly, the aim was to throw the Dresden rubble into the path of the victorious Red Army and at the same time hinder the prospective reconstruction of East Germany under Soviet occupation by destroying one of the most important economic and administrative centres.
Secondly, the Americans wanted to test the impact of their latest bombs before the end of the war. In order to be able to fully ascertain the impact they chose for this inhuman ‘experiment’ a city which until then had remained untouched.’
Between the fifth and the tenth anniversary of the bombing, the annual commemoration grew in importance and the propaganda machine was cranked up. In 1955 the Mayor of Dresden, Walter Weidauer, made a speech declaring that the bombing of Dresden was a war crime, and speakers at a ceremony at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp equated SS killers with the US Luftgangster who murdered Dresden. The moral equivalence of Nazi and Anglo-American actions was a thesis restated in the design of the main war memorial to the victims of the bombing. Most of those killed in the raids had been buried in a corner of the Heidefriedhof cemetery in the north of the city. The municipal authorities decided to make the burial ground into an Ehrenhain (Grove of Honour), with a park and garden commemorating the victims of the Second World War. Visitors entering the park follow an avenue which opens out into a circular plaza, created in 1965, around which stand fourteen pillars. Seven of the pillars commemorate Nazi concentration or extermination camps, and seven bear the names of cities or villages destroyed in the war. Of the latter, six were destroyed by the Germans but the seventh is Dresden itself.[ix]
The Communist interpretation of the bombing was most fully set out in Walter Weidauer’s book Inferno Dresden, published in 1965. Its propositions have been summarised by Fox as follows:
1) The United States had hoped to unleash the first atom bomb on Dresden. Only the unexpectedly quick victory of the Soviet Union prevented Dresden from serving as more than the metaphorical German Hiroshima. 2) Imperialists in Germany, Great Britain and the United States wished to make a separate peace in order to create a united front against the Soviet Union. The destruction of Dresden was a demonstration designed to shock and awe the Soviet Union…3) The destruction was part of a concerted effort to destroy cities in what would become the GDR. 4) The destruction was a barbaric act of calculated terrorism, and was directed against civilian targets, cultural-historical treasures, refugees, and not against any military objectives. 5) The Soviet Union did not request or support the bombing. In contrast to the western allies, the Soviet Union made heroic efforts to protect cultural historical monuments and civilian populations.[x] Weidauer’s account also included a letter from Marshal Koniev, who condemned the bombing as barbaric and stated that there were no targets of any great military or industrial significance in the city.[xi]
All told there was much to indicate that the spirit of Goebbels lived on in the German Democratic Republic. The notion that the Dresden raids were anti-Soviet in intent flies in the face of the evidence that they were mounted with the intention of assisting the Red Army’s advance and as we have seen the Soviet military representative at Yalta requested the allies to bomb east German cities.[xii] It was true that the Soviet air force did not engage in area bombing, but this was for reasons of military doctrine which had nothing to do with the ethics of war. Contrary to Koniev’s claims Dresden was undoubtedly a target of military significance: a transport hub and a town with much arms-related industry. As for the allegation that the British and the Americans intended to destroy cultural artefacts, it simply never occurred to allied leaders and commanders that the preservation of historic buildings or great works of art should stand in the way of military objectives.
The Soviet Union’s credentials as guardian of the city’s cultural heritage were open to question. During the Second World War the great collection of paintings in the Semper Gallery were removed for safety to castles and country estates in Saxony. This proved to be a wise precaution as the Gallery itself was destroyed in the bombing. As the Red Army approached, the local Gauleiter instructed – presumably with the aim of keeping them out of Russian hands – that all the paintings stored east of the Elbe should be recovered and moved closer the city. About 100 of the most important pictures, including the Sistine Madonna by Raphael, were stored in a nearby tunnel, and others in a waterlogged gravel pit. When Marshal Koniev’s troops arrived in Dresden he despatched reconnaissance units to find the paintings, which were soon located and taken to a palace in the suburbs of Dresden. According to Koniev’s memoirs they had been so badly affected by damp that only treatment by expert craftsmen in Moscow could restore them. He therefore requisitioned a special train and despatched the entire collection to the Soviet capital, where they disappeared from view. This is, however, an unlikely tale. Other accounts suggest that most of the paintings, including those recovered from the tunnel, were found to be in perfect condition. Nor was the removal of the collection an isolated incident. In the aftermath of the war about one and a half million items were transported to Russia from museums in the Soviet zone, and it is hard to believe that they were all in need of conservation. [xiii]
There was, however, another side to Soviet policy. Almost from the start of the Soviet occupation of East Germany plans were drawn up for the reconstruction of key historic buildings. Much of what remained of bourgeois Dresden was demolished and replaced by monotonous Stalinist architecture, but the ruins of historic monuments were carefully preserved and work begun on the restoration of the Zwinger. As Alan Russell explains, the city’s illustrious musical tradition was also revived: ‘The choirboys of the Kreuzschule sang under Mauersberger’s baton even before the ruins had cooled and the Dresden Philharmonic gave its first performance as early as June 1945.’ [xiv] While Communist propaganda sought to represent the bombing of the city as an allied atrocity, it was no less in the interests of the Soviet and East German regimes to build up in the west an image of Dresden as the embodiment of Communism’s commitment to the arts and the preservation of high culture.
In 1955 the Soviet government suddenly announced that it would return the missing paintings to Dresden and the government of the GDR promised to rebuild the Semper Gallery. The Soviet initiative, which marked the beginning of a general policy of restitution of ‘rescued’ articles to east German museums, was intended to improve relations with East Germany and coincide with the celebrations in June 1956 of Dresden’s 750th anniversary. Although, therefore, the western powers refused to recognise East Germany, Dresden was gradually recovering the position it had occupied up to the Second World War as an internationally recognised centre of the arts, qualitatively different from all the other towns and cities on ‘Bomber’ Harris’s target list. In an article entitled ‘Restoring Dresden’s Old Splendour’ The Times correspondent wrote: ‘If all the reconstruction of Dresden were confined to the Semper Gallery and its paintings, this sorely tried town could still lay claim to being one of the great art centres of the world.’[xv]
David Irving
Between 1945 and 1963 the bombing of Dresden was a comparatively minor issue in Britain, in part perhaps because of a desire on the part of wartime leaders and commanders to bury an embarrassing topic. The Bombing Restriction Committee, which had campaigned against area bombing, put out a pamphlet claiming that 200,000 to 300,000 people had been killed, but hardly anyone took any notice. The fate of Dresden appeared to be a comparatively minor episode in a vast panorama of epic battles. In the sixth volume of his war memoirs, published in 1954, Churchill devoted a single sentence to it: ‘Throughout January and February our bombers continued to attack, and we made a heavy raid in the latter month on Dresden, then a centre of communications of Germany’s Eastern Front.’[xvi] The origins of the affair remained obscure until 1961 when Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland published a lengthy analysis in the official history of the strategic air offensive. They emphasised the importance of the Soviet request for assistance, and sought to show that as a centre of communications and war industry Dresden was a legitimate target. They also revealed for the first time the extent of Churchill’s personal responsibility, and the astonishing volte face he performed only a few weeks later when he fired off a minute to the Chiefs of Staff condemning, and appearing to disown, the bombing of Dresden:
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…The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of allied bombing…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.[xvii]
After strong protests from Harris and Portal, the Chief of Air Staff, Churchill withdrew the minute and substituted a more anodyne version, but the first draft was an astonishingly candid revelation of the nature of area bombing as understood by the man principally responsible for its adoption. His words seemed almost to invite radical attacks on Dresden, area bombing, and his own reputation.
The opportunity was seized by David Irving. Born in 1938, the son of a Royal Navy commander, Irving was briefly a student of physics at Imperial College London, where he won some notoriety for his racist opinions. Rejected by the RAF, he took a job at a steelworks in the Ruhr where he became fluent in German, and first learned from a magazine article about the Dresden raids. Allegedly shocked by the claim that a quarter of a million people had been killed, he began to look into the subject and soon decided to write a book about it. The official history had told the story of decision-making at the top. Irving produced a gripping minute by minute account of the raids and their effects on the ground. He interviewed three hundred British and American aircrew together with numerous victims of the raids and assembled his own collection of documentary sources. With its graphic account of the sufferings of the victims of the raid, the book turned the abstractions of military history into the charred corpses of women and children. Irving included shocking photographs by the Dresden photographer Walter Hahn of piles of corpses and the burning of bodies in the Altmarkt.
In Britain and West Germany there were photographic archives containing equally distressing images, but they were seldom if ever published. The images associated with Dresden was therefore particularly disturbing. ‘I imported Dresden into the vocabulary of horror’, Irving has said. ‘People now say “Dresden” in the same breath as they say “Auschwitz” or “Hiroshima”.’ [xviii]
The Destruction of Dresden was Irving’s first book. Serialised in the Daily Telegraph it was published to widespread acclaim and established a reputation for him as a serious historian with a flair for the discovery of hitherto neglected evidence. Alas, all was not as it appeared to be. When Irving’s publisher William Kimber received the first proofs of the manuscript he decided to have them checked by his legal advisers. They reported, as Kimber wrote to Irving, that the text was ‘riddled with falsifications of the historical facts. The picture painted by these falsifications led to the inescapable conclusion that your book could be interpreted as the work of a propagandist for Nazism who had not scrupled to distort many facts and omit numerous others in order to vilify the British War Government and in particular Winston Churchill.’ [xix] Kimber and his staff then proceeded to purge the book of its pro-Nazi and anti-Churchill content. The book as published was therefore a sanitised work, and included passages in which Irving appeared to express the most impeccable sentiments about the responsibilities of the Nazis for the war and for the Holocaust: according to Irving they had been inserted by Kimber himself.[xx]
The result was that Irving’s book, with its façade of respectability and claims to rest on exhaustive research, was far more persuasive than it could ever have been in the unexpurgated version. It was a synthesis of Communist and Nazi themes, sufficiently disguised to gratify a liberal audience, and easily mistaken for a tract against war. It shared with the Communist version the core myth of allied guilt and German (or working-class) innocence, and it was no accident that Irving subsequently developed close ties with his adopted city. But there were also striking differences of approach. Irving’s account was of course free of Marxist jargon and appeared to be grounded in empirical detail, but the subtext placed the book in direct line of descent from elements on the West German Right which had never accepted the verdict of the Nuremberg Trials. As Donald Bloxham explains:
Politicised pseudo-comparisons with Nazi genocide were particularly popular in Germany at the close of the war and during the ensuing years of occupation and war crimes trials and then, in the west, during the early life of the Federal Republic. Nationalistic Germans seeking to exculpate themselves and undermine the moral authority of the Allies launched a host of counter-accusations against their conquerors, and the accusers included the very highest political authorities in the nascent republic. Alongside the Allied use of submarine warfare, the Soviet murder of Polish officers at Katyn, the fate of Wehrmacht officers still in Soviet hands and the experience of millions of ‘ethnic German’ refugees…the Allied bombing policy was used as the crudest form of moral and legal defence for Nazi criminality – the tu quoque or ‘you did it too’ argument.[xxi]
Here was a context in which Dresden was bound to surface. When the former German Chancellor, Franz von Papen, was interrogated in October 1945, he attempted to draw some parallel between the atrocities committed in Nazi concentration camps and the bombing of Dresden where, he claimed, between 300,000 and 350,000 people had been killed in one day. He did, however, concede that ‘one is warfare, and the other is murder.’[xxii] Neo-Nazis, among whom we must count Irving, sought to equate the two.
It was for this reason that Irving attached so much importance to the scale of the death-toll in the Dresden raids. Rejecting the municipal authority’s estimate of 35,000 dead, he raised it to 135,000, a figure based almost entirely on the oral testimony and the personal impressions of Hanns Voigt, the official in charge of the missing persons bureau in the city in the weeks after the bombing. With Irving’s endorsement Voigt’s conjecture passed instantly into the realm of established historical fact. It sounded all the more reasonable because, as Irving pointed out, it was so much lower than the figure of 200,000 to 300,000 which had been circulated by Goebbels. Indeed he accused Goebbels of faking the statistics. Weidauer then obtained and published a copy of a long lost document, the 1945 Dresden police report, which estimated the number killed at 25,000. This prompted Irving to write a letter to The Times admitting his error and accepting the new figure, but in the 1977 and 1981 editions of the book he wrote that the death toll was estimated at the time at a quarter of a million.
Since, as we have seen, grossly inflated estimates of the casualties were in circulation at the end of the war, Irving’s statement was technically correct, but muddied the waters and left readers with a misleading impression.[xxiii] ‘Irving’s unscholarly and misleading presentation of the number of the dead’, writes Richard Overy, ‘was designed to show that this was an atrocity of exceptional callousness and magnitude, in order to demonstrate that the Western liberal states were just as capable of massive crime as the states they opposed.’[xxiv] By radically reducing the estimates number of Jews killed by the Nazis, and greatly inflating the number of German civilians killed by the allies, Irving was attempting to demonstrate the moral equivalence of the two sides. In an interview in 1991 he claimed that the number killed in Dresden in one night was five times the number of those killed at Auschwitz.[xxv] The figure of a quarter of a million also had another advantage: it was even greater than the death toll at Hiroshima, which was in the region of 140,000. Apart from the gross exaggeration of the casualty figures, the main distortion in Irving’s book lay not so much in his presentation of allied guilt as in his portrayal of the people of Dresden as innocent victims. Some of them, no doubt, were blameless, but there is no reference in Irving’s book to the anti-Semitism of many of its inhabitants or the burning down of the synagogue on Kristallnacht. In this great city of the arts 84 Jewish musicians, dismissed without pension or compensation, were excluded from all musical or cultural life between 1933 and 1938.[xxvi] The flourishing local Nazi party and the suppression of its political opponents are almost invisible in Irving’s account, which also leaves readers ignorant of the fact by 1944 Dresden was home to 127 factories engaged in war production, some of which employed slave labourers.[xxvii]
The Liberal Agenda
In Weidauer’s interpretation, it was the Americans who were main instigators of the Dresden raids. Irving reminded the world that it was RAF Bomber Command which had pulverised Dresden, and he did so with such force that he aroused liberal opinion. Even during the war years, when hatred of Nazi Germany drowned out all pleas for moderation, a small band of British dissenters had campaigned against area bombing: Vera Brittan, Richard Stokes, and George Bell, the bishop of Chichester, being the most prominent among them.[xxviii] After the war, when it was safe to do so, the Church of England joined in and declared that the bombing of whole cities must be condemned as ‘inconsistent with the limited end of a just war.’ [xxix] The possibility of nuclear war, which led to the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957, raised once more the military and ethical issues involved in the bombing of civilian populations, and revived old controversies. The intellectual excitement aroused by C.P. Snow’s lectures on ‘Science and Government’ at Harvard in 1960, in which he argued that area bombing in the Second World War had been a major strategic error caused by the ascendancy over Churchill of Professor Lindemann, suggested a growing impatience with the Establishment version of the Second World War.When the satirical review Beyond The Fringe was first staged in 1961, it featured a sketch entitled ‘The Aftermyth of War’ in which Peter Cook and company mocked with deadly mimicry the stiff upper lip war movies and reverential documentaries in which the British sentimentalised the Second World War.
The demythologisation of war was one of the key liberal demands of the 1960s as it had been during the inter-war years. It was intimately connected with hopes for détente and later in the decade with growing opposition to the American war in Vietnam. These were issues on which secular liberals, who believed in reason and progress but were conscious of guilt, had much in common with liberal Christians, who believed in love and forgiveness, but were conscious of sin. Whether they were outright pacifists or moderates in defence and foreign policy they were at odds with militarism and nationalism, and in search of histories which debunked them. They revelled in Joan Littlewood’s production of Oh What a Lovely War! , first produced in 1963. Irving’s book, published that same year, was therefore timely. Although it offended old-fashioned patriots and veterans of Bomber Command, it was warmly received by liberal opinion. In his review of the book Harold Nicolson wrote that the bombing of Dresden was ‘an operation unworthy of our history. Nobody would contend that Dresden was a legitimate strategic target: nobody would contend that this terror raid shortened the war or satisfied our Russian allies.’ Lord Boothby declared: ‘This was just about the worst crime Britain has ever perpetrated and put us – at long last – on a par with the Nazis.’ Richard Crossman, a leading Labour politician, described Dresden as ‘one of those crimes against humanity whose authors would have been arraigned at Nuremberg if that court had not been perverted into a mere instrument of Allied vengeance.’ [xxx] On the 25th anniversary of the bombing in 1970 the Daily Telegraph was equally repentant. ‘Aerial bombing’, the paper declared, ‘and especially the wiping out of Dresden left the rest of us to defend the indefensible.’[xxxi]
From expressions of guilt it was but a short step to apologies and acts of contrition. The lead was taken by the city of Coventry, which had been blitzed by the Luftwaffe in 1940. Since the war it had been led by a left-wing Labour council which sought to maintain friendly relations with the Communist bloc, and Anglican clergy committed to the cause of ‘reconciliation’ with potential or former enemies. From 1958 onwards Coventry was twinned with Dresden and Richard Crossman, as one of the city’s MPs, was a frequent guest of the Mayor of Dresden. His visits marked the beginning of a new development: the pilgrimage to Dresden and its conversion into a site of Anglo-German reconciliation. In March 1965 the Provost of Coventry Cathedral, who described the bombing of Dresden as a chapter of history of which Britain should bow its head in shame, launched an appeal for funds to help repair a Lutheran hospital which had been destroyed in the bombing of the city. The funds were raised and in a further gesture of goodwill, 25 young people were recruited to go to Dresden in order to clear the rubble from the site on which the hospital was to be rebuilt.[xxxii] Crossman himself proposed in 1963 that a British memorial should be set up in Dresden as an act of atonement for the bombing of the city. A more ambitious proposal, for a large-scale memorial to be built with volunteer labour from Britain, and an opening ceremony at which Benjamin Britten would conduct his War Requiem, was put forward by Irving.[xxxiii] The Foreign Office, however, was keeping an eye on Irving and well aware that he was playing politics. One official commented:
He advocates a memorial in Dresden ‘as a mark of our wish to dissociate ourselves from this act of the wartime British Cabinet.’ This is in line with a theme which Communist propaganda has been busily developing for many years, to the effect that the destruction of Coventry and Dresden were two acts of capitalist barbarism on the same level. This line has an appeal for ex-Nazis because it suggests the British and the Americans were just as bad as Hitler.[xxxiv]
With hindsight it is apparent that Irving was manipulating humanitarian sentiment in Britain in the interests of a neo-Nazi agenda. But it would be wrong to suppose that the reaction against the bombing of Dresden was solely due to Irving. It was closely associated with liberal Anglicanism and the doctrines of reconciliation and forgiveness. The Dresden Trust, which campaigned to raise money for the restoration of the Frauenkirche, was closely associated with the Church of England. But remarkably the promptings of conscience were also to be found in one of the pilots who had played a prominent part in area bombing. Group Captain Peter Johnson, who had commanded a squadron of Lancaster bombers and later a squadron of the Pathfinder Force, was a man without religious beliefs. But in his memoir The Withered Garland (1995) he explained how doubts he had experienced at the time were crystallised by post-war study and reflection into outright rejection of the policy on both military and moral grounds: ‘It is clear now, and should have been clear in March 1943 to those with full knowledge of war planning and the technical factors then emerging, that any justification for Bomber Command continuing to rely on area bombing…had vanished by April 1943. Britain was no longer alone and the balance of potential power was now so overwhelmingly in our favour that it was almost certain that the war could, would and above all should, be won by other methods than attacks on civilian morale.’[xxxv] The bombers of 5 Group, which carried out the first of the two RAF attacks on 13 February, were renowned for their accuracy. The following night they precision-bombed and destroyed an oil installation at Rositz, about fifty miles from Dresden.[xxxvi] If, therefore, the main purpose of the attack on Dresden was to disrupt transport, what was the point of carpet bombing an area of thirteen square miles in the city centre, while the bridges over the Elbe, and the railway marshalling yards, were outside the target zone? ‘The railway could have been cut at other points’, wrote Liddell Hart to the bishop of Chichester in 1949, ‘without the wanton destruction of this beautiful city, and the immense slaughter of women and children, for it was known to be crowded with refugees.’ [xxxvii]
A Myth in Decline?
The East German regime collapsed in 1990 and the Soviet Union the following year. Communist propaganda was suddenly out of date and the whole fabric of Marxist history, which had looked so impressive in earlier decades, began to disintegrate. David Irving’s reputation as a historian declined more slowly, undermined from the late 1970s onwards by more and more outspoken attempts to minimise or deny the Holocaust, and his claim that Hitler bore no responsibility for it. When the historian Deborah Lipstadt described him as a Holocaust denier, Irving sued her for libel in a case which led to a rigorous examination in court of his use of historical evidence. Mr Justice Gray’s final verdict was damning:
The charges which I have found to be substantially true include the charges that Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.[xxxviii]
With both Communist and neo-Nazi versions of Dresden in disrepute, more objective and scholarly accounts have begun to appear.[xxxix] There is still scope for heated arguments over the question of whether or not the bombing of Dresden, and area bombing in general, constituted a war crime, but even those who argue that it did reject entirely the Communist or neo-Nazi doctrine of the moral equivalence of allied and Nazi actions. War crimes – that is offences against the laws governing the conduct of war – ought never to be confused with ‘crimes against humanity’, the much graver charge of which the Nazi leaders were accused in the Nuremberg Trials. ‘It is unquestionably true’, writes the philosopher A.C. Grayling, ‘that if the Allied bombing in the Second World War was in whole or part morally wrong, it is nowhere near equivalent in scale of moral atrocity to the Holocaust of European Jewry, or the death and destruction all over the world for which Nazi and Japanese aggression was collectively responsible: a total of some twenty-five million dead, according to responsible estimates.’ [xl]
Can academic history ever supplant myth? It can, perhaps contain it, but a popular myth once established takes on a vigorous life of its own. Nothing illustrates its enduring effects better than Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five, first published in 1969 and still in print. It is impossible to read it without the respect due to a writer who, as an American prisoner-of-war in the vicinity of Dresden, was marched into the bombed city and helped to dig out the corpses. But although he was an eye-witness of events, Vonnegut frames his personal experience within a historical context taken directly from Irving: hence he repeats the figure of 135,000 dead and the claim that Dresden was a target of no military significance. To judge from an interview he gave recently he still regards Irving as the last word on the subject. Slaughterhouse Five, therefore, works well as a universal fable, free of time and place, but as a history lesson it loses the plot. As Theodore Dalrymple comments, Vonnegut ‘writes of the war and the bombing itself as if it took place in no context, as if it were just an arbitrary and absurd quarrel between rivals, between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, with no internal content or moral meaning – a quarrel that nevertheless resulted in one of the rivals cruelly and thoughtlessly destroying a beautiful city.’[xli]
Where Dresden is concerned the old Communist and neo-Nazi doctrine of moral equivalence is far from dead. In the Heidefriedhof cemetery it is set in stone, and more alarmingly it seems now to have escaped from its East German or neo-Nazi origins and entered the mainstream of German discourse. Jorg Friedrich’s book Der Brand (2002), a harrowing account of the victims of the bombing war which topped the best-seller list in Germany for several weeks, drew repeated rhetorical parallels between area bombing and the Holocaust. ‘He turns air-raid shelters into Krematorien’, wrote one reviewer. ‘Bomber Group Number 5 becomes Einsatzgruppe, a term that evokes the SS. When he deals with Anglo-American tactics and policies, his language is saturated with a sarcastic sneer. This tone has lately become quite fashionable in Germany.’[xlii] Greeted as a breaking of long-held taboos which had prevented the airing of popular memories of the allied bombing offensive, Der Brand seems to have struck the public of the former West Germany with the force of a revelation. For the people of Dresden it is a reprise of an old song to which they had become accustomed over half a century.[xliii]
This essay began by asking why, of all the German towns and cities devastated by area bombing, Dresden acquired such unique notoriety. Part of the explanation is attributable to the tragic suffering of a defenceless city, part to the dismay over the destruction of the city’s cultural heritage, part to the timing of the attack at a date when victory was in sight and the bombing of Dresden might be seen in retrospect as a gratuitous act of revenge. But Dresden would never have assumed the prominence it did without the impact of a propaganda war in which Communist and neo-Nazi propaganda awakened the liberal and Christian consciences of opinion-makers in Britain.
[i] Tami Davis Biddle, ‘Wartime Reactions’ in Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang (ed), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden 1945 (London, 2006), 105.
[ii] Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany (London, 1961), vol 3, pps 98-108; Sebastian Cox, ‘The Dresden Raids: Why and How’, in Paul Addison and Jeremy A Crang, Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden 1945 (2006), pps 19-29
[iii] Richard Overy, ‘The Post-War Debate’ in Addison and Crang, Firestorm, p 137
[iv] The United States Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that the proportion of the population killed was 2.5% for Dresden (25,000 out of 1,000,000) and 2.4% for Hamburg (41,800 out of 1,738,000) Estimates were also made for three other cities subjected to incendiary attacks. According to these Wuppertal lost 1.3% of its population, Kassel 3.9% and Darmstadt 7.5%. See USAF Historical Division, Historical Analysis of the 14-15 February 1945 Bombings of Dresden (1953), p 9, http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/PopTopics/dresden.htm accessed 1 July 2005 Comparison may also be made with the bombing of Coventry on 14 November 1940. The population of the city was 213,000, the number killed 554: 0.26% of the population. <check these figures>
[v] Washington Post, 4 May 1945.
[vi] Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945 (2005), p 503. The book was Axel Rodenberger’s Der Tod von Dresden (The Death of Dresden).
[vii] Thomas C. Fox, ‘East Germany and the Bombing War’, in Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (ed), Bombs Away: Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan, Amsterdamer Beitraege zur neueren Germanistik Vol 60, pps 115-6
[viii] I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1933-1941 (1999 edition); To The Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942-1945 (2000 edition); see also Jeremy Crang, ‘Victor Klemperer’s Dresden’ in Addison and Crang, Firestorm, pps 78-95
[ix] Christiane Hertel, ‘Dis/Continuities in Dresden’s Dances of Death’, The Art Bulletin Vol 82 No 1 (March 2000), pps 83-4
[x] Fox, ‘East Germany and the Bombing War’, pps 117-8
[xi] Walter Weidauer, Inferno Dresden (Berlin, 1966), pps 89-90
[xii] I must add that the late John Erickson, internationally renowned as a historian of the Red Army, told me in conversation of his conviction that the allied bombing of Dresden was undoubtedly intended as a warning to the Soviet Union.
[xiii] This paragraph and the following paragraph are based on a piecing together of information from the following sources: The Times, 22 October 1959, 22 March 1961; New York Times 24 August 1965; The Burlington Magazine vol 48 (July 1956), pps 221-3
[xiv] Alan Russell, ‘Why Dresden Matters’ in Addison and Crang, Firestorm, p 177
[xv] The Times, 22 March 1961
[xvi] Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War Vol VI: Triumph and Tragedy (1954), p 470
[xvii] Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive Vol 3, p 112 Churchill’s minute was dated 28 March 1945
[xviii] D.D. Guttenplan, ‘Holocaust on Trial’, Atlantic Monthly vol 283 (February 2000).
[xix] Richard J. Evans, Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial (2002), p 185
[xx] See his introduction to the 2005 online edition of the book.
[xxi] Donald Bloxham, ‘Dresden as a War Crime’ in Addison and Crang, Firestorm, p 184
[xxii] Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (2001), pps 433-4
[xxiii] see also David Irving, Hitler’s War (1977), pps 770-1
[xxiv] Overy, ‘The Post-War Debate’, p 139
[xxv] Guttenplan, ‘Holocaust on Trial’.
[xxvi] I owe this detail to a review by Frank Bright of Agata Schindler, Dresdner Liste – Musikstadt Dresden in Nationalsozialistischer Judenverfolgung 1933-1945 in Wort und Bild: Ein Beitrag zur Dresdner Musikgeschichte (Dresden 2003) in AJR Journal June 2006, p 9
[xxvii] Taylor, Dresden, p 169
[xxviii] On the wartime dissenters see A.C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime? (2006), pps 179-189 and Stephen A. Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities (New York, 1993), pps 101-127
[xxix] Garrett, Ethics and Airpower, p 100
[xxx] New York Times, 19 May 1963
[xxxi] Quoted in Alan Russell, ‘Why Dresden Matters’ in Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang (ed), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, p 167
[xxxii] The Guardian, 15 March 1965; Morning Star, 1 September 1967
[xxxiii] The first overseas performance of the War Requiem was given in Dresden in 1965
[xxxiv] TNA FO 371/169329, memo by W.B.J. Ledwidge, 27 June 1963
[xxxv] Peter Johnson, The Withered Garland (1995) pps 332-3
[xxxvi] Johnson, Withered Garland , p 233
[xxxvii] Basil Liddell Hart, ‘Notes for History: Talk with E.J.B. Rose 8 February 1949’, Bell Papers Vol 38 Part 1, Lambeth Palace Library.
[xxxviii] http://www.pixunlimited.co.uk/news/ref/irvingjudgment.rtf, accessed 1 October 2006
[xxxix] Taylor, Dresden; Sebastian Cox, ‘The Dresden Raids: How and Why’ in Addison and Crang, Firestorm, pps 2-61
[xl] Grayling, Among The Dead Cities, p 5
[xli] Theodore Dalrymple, ‘The Specters Haunting Dresden’. City Journal Winter 2005.
[xlii] Reiner Lukyen, ‘Germany’s Final Taboo?’, Prospect, March 2003, p 73
[xliii] On this point I am indebted to Thomas Fox’s article, already cited above.
