In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the German city of Dresden. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than of the city centre. Up to 25,000 people were killed. Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March aimed at the city's railway marshalling yard and one smaller raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas.
Postwar discussions about whether the attacks were justified made the event a moral of the war.: Cites . Note: The casualty figures are now considered lower than those from the firebombing of some other Axis cities; see Tokyo 9–10 March 1945, approximately 100,000 dead, and Operation Gomorrah campaign against Hamburg July 1943, approximately 50,000 dead Nazi Germany's desperate struggle to maintain resistance in the closing months of the war is widely understood today, but Allied intelligence assessments at the time painted a different picture. There was uncertainty over whether the Soviets could sustain their advance on Germany, and rumours of the establishment of a Nazi redoubt in Southern Germany were taken too seriously.
The Allies saw the Dresden operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which USAAF reports, declassified decades later, noted as a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers supporting the German war effort. Several researchers later asserted that not all communications infrastructure was targeted, and neither were the extensive industrial areas located outside the city centre. Critics of the bombing argue that Dresden was a cultural landmark with little strategic significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and were not proportionate to military gains, thus amounting to a war crime.Dresden was a civilian town with no military significance. Why did we burn its people? By Dominic Selwood. The Telegraph, 13 February 2015
The death toll of the bombing has been exaggerated by both Nazi and Soviet propaganda, with the post-war East German Communist government presenting it as an example of "Anglo-American barbarism". At the present time, the modern German far-right continues to occasionally refer to it as "Dresden's holocaust of bombs" (). In the decades following the war, large variations in the claimed death tolls have led to controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. City authorities at the time estimated that there were as many as 25,000 victims, a figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council. In March 1945, the German government ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000, and death tolls as high as 500,000 have been claimed. These inflated figures were disseminated in the West for decades, notably by David Irving, a Holocaust denier.
Background
Early in 1945, the German offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge had been exhausted, as was the 's failed New Year's Day attack. The Red Army had launched its Silesian Offensives into pre-war German territory. The German army was retreating on all fronts, but still resisting. On 8 February 1945, the Red Army crossed the Oder River, with positions just from Berlin. A special British Joint Intelligence Subcommittee report, 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. Despite the postwar assessment, there were serious doubts in Allied intelligence as to how well the war was going for them, with fears of a "Nazi redoubt" being established, or of the Russian advance faltering. Hence, any assistance to the Soviets on the Eastern Front could shorten the war.
A large-scale aerial attack on Berlin and other eastern cities was considered under the code name Operation Thunderclap in mid-1944 but was shelved on 16 August. This was later reexamined, and the decision was made to pursue a more limited operation. The Soviet Army continued its push towards the Reich despite severe losses, which they sought to minimize in the final phase of the war. On 5 January 1945, two North American B-25 Mitchell bombers dropped 300,000 leaflets over Dresden with the "Appeal of 50 German generals to the German army and people".
On 22 January 1945, the RAF director of bomber operations, Air Commodore Sydney Bufton, sent Deputy Chief of the Air Staff Air Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley a minute suggesting that if Thunderclap was timed so that it appeared to be a coordinated air attack to aid the current Soviet offensive, then the effect of the bombing on German morale would be increased. On 25 January, the Joint Intelligence Committee supported the idea, as Ultra-based intelligence had indicated 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". Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, AOC-in-C Bomber Command, nicknamed "Bomber Harris", was known as an ardent supporter of area bombing; when asked for his view, 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. Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, answered: "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 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 Portal a message 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 Air Marshal Sir Douglas Evill on 1 February, in which Evill states interfering with mass civilian movements was a key factor in the decision to bomb the city centre. Attacking main railway junctions, telephone systems, city administration and utilities would result in "chaos". Britain had ostensibly 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 paralyzing the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig with aerial bombardment. In response, 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. However, according to Richard Overy, the discussion with Antonov, recorded in the minutes, only mentions the bombing of Berlin and Leipzig. The bombing of Dresden was a Western plan, but the Soviets were told in advance about the operation.
An alternative account, by historian Martin Gilbert, is that Bletchley Park codebreaking had shown the Germans ordering large bodies of troops to move towards Breslau. When the Soviet Union were advised of this, they requested bombing raids to prevent this movement. This was received whilst Portal and Churchill were travelling to the Yalta conference. The raids were therefore authorised by Clement Attlee, the Deputy Prime Minister, and by Portal's deputy.
Military and industrial profile
According to the RAF at the time, Dresden was Germany's seventh-largest city and 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 matériel. 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, which remained classified until December 1978, in response to international concern about the bombing. It said that there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers in the city supporting the German war effort at the time of the raid.: Cites "Dresden, Germany, City Area, Economic Reports", Vol. No. 2, Headquarters U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 10 July 1945; and "OSS" London, No. B-1799/4, 3 March 1945. 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); and factories producing electrical and X-ray apparatus ( AG); gears and differentials (Saxoniswerke); and electric gauges (Gebrüder Bassler). The report also mentioned barracks, hutted camps, and a munitions storage depot.: Cites "Interpretation Report No. K. 4171, Dresden, 22 March 1945", Supporting Document No. 3.
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.: Cites Chambers Encyclopedia, New York, 1950, Vol. IV, p. 636, 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 gave some reasoning for the raid:
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".