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The destruction of Dresden - "we will show the Russians what we are capable of." Bombing of Dresden (1945) Dead soldiers in the battles for Dresden

The destruction of Dresden - "we will show the Russians what we are capable of." Bombing of Dresden (1945) Dead soldiers in the battles for Dresden

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

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Destruction of Dresden, 1945

Second World War left many sad and terrible pages of human cruelty in world history. It was during this war that the tactics of carpet bombing cities became widespread. As the well-known proverb says, he who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. This is exactly what happened to Nazi Germany. Beginning in 1937 with the bombing of Spanish Guernica by the Condor Legion, continuing with raids on Warsaw, London, Moscow and Stalingrad, from 1943 Germany itself began to be subjected to Allied air strikes, which were many times more powerful than the raids carried out by the Luftwaffe in the initial period of the war. . Thus, one of the symbols of the tragedy of the German people was the Allied air raid on the large city of Dresden in February 1945, which led to huge destruction of the city's residential infrastructure and heavy casualties among the civilian population.

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

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

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

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

Dresden, the 7th largest city in Germany... by far the largest enemy area still un-bombed. In the middle of winter, with refugees heading west and troops having to be quartered somewhere, housing is in short supply as workers, refugees, and troops need to be accommodated, as well as government offices evacuated from other areas. At one time widely known for its porcelain production, Dresden has developed into a major industrial center ... The aim of the attack is to strike the enemy where he feels it most, behind a partially collapsed front ... and at the same time show the Russians when they arrive in the city what the RAF is capable of.

Dresden. Chronicle of tragedy.

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

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

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

4. Ruined Dresden. 1945

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

6. Analysis of the rubble in the area of the ruins of the Frauenkirche Cathedral in Dresden.

The end of World War II was nearing. Hitler and Goebbels cheerfully proclaimed words of endurance and resilience, while the Wehrmacht was less and less able to deter the Allied attacks. The Luftwaffe was less and less able to protect the German population from Allied bombs, as the bombing returned to the country, which at the beginning of the war devastated the cities of opponents. On the night of February 13-14, Dresden was practically destroyed to the ground.

Ruins of Dresden

Stefan Fritz is a priest of the restored church of St. Mary in Dresden: the bell that sounds every mass is the bell of peace, it bears the name of the prophet Isaiah and there is an inscription on it: "... and they will beat their swords into plowshares" (the book of the prophet Isaiah 2: 2-4 ).

Since February 1, 2005, the upper platform directly under the golden cross on the tower has been open to visitors. Whoever stands here has a beautiful view of the old and new part of Dresden, which on February 13 and 14, 1945 became the target of bombings.

The date of the raid was determined by weather conditions. On the night of February 13, meteorologists predicted clear skies over Dresden. The command of the British bomber aviation informed the Soviet Army, whose front line was 150 kilometers from the capital of Saxony. On the afternoon of February 13, 245 Lancaster aircraft of the fifth bomber squadron took off from British airfields for a night raid. Resistance was not expected. The city was darkened, there was no street lighting, but some cinemas and cafes were still open - it was the day of the carnival. At 21.40, an air raid began, and twenty minutes later the first bombs fell on the city.

Götz Bergander, the historian and chronicler of those events, was at that time seventeen years old and he lived with his parents in Friedrichstadt, an area located west of the old part of the city. He recalls: “The so-called “illuminator” aircraft were the first to appear over Dresden. They were high-flying bombers that parachuted with brightly glowing white and green illuminating aircraft bombs. They illuminated the city so that the bombers flying behind them could see the city below very well and could descend at a peak up to 300 m above the ground, dropping bombs directly at the intended targets.

After the targets were illuminated and marked, the lead bomber circling over Dresden was ordered to attack at 22.11. Carpet bombing has begun.

The strategy behind it had been developed in great detail three years earlier. On February 14, 1942, a so-called "moral carpet bombing" directive was issued to the British Air Force, which declared the destruction of populated areas essentially a primary objective. This decision provoked a rebuff from British politicians: "Of course, the Germans started it all, but we must not become worse than them." But these considerations had no effect on the increased intensity of air raids. The first target of the new strategy was the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, which was destroyed on Palm Sunday 1942.

From August to October, the commander-in-chief of the British bombers, Arthur Harris, ordered 4 million leaflets to be dropped from aircraft with the following content:

Why are we doing this? Not out of a desire for revenge, although we have not forgotten Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade, London, Plymouth, Coventry. We are bombing Germany, city by city, stronger and stronger, to make it impossible for you to continue the war. This is our goal. We will pursue you relentlessly, city after city: Lübeck, Rostock, Cologne, Emden, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Duisburg, Hamburg - and the list will be longer. If you want to let yourself be plunged into the abyss along with the Nazis, that's your business ... In Cologne, Ruhr, Rostock, Lübeck or Emden, they may believe that with our bombing we have already achieved everything we wanted, but we have a different opinion. What you have experienced so far will be incomparable to what is yet to come, once our bomber production has gained momentum and the Americans have doubled or quadrupled our power."

At midnight from February 13 to February 14, 1945, a column of 550 Lancaster bombers moved for a second raid on Dresden, stretching for 200 km. This time, the target could be found easily.

Bergander: “The crews reported that already at a distance of 150 km a red glow was visible, which became more and more. These were fires that their planes were approaching."

Dresden, 1945

During two night raids, 1,400 tons of high-explosive bombs and 1,100 tons of incendiary bombs fell on Dresden. This combination caused a fiery tornado that devastated everything in its path, burning the city and people. The cellars could not provide shelter as before, as the heat and lack of oxygen left no chance for life. Those who still could fled from the city center to the outskirts, or at least to the banks of the Elbe or to the Grossen Garten - a park with an area of about 2 square meters. kilometers.

The dancer and dance teacher Grete Palucca founded a modern dance school in Dresden in 1925 and has since lived in Dresden: “Then I experienced something terrible. I lived in the center of the city, in the house where I lived, almost everyone died, including because they were afraid to go out. After all, we were in the basement, about sixty-three people, and there I said to myself - no, you can die here, because it was not a real bomb shelter. Then I ran straight into the fire and jumped over the wall. Me and another schoolgirl, we were the only ones who got out. Then I experienced something terrible, and then in Grossen Garten I experienced an even greater horror, and it took me two years to overcome it. At night, if in a dream I saw those pictures, I always started screaming.

Wolfgang Fleischer, historian at the Museum of Military History of the Bundeswehr in Dresden: “The Grossen Garten, which extended all the way to the city center, was damaged on the night of February 13th-14th. The inhabitants of Dresden sought salvation from the fiery tornado in it and the zoo adjacent to it. An English ace bomber, circling over the target, saw that a large area immediately near the center of the city was not on fire, like all its other parts, and called in a new column of bombers, which turned this part of the city into flames. Numerous residents of Dresden who sought refuge in the Grossen Garten were killed by high-explosive bombs. And the animals that escaped from the zoo after their cages were destroyed - as the newspapers later wrote about it - wandered around the Grossen Garten.

Dresden after the bombing

The third raid took place on the afternoon of February 14th. Still painful memories of carpet bombings of people who tried to hide in the Grossen Garten and on the banks of the Elbe are associated with them. The reports of witnesses contradict the opinions of historians. 35,000 people died in the Dresden fire. (edited by other sources 135.000 people) For the inhabitants of the city, it remained incomprehensible: in a few hours their city was turned into a pile of ruins and ceased to exist. Then no one knew that this could happen in an instant. The shock experienced then left its mark in biographies, messages and oral stories, which were passed on by parents to children and grandchildren.

The last phase of the war demanded an even greater number of casualties. In this last phase, Dresden was neither the first nor the last German city to be destroyed by carpet bombing. The spread of this strategy has raised the doubts that British politicians had. In 1984 famous physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked at a bomb research center during World War II, admitted: “I have repeatedly come to the conclusion that, on the basis of moral motives, I must go out into the street and tell the British what a stupid thing they have done on their behalf. But I didn't have the courage to do so."

O. Fritz: “I also remember very well what was in the minds of the inhabitants of Dresden - it was a completely unnecessary, meaningless raid, it was a city-museum that did not expect anything like this for itself. This is fully confirmed by the memories of the victims at that time.”

Church of St. Mary

The people of Dresden have long been proud of their city of art with its baroque castle, famous art gallery, art industry museum, St. technical university. They expected a milder fate for their magnificent city. But the deadly war unleashed by Germany did not guarantee this to them. In the memories of the older generation about the sufferings personally endured, the bitterness from this unfulfilled hope and the death of the victims they saw are still mixed.

The church of St. Mary, restored today, with burnt fragments of the former building included in its walls, is both a reminder and, at the same time, a symbol of reconciliation.

O. Fritz: “I think our memories should be aimed at giving place to historical truth. We must appreciate that, sixty years after the end of the war, we live in a recreated city, that the greatest efforts have been made for this. We are not in the same state as we were after the bombings, and with the peoples with whom Germany used to wage war, we live in European neighborhood and friendship. And this is the greatest blessing that we do not want to lose. The temple we are in is surmounted by a cross given as a gift from the British people.”

Translation from German: Natalia Pyatnitsyna
Editorial material: priest Alexander Ilyashenko

Note from the editor:

As a result of the Anglo-American Air Force total bombing of Germany and Japan, civilians were killed, cities were destroyed, historical and cultural values disappeared from destruction and in the flames of fires.

“The war was distinguished by two main features: it was surprisingly mobile and unprecedentedly cruel. The first feature was due to the development of science and industry, the second - the decline of religion and the emergence of what, for lack of a generally accepted name, can be called "cadocracy" (from cadocracy - the power of an uneducated crowd, mob). The age of outstanding people has passed, and instead of it the age of the mob has come. The gentleman - a direct descendant of the idealized Christian knight, a model for many generations - is supplanted by a rude, uneducated person. The peoples of the United States and England were inspired that they were waging war "in the name of justice, humanity and Christianity." In reality, however, the Allies returned "to methods of war which civilized nations have long ago cast aside".

In the fires, people were burned alive. As a result of the barbaric bombing in Dresden, 135,000 people died, mostly Germans, of course, but among the dead were prisoners of war: Russians, British, Americans. (J.F.S. Fuller World War II 1939-1945. Foreign Literature Publishing House. Moscow, 1956, p. 529)

In specially designated quarters of the southern suburbs of Dresden in the 2nd half of the 19th century. settled numerous foreigners. Since at the same time they did not integrate into the Evangelical denomination of Dresden, but retained their religion, between 1869 and 1884. four foreign churches were erected. The Anglican, American and Scottish Presbyterian churches were destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Only the Russian Church survived. Orthodox Church, built in 1872-1874. for the Russian Mission in the Principality of Saxony.

What about Dresden??? Well, that's what everyone is wearing with Dresden ???
Allies bombed EVERYTHING in a row, all cities
Hamburg - 37,554 people died as a result of that grandiose Allied operation in late July - early August 1943. Of every thousand people in the population, an average of 22.1 people died then. 25,965 people, or almost 70% of those who died, lived in the Grossbezirk Mitte, located in the city center. The casualty ratio in the area was 59.6 per thousand of its inhabitants. In the Grossbezirk Mitte area, the death toll of women was 45% higher than that of men. And the number of people who died in Grossbezirk Mitte residential buildings turned out to be even higher compared to the average data for the central areas. Losses here amounted to 18,500 people, that is, more than half of the officially recorded total number of deaths.
So, for example, in the Hammerbrook area, the average losses were 361.5 people per thousand, that is, one in three found their death in the flames of fires. In the other two districts, these figures are 267.2 and 160 people per thousand inhabitants, respectively.
The death toll from the Allied bombings in Hamburg exceeds the death toll in the whole state of Bavaria. But even this figure of 37,554 does not reflect the exact number of victims. After a number of years of research, it became clear that at least 17,372 more people should be added to this.

What happened during the large-scale air strikes with the use of a huge number of incendiary bombs was beyond all previous practice of city services and the population.
While firefighters and civil defense officials tried to fight the first fires and dig out the first victims from under the ruins, with every chance of saving people, a second powerful blow hit the densely built-up residential areas of the eastern part of the city. Numerous fires arose, which soon grew into a fiery sea that flooded entire neighborhoods, destroying everything and everyone in its path.
The third and fourth wave of bombers completed the destructive work. The fire fell on those areas of the city that were spared by the previous bombardments. At the same time, two neighboring small towns of Elmshorn and Wedel were bombed, where a stream of refugees from Hamburg flocked. These operations, carried out by the RAF under the cover of night, were clearly terror raids. In the daytime, US Air Force bombers attacked military and industrial facilities in the dock area, primarily shipyards where warships And submarines. The Americans used mainly high-explosive bombs.
Bold attempts to fight the fire in the city itself, which in the early stages of the bombing were made by fire brigades with the help of civil defense forces and the population, were soon stopped by more and more streams of incendiary bombs falling on the roofs, and then from the roofs. New fires sprang up all over the place. Finally, due to an acute shortage of water, fire extinguishing work was completely paralyzed. Some idea of the intensity of the air raids can be given by the fact that 65 incendiary bombs, four containers of phosphorus and one high-explosive bomb were dropped on one of the sites measuring approximately 75 by 45 meters. The British dropped 155 incendiary bombs on one of the medium factories. These figures reflect not only the extent of the catastrophe that the city had to endure. They give an approximate ratio between the weight of incendiary and high-explosive bombs dropped on Hamburg.
The city's water supply system received 847 direct hits from high-explosive bombs, and very soon the water supply system was no longer able to provide even the basic needs of the population. This greatly hampered the work of city fire brigades. Firefighters received so many calls that they were simply not able to cope with them. The city authorities counted on getting help from outside, but what could be done when fires simultaneously engulfed 16,000 buildings, and city blocks heated up to terrifying temperatures (more than 800 degrees Celsius), when not individual houses, but entire areas were engulfed in flames? The heat led to the fact that the flames covered more and more new buildings, and this happened so quickly that hundreds of men, women and children who tried to escape were burned alive right on the streets and squares.
In many places, the burning ruins exuded such heat that even after the flame itself had been knocked out, several days passed before one could simply try to get into these streets. In areas of fire only 30 hours after the end of the raids, it was possible to see at least something in natural light. Before that, dense clouds of black smoke mixed with dust completely obscured even the cloudless sky.

In the same way, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are good, but there was Tokyo, where the Ami also worked with land mines and lighters on the Yap huts made of paper and wood, and where the losses were greater than in X and N.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY - the bombing of Murmansk and Stalingrad - where is the regret and worries about the killed civilians ???
The Germans just got a response - and yes, Guernica, conceived by Speerle was the first - so "I will repay"

Aviation of the Western Allies launched a series of bombing attacks on the capital of Saxony, the city of Dresden, which was almost completely destroyed as a result.

The Dresden raid was part of an Anglo-American strategic bombing program launched after the US and British heads of state met in Casablanca in January 1943.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subsequently, the Western Allies claimed that the raid on Dresden was a response to the request of the Soviet command to strike at the city's railway junction, allegedly made at the Yalta Conference of 1945.

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

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

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

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

Vitaly Slovetsky, Free Press.

Is the largest bombing of World War II recognized as a war crime?

For several decades, calls have been heard in Europe to make the bombing of the ancient city of Dresden the status of a war crime and genocide of the inhabitants. Recently, the German writer and Nobel Prize winner in literature Günter Grass and the former editor of the British newspaper The Times Simon Jenkins again demanded this.
They are supported by the American journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens, who said that the bombing of many German cities was carried out solely so that new aircraft crews could work out the practice of bombing.
The German historian Yorck Friedrich noted in his book that the bombing of cities was a war crime because in recent months war, they were not dictated by military necessity: "... it was an absolutely unnecessary bombardment in the military sense."
The number of victims of the terrible bombing that took place from February 13 to 15, 1945, is from 25,000 to 30,000 people (many sources claim more). The city was destroyed almost completely.
After the end of World War II, the ruins of residential buildings, palaces and churches were dismantled and taken out of the city. On the site of Dresden, a site was formed with marked boundaries of former streets and buildings.
The restoration of the center lasted about 40 years. The rest of the city was built much faster.
To this day, the restoration of historic buildings on Neumarkt Square is underway.

The fiery tornado drew people in ...
Before the war, Dresden was considered one of the most beautiful cities Europe. Tourist guides called it Florence on the Elbe. The famous Dresden Gallery, the second largest porcelain museum in the world, the most beautiful Zwinger palace ensemble, the Opera House, which competed in acoustics with the La Scala Theater, and many churches built in the Baroque style, were located here.
Russian composers Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Alexander Scriabin often stayed in Dresden, and Sergei Rachmaninov prepared here for his world tours. The writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, who worked on the novel "Demons", lived in the city for a long time. Here his daughter Lyubasha was born.
At the end of World War II, the locals were confident that Dresden would not be bombed. It did not have military factories. There were rumors that after the war the Allies would make Dresden the capital of a new Germany.
There was practically no air defense here, so the air raid signal sounded just a few minutes before the start of the bombing.
At 22:03 on February 13, the inhabitants of the outskirts heard the rumble of approaching aircraft. At 10:13 p.m., 244 RAF Lancaster heavy bombers dropped the first high-explosive bombs on the city.
Within minutes, the city was engulfed in flames. The light from the giant fire was visible for 150 kilometers.
One of the pilots of the British Royal Air Force later recalled: “The fantastic light around became brighter as we approached the target. At an altitude of 6000 meters, we could distinguish in an unearthly bright glow details of the terrain that we had never seen before; For the first time in many operations, I felt sorry for the people downstairs.”
The navigator-bomber of one of the bombers testified: “I confess, I glanced down when the bombs were falling, and with my own eyes I saw a shocking panorama of the city, blazing from one end to the other. Thick smoke was visible, carried by the wind from Dresden. A panorama of a brightly sparkling city opened up. The first reaction was the thought that shocked me about the coincidence of the massacre taking place below with the warnings of the evangelists in the sermons before the war.
The plan to bombard Dresden included the creation of a fiery tornado on its streets. Such a tornado appears when the scattered fires that have arisen are combined into one huge bonfire. The air above it heats up, its density decreases and it rises.
The British historian David Irving describes the firestorm created in Dresden by the British Royal Air Force pilots as follows: “... the resulting firestorm, judging by the survey, absorbed more than 75 percent of the destruction area ... Giant trees were uprooted or half broken. Crowds of fleeing people were unexpectedly caught up by a tornado, dragged through the streets and thrown directly into the fire; ripped off roofs and furniture… were thrown into the center of the burning old part of the city.
The fiery tornado reached its peak in the three-hour interval between raids, precisely at the time when the inhabitants of the city who had taken refuge in underground corridors had to flee to its outskirts.
A railroad worker who was hiding near Postal Square watched as a woman with a baby carriage was dragged through the streets and thrown into the flames. Others fleeing along the railroad embankment, which seemed to be the only way of escape not littered with debris, told how the railroad cars on open sections of the track were blown away by a storm.
Asphalt melted on the streets, and people, falling into it, merged with the road surface.
The telephone operator of the Central Telegraph left the following memories of the bombing of the city: “Some girls suggested that we go out into the street and run home. The stairs led from the basement of the telephone center building to a quadrangular courtyard under a glass roof. They wanted to get out through the main gate of the courtyard to Postal Square. I didn't like this idea; suddenly, just as 12 or 13 girls were running across the yard and fumbling with the gate, trying to open it, the red-hot roof collapsed, burying them all under it.
In a gynecological clinic, after being hit by a bomb, 45 pregnant women died. On Altmarkt Square, several hundred people who sought salvation in ancient wells were boiled alive, and the water from the wells evaporated by half.
In the basement of the Central Station during the bombing there were approximately 2,000 refugees from Silesia and East Prussia. Underground passages for their temporary residence were equipped by the authorities long before the bombing of the city. The refugees were cared for by representatives of the Red Cross, women's service units under the state labor service and employees of the National Socialist welfare service. In another city in Germany, the accumulation of such a large number of people in rooms decorated with flammable materials would not be allowed. But the Dresden authorities were sure that the city would not be bombed.
Refugees were also on the stairs leading to the platforms and on the platforms themselves. Shortly before the raid on the city by British bombers, two trains with children arrived at the station from Koenigsbrück, which was approached by the Red Army.
A refugee from Silesia recalled: “Thousands of people crowded shoulder to shoulder in the square ... Fire raged above them. At the entrances to the station, the corpses of dead children lay, they were already stacked on top of each other and taken out of the station.
According to the air defense chief of the Central Station, out of 2,000 refugees who were in the tunnel, 100 were burned alive, another 500 people suffocated in the smoke.

"The number of victims in Dresden is impossible to count"
During the first attack on Dresden, the British Lancasters dropped 800 tons of bombs. Three hours later, 529 Lancasters dropped 1,800 tons of bombs. The losses of the Royal Air Force during the two raids amounted to 6 aircraft, 2 more aircraft crashed in France and 1 in the UK.
On February 14, 311 American bombers dropped 771 tons of bombs on the city. On February 15, American aircraft dropped 466 tons of bombs. Part of the American P-51 fighters were ordered to attack targets moving along the roads in order to increase chaos and destruction on the region's important transport network.
The commander of the Dresden rescue squad recalled: “At the beginning of the second attack, many were still crowded in the tunnels and basements, waiting for the end of the fires ... The detonation hit the basement windows. Some new, strange sound was added to the roar of explosions, which became more and more muffled. Something resembling the rumble of a waterfall - it was the howl of a tornado that started in the city.
Many who were in underground shelters instantly burned out as soon as the surrounding heat suddenly increased dramatically. They either turned to ashes or melted…”
The bodies of other dead, found in the basements, shrunken from the nightmarish heat to one meter in length.
British planes also dropped canisters filled with a mixture of rubber and white phosphorus on the city. The canisters broke on the ground, the phosphorus ignited, the viscous mass fell on the skin of people and stuck tightly. It was impossible to redeem...
One of the inhabitants of Dresden said: “The tram depot had a public toilet made of corrugated iron. At the entrance, with her face buried in a fur coat, lay a woman of about thirty, completely naked. A few yards away lay two boys, about eight or ten years old. They lay down, hugging each other tightly. Also naked... Everywhere, where the eye reached, people lay suffocated from lack of oxygen. Apparently, they tore off all their clothes, trying to make it look like an oxygen mask ... ".
After the raids, a three-mile column of yellow-brown smoke rose into the sky. A mass of ash floated, covering the ruins, towards Czechoslovakia.
In some parts of the old city, such heat was created that even a few days after the bombing it was impossible to enter the streets between the ruins of houses.
According to the report of the Dresden police, compiled after the raids, 12,000 buildings burned down in the city, “... 24 banks, 26 buildings of insurance companies, 31 trading shops, 6470 shops, 640 warehouses, 256 trading floors, 31 hotels, 26 brothels, 63 administrative buildings, 3 theaters, 18 cinemas, 11 churches, 60 chapels, 50 cultural and historical buildings, 19 hospitals (including auxiliary and private clinics), 39 schools, 5 consulates, 1 zoological garden, 1 waterworks, 1 railway depot, 19 post offices, 4 tram depots, 19 ships and barges.
On March 22, 1945, the municipal authorities of Dresden issued an official report, according to which the number of deaths recorded by this date was 20,204, and the total number of deaths during the bombing was expected to be about 25,000 people.
In 1953, in the work of the German authors “Results of the Second World War”, Major General of the Fire Service Hans Rumpf wrote: “The number of victims in Dresden cannot be calculated. According to the State Department, 250,000 people died in this city, but the actual figure of losses, of course, is much less; but even 60-100 thousand people of the civilian population, who died in the fire in one night, hardly fit in the human mind.
In 2008, a commission of 13 German historians commissioned by the city of Dresden concluded that approximately 25,000 people died during the bombings.

“And at the same time show the Russians…”
On January 26, 1945, Air Force Secretary Archibald Sinclair suggested bombing Dresden to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in response to his dispatch with the question: “What can be done to properly finish off the Germans during their retreat from Breslau (this city is located 200 kilometers from Dresden. "SP")?
On February 8, the High Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe informed the RAF and the US Air Force that Dresden was included in the list of targets for bombing. On the same day, the US military mission in Moscow sent an official notification to the Soviet side about the inclusion of Dresden in the list of targets.
An RAF memorandum given to British pilots the night before the attack stated: “Dresden, the 7th largest city in Germany… is by far the largest enemy area yet to be bombed. In the middle of winter, with refugees heading west and troops having to be quartered somewhere, housing is in short supply as workers, refugees, and troops need to be accommodated, as well as government offices evacuated from other areas. At one time widely known for its production of porcelain, Dresden has developed into a major industrial center ... The purpose of the attack is to strike the enemy where he feels it the most, behind a partially collapsed front ... and at the same time show the Russians when they arrive in the city what they are capable of Royal Air Force".
- If we talk about war crimes and genocide, then many German cities were bombed. The Americans and the British developed a plan: mercilessly bomb the cities in order to break the spirit of the German civilian population in a short time. But the country lived and worked under bombs,” says Vladimir Beshanov, author of books on the history of World War II. - I believe that not only the barbaric bombing of Dresden, but also the bombing of other German cities, as well as Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should be recognized as war crimes.
In Dresden, residential buildings and architectural monuments were destroyed. Large marshalling yards received almost no damage. The railway bridge over the Elbe and the military airfield, located in the vicinity of the city, remained intact.
After Dresden, the British managed to bomb the medieval cities of Bayreuth, Würzburg, Zoest, Rothenburg, Pforzheim and Welm. Only in Pforzheim, where 60,000 people lived, a third of the inhabitants died.
What will come out of another attempt to give the monstrous event the status of a war crime is unknown. So far, every year on February 13, the inhabitants of Dresden commemorate fellow citizens who died in a fiery tornado.