PITY THE POOR GERMANS:

A Blitz on Dresden: a review of Dresden by Frederick Taylor (George Rosie, Sunday Herald)

Taylor is an assiduous researcher. He paints a picture which, while still terrible, is not quite the apocalyptic one of popular history. And in the process he deflates a number of myths.

One of them is that Dresden was an “innocent” city, a wonderland of art and architecture devoid of any strategic significance. Nothing more than Florence on the Elbe. This is nonsense. Dresden was home to any number of high-tech engineering firms all working flat out to supply Hitler’s war machine. One was Carl Zeiss-Jena, the lens-making company which was churning out optics for bomb sights, artillery sights and U-boat periscopes. Many of these factories relied on slave labour from concentration camps. In fact, the Dresden Yearbook for 1942 boasts that the city was “one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich.”

Dresden was also the site of one of the most important railway marshalling yards in eastern Germany. It was a nodal point on the network with hundreds of thousands of troops, guns and tanks being shunted through Dresden on their way to the eastern front. Politically, the city was solidly Nazi. Hitler’s visits were met with wild enthusiasm. There was an SS barracks in the suburbs. Hundreds of Hitler’s enemies had died on the blade of Dresden’s electric-powered guillotine. One way or another, Dresden was a “legitimate” target for the allied bombers (if bombing of any city can be regarded as legitimate).

Ironically perhaps, Dresden’s tragedy was not to have been bombed far earlier in the war. If it had been, things might have been different. But for years the city was beyond the reach of allied aircraft. Dresden seems to have been lulled, quite literally, into a false sense of security. As a result it failed to build the kind of deep, air-raid shelters with blast shutters and air-filtration systems which was the norm elsewhere in Germany (and which probably saved millions of lives). Dresdeners made their own arrangements – in basements, cellars, under stairs, where so many were to prove utterly vulnerable to the rain of high explosives and incendiaries.

Hey, here's an idea: don't want to be bombed? Don't start a war.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 22, 2004 9:13 AM