February 13, 2005, marks the 60th anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II. -- The lead editorial in Saturday's Guardian discusses the anniversary.[1] -- BACKGROUND: "Civilian death estimates vary wildly largely as a result of propaganda figures which received widespread publicity at the time; however, the most recently available evidence points to 35,000 deaths, which is less than the number that died in Hamburg, but Dresden was a smaller city. Numbers between 25,000-140,000 have been used in official statistics; estimates in western Germany were often higher than the 35,000 used in the east. At that time, Dresden’s population was 600,000, but hundreds of thousands of refugees were living in and passing through Dresden as the Russians were now only fifty miles away. The entire inner city (15 square kilometres) was utterly devastated, and other quarters were damaged to some degree, the many villa quarters, however, on average much less than others. -- While some think that the bombing of Dresden was a tragic occurrence that Nazi Germany brought upon itself, others feel it should be treated as a war crime. Fortunately, much of the city's beauty has been restored, thanks to the zeal of the populace in recreating the architecture of ‘old Dresden.' Today Dresden has a strong partnership with the English city Coventry, which was heavily damaged by German air attacks. The partnership is deeply supported by the populace in both cities." -- Wikipedia, Dresden (as of Feb. 12, 2005) -- For more detail, see Wikipedia's article on Bombing of Dresden in World War II. -- Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969; film version, 1972) has helped keep the bombing of Dresden in American consciousness....
1.
Dresden anniversary
Leader
CASUALTIES OF TOTAL WAR
Guardian (UK)
February 12, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1411278,00.html
Sixty years on, the bombing of Dresden still evokes horror and regret: horror
at the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians; regret that the British and
American planes which attacked it on February 13, 1945, destroyed so much of the
lovely city known as the "Florence of the Elbe." But such emotions have to be
seen in the context of the times: the final, cruel months of a world war
launched by an aggressive, racist, totalitarian state.
The vast majority of today's Germans recognize that truth, even if they are
now more able than before to say openly that they too were victims of "die
Hitlerzeit." Thus the recent success of books such as Gunther Grass's novel
Crabwalk, which features the sinking of a ship with thousands of refugees
fleeing the Red Army.
But acknowledgment that Germans were victims as well as perpetrators is not
the goal of the neo-Nazis planning to demonstrate in Dresden against what they
provocatively call "the bombing holocaust." That creates a false parallel
between the genocide of Europe's Jews by the Nazi state, and the allied military
effort to destroy that regime. To say that war is cruel is not to duck the
debate about whether the city was a "legitimate" target -- the latest
scholarship says it probably was, and that Hitler's propagandists exaggerated
the number of casualties -- or a gratuitous and vindictive act that made no
difference to the predictable outcome of the war. What is indisputable is that
there was, and is, no moral equivalence between the sides. The neo-Nazis of the
National Democratic party are an odious bunch. Their rise, with 9% of the vote
in the last Saxon regional elections, reflects a depressed economy, unemployment
twice the national average and the weakening of civic and democratic traditions
by decades of communism. But unified, democratic Germany is robust enough to
deal with, and perhaps even to outlaw, demagogues who nod and wink about Iraq
and claim that thousands of utterly blameless Dresdeners were burned to death in
the name of "Anglo-American gangster politics."
Six decades, in the span of an average human life, is the moment when memory
becomes history, as it did with D-Day last summer and this month's Auschwitz
anniversary. Time and distance should cool this terrible firestorm. So it will
be a sad irony if protests overshadow events that are intended to share
Dresden's grim experience with Hiroshima, Guernica, Coventry, Sarajevo, Grozny,
and New York. History should neither be nationally exclusive nor fenced off into
areas that are taboo. Nor should it be abused for extremist political purposes.
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