Dresden why bombed

SS personnel played a key role in creating these makeshift funeral pyres. The smell permeated everything. Allied prisoners of war were forced to help extract bodies from the rubble. We know of at least one case where an American POW was executed, purportedly for looting.

Mass graves became the final resting places for thousands. A widely accepted estimate is 35, killed during the 37 hours of terror. Rival claims go far higher. The German government, however, proposes 25, as a defensible guess. Since so many victims were immolated after the attacks, we will likely never know the precise number.

The photographs snapped by Richard Peter months after the firestorm have not lost any of their capacity to unsettle. Allied prisoners held in Dresden during the bombing, such as British rifleman Victor Gregg and the American Kurt Vonnegut, whose postwar novel Slaugherhouse Five vividly conveyed the resulting carnage, condemned the attacks.

Winston Churchill went so far as to write, "the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, Translated by Allison Brown. New York: Columbia University Press, Miller, Donald. Stargardt, Nicholas. New York: Basic Books, Washington, D. As an adult, Janine Simone Hopkins was encouraged by her family to record her experiences and reflections of her life in Paris during the German occupation. Austrian ski racer Hermann Maier makes one of the most dramatic crashes in skiing history when he catapults 30 feet in the air, lands on his helmet and rams through two safety fences at an estimated 80 miles per hour on February 13, Amazingly, Maier suffered just minor In , many A year-old woman named Mary accepts a ride from a man in the ski town of Breckenridge, Colorado, and is raped and severely beaten with a claw hammer.

The attacker, Tom Luther, was traced through his truck and apprehended. Luther told a psychiatrist thatMary reminded him of his Following the death of Yuri Andropov four days earlier, Konstantin Chernenko takes over as the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the ruling position in the Soviet Union. Live TV. This Day In History. So while the Dresden bombing was a terror campaign that dealt a devastating assault on civilians and cultural sites, it was part of a war in which such tactics had been widely—and grimly—deployed.

Less than three months later, and eight days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker, the German High Command signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. The woman remains lying on the ground, completely still".

Kurt Vonnegut survived the bombing as a prisoner of war in Dresden. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn," he wrote in his work Slaughterhouse-Five. He described the city after the attack as "like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot.

Everybody else in the neighbourhood was dead. In total, the British lost six bombers in the attack, three to planes accidentally hitting each other with bombs. The US lost one. Nazi Germany immediately used the bombing to attack the Allies. The Propaganda Ministry claimed Dresden had no war industry and was only a city of culture. Though local officials said about 25, people had died - a figure historians agree with now - the Nazis claimed , civilians were killed.

In the UK, Dresden was known as a tourist destination, and some MPs and public figures questioned the value of the attack. A story at the time published by the Associated Press news agency said the Allies were conducting terror bombing, spreading further alarm. US and UK military planners, however, insisted the attack was strategically justified, in the same way as attacks on other cities - by disrupting industry, destroying workers' homes and crippling transport in Germany.

But Dresden was "a legitimate military target", the report said, and the attack was no different "from established bombing policies". The debate about the Allied bombing campaign, and about the attack on Dresden, continues to this day. Historians question if destruction of German cities hindered the Nazi war effort, or simply caused civilian deaths - especially towards the end of the conflict.

Unlike an invasion like D-Day, it is harder to quantify how much these attacks helped win the war. Some argue it is a moral failing for the Allies, or even a war crime. But defenders say it was a necessary part of the total war to defeat Nazi Germany.