Dresden: avoiding talk of past while looking to future

SHOULD the bombing of Dresden be considered a war crime? Maybe — but none of the 27 EU Justice Ministers were asking when they toured the city this week.

The town in the former German Democratic Republic was chosen by the Germans to host the first meeting of their six month long presidency.

The city treated them to an extensive cultural programme that included a tour of the historic buildings in this Saxon region bordering the Czech Republic.

Nobody mentioned the war directly but of course it had to come up as part of the explanations for many of the buildings included in the tour.

Dresden was reduced to a smouldering heap of rubble on the night of February 13 1945 by what has been described as the savage blanket-bombing by British and American planes.

It was one of a number of cities bombed in this way towards the end of the war when it was clear that the Germans had lost.

Dresden, considered one of the finest historic and architectural cities of Europe and Germany’s most beautiful city, had managed to come through the war relatively unscathed. In February 1945 it was full of refugees trying to flee the Russian forces rapidly spreading across the region, German women and children who had survived and others who had escaped the Nazi death camps. As in some of the other cities, they took refuge in the basements and underground shelters when the raids began.

But the blanket bombing created a fire storm, with buildings all across the cities going up in flames, sucking all the oxygen out of the underground shelters and suffocating those taking refuge there. At least 35,000 people died.

Afterwards it was said the Russians had requested the bombing to finally break the will of the Germans and make it easier for their troops rapidly sweeping across the countryside.

But the Russians, who occupied Dresden for almost 50 years after the war, used it as propaganda against the West, blaming the US and Britain for the act.

Churchill certainly had to authorise the decision and some suspect his motives, saying the flattening of several of Europe’s cities, including Rotterdam, smacked of revenge for the bombing of London earlier in the war. At any rate when the damage was done, Churchill distanced himself from the decision and blamed one of his generals.

Now the city is a mix of Stalin-era blocks, buildings that reflect its swift growth as part of the new reunited Germany, and its mostly rebuilt historic edifices in the centre. Many were rebuilt during the Communist era when east Germany was touted as an example of how successful the system could be.

But one building was left in ruins, the huge main palace of the Electors and Kings of Saxony, the Residenzschloss.

It was kept fenced off and un-repaired as a monument to the war but following reunification work began on rebuilding it.

Questions to German officials and European journalists as to whether the bombing of Dresden was a war crime were met with wry smiles, and most shied away from answering. If one agreed, then what other cities could be included in the list on both sides of the Second World War, some asked.

The city itself is one of the most economically successful in the east of the new Germany, building on its past that includes its collection of art that survived the war, carefully stored away outside the city.