The SHOCKING Real Story of the Dresden Firestorm

This historical documentary will be discussing events of a sensitive nature. If you are likely to get triggered, please run to your safe space now. In September 1944, Dresden had yet to be hit by the air, and as a result, they were totally unprepared. The city's police chief described the air defences as inadequate, and said that there was a lack of air raid shelters. No new shelters could be built because of widespread shortages of the necessary materials. And he said that it was only a question of time before Dresden was bombed, and that their only hope now was to minimize the destruction. The first bombs to hit Dresden came in October 1944, when 30 American bombers were diverted from other targets to the city. Only 270 people were killed, so the authorities pretended that the air raid had never happened, not even allowing mention of it in the press. Considering that London's death toll had been 250 people on average for a given raid during the Blitz, the fact that just 30 American bombers could kill more than that in one night in Dresden should have been a warning sign that a proper raid on the city would be a lot more devastating. Yet the authorities seemed clueless. During the first raid, the city had been defended by 24 88mm anti-aircraft guns. But since the city had only been targeted once throughout the war, whereas the British and Americans were bombing numerous other cities, going for their military and industrial targets, it didn't seem necessary to keep the anti-aircraft guns in Dresden. The city's flak guns were, therefore, packed up and placed into boxcars at the railway station to be sent elsewhere, as another raid hit Dresden on the 16th of January 1945. This time, 127 B-24 Liberator bombers had orders to target another location, but bad weather over the original target compelled them to bomb their secondary target, Dresden. 127 bombers was more than the 30 they had seen previously. And so, when they dropped their bombs, 376 people in Dresden were killed, 100 more than the previous raid. This hadn't been a precision raid, so the bombs fell throughout the city, with only one area around the railway station and the military barracks being considered to be a concentrated hit. But the authorities couldn't ignore this raid this time, and allowed the details of it to be published. The reason why the Allies hadn't really targeted Dresden before was because there were much more important targets. Yes, Dresden was the 7th largest city in the Reich, boasting an armaments industry, other industries, a military barracks, and a rail network. But it was also in East Germany, miles away from the Allied airbases. It was a four-hour journey just to reach it, then turn back, which was exhausting for the bomber crews, but also dangerous since they were flying over numerous anti-aircraft gun batteries and interceptor fighter screens. Really, it wasn't until the Luftwaffe was crippled in the late war, and when many of the other targets had already been hit, that Dresden even made sense for them to consider. But because Dresden had so far been spared, many Dresdeners genuinely believed that their historic city was exempt from destruction. They also believed that there was little reason to target it. In fact, they were less concerned about a bombing raid than they were about the Soviet armies who were approaching the city from the east. What they didn't realize was that it was precisely this factor, the advancing Soviets, that would make Dresden a priority target for the Western Allies. On the 1st of January 1945, Colonel General Heinz Guderian officially designated Dresden a defensive area, or Verteidigungsbereich. For all practical purposes, this meant that Dresden was a fortress city, although not technically till later, and was expected to be defended until the last man. The Germans believed that the city would end up being besieged, pounded, and fought over in heavy street-to-street fighting. They thought that the civilians would be starved, and that it was going to be like Stalingrad, or what was happening in Königsberg to the north, meaning that they knew that the city was going to be destroyed at some point anyway. And at this time, German civilians were fleeing from cities in the east, with 18,000 refugees dying from the cold and privation from Breslau to Canth. They were welcomed at Dresden, where the National Socialist People's Welfare Organization helped find accommodation and cared for new arrivals, setting up medical treatment facilities and soup kitchens before the refugees were sent further west. The British knew that Dresden was a major transportation hub, and had intercepted German reports stating that they were currently shifting forces to the Eastern Front. The Soviets also requested that the Allies hinder this German movement to the east, so the cities of Chemnitz, Leipzig, and Dresden became priority targets, with their rail networks having to be taken out, along with Berlin's. At least, that's what Air Marshal Arthur Harris believed. Bomber Harris, as he was called, is a controversial figure having received a lot of criticism during and after the war for his conduct of it. While some of this is valid, as we shall see, it's worth remembering that he was a man of his time. A time where people knew what the Germans had done to the world. The technology wasn't there yet for bombers to hit targets with any accuracy, and that technology wouldn't develop until the end of 1944, and even then it was impacted heavily by the weather and human error, making the chances of actually hitting the targets questionable at best. The British were also forced to strike at night as a way to reduce casualties on their own forces, which meant that they would never be able to precision bomb with sufficient accuracy. In March 1945, the Americans realized that, over the previous winter, 42% of their bombs fell more than 5 miles from their target, bearing in mind that the Americans bombed during the day, not at night like the British did. Thus, the only option for the British was to aim for large targets, like German cities. And that's what they did. Now, due to the Western Allies' intentions of landing on the European continent, Bomber Harris was forced to send his bombers to support the Allied ground operations. It was only from mid-September 1944 onwards that he got the chance to mount more of his area-bombing campaigns that had been so effective in 1943. At this point, Harris was being urged to attack Germany's synthetic oil plants, as well as the German transportation system. Harris though, was having none of it. He said that they couldn't wait around doing nothing for the perfect weather to attack specific targets like that. They had to bomb different parts of Germany to keep the enemy air defences guessing. So he would attack the Ruhr and the oil plants when the opportunity arose, but in the meantime, he would strike the remaining 15 major German cities that were left unbombed. It's worth noting that Harris had previously gone along with various other proposals to attack one target or another, including the Dambuster raids, which he hadn't been a fan of. He'd attacked the ball-bearing plants as well, but none of these appeared to have had any impact on the war, so why would attacking the oil plants make a difference? Well, it's because Harris was wrong about the oil situation. The Germans had suffered from a major oil shortage throughout the war, and they were on their last legs regarding oil at this point. However, Harris didn't think the intelligence reports regarding the oil shortage in Germany were particularly accurate, and the reason why was because he hadn't been informed about the breaking of the Enigma Codes, so he didn't realize that the information he was receiving was actually correct. Also, another factor to consider was that Dresden hadn't really been hit before. When striking the Ruhr, or other areas that had been targeted over and over, Bomber Harris had realized that incendiary bombs were not that effective, since rubble doesn't burn well. Therefore, in those cases, his bombers were loaded more and more with high explosive, which, while devastating, couldn't hope to destroy a city as well as fire could. Thus, there was a shortage of high explosive bombs, and lots of incendiaries lying around. So, cities that had barely been hit with lots of wood, like Dresden, were ideal targets because plentiful stocks of incendiaries could be used to burn them down. And, although German and post-war propagandists would claim otherwise, there were numerous factories in Dresden, including Dresden's largest employer, Zweise Ikon AG. This was a producer of cameras and lenses important to the war effort, but also produced bomb sites for aircraft, and time-delayed fuses for torpedoes. So yes, while there was a revenge element when it came to the Dresden Raids, since the Germans had targeted British cities and others throughout Europe, that wasn't the primary motivation. Dresden was seen as a legitimate target, and a logical choice when you take into account all the various factors. And Harris wasn't alone in this decision-making. On the 27th of January 1945, with Churchill calling for action, Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Norman Bottomley, told Harris to target Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz. These, Bottomley hoped, would cause confusion in the evacuation of refugees and hamper troop movements in the east. Churchill approved the bombing of these industrial cities on the 28th, and there was a note to the Chief of Staff's committee which I should point out, doesn't say that they're targeting refugees specifically, but shows the British attitude at the time. "...Evacuees from German and German-occupied provinces to the east of Berlin are streaming westwards through Berlin itself and through Leipzig, Dresden and other cities in the east of Germany. The administrative problems involved in receiving the refugees and redistributing them are likely to be immense. The strain on the administration and upon the communications must be considerably increased by the need for handling military reinforcements on their way to the Eastern Front. A series of heavy attacks by day and night upon those administrative and control centres is likely to create considerable delays in the deployment of troops at the front and may well result in establishing a state of chaos in some or all of these centres." It appears that the Americans joined the British in their scheme because the Soviets had specifically asked the Western Allies to bomb the Germans to prevent them sending forces east, and both the Brits and the Americans wanted to help them out. Then, on the 6th of February 1945, Portal gave the order to Harris to attack Dresden. And David Irving later said that Harris was so shocked by this that he drove to London to query the order. But as historian Frederick Taylor points out, this makes no sense since Harris had known as early as November 1944 that Dresden was a legitimate target, and he also wanted to bomb cities, so why was he so shocked? Also, as will become clear as we wade through this, the Allies had expected to do damage to Dresden, but not necessarily as much damage as they ended up doing. The Allies sent a similar number of aircraft to Dresden as they had to other cities, and yet it resulted in massive destruction. Why? Well, the reason was because, unlike the other raids, at Dresden almost everything went right for the Allies, and almost everything went wrong for the Dresdeners. By February 1944, Dresden's Flak guns and crews had been sent elsewhere to be overrun by Allied and Soviet advances, and Dresden was basically defenceless, although the Allies didn't know that. It is said that the withdrawal of Flak indicated the low status of Dresden as a military or industrial centre. Not necessarily so. No-one would deny the industrial status of the city of Chemnitz, known for tank production. Yet, Chemnitz too lost its anti-aircraft batteries in November-December 1944, and became equally defenceless. The Third Reich, bereft of labour and fighting men, had become desperate. Towns that should have continued to be defended were not. 796 Lancaster bombers would be used on the Dresden Raid, and this was actually less than the 1,000 bomber raids against cities like Essen and Dortmund. The first wave to go in were from Number 5 Group, the same one which had taken part in the Dambuster Operation with the bouncing bombs, and they had 14 squadrons for a total of 244 aircraft. The Germans sent up their fighters, all 10 of them, in a desperate attempt to protect Dresden, but they didn't have a chance. In fact, throughout the entirety of Germany that night, only 6 of the 1,173 British bombers that participated in raids were brought down by the German air defences, which was 0.085% of their entire force. The air raid sirens at Dresden started at 2140 hours on Tuesday the 13th of February 1945. Some Dresdeners were sleeping, or weren't dressed, and so barely had time to put their clothes on or drag their children out of bed before the bombs started falling. Many Dresdeners ran into their cellars, and there weren't enough proper shelters, with many of them becoming overcrowded to the point that people were forced to stand up in them, and others were denied access. The few residents that had built proper bunkers had even been mocked for having them, since the city would never be attacked, they thought. Well, those left outside weren't laughing now, as they darted for cover, or just stared up at the sky, with police officers running around trying to get them underground somewhere. Anywhere. One group settled in the basement of a pub that they had been drinking in just a few minutes earlier. Others in the central train station flooded into the basement, having been told it was safe. They found it overcrowded with people and luggage. For one blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 20 year old woman, Henny Wolf, the option to go into the nearby air raid shelter was not available to her. Why? Because, while her father was a German Aryan, her mother was a Russian-born Jew. Henny's entire family had been ordered to report to the train station on the 16th of February for liquidation… sorry, evacuation, but on the 13th, the sirens went off. They waited in their home, thinking it was another false alarm, since Jews weren't allowed to have radios, and so weren't to know that the British bombers had been sighted. But a local air raid warden who knew the family said it was alright, and invited Henny's father and his family into the cellar beneath their apartment building. At 2203 hours, the lead bombers dropped their flares, described as Christmas trees by those looking up at them, to guide the rest of the bomber's stream. The scheduled time for the bomb release was 2215 hours, but they actually started dropping at 2213 hours. Unlike in other raids, there was no undershooting, sometimes called creep-back, where the bomber crews would be so eager to drop their bombs that they would drop them early. Because Dresden had no anti-aircraft guns or fighter defences, the crews didn't feel this urgency, and so dropped their bombs more or less on target, another reason why the bombing was so devastating. The majority of the bombs dropped were still high explosive, despite the higher-than-normal ratio of incendiaries. The high explosives shattered roofs, windows, doors and walls, while the numerous incendiaries began to cause fires in the furniture and whatever else would catch fire. The first wave dropped their bombs over a period of just 15 minutes. Dresdeners cowered in their shelters, praying for salvation as the blasts shook the ground, deafening some and sending dust everywhere. Once the bombs had fallen, some Dresdeners went outside or poked their heads out to observe the destruction. For some, they found that their homes had taken a direct hit, and that the rubbish in the streets was what remained of their possessions. Others found that their homes hadn't been hit at all, with some going back to bed. Those in the pub mentioned before had survived, and the landlady gave them a glass of schnapps, each to celebrate. One of them went outside to go back to find his family, and witnessed that the flames were beginning to take hold. Part of the reason why the RAF attack on Leipzig had been so ineffective was due to the fact that the locals had disobeyed orders. Rather than staying in their shelters and waiting for the official call, they had scrambled out to start dealing with the incendiaries before the flames really took hold. It was possible to douse the small fires and incendiaries themselves with sand, or by picking them up and throwing them into the street where they were ineffective. As Taylor explains, "...the Dresden population was much more passive and more obedient, perhaps more trusting of the authorities. It would pay dearly for this." Nammy! You've got to trust the experts. You can't think for yourself or take ownership for your own lives. So, stay inside, follow the Fuhrer's state, save lives! So anyway, the people of Dresden followed the rules, and all burned to death. While another wounded German veteran, who had been sent home, confirms that many of the Dresdeners hadn't experienced bomb raids before, and also said that the fatal error that they made during the first wave was to rescue their possessions from the buildings instead of tackling the fires. But to be fair, some couldn't get out of their cellars as the buildings above them were on fire. Others in the lesser-hit areas of the city did try to put the flames out, or just simply flee the city. But at the Central Railway Station, a fire from an incendiary started above ground, and a panic followed below it. Some were trampled, others suffocated in the smoke or from the weight of bodies pushing against them. A thousand firefighters were stationed in the city, and many auxiliaries and reinforcements from other areas would arrive soon. But they couldn't control the flames alone, which quickly got out of hand. One fire warden found that his house and neighbourhood were largely intact, with only one fire that was soon under control. But as he went to inspect other areas, he observed far more widespread destruction, as well as the firefighters trying to battle the flames. He helped evacuate some of the elderly first, until the fires became overwhelming. No reliable documents from the firefighting operations have survived because so many firemen were killed during the night. One family with two daughters, one called Erika, found that the initial damage to their apartment was minimal, and started tackling the fires. Unfortunately, as most of the other residents had stayed below, the other apartments in the block caught fire, and they had no choice but to grab what belongings they could, and get out. Erika's father took their state-of-the-art sewing machine, the most valuable of their possessions, as her mother packed clothes, a camera and a hat, into bags. Some of the elderly in the building were resigned to their fate, but Erika's father ordered them to get ready to leave. They doused themselves in water from a barrel, and waited for the fires in the street to die down before attempting to break out. However, Erika observed something concerning. The tar in the street was bubbling. The Jews, who had been allowed into the cellar of their building by the air-warden, came out of it, against the orders of the city, to discover that the building was on fire. The father of Henny-Wulf ran into the building before the flames became too intense, grabbed their papers, documents and some money, and made it out of the building. Knowing that they were about to be deported in a few days' time anyway, they tore off their yellow stars and made their way out of the city, observing that the Gestapo headquarters and Nazi Party buildings had been hit and were in the middle of the flames. The heart of Dresden was a roaring blaze by 2,300 hours, barely 47 minutes after the first bomb fell. Worse, many of the streets in the city centre were blocked with rubble, preventing those that wanted to leave from getting out. That's when the second group of British bombers appeared, this time 552 of them. The air-raid sirens started up again in Dresden at 0107 hours on the morning of the 14th of January, but only in the suburbs. The centre of the city was without power, so only a few civilians there could hear the wails. Many didn't know there was another wave until flares descended upon the city, or when the bombs started falling. Meanwhile, in the air, the British 2nd Wave faced a dilemma. It was night-time, but several reports indicate that it was as light as day due to the fire, to the extent that one aircraft crewman could see the crew members of another bomber. Their orders were to hit the centre of the city to maximize destruction, but it was obvious that maximum destruction had probably already been achieved. They then quickly discussed whether to hit the centre again, or bomb other parts of the city, and in the end, by a purely on-the-spot decision, they moved their target zone to the areas outside the city centre, including some of the suburbs. As a result of this decision, the outcome would be the greatest area of a city destroyed in a single night due to strategic bombing up until that point. It was so bad that, at 0142 hours, the markers dropped to the ground to indicate where to attack had all been consumed by fire, so the order went out to just drop their remaining bombs somewhere in the middle of the Inferno. 1,435 high-explosive bombs 967.6 tons, and 443,158 incendiaries 791.3 tons, were dropped between 0121 hours and 0155 hours. Historians, and some eyewitnesses, are of the opinion that the central part of Dresden was probably already a firestorm, and definitely beyond saving even before the second wave arrived. But the second wave added to the carnage, making the situation much worse for the firefighters below. The wounded veteran soldier I mentioned earlier was in a school, which had been converted into a hospital. The soldiers and firefighters in the school had put out the fires from the first wave saving the building, but then the second wave bombs started to explode. Nobody had heard the sirens, and so there was a mad dash into the shelters again. This time though, bombs struck the building, and flames set the ground floor on fire, so the wounded soldier fled. "...out on the street the firestorm was at full raging power, the air a maelstrom of burning chunks of wood and metal and paper. Blazing tree limbs flew past the terrified young soldier, all kinds of half-recognizable objects caught up in the searing tornado, including, he realized, helpless human beings." During a firestorm, the temperature rises to such an extent that all the air becomes hot. Well, since hot air rises, it takes all the oxygen up with it, and away from the ground level. You could be stood in a vacuum with flames around you, and for a moment everything appears calm as you try to catch your breath. But then the super-hot air rushes back in, burning your lungs not with oxygen, but with poisonous carbon monoxide. "...the fire was reaching up into the sky, consuming oxygen at an ever-increasing rate, and the cold drizzly air in the Elbe Valley was rushing even faster into the vacuum. In the cellars the chemistry was changing too, as invisible fumes began to whisper from brick chamber to brick chamber, though so gradually that those who noticed a shortness of breath a curious feeling that even the deepest breath could not fill their lungs, might have attributed the symptoms to stress or fear." There was a natural firestorm in America in 1871, caused initially by railway workers clearing some bush, but that then got out of control by the wind. The flames spread so fast that some said it sounded like a freight train when they reached the town of Pestigo, which was then engulfed in a wall of fire a mile high, and hot enough to turn sand into glass. Some of the dead were found with no marks on the outside, not even on their clothing. And the same thing had happened in Hamburg in 1943, where many of the victims were found without burns, but with pink skin, a feature of carbon monoxide poisoning. Worse, many of those caught near the fire-tornado, or the Gale-style fire-wind, over a hundred miles per hour, were sometimes pulled into the flames. And the same thing happened at Dresden. The wounded veteran soldier was lucky though. He found five other soldiers, and they all formed a circle with damp cloths over their faces. They stood there for six hours, patting each other down, when one of them caught fire, until the firestorm died down. They were some of the very few who'd survived from the school. Another man freed himself from a cellar that had collapsed and was full of smoke, leaving the other people behind to their fate. He commented, "...outside it was as if one had been thrust into a burning stove, as far as one could see a roaring firestorm. In the cellars beneath the train station, it wasn't the fire that killed the people, but the super-hot air, or the lack of it as it was all sucked upwards. Some managed to get out and onto the surface, but most did not. And, because there was no real preparation for the air raids, one of the provisions was that the cellars of buildings would have thin walls cutting off each other. The idea being that, in case one building was on fire, the people sheltering in that cellar could break through the wall and free themselves via another building. This might make sense in a normal air raid, but in the firestorm, it just meant that multiple cellars would all have their air sucked out of them at the same time, resulting in higher casualties." One man's dog ran off into the night, barking at the bombs, never to be seen again. One family scrambled out from their shelter, found their Dachshund still alive somehow, then walked through the firestorm that was blasting them in the face, climbed over burning tree trunks, and got out alive. And yes, the Dachshund survived, as did the little girl who carried it. In fact, the stories of many of the survivors are similar. They were young, or fit enough to escape the suffocation and the flames, and walked through hell, trying not to be blinded or wounded from the flames and debris, many making it to safety, usually to the Elbe. Those unable to keep going, especially the elderly, often fell down or sat down through exhaustion or the lack of oxygen. And this was a fatal decision, as they would just die as the air was sucked away. The family mentioned earlier, with a daughter called Erika, tried to get their car to start, but Erika herself fell over and burned her hands on the hot cobblestones. They had previously doused their clothes in water from a barrel, but these had almost dried now. She reported that the tar in the street melted into what one book describes as molten rivers of tar. She survived because she had chosen to wear knee-high boots that day, whereas others, she said, found that their shoes became stuck in the tar. Those that tried to continue barefooted quickly found that they couldn't due to the pain of the burns, and then they died. She on the other hand survived because her boots stayed on. Then there were red herrings, such as the large tanks of water that had been constructed throughout Dresden in order to supply the fire service with plentiful amounts of water. People headed for the tanks, often dying on the way, but those that made it into them either died when the air got sucked away, or died from exhaustion trying to keep afloat for hours on end in the tanks that they couldn't get out of, or were simply boiled alive. Another elderly Jewish man, Victor, had been spared deportation so far because he was married to an Aryan wife. He had witnessed deportations though, and had been the one, just before the Dresden Raid, to hand out the letters to the remaining Jews who were about to be deported. Well, Victor and his wife had become separated in the chaos as a bomb exploded near them, and he ended up in the burning local Reichsbank building. But he eventually made it to the Elbe, where, miraculously, his wife was. Eva cut his yellow star from his jacket with a pocketknife, and the two of them escaped Dresden, with the chaos allowing him to pretend to be an Aryan until he was liberated by the Americans later in the war. A happy ending. But he was one of barely a hundred Dresden Jews to survive the war. As the bombers flew back to Britain, more bombers were about to be prepared. These were different though. These were American. The idea had developed that the British would strike by night, and the Americans would strike by day. At Dresden, the Americans had been scheduled to go in first, with the British following up in the evening, but the weather had prevented the Americans from taking off. Therefore, the British had gone in first, and now the Americans would leave their mark. 431 B-17s of 1st Bombardment Division, escorted by P-51 Mustangs, were tasked with bombing Dresden, and many more were to bomb other targets. This would put, if all went well, another 678.3 tons of high explosive and 400 tons of incendiaries on the city that was more or less a ball of flame. But on their way, three groups became separated from the rest after a run-in with some flak guns, and ended up losing their way. Instead of hitting Dresden, their aim was slightly off, and they ended up bombing Prague, the Czech capital. By the time the main group of 311 bombers was approaching Dresden, the firestorm had died down, but many fires still burned, and the sky was black to the point that some Dresdeners didn't know it was daylight. The main railway marshalling yard and the industrial area west of the city centre weren't so badly hit, so one lot of flying fortresses targeted that. However, clouds obscured some of the groups, and they ended up having to use their unreliable radar-targeting system to guide them in, which meant that a good portion of the bombs were scattered throughout the city, or missed Dresden entirely. One unit ended up flying to the Bruks synthetic oil plant instead, which was miles away. But it only took 13 minutes for the flying fortresses to drop their bombs over Dresden. 1,900 high explosive and 136,800 incendiaries fell. This was 771 tons, about two-thirds of the amount the first British wave had dropped. And it was confirmed later that they had largely hit the marshalling yards and the industrial area to the west of the city centre. Several armaments factories were destroyed, although the American raid hadn't been as effective as the British due to all the difficulties and the fact that the city was already gutted. Some of the fires would burn for three days. The aftermath is also too gruesome to detail here on YouTube, but needless to say, it wasn't pretty. Feel free to google some of the images. Then the Americans returned again to Dresden on the 15th of February. They weren't meant to, but couldn't find their original target, so decided that Dresden deserved another good pounding. 210 B-17's dropped another 461 tons of bombs, with a lot missing the city completely, although some did hit the Dresden prison, freeing a bunch of Communist and Czech resistance members. Unfortunately for the Czechs, not speaking German well, they were easily apprehended, whereas the German Communists survived. Then 2,000 Wehrmacht troops, a thousand prisoners of war, and various other teams, including some SS, were sent to help clean up the mess. Martial law was imposed, with 79 Dresdeners being arrested for looting, with many of them being executed. British and American POWs were used to clear the streets, and corpse mine, which was the process of removing bodies from the cellars. There was even a Māori who had been captured at Tobruk who was helping out. After three days, 10,000 bodies were moved to the local cemeteries, but the rest remained, and the fear was that infectious diseases could spread if the rest weren't dealt with quickly. So the decision was made to burn the bodies, since transporting them to the cemeteries would take too long. One 500-body pile was burned per day, taking up large quantities of precious gasoline, under the watchful eye of SS experts who were probably from the Treblinka camp. 6,865 bodies were burned this way from the 21st of February up until the 5th of March. In some cases, soldiers with flamethrowers had to be deployed to burn the decaying bodies trapped under buildings. The Germans kept meticulous records, listing where each body was found, their identification if possible, their possessions, and the cause of death. Thus, the first SS report stated on the 10th of March 1945 that a confirmed 18,375 people had been killed, 2,212 people seriously wounded, and 350,000 were homeless. They knew that more corpses lay under the rubble, so they estimated that the total number of dead would be 25,000. 75,000 houses or apartments were also destroyed, and this was one-third of the entire city's housing, and only one in five houses remained undamaged. However, morale didn't collapse into a rebellion against the regime, as had been hoped by the Allied planners. Dresdeners, although shocked and upset, just concentrated on trying to clear and rebuild their lives. Yes, they may have been angry at the regime, but there was no time or energy for rebellion. The marshalling yards and some of the lines from the city were hit or destroyed. However, filling in holes and repairing track wasn't too hard, and so, within days, the railway routes through Dresden were back in order, although nowhere near full operation. Thus, there was disruption to the communications network. But 199 factories were damaged or destroyed in the raid. 41 of these were classed as important for military production, 21 of which were now completely out of action. And since many of their employees were killed, some of those that did survive saw reduced capacity. The Allies announced to the public that Dresden had been hit, and that the raid had been successful. They said that the main line of supplies to the front ran through Dresden, and that they and the communications network had been taken out, helping the Red Army. Again, the objective was to cripple the German defences and help the Soviets. And it's worth noting that, this being shortly after the Ardennes Offensive, the war was certainly not over yet. There are also accounts of American generals and politicians at the time saying that the war wasn't finished, and that the casualty lists would grow, especially if they couldn't end the war in 1945. The Americans had lost 27,242 casualties in the first week of February, comparable to the losses sustained at Dresden, as we're about to see. However, it all kicked off when Commodore Greeson of the RAF gave a press conference and was asked why Dresden was targeted. He replied. "...first of all, they are the centres to which evacuees are being moved. They are centres of communications, through which traffic is moving across the Russian front and from the Western Front to the Elbe." He was then asked to clarify if the main aim was to target refugees or hit the communications network. Greeson replied that communications was the main aim, with a morale hit as a secondary concern. As a result of this, a journalist called Howard Cowan ran with the story that the RAF had adopted deliberate terror-bombing of Great German population centres as ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler's doom. He also described Dresden as a refugee-crowded capital, with other cities stated as being jammed with civilians fleeing Russian-tied in east. This was one of the great propaganda mistakes of the war. How could a newspaper man subject to official censorship have been allowed to use the taboo phrase terror-bombing to refer to Anglo-American air raids? "...the human face of these particular deaths, the deaths of women and children and the elderly, was hard to reconcile with the principles the Allies claimed to be fighting for." Cecil King, executive of the London Daily Mirror, commented saying that this gave legitimacy to everything Goebbels had ever said on the subject. Worse, even though it was true to some extent, Cowan had run with the story despite the fact that nobody had told him it was a terror-raid. He had just concluded that himself. But even more surprisingly, the censors had allowed him to publish the report. They tried to walk back the damage, quickly saying that the primary target was the communications network in Dresden, and that the refugees in the city were a coincidence. Even though they were not, that was precisely why it was targeted, because their presence proved it was a communications hub. On the 19th of February 1945, Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Walter Bedell-Smith, called the ideas expressed in the press misinformation, which is an interesting choice of words considering that the misinformation was actually truthful. Not the first time, nor the last. The Americans launched an investigation into the Dresden Raid, and a Labour Party member of Parliament fired off a string of complaints at the coalition government that his party had been a part of for the past five years, and was therefore equally guilty for. The debate in Parliament lasted five hours, until he was told by an under-secretary from the Air Ministry that his interpretation of the information was technically incorrect, and that nobody in the Air Force was eagerly wanting to kill German women and children. Meanwhile, Hitler heard the news of the destruction of Dresden's centre with a face of stone, his fists clenched with suppressed emotion. Goebbels, reportedly shaken with rage, suggested to the Führer that they order the execution of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war, one for each civilian killed in Dresden. Albert Speer later said that the Nazi leadership were on the verge of abandoning the Geneva Convention with the Western Allies so that they could fight as bitterly as they could in the East. Some of the German leaders, such as Reichsleiter Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, were of the opinion that the destruction was a good thing. Having wiped out the old and weak Christian humanist past, the city and others could be rebuilt without the historic buildings that reflected the Goebbels, however, announced on the 16th of February 1945 that Dresden, a city without war industries, a peaceful cultural centre with hospitals, was smashed by Allied bombs. The German press said that the centre was hit, and not the transport stations, which were on the periphery of the city, undermining the Ally claim that they had attacked Dresden for that reason. "...it was wholly possible for the residential areas of Dresden and its cultural-historical centre to have been spared. The use of incendiary bombs shows that the cultural and residential areas were deliberately attacked and destroyed. The explanation can only be that they desire to obliterate and annihilate the German people and all its remaining possessions." For years, Goebbels had described the Allied air raids as terror attacks. But this time, it really hit home, because people could see the devastation first-hand. In the weeks after the event, photographs were shown, even of burnt children, with descriptions like Dresden, massacre of refugees. One German newspaper said that tens of thousands were buried in mass graves, with no possible way of identifying them. And that's when the numbers started coming out. It wasn't 100,000 fatalities, but 200,000 one German source claimed. The German authorities were well aware of the 25,000 figure put forth by the SS, but that didn't matter. One German-operated newspaper in Sweden said that 2.5 million people were in Dresden at the time of the raids, which was four times the actual number. And no, there simply weren't two million refugees in the city. But that didn't stop them from claiming 400,000 deaths, since every cinema and church was supposedly overflowing with refugees, and all of these were destroyed. It was also said that those fleeing the city were strafed by aircraft, destroying vehicles and carts. These then blocked the streets, preventing aid from getting to Dresden. Except this didn't happen. This dramatic account, it turned out, was based on the testimony of one eyewitness who had reached Berlin some days after the raid. Similar stories would emerge from Britain. Children who distinctly remembered not just German planes swooping down, but even, and impossibly, the faces of the pilots. Then the figures started to fall as more accurate accounts were heard. But the 100,000 to 200,000 figure kept circulating. Before the SS's final report that estimated 25,000 fatalities in Dresden, there was an earlier report that had counted 20,204 dead so far. The Propaganda Ministry doctored the document, adding an extra zero, making the number 202,040. Even the number of corpses incinerated in the altmarked 6,856 was given an extra zero, taking it up to 68,650. Goebbels himself finally wrote to the German public on the 4th of March 1945 in the Das Reich newspaper. Failing to make mention of the armaments factories, or any other important targets in Dresden, he informed the public that the attack had been a radical annihilation of an urban area where thousands of inhabitants were now buried in mass graves. "...his aim is to force us by mass murder into surrender so that he can then carry out a death sentence on, as the other side expresses it, the surviving remnants." Meanwhile, V2 rockets continued to pour on London until the 27th of March 1945, when the last one hit a block of flats, killing 134 residents, most of them Jewish. Coincidentally. So it appears that the Germans also employed mass-murder tactics in order to compel the Allies to surrender, suggesting that Goebbels was projecting Nazi goals onto others. In his The Death of Dresden book, published in 1952, Rodenberger said that there were 350,000 to 400,000 dead in Dresden, as recorded by a local official of the Propaganda Ministry in a report to Berlin. But the record has never been found, so it's not clear how Rodenberger got access to such a document, or if it even existed. Plus, it was written by the Propaganda Ministry, and therefore wasn't likely to be truthful anyway. In 1955, the Communist politician Max Seidewitz wrote the Unconquerable City, where he said, with the full authority of the East German government, that there had been 35,000 deaths in Dresden, possibly a few thousand more. David Irving wrote his The Destruction of Dresden in 1963. On the one hand, Irving's book actually brought a lot of interest in the subject of Dresden, since he interviewed several surviving RAF officers, including Arthur Harris himself, and gained access to other documents. But he also claimed that 135,000 people were killed in the raid. This figure came from a man called Hans Voigt, who had been in charge of the Missing Persons Centre in Dresden in the weeks after the raid. Although the street books kept by the searchers only went up to between 30,000 and 40,000, Voigt insisted that this was a minimum figure. Irving accepted Voigt's higher personal estimate, an informed guess, that at least 135,000 must have died. The problem was that the documents needed in order to disprove this figure were in East Germany, and weren't available in 1963 when Irving published his book. And as a result, people were heavily influenced by this figure. Worse, Irving was then given a copy of the German document that said that the confirmed deaths were 202,400, and 250,000 were anticipated. These figures had been in circulation for many years. Irving had dubbed them fake in his book's first edition. But on seeing apparent authentication, he publicized the new, even more horrifying figure widely. He was actually told that it was a fake when he received the apparent authentication, but still went ahead and used it as evidence. Then, in 1965, Walter Weidauer, a communist but also historian, was approached by a woman after a lecture. She gave him a document that her father-in-law had had. He had been a colonel in the Order Police in Dresden, and this document was the SS's final report. In fact, it was her father who had signed it. The report was confirmed by the discovery of a situation report written by the Order Police in Berlin with similar numbers. The numbers were between 18,000 and 22,000 confirmed, and 25,000 estimated deaths. Plus, the document that Irving had received, with the anticipated 250,000 figure, also noted that this number was being issued as an exceptional measure in order to squash rumours that the casualty rates were much higher. So what were the rumours saying? That millions had died? That would clearly be far too high. So it was then realized that an extra zero had been added to the numbers. The real numbers were 20,400 confirmed and 25,000 anticipated. Irving therefore wrote a letter to the Times of London, explaining that the estimates in the document were probably faked. And this would be great, except Irving then proceeded to continuously claim, without concrete evidence, that over 100,000 people were killed at Dresden, even going as high as 250,000. At the launch of the Leuchte Report in 1989, Irving stated that there were one million refugees in Dresden, and that hundreds of thousands were killed. Apparently, he still thinks the death rate was in the hundreds of thousands, even if there's no concrete evidence of that right now. And there's actually a nice list provided online as a result of the trial where he sued Penguin Books for libel and lost, which lists all the times he publicly said that deaths exceeded many more times the numbers that the evidence showed. His figures are all over the place, and this is what the judge concluded. "...in my judgment of the estimates of 100,000 and more deaths which Irving continued to put about in the 1990s lacked any evidential basis and were such as no responsible historian would have made." His motivation for increasing the numbers is obvious. In a television documentary screened on 28th of November 1991, Irving said that 25,000 people may have been executed in Auschwitz, but five times that number were killed in Dresden in one night. Irving later referred to the bombing as a Holocaust, and said that the Allies, not the Germans, had killed many of the Jews that were missing in their bombing campaigns. Of course, the idea being presented by Irving, and others, was that the Western Allies were the ones who committed crimes against humanity, and that they blamed it on the innocent Germans. Thus, the British and Americans were the real criminals. Alexander McKee, writing almost twenty years after Irving's book was first published, at one point cites, without comment, a diary entry claiming that the authorities had counted 256,000 dead. He ends up taking the 35,000 figure, and then remarking that, given the poor air-raid provision and the numbers of anonymous refugees in the city, which, like most writers of the time, he vastly overestimates, it might easily be doubled to 70,000 without much fear of exaggeration, but no one will ever know for certain. In other words, McKee simply decided to double the number because he didn't think it sounded like enough. A lower figure, it must be said, would not have enabled his book to be published under the impressive title, The German Hiroshima, Das Deutsche Hiroshima, in Germany. McKee was also pushing the view that Dresden was a massacre that had no military or strategic justification. Franz Kurowski, someone I've referred to in previous videos, especially my series on the North African Campaign, went back to the old statistics that had since been proven to be false, and concluded that between 100,000 and 300,000 people were killed. "...he blamed the game-playing with figures on a general tendency to play down the total dead at Dresden in order to reduce any prospect that the victorious Allies might have been held to account before an international court, as German leaders had been, but also as a reflection of a German tendency to take the blame as an act of atonement for manifest German crimes." Both sides, concluded Kurowski, were equally guilty of hideous atrocities. But German historians felt compelled to remain silent and to write of the ever-enduring German guilt towards Gott's Burgunder in the Air War in Dresden, published in 1977, came to the conclusion that it was possible for between 35,000 and 40,000 to have died. More estimates claimed similar numbers, based on someone who said that they counted the bodies that they buried. It turned out that he had over-counted by many thousands when records were found stating the actual number. McKay, not McKee but McKay, says that 25,000 people were killed, while Taylor says that a fair estimate places the deaths between 25,000 and 40,000. But Addison and Krang state that this was a compromise figure, and that it's highly unlikely that the death toll was higher than 35,000 to 40,000. I also agree that going up to 40,000 is a little excessive. It's more likely that up to 25,000 people were killed, as the SS themselves estimated. That said, Dresden was a war crime. And I'm not the only one to come to that conclusion. Real historians are saying that too. It wasn't a crime against humanity, because a crime against humanity doesn't necessarily have to take place in wartime, and is defined as a state targeting a population. A war crime, obviously, has to take place during war, and is usually viewed as crimes taking place through the conduct of war. So for example, an army is fighting a battle, but then its soldiers kill some civilians or prisoners of war. That would be a war crime, whereas the Holocaust was a crime against humanity because a war wasn't necessary for the persecution of those civilians. Therefore, Auschwitz was a crime against humanity. Dresden was a war crime. And those are two separate and distinct categories. So while some have labelled Dresden a genocide, this isn't true. It was a war crime, not a genocide, nor a crime against humanity. "...killing civilians was still a means to an end, not an end in itself. This was not genocide. It was about winning the war, not about racial cleansing." While he had no intention of wiping the German people off the face of the planet, Harris himself pointed out that the Germans could have their factories repaired in a matter of weeks, but it would take them 21 years to raise a new worker. So he deliberately targeted civilians under the guise of knocking out Dresden as a communications hub and industrial base. Now, I don't have time to cover all the discussion of this here, so I encourage you guys to read the books if you want to know more. While Taylor's and McKay's books are both great narratives of the actual bombing, I would say that Taylor's book is the best book on Dresden because he goes into more detail, he has a larger word count, and talks more about the numbers debate, including in one of the appendixes, which I recommend that you read. McKay's is a great book in its own right though. And finally, on the discussion of whether Dresden is a war crime or not, I would encourage you to check out Chapter 8 in the book Firestorm! The Bombing of Dresden by Addison and Crang. The Germans bombed Allied cities earlier in the war, including Rotterdam, which I've covered here, and I'll be covering similar bombing raids in the future, so be sure to subscribe if you haven't done so already. Thanks for watching, bye for now.