The Bombing of Dresden

As the Second World War neared its bloody climax, Allied bombers unleashed a devastating firestorm on Dresden. In just two days the historic city was reduced to rubble, and tens of thousands were killed. The question remains - was this a legitimate military operation, or an unjustifiable act of destruction? For the latest episode in our 'D-Day to Berlin' series, we're joined by Sinclair McKay, author of 'Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness'. Aided by the words of Victor Gregg, a British POW who was in the city that fateful night, Sinclair unpacks one of the most controversial events of the Second World War. Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of events that some listeners may find upsetting. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:24Dan Snow?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. A few years ago, I had one of the most memorable experiences of my career. I accompanied a survivor of the Dresden firebombing of the Second World War back to that German city decades after the bombing. I was enormously privileged to watch as he met with other survivors. He showed me around the centre of that city. Some of the buildings there have been reconstructed, others communist era replacements. It was a moving and important trip. That survivor was a man called Victor Gregg. He'd been a British prisoner of war, captured at Arnhem, and he was just unlucky enough to be in Dresden in February 1945, when those sirens went off and the Allies began their

• 2:08Dan Snow?

  assault on the city. It's really special for me to be able to bring back Victor's voice in this episode. That remarkable man died in 2021, a day or two short of his 102nd birthday. And in this episode, you'll hear parts of a conversation that I had with him to mark his 100th birthday. I'll never forget that one either because my kids came along and they, we all sat in this house. I talked to him and they drew some birthday cards that he then placed on his mantelpiece after we chatted. And the reason we're going to be hearing from Victor Greg in this episode is because we're talking about Dresden. This is the latest of our D-Day to Berlin series. We're following in the footsteps of Allied forces as they liberated Europe 80 years ago. From last summer, we've been marking

• 2:52Dan Snow?

  the major milestones from the D-Day landings, all the way through to the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of Auschwitz. And although it's not technically part of the D-Day Berlin story, but they are big Second World War anniversaries. So I've also released a podcast about events in the Pacific and the terrible fighting for the island of Iwo Jima, which was going on 80 years ago now. In fact, you can hear our episode on Iwo Jima from earlier on this week to check out the feed. But this episode is all about Dresden.

• 3:26Dan Snow?

  The sirens sounded in that eastern German city around 10pm local time on the 13th of February 1945.

• 3:35Dan Snow?

  Minutes later, Pathfinder aircraft dropped flares and very, very shortly after the Pathfinder had lit up the target, well, the might of Bomber Command's heavy bomber force arrived to smash the city, to pulverize it. A city that had been known as the jewel box or the Florence on the Elbe.

• 4:00Dan Snow?

  The next hours saw that city annihilated. Thousands were killed, asphyxiated, even boiled.

• 4:13Dan Snow?

  It's become a symbol of the bombing campaign against Germany in the Second World. Was this and were other raids necessary? Or were they misguided? Were they important or were they a cruel and inefficient use of Allied military might? To tell us all about the raid, what happened, then perhaps get into some of these questions as well, I'm very happy to be joined by Sinclair McKay, a bestselling author who's written books on lots of subjects, from Bletchley Park and Churchill to the histories of places like Berlin and St Petersburg. But he's on today because he's the author of Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness. And he has interviewed many of the survivors of the bombing of Dresden.

• 4:57Dan Snow?

  He has spent weeks in the archives, looking at primary accounts. He's covered the subject in extraordinary detail. And you're also going to hear from Victor Gregg, a bit more about Victor, he was a Second World War veteran. He served through North Africa and the Middle East and Italy. He parachuted into Arnhem during Operation Market Garden, the assault on Arnhem in late 1944. He was captured and he was sent to a prison of war camp near Dresden. So these two excellent gentlemen will be our guides for this anniversary episode on the bombing of Dresden. Sinclair, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Well, thank you very much for asking me. Very nice to meet you.

• 5:45Dan Snow?

  Well, take me back to February 1945. Take me back to those weeks in the winter, the last winter of the war in Europe. Who was where? What was the strategic situation in Europe at the time?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  You've got to envisage a city like Dresden, deep in the east of Germany, and you've got to envisage the approach of the Red Army from the east, rushing headlong, smashing through as if through a rotten door, through the crumbling German defences. At this point, February 1945, with hindsight, we can say that this is, you know, three months before victory in Europe, this is three months before the end of the war, but no one knew that at the time. The Wehrmacht, the Nazis, were fighting back still with real venom and real firepower. And in terms of the bombing of cities, there was... A kind of frenzy was taking over.

• 6:38Dan Snow?

  So you've got the Red Army grinding its way through what is now Poland, but now on German soil, approaching the city of Dresden. In the West, you've got the Allies that have liberated much of France, the Low Countries, they're about to push onto German soil. What's going on in the air? Are the Allies determined to keep pounding these German civilian centres, even though the jaws are now tightening on the Third Reich?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yes, they are absolutely determined to keep pounding these, as you say, civilian centres, but also centres which still had military significance. The Allies weren't actually just bombing civilians, despite what Lord Charles Portal had said and Lord Frederick Lindemann had said about dehousing populations, raising firestorms from 1942 onwards, the bombing of Hamburg, et cetera. There was method in this ghastly madness. A city like Dresden, for instance, deep in the east of Germany, just 100 miles away from Prague, nestling in this valley, which almost had a kind of fairy tale quality, it seemed so far away from the stream of the 20th century, let alone anything else.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  But Dresden, despite its Baroque beauty, the fantastic beauty of its 18th century architecture, the immense civilisation of its art and culture and music, it was still ringed with military installation, but military industry, basically, all of its factories had been turned to military purpose. There was a lot of optics work going on in Dresden actually, for the Luftwaffe, technical factories that were producing all sorts of material, not just for the Luftwaffe, but the Wehrmacht as well. And on top of this, it stood on quite a crucial railway junction, railway lines leading into the east but also into the south. There was a vast marshalling yard, which is of military significance. So the Allies...

• 8:25Speaker 02

  And the Royal Air Force had drawn up lists of cities that were to be targeted. Sir Arthur Harris had this list that Bomber Command were to target. Interestingly, when you look at them now, you see them in the archives, Dresden was actually fourth down on a list of cities, as I think included Chemnitz and Magdeburg, of targets to be bombed. So when you think about the context of February 1945, you think about the gravity and the momentum of the Allied push, plus the momentum of the Red Army coming from the other side. It's more like chaos theory than anything particularly calculated or planned. It's like a desperate sort of swinging of sledgehammers, rather than anything finely calculated.

• 9:11Dan Snow?

  So that's interesting. So you mentioned that there were important marshalling yards there, there are factories there, there is a military argument for destroying that production and interfering with German transport infrastructure. But are you arguing that there's also just something else going on? Is there a sense of blind rage striking out at German targets? Is there a sense you've got this mighty air armad, you've gone to enormous trouble to build it, you better do something with it? Is there a sense that still maybe if you hit these German big cities hard enough, somehow the Nazi regime will just sort of fall?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  There might have been the thought that, yes, I'm going to just hit one sensitive target or several sensitive targets hard enough. Remember, they were bombarding Berlin as well, absolutely consistently. And Berlin, just every single night, was being shattered with incendiary bombs. Again, all in the desperate hope that this would make the Nazi regime just crumple and fold into itself. We know it didn't, but Dresden as a target had a particular... The previous year, the Germans had launched bombing raids against the more beautiful British cities as opposed to serious industrial targets. They had targeted Bath, Canterbury, Oxford, Exeter, the Bidecker raids, as it were. This was aimed at a kind of spiritual blow at England, as well as the bombing raids

• 10:32Speaker 02

  that would hurt the military effort. This was intended as a means of hurting the population directly, destroying beauty, destroying history. And there's an element in the targeting of Dresden where you think, no matter how many military targets the city had ringed around it... Dresden itself was so often described as it was extraordinary architectural jewel. It was very well known to a number of British people because before the ascension of the Nazis, it had been a terrific Thomas Cook tour destination. It has come to Dresden. Huge numbers of British and American people, not only traveled to Dresden, but a number of British and American people have lived there in the earlier parts of the century. So it was kind of familiar city from that point of view.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  The Dresden Opera had come to London and had received all sorts of rave reviews in columns in the 1930s. There was a very strong sense that Dresden had this culture and beauty. And there was a sense in targeting it that you were targeting the heart of German culture itself. Now, we know that Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Harris, the head of Bomber Command, was very xenophobic when it came to Germany itself, just the very idea of Germany. And he was very happy with the idea of what he regarded as the darkest strains of German civilization just being pulverized. He would have been very happy with the Morgenthau Plan to remove all urban development from Germany after the war and return it to kind of farmland.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Arthur Harris's view was that German culture itself was the problem. But that was not shared by a number of people. And Sir Arthur Harris was not in sole charge of deciding these targets. The efforts of Bomber Command going deeper and deeper into Germany is of hitting city after city after city all over the country, from Frankfurt to Hamburg to Cologne, Magdeburg, Mannheim. No city was spared. And yes, by February 1945, you just have the the gravity of war in the sense that they just simply have to now. They have to pound with all their strength, all the weak points that they can find,

• 12:42Speaker 02

  even if that means for Bomber Command and the pilots and the crews flying deeper into Germany than they'd ever flown before. But it was already hazardous enough to be in Bomber Command. The chances of being blown out of the sky were already so macabre high. And the crews who flew to Dresden must have known that the chances of that happening increased enormously.

• 13:03Dan Snow?

  So Dresden's been identified as a target for February 1945. Tell me what happened that night. First of all, how many aircraft are involved and take off from... Are they flying from bases in the UK or are they flying from bases in recently liberated Western Europe at this point?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  These planes are assembling in airfields in England. The target has been revealed. The way that the targets were revealed, the crews would go into these special meeting rooms for reasons of secrecy. The targets were written on some blackboards, but the blackboards were hidden behind curtains. And it was only when everyone was assembled that the curtain would be drawn back and the crews would see their target written down for that night. And on the night of February 13th, they saw that the target was Dresden. And there were approximately, well, I think it was 796 planes in total. But you can imagine in airfields all across the east of England preparing as the sun went down. And then switch over to the people of Dresden who have had some bombing raids, so they are used to the idea of...

• 14:05Speaker 02

  And Dresden itself, the old city, is honeycombed with these brick cellars, these brick basements. There weren't specially built bomb shelters, they were just part of the 18th and 19th century architecture. There were no specially built bomb shelters in Dresden, apart from that that was built for the Gauliter of Dresden, Martin Wuchmann. The civilians just had to make do with these musty brick cellars that were not protected in any way and which were all interconnected as kind of subterranean maze through the city. I mention all this because it's vital for what the effect of the bombing as it starts. So going back to England, you have these bomber crews, these extraordinary young men who themselves have already seen so much death and so much horror and had seen those

• 14:49Speaker 02

  who survived, those who came back, had seen the effect of their bombs from many thousands of feet in the air, had seen cities blossoming and exploding into flame, the flames conjoining street by street, almost like a golden latticework, as one said. They could see the destruction that they were bringing, but at that kind of height, it gave it, I suppose, a level of abstraction which made it possible for them to continue what they were doing. But to be presented with this target, the furthest many of them had ever flown before into enemy territory. Enemy territory which is still absolutely alive with anti-aircraft fire and anti-aircraft offences. And that was the prospect. It's a four and a half hour flight, I think it was, taking off from the east of England in the early evening.

• 15:33Dan Snow?

  And we should say here that by this stage, bomber command are really, really, really good at this, aren't they? I mean, I was lucky enough a few years ago to meet Ken Oatley, who was a Pathfinder. So he flew a smaller aircraft than the big Lancaster bombers, a smaller mosquito. And he, his job was to drop flares so that the rest of the bomber force could hit the target more accurately. And he remembers, he remembers the steeples, the church spires of Dresden. He was, he was one of the first allied aircraft in that night. So by this stage of the war, a lot more of those bombs are landing where they're intended to.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. And in a sense, I mean, looking at it just from a technical point of view, there was an element of wonder as well as horror in what they achieved, you know, in a pre-computer age. As I say, the Pathfinders, there's navigating through hundreds and hundreds of miles of enemy territory towards blacked out cities, which were showing no light. Just an extraordinary feeling. And then, as you say, the first of the craft flying over the city, dropping these, these incendiary flares as so they'd be markers for the other bombers to follow. But then look at it from the point of view of the people of Dresden. The first of these marker flares start coming down at arounds of nine thirty at night. They've heard the distant base hum of the approaching bombers.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  The alerts have gone off in the city, much like our own bomb alerts here. And people have been taken to their shelters. But there was also just an, an element of wonder for those on the edge of the city, because the city is based arounds of hills, and there were those living in the hills around, who watched as this kind of first wave of bombers filled the sky. And then the incendiary started falling and they were referred to as Christmas trees. There were children who were looking up at the sky that night and looked in wonder at these flares, which were bright, not as white, but red and green and blue, the different colours, incidentally, denoting different kinds of targets. The red being the more military target. So from the point of view of the first wave of bombers, there they

• 17:30Speaker 02

  are throwing these marker flares down. But then there were the people in the city looking at, knowing that something absolutely terrible is coming, but nonetheless, seeing this incandescence of the old city being lit up in this extraordinary way before they do And then a matter of minutes after that, the horror begins.

• 17:49Dan Snow?

  Tell me about that horror. What happens? What does a Lancaster bomber, what kind of bombs was it carrying? And how do they decide where and when to drop them?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  The Lancaster bombers that were carrying, some of the bombs were called cookie cutters. Basically, there was a thousand pound bombs calculated that when they would hit a roof, they could dissect kind of houses. But there were a huge number of incendiaries too, because the aim really was not just to pulverize stone and drive the city into dust, but also to raise fire. This was the great experiment of firestorms that Sir Arthur Harris had been fascinated by earlier on. The bombing of Hamburg in nineteen forty two onwards. The idea of raising a firestorm, you have so many fires going at the same time in a city that the flames can join, but then suck all the oxygen out of the surrounding atmosphere, basically turn the air inside out.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  So much so that the flames then rise higher and higher and higher. That was the aim. Now, that night of February the thirteenth, nineteen forty five, as the people of Dresden have taken to those musty brick cellars and to the crypt of the Frownkirk, the city's amazing eighteenth century Baroque cathedral. The first of the bombs started falling and they were felt as many of them called that as the footsteps of a giant. But then, almost instantly, the fires started too.

• 19:12Dan Snow?

  And so we're just saying, so incendiaries are smaller, almost bomblets, but which just burn very, very brightly. And they get lodged in the eaves, the wooden gables of a roof beneath the tiles or in cathedral roofs or factories, domestic houses, and just immediately start fires. So you've got pinpricks of fire all over the city. You've also got these giant thousand pound bombs just causing earthquakes, blasting buildings to pieces in the split second.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. You have this combination, but for those in the city, looking at those civilians in the city, either in the shelters who are just looking up with each kind of terrible boom. But there are those more on the kind of edges of the city who are watching this starting to unfold, watching these terrible explosions reach into the sky. But then there are those closer in too, who haven't taken to the shelters and who are trying to save their own homes, who are trying to extinguish the incendiaries, which already have started to catch fire in those very attics and eaves. There are already some scenes of desperation, panic and some disbelief breaking out. People under that kind of bombardment is astonishing that anyone can do anything remotely rational.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  You would think that the overwhelming human instinct would just be to run, to absolute panic. But there are people who take some remarkably rational decisions. There are numbers of people who head straight for the river, for instance, as the as the fire starts to take hold in that first wave from nine forty five P M onwards. The town has very wide embankments, quite a wide river. Numbers of people make their way to the river basically to escape this fast developing furnace heat in the old city and in patches of the new city across the river too. But on top of that, from Sir Arthur Harris's point of view, to create a successful firestorm, you need the perfect climactic conditions. And that's what they have that night on February thirteenth.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  It's cold, it's chilly, there's no clouds, there's no wind, there's no rain. So all the conditions for all these fires in the old city, which have started to join together, are absolutely perfect. In the first wave of bombing, in the time that it takes for the bombers to go over to unleash these deadly loads going for the railway marshalling yards and the factories. But they also, obviously, they hit hospitals, they hit churches, they hit some private houses. It's, you cannot have precision bombing at all in those circumstances.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  But after that first wave, then there's the shocked silence as the citizens who are underground now start to wonder, is it safe to come out?

• 21:46Dan Snow?

  How long would that first wave have gone on for? We've got something approaching 800 heavy bombers.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Well, I think in the first wave, it would have been about, I think, 250 in the first wave. And it would only be a matter of minutes, possibly not that much more than half an hour, 9:45 to, I think, 10:15 PM. And then after that, if you can imagine, just those who are sitting in these extraordinarily claustrophobic cellars and crypts, aware that the bombers have gone, that there's a silence, and the all clear in some of the districts in the city has started to sound. There are people packed, I think there was one particular basement to the south of the city where just huge numbers of people were packed into a basement where suddenly the lights went off. And there's absolute horror and panic. But then the all clear sounded, they were able to get out, again, with a semblance

• 22:36Speaker 02

  of calm and rationality, which would have been completely beyond me had I been in those circumstances. So imagine it, you're emerging from the darkness into this nightmarish glowing city that no longer looks like the city you once knew, because so much of it has already been pulverized, the Kreuzkircher roof absolutely smashed in, the old market, there's so many landmarks around that, just leaping, vaulting flame, a huge orange furnace of flame and heat, the air filled with these lethal orange embers, sticking to skin, burning skin, the tarmac on the roads already starting to melt, feet becoming sticky as people trying to

• 23:19Speaker 02

  walk. It is genuinely, it is the circumstance of a nightmare. And this is just before, the firestorm is just really starting to build its strength. The people of Dresden cannot imagine the inferno that's coming, but they have to get away from that heat, and they have to get away from the flames. But there are some who, because they're elderly, because they're infirm, at the same time, haven't left those cellars. There are numbers of people who haven't left those subterranean cellars because they're not convinced that it's over. And they think that that's the place of greatest safety. It really isn't.

• 23:51Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the bombing of Dresden, all coming up.

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• 26:28Dan Snow?

  We're going to briefly interrupt Sinclair here to bring you the words of Victor Gregg from the History Hit Archive. In February 1945, so just before the bombing of Dresden, Victor had been in a prisoner of war camp just outside the city. Now, true to his character, he had caused trouble. He refused to abide by the rules, he'd attempt to escape, and he burned down a factory. And by this stage of the war, things got so bitter and terrible that Hitler had ordered that any prisoners of war who were acting in this way, out of line, were to be shot. So by mid-February, Victor and a comrade were actually inside the city of Dresden itself, they were actually waiting to be sentenced and shot. He remembers hearing the sirens, and it was actually the dropping of the bombs that saved

• 27:12Dan Snow?

  him, they allowed him to escape. And it was that stroke of luck, I suppose you could say, although Victor was always very uncertain about that turning point in his life because of the horror that he was about to endure. It was that turning point that meant that he witnessed Dresden on the ground. As I said at the start, I went back to Dresden with Victor. Actually, I took my kids on that trip too, they got a lot of World War II history. I'll never forget walking around, Victor holding my son's hand, about three years old, and my son had a teddy, so he was holding a teddy and he was holding Victor Gregg's hand. And while we're in Dresden, he met fellow survivors, particularly a German lady who'd been a child at the time and who'd suffered terrible burns during the bombing, the scars

• 27:54Dan Snow?

  of which we could still see on her skin all of those years later. I think the bombing of Dresden profoundly changed Victor Gregg. And as you're about to hear, he told me in very direct and honest terms about the trauma that he's lived with for the rest of his life as a result of, well, the war, but I think particularly what happened those terrible days in February 1945, and the effect they continue to have on him all of these years later.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  Dresden made me completely, turned me completely bizarre. I used to hear the screams, you can't tell to people about it. You had these people who was jumping in these water. They had these, they had about three of these big water things made of cement. What they, they built in the middle of Dresden. And they were supposed, they were filled up with water. That was in case you got bombed. So when, when it was getting hot, people were jumping in the water to get away from the heat. And then what, eventually the water boiled because of the heat. And they couldn't get out and they couldn't climb up the sides of these things. And they, they were being boiled alive.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, when you hear people screaming and you can't get anywhere near there because it's too hot.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  That's when it turned you into a psychopath. And there's no way out of it. I could go for weeks as a normal person, then somebody would say something. And I met a few blokes who were like that. I met a chap who was in the barroom when it got sun. And he said he used to wake up at night and he could hear the blokes banging on the waterproof doors. They couldn't get out as the boat was sinking. No, no, no, it turned me, it was completely, completely, completely antisocial. Completely. You've got the good side of you who wants to, who wants to live a life of peace.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  And wants all your kids around you and everything like that. And then the other half, which wants to go around leaving evidence of vengeance and stuff like that, I'm gonna make somebody pay for it. And one side doesn't recognise the other. And that's what, that's what my life's been like. I think that this trauma which they discovered later,

• 30:22Speaker 04

  I think what I've suffered from, I think it was caused through a guilt by association. I felt that I was guilty for it because I was British. It was, the British had done this and it was terrible, it was terrible.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  It's the two women, the two German women really, the one at Coventry Cathedral and the one that you introduced me to. Well, she, she was holding my hand all the way through that interview and she was holding it like that. And then she was, she was crying at the end, as you know, and she wouldn't let me go.

• 31:00Dan Snow?

  And that was in Dresden when we went back?

• 31:01Speaker 04

  Dresden, and that's when I felt that I, that's when I felt that I was forgiven. Because she really made me feel that, she really made me feel that I, I, it wasn't my fault. That she was forgiving. Well, I can say she was forgiving me or not, I don't know. But I thought it's hardly different after that Dresden visit.

• 31:28Dan Snow?

  Well, those are the words of Victor Gregg, and I will certainly never forget him. I'm so excited that in a very small way, we're able to on this platform to keep Victor and his recollections and his words alive. Now, let's get back to Sinclair. You've spent a lot of time in Dresden, you've been through the vast amounts of oral testimony in the archives. I mean, it must have, there must have been so many stories that have stuck with you. But at this phase, you've got people staying in the basements for safety, other people trying to escape, even though the roads are melting. And I've heard accounts of where there were little reservoirs, for example, or water tanks, that the water was almost boiling, it was almost, it was too dangerous to get in them and try and cool down.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Yes, the water bubbling and hissing and boiling and...

• 32:08Dan Snow?

  What are some of the stories that you can share with us that have stuck with you?

• 32:11Speaker 02

  There are a number of stories in the Dresden city archives now from people who were children at the time, who were writing about it much later, but who kept diaries. And those are kind of, I think, I mean, obviously the most affecting, because they were children looking at this extraordinary nightmare of destruction, and also the contrast with the day they'd just had. It had been a day of carnival for the children, February 30th, 1945. There's a special Lent thing called fashing, where all the little children dress up in sort of colourful costumes, and there comes pirates and cowboys. Interesting, actually, there's even in Nazi Germany, the icon of the cowboy was still universal among children. And numbers of these children in these shelters were still in these colourful costumes.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  This had been a jolly day for them. And now, they were looking at the grown-ups around them, looking at the city beings of dismantled piece by piece. Those are the good cities. But also, the other thing that struck me particularly, the number of the accounts, was the way that the civic realm could have held together. No thanks, obviously, to the Nazi gallant and Martin Mutschmann, and any members of the Nazi Party, nothing to do with them. This was just the Dresden civic realm, the firefighters, the doctors, the hospitals, the emergency services kept themselves going under this extraordinary onslaught. I mean, there are stories from the hospitals now. Dr Albert Frum was one of the chief surgeons there. And there was extraordinary account from him, where in the wake of the first bombing, he knew he had to make his way to the hospital. That was his first instinct,

• 33:36Speaker 02

  to leave a party that he'd been having at his flat. But in order to get to the hospital, to walk across that part of the city, he had to put on special skiings of sleds, almost, because the road underneath him was melting, and his shoes wouldn't hold. He battled through the heat and through the embers to get to a hospital where extraordinarily, they still tried to keep it functioning. Then, there's the story of Viktor Klempner, whose diaries are now very famous, his eyewitness account of Dresden. He was one of the very last Jews in Dresden. Most of the Jewish population of Dresden had by that stage already been deported by the Nazis and sent to the death camps. That day, February 13th, Viktor Klempner and his wife had received their own notice that they too were going to be deported. That night...

• 34:22Speaker 02

  They didn't take to their shelter. They were in an old house in the old town, which had been allocated to the city's last remaining Jews. And part of them was a despair, but part of them then knew, it was by instinct, again, making for the river. And they made for the river and witnessed the firestorm start to take hold. Bear in mind, this is just after the first wave of bombing. This is before the second wave of bombing, where people have imagined that it's over and it's not.

• 34:46Dan Snow?

  You've got people trying to go to hospital, society trying to, trying to meet this appalling challenge. What happens next, though?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  The next. Among some of the, among some of the accounts you read now in the city archives, again, sort of hauntingly, there is a sense by about 11:11.30 that perhaps a false sense of security, I mean, there can be no security, because already the city has been pulverized to such an extent, as the firefighters can't get through, water is boiling, hissing, there's electricity, those parts of the city that still have electricity is beginning to falter. It's apocalyptic, but there is a sense that it might still be possible to get to a place of greater safety. And as you can imagine, sleep obviously is impossible for all the citizens. We're talking about some, Dresden has a population of about 600,000 people. It's quite large in terms of

• 35:38Speaker 02

  population. And as I say, a number of people live in the hills around the old city. And there are a lot of eyewitness accounts from people looking at the city, down at the city, from these houses. There's one young physicist who himself was from Latvia. And he said that as he was watching the city burn beneath him, he suddenly felt weirdly like the Emperor Nero. That's a terrible reflexive moment that he couldn't help. But obviously, sleep is impossible. People are trying to, to deal with the wounded, trying to deal with the dead. But then the second wave of bombers comes in. Some three hours later, after midnight, a further wave of some 250 bombers swoop in

• 36:17Speaker 02

  over the city and drop yet more enormous cricket, about 1,000 pound bombs, intended once again just to pulverise really as much as they can. There are factories quite close to the historic old centre of the city, which they are aiming for. But these are bombs which hit the 18th century Fronker, this beautiful structure at the centre of the old city. They hit all the buildings around it. And so, from the point of view of the bombers above, I mentioned earlier, there was one man who said that the streets were like a latticework of molten gold, this extraordinary grid pattern of flame and fire.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  When seen from that height, I mean, obviously you can't see any individual people or bodies. The Airman Miles Tripp described the peculiar kind of aesthetics of it. I mean, you knew that it denoted absolute horror and apocalypse, but at the same time it was just impossible to tear the eyes away from. From the point of view of those on the ground, however, who had to return to those shelters, a new air raid warning, a new air raid siren, it was starting all over again. They had to go back to those musty cellars, they had to go back to those ill-fitted basements, which were just constructions of brick, which were even under the wave of the first bombardment started to fall apart. There are people describing how in houses, the shockwaves of the blasts made doors open

• 37:40Speaker 02

  and shut of their own volition, like poltergeist activity, it was like having demons in the house, terrifying for the adults, doubly terrifying for the children, as you can imagine. With the second wave of bombing, the intensification of the fire, the city now just becoming this absolute bowl of molten kind of heat. Those subterranean cellars that I mentioned earlier, that maze of cellars honeycombing the old city, all those people sitting on wooden benches in these tiny claustrophobic tunnels. They couldn't see what was happening. The aim of Firestorm is basically to turn the air inside out, to take the oxygen away from the air. And what happened was the people in the cellars couldn't even know what was happening to them. The oxygen was being drawn away and

• 38:25Speaker 02

  being replaced with carbon monoxide. They were getting sleepier and sleepier. Some were getting chest pains, but they'd put it down to heart trouble or anxiety. But basically, they were being suffocated to death, as well as being slowly baked to death as well. These subterranean cellars, they had no blast doors, no bomb proof doors. The city had not provided any proper bomb shelters at all. And so what had happened was that the entrances to these cellars were not secure in any kind of way. The flames above, they couldn't be protected from them because they're drawing all the air out of this maze. There were some people in those cellars who did start to realise and then started to panic. It's impossible to envisage the horror of being one of those sort of sellers trying to get out, the push of people trying to get out when they

• 39:08Speaker 02

  realised what was going on but couldn't. And realising that they were being slowly baked and suffocated to death. This is a nightmarish proposition, but it was being repeated right the way across the old town. And also right the way across the city where people were just sitting in the basements of residential apartment blocks. They were just simple basements where bricks were being knocked out, where entrances were being destroyed by bombs, which meant that there was no way out at all. These shelters basically became tombs.

• 39:38Dan Snow?

  And survivors that I've met have told me about the extraordinary wind as that heat is sucking in cold air from the surroundings. People trying to escape almost being blown off their feet.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  And not just blown off their feet. I mean, one of the effects of the Firestorm is to create a fire tornado. Such things have been witnessed before in the bombing of Japan. And it happened in Dresden. What starts the strong wind becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. There were people who were outside who found themselves being lifted. Off, there was one man who was literally lifted off his feet and sucked up into the air and is not just being sucked up into tornado, it's been sucked up into a tornado of fire. You're basically being burnt alive as you're drawn into the air. Again, it is the absolute stuff nightmares. And there are others out on the streets who are trying to make for the river, trying to make for shelter, who are walking along these streets

• 40:29Speaker 02

  where the tarmac now has melted and where the tarmac is now bubbling. People who've fallen to their hands, their hands getting burnt, trying to move. It is incomprehensibly horrible, actually. On top of that, you have the air filled with these lethal orange embers on top of that, being sucked by this terrible, terrible tornado. So that people are being burnt left, right and center, their clothes catching fire because of these embers, which are then being drawn into the greater firestorm. As a physical phenomenon, it really is just an emblem of pure terror, really, and hell.

• 41:04Dan Snow?

  Listen to Dan Snow's History. More bombing of Dresden after this.

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• 42:40Dan Snow?

  And yet their torment obviously wasn't over and it was not over either from the hands of the Allies. The Americans arrived the next day.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  The Americans arrived the next morning. And this is that when you read the accounts now, so many accounts in those Dresden city archives. There was one teenager who had been doing his best in civic defence terms. This young chap, 15 years old, was basically a stamp collector. That was all he ever wanted to do. He was a proper good nerd. He was fascinated by stamps. So he was caught in this night of horror and he thought it's his civic duty in the new city away from the main area of carnage. He could see people stumbling over the city's bridges to the sanctuary of the Neustadt across the water. And these people who'd been blinded by the embers, who were holding on to each other's shoulders and they were walking out of this orange mist like zombies, like the living dead.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  How do you even begin to coordinate the civic realm? Everyone did as much as they could. Firefighters going to the river, not just to put out the flames but also to find wet cloths to treat people's eyes. There were so many people with eye problems. Again, in these accounts, we then have people who obviously have not slept. How could anyone possibly remotely sleep on that night? Who then trying to navigate the city as the dawn came, but the dawn didn't come up in Dresden the next morning because the sky was still filled with basically the embers of the dead city and all the embers of the victims. So the sky was black and livid and bruised in a sense. There was no sun to be seen.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  But the next day came up and people were moving around the streets and moving around this gutted city, moving around again, just pulsing with heat and with flame. People who had taken shelter in the Neustadt, trying to make their way back across bridges in the hope of finding loved ones who had been left behind, in the hope of finding friends, family, in the hope of finding remnants of homes. And they were stumbling through streets which were still hot and now just filled with ash and the air itself was raining ash. It was just descending from this black sky. And then...

• 44:48Speaker 02

  To the absolute disbelief of so many of the eyewitnesses, the base hum of approaching bombers could be heard again in the morning. This was the American wave of bombing, the third wave, the third wave that again was supposed to be targeting the marshalling yards, the larger factories. But the Americans, whereas the British bombed at night, the Americans generally bombed by day. And the idea was that it was partly, they said, it slightly had a moral aspect. By bombing in the day, they could see targets more clearly. When you're bombing a city that's already destroyed, what targets could there conceivably be left? But the Americans thought there were targets that were left. And so this would then reverberate actually through the city's understanding of its own history through

• 45:31Speaker 02

  the decades afterwards. That final American bombing, as well as the brutality of British bombing.

• 45:37Dan Snow?

  What was the military effect of this bombing?

• 45:39Speaker 02

  That is very difficult to quantify. It has been said that by going for the main railway junction, the bombers did hit the Dresden railway junction, which, as mentioned earlier, was quite central. There were lines snaking throughout Europe from Dresden. And there is the suggestion that it helped to hinder troop movements. But troop movements in that sense, heading east, but heading east towards the Red Army who were rushing in at a rate of knots. It is February 13th by that stage. As I say, they were cleaving through so many rotten German defences by that stage. In terms of westwards, again, it's just impossible to really to quantify what kind of military effect the bombing would have had. All we can really say with any certainty is that 25,000 civilians, or

• 46:24Speaker 02

  roughly that number, because we can never know the exact number now, but roughly 25,000 civilians were killed in the space of one night. Was this a major setback for the Wehrmacht at that situation? It's difficult to see that it could have made really any huge difference.

• 46:38Dan Snow?

  And the survivors didn't rise up to throw off the Nazi regime?

• 46:44Speaker 02

  The stories now that you read in the city archives of how people reacted in the days afterwards and how the Dresden civic realm, as opposed to the realm that had been ruled over by the Nazis, you know, there was no sense of what they called the golden pheasants, these Nazi party bigwigs, they had all vanished into their specially constructed as a bomb shelter, there was no sign of them on the streets. The people that you saw on the streets were the firefighters and the police and the doctors doing what they could, and there were hospitals around the city, cottage hospitals, I suppose we call them now, that had opened up, people who were just walking out into the countryside in fugue states on this cold February day, huge snaking lines of people just marching

• 47:29Speaker 02

  along roads, civilians just marching along roads into the wooded hills beyond, just simply the human instinct to get away. What you don't see is any sense of, yeah, I mean, you don't see the people rising up and saying, you just see people in trance states of shock. Remember, many of whom, older Dresdeners, remembered British and American people long before the war, long before Nazism, as being their friends, as being cosmopolitan visitors who enjoyed all of the art and music and colour of Dresden. This is how they could have understood themselves, the Dresdeners, they understood themselves as being this centre of beauty and culture. And that's what you get the real sense of, a sense

• 48:10Speaker 02

  of not just the mass murder, but also the sense of violation too.

• 48:16Dan Snow?

  So ninety percent of the city, the jewel box was destroyed, as you say, twenty five thousand or so people killed in a night. Tell me about the debates that really sparked instantly, people might think it's sort of wokeist, young people that don't remember the war, but actually the debate about whether it was worth striking Dresden and whether it was in fact criminal to do so, that began almost immediately from people in the know.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  That did. It began very quickly, and in fact, as you say, it's not a question of work, there had already been questions in Parliament asked about the Efficacy of city bombing, could it ever be right to bomb civilians and civilian centres? You know, this debate was being had in the British Parliament even before the bombing of Dresden. But the bombing of Dresden itself, the recoil was kind of instant. Most famously, Winston Churchill himself, who, according to one account, was heard to ask, are we beasts? But this spread throughout, you can see it actually in the newspaper coverage of the time. There is kind of a sense of shock. It was, I think, it was only the Daily Telegraph and its Peachberg column that said, oh, the new version of Bull in a China Shop.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Because Dresden was famous for its mice in China. Other newspapers were just reported it absolutely head on as huge numbers of casualties and a beautiful city in flames. And what then, as you say, came afterwards is an instant among so many that there was something wrong and shameful about this. Morally, it couldn't be justified. And the lightning rod for that was Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Harris. But it's wrong to put the blame entirely on him now, and it was at the time. But, but yes, this has to debate. And of course, on the German side, Goebbels was very quick to see the propaganda potential. You know, even at that stage in the war, Goebbels was working the propaganda angle.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  And he, first of all, he inflated the numbers of the dead to a hundred thousand. But he also pinpointed, here are your allies. This is the true face of the allies for you. Here are the monsters who are trying to destroy Germany. And, I mean, when you consider that so many other German cities had been bombed relentlessly as well. The Falkheim, I think, in the Wester Country suffered proportionately more, smaller city, but proportionately a large number of people killed in the space of one night. And again, the city smashed to pieces, but we never hear so much of that. We never hear so much about Cologne, we never hear so much about Mannheim. Dresden hit that very particular nerve. And I think it was to do with an understanding that what comes after this war?

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Was the purpose of the war to destroy Hitler and the Nazis? Or was it to cauterize German culture itself? You know, we've heard the Arthur Harris line, that German culture itself was to blame for two world wars. There was a young physicist at a party who'd been working with Bomber Command, who was talking to A woman about the ethics of city bombing and the ethics of bombing Dresden. And he was shocked when the woman, a very smart woman, turned to him and said, well, it's important that we kill the babies in Germany because otherwise they'll just start all over again in 20 years' time. And he could have recalled with horror and realised that there had been that side of the argument, that civilian bombing was justified because there was something inherent in German culture that was creating war.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  But there were huge numbers of other people who absolutely recoiled from that and were recoiling days after the bombing. And this would then reverberate through the years and is still reverberating now, actually. The electric power of history. If you go to Dresden now, I mean, it's only really quite recently that people and British delegations have been welcome in the city again. There was a time when they weren't.

• 51:56Dan Snow?

  It's interesting that the United States Strategic Bombing Survey said that terrorism was incredibly cruel. The death of women, children, civilians was extremely weighty and of no avail. But it does conclude, doesn't it, that the idea that, as you say, that there's something deeper going on in order to prevent another war, these extraordinary acts of destruction and so to sort of teach, to teach a lesson.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  It's kind of atavistic, I think. That's when war really does reduce everyone, even the most civilised people, to actually the most primitive, instinctive kind of level. And you see that particularly in Dresden, there's this awful kind of gravitational whirlpool of destruction where both sides have to offer at the end of such a war, both sides, all these sides exhausted, it's just death and more death. You see it in the destruction of the Frauenkirche. I mentioned this extraordinary 18th century cathedral before. It stood proudly at the centre of Dresden. It was only the next day when this amazing dome, this 18th century mathematical wonder, gave way and collapsed and the entire cathedral could have collapsed in on itself and that.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  In a sense, became the symbol of what the Allies had done to the city. I mean, there was the nightmare of all the bodies in the cellars that I've been talking about, and Kurt Vonegut, the American novelist, who famously then went on to write Slaughterhouse Five a couple of decades later. That was, in essence, about his experiences as an American prisoner of war in Dresden. Slaughterhouse Five had been the temporary prison that he and his fellow prisoners of war had been kept in on the edges of the city. It was an apothor on the edge of the city. And so he was witness to the bombing that night, and he was witness to the aftermath, because he was one of the people made to go into those brick cellars to exhume the bodies from within. Scenes of just, again, absolutely unimaginable horror.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  So he saw, as an American prisoner of war, close up the obscenity of what had been done. There were still Wehrmacht troops wandering around the city. So, yes, it would back up that, what had been for, what had been the point of this. But, there, but as I say, even before the bombing of Dresden, there had been in Parliament and elsewhere, you know, the novelists and MPs and bishops in Britain, who were saying that you cannot hope for any kind of peace in the future, if this is the approach. If you're attacking civilians and culture, what does that leave you for the future? As much as horrifying, it's nihilistic. The nihilism doesn't give any kind of hope for any kind of future. And

• 54:28Speaker 02

  those voices then started to prevail immediately after the war, so much so that Arthur Harris, Sir Arthur Harris, felt personally very hard done by, because Churchill then began to elide the bombing companies. Is it Churchill ever the master of history, ever the master of seeking to control how history saw him and all the best of it? You know, the bombing of Dresden was, I suppose you would say, what would be the phrase now, a memory hole. It would be just one of those things that was, let's try and pretend that didn't happen. But, of course, no one could, because the city stewardess is an absolutely stark reminder. There were numbers of German writers, that I think Eric Kastner, the author of Emil and the Detectives, who himself had been on the run from the Nazis, the Nazis hated

• 55:12Speaker 02

  him, this brilliant German children's author. He'd been born in Dresden, and he returned to the city just a couple of years later. And even a couple of years later, the city was just a moonscape of death. There was this extraordinary lunar landscape of just absolutely pulverized stone, and...

• 55:29Speaker 02

  And just that sense of overwhelming sense of mass death. Dresden became, after the war, became subsumed into the GDR. It was taken over by Stalin's Russia, it was basically the Soviet Union. And the bombing of Dresden immediately became the work of Anglo-American gangsters. That's how it was framed. It wasn't necessarily the war against Nazis, but it was a deliberate act of cruelty by Anglo-American gangsters. And this informed the history of the city all the way through up until the end of the GDR. But if you go to Dresden now and go to Dresden bookshops and Dresden history bookshops, there's a lot of nostalgia, first of all, for the old GDR. There are sections of the bookshop, which Dresden as it was in the golden days of the GDR.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  But there are still a lot of older people in Dresden who, despite all the years of mutual respect, I'm a member of the Dresden Trust, which is a charity set up specifically to improve British-German relations in terms of rebuilding the city and rebuilding some of its landmarks, which has been done beautifully. Actually, these landmarks have been restored to just absolute perfection. And attitudes in the city have changed a lot. There was, there's an old lady who said to me that at a performance of the Dresden Requiem, I had tears in my eyes, but she turned to me and said, well, this is for Coventry too. There was an understanding, finally, that there had been terrible, terrible acts on both sides. You know, the Germans tried to firebomb Coventry too.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  But among the older people, it took a long, long time for this loathing of the British to subside. Understand me?

• 56:59Dan Snow?

  Well, Sinclair McKay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all of your knowledge on this, on this anniversary.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. Thank you.

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