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Originally posted by parabellum:
Andrew Dice Clay once wondered out loud- given Japan's economic success after the war- if there was fertilizer in those bombs.

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Dresden's Destruction

The Misappropriation of a Tragedy

For years, the right wing in Germany has been trying to instrumentalize the World War II destruction of Dresden. With the 75th anniversary of the bombing now here, many in the city are fed up with the debate.

By Susanne Beyer, Katja Iken, Dirk Kurbjuweit, Ann-Katrin Müller, Klaus Wiegrefe und Steffen Winter

12.02.2020, 17:38 Uhr

Rubble. Everywhere. And the remnants of bombed-out buildings, as far as the eye can see. Only the corner towers remain of the once-majestic cathedral known as the Frauenkirche. Smoke, both black and white, is rising from the destruction, with a few fires still burning here and there. There’s a destroyed streetcar and, if you look closely enough, you can see people wandering through the rubble, most with their shoulders slumped. A mother dragging her two sons behind her passes a bench on which a dead couple is slumped. Two swastika flags hang from a building.

The music is atmospheric and the sound of the wind can be heard. Night falls, before then once again giving way to daylight - a blood-red sun, as though mortally wounded.

The images are from an overpowering representation of Dresden following the bombing raids on the city that took place on Feb. 13-15, 1945. It is a trip back in time on 3,000 square meters of polyester, created by the artist Yadegar Asisi. The circular, dark panorama is 107 meters long, 27 meters high and can be seen in the old Dresden gasometer.

According to the artist, the panorama shows a city "at its nadir, at a moment of paralysis, the zero hour." Asisi assembled his depiction of destroyed Dresden using old photos and film clips after having sent out an appeal to the population to send him material.

The panorama was inaugurated five years ago, on the 70th anniversary of Dresden’s annihilation. It was, from today’s perspective, a different era.

The fight for the city's memory is not over yet.

Back then, it seemed as though the vast majority of Germans had found a way to remember the Nazi era and the vast carnage of World War II their ancestors had triggered. It looked like they had managed to internalize the pain of Germany’s guilt and to recognize that Dresden’s destruction was a consequence of that culpability. The logical conclusion born from that approach to the city’s World War II history was clear: Never again. No Nazis. No war.

Even then, though, the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, was consistently misappropriated by right-wing extremists to portray the residents of Dresden as the victims of Anglo-American "terror,” just as the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, did in the final months of the war. After the initial waves of British bombers, the Americans then showed up on Feb. 14 and 15. Around the turn of the millennium, a right-wing group called for a march on behalf of the victims, a protest that became something of an annual tradition. Indeed, according to German domestic security officials, the demonstrations developed into "one of the most important right-wing extremist events in Germany." In 2009, there were 6,500 participants, making it one of the largest gatherings of Nazis in all of Europe.

But a self-assured Dresden populace pushed back and made sure that the whole story was told on the day of commemoration – namely that Dresden wasn’t quite as innocent as the right-wing extremists wanted to believe.

Historian Mike Schmeitzner points out that the city was a stronghold for National Socialism in the state of Saxony, with 20,000 political functionaries working in Dresden by 1935. Moreover, "racial hygiene” had already been introduced as an academic field in Dresden by 1920, says Schmeitzner.

Without the crimes of the Nazis, there would have been no bombs and Dresden would not have been destroyed. Which means that the two significant anniversaries in the first weeks of this year – the Jan. 27 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the commemoration of the bombing of Dresden – are intimately linked.

As he did for the Auschwitz anniversary, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is planning a speech to mark the Dresden commemoration. The challenge, just as it has been for presidents before him, will be that of finding the right tone – of recognizing the suffering of the victims while also acknowledging Germany’s guilt. No matter what, though, his speech will be just the next round in the ongoing battle for the historical interpretation of what happened in Dresden.

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Thousands of civilians died in the hail of bombs, that is undeniable. And it also makes remembrance so challenging legitimate pain combined with deep culpability. The result is an equally complex approach to mourning.

That complexity can be illustrated using two examples: That of a politician from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and that of a poet.

For AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla, 44, Feb. 13 is an important day. "I dont need to put it in my calendar. The appointment is inside me," he says, briefly pressing his right hand to his heart. Both his grandmother and father experienced the bombardment in person and spoke of it frequently, he says. Chrupalla says his family had fled to Dresden from Silesia, which is today part of Poland, and they spent the night of the bombardment cowering under a bridge. And they survived. His father was just five years old at the time, but still had memories of that night.

Chrupalla would like more to be done to remember the destruction of Dresden. "A special place of remembrance in Dresden is needed to commemorate the victims," he says. Thus far, there is merely a plaque in the ground. "I dont think thats enough, Chrupalla says, adding that he isnt planning on going to the event at which Steinmeier is speaking. He suspects the German president will use the ceremony to attack the AfD. "I would like to be allowed to speak so I could present our view of things."

Chrupalla says he's surprised that the number of victims has been adjusted downward in the past decades, with experts now believing that 25,000 people died in the bombings. He thinks that number is way off. "I believe there were around 100,000 victims," he says. The Red Cross wrote of 278,000 dead in 1948, he says. "My grandmother, my father and other witnesses told me that the streets were full before the attack and that there were mountains of corpses after that night," Chrupalla says. None of them believe the newer number of 25,000 dead, he says, which is why he has his doubts as well.

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But how many people actually died in the bombing raids? Arriving at a number in Dresden is just as difficult as agreeing on the proper form of commemoration. The numbers are subject to manipulation just as they have been from the very beginning.

On March 15, 1945, the SS in Dresden reported to Berlin that 18,375 victims had been counted up to that point and that the final number was likely to rise to 25,000. A short time later, though, the Propaganda Ministry released new numbers to back up the idea of a "monstrous terror attack on civilians", as the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter would have it. Correspondents from neutral countries were not allowed to visit Dresden, but just days after the air raids, fantastical numbers, likely from Goebbels' team, began making the rounds.

Citing trusted sources in Berlin, the Svenska Morgonbladet in Stockholm reported 100,000 deaths on Feb. 17, with the Svenska Dagbladet reporting eight days later that the number was "closer to 200,000 than 100,000", citing official "Third Reich" sources.

The success of the propaganda campaign was astounding, as historian Matthias Neutzner has determined. By summer 1945, a significant share of both the German and Western public believed that there had been "several hundred thousand victims." That would have meant that more people were killed in Dresden than in the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, where 80,000 lost their lives in the initial blast.

A falsified document was even in circulation, Daily Order No. 47 from the SS in Dresden, issued on March 22, 1945. It stated that there had been 202,040 victims, with the final total expected to rise to 250,000. Later, though, it was found that someone had added an extra zero to both numbers.

But the debate continued nonetheless. A number of theories were offered up to explain how so many people could have died in a city with a population of less than 600,000. Dresden was full of refugees from the east; the fire was so hot that many people were incinerated without a trace; in the chaos following the firestorm, huge numbers of bodies were secretly buried or interned in the ruins.

Dresden, though, was misappropriated by both the left and the right. Those seeking to criticize the U.S. for its reliance on air power, whether in Vietnam in the late 1960s or in Iraq in 2003, were more than happy to refer to Dresden as an example. The peace movement was likewise fond of citing the Dresden inferno in their Cold War protests against the nuclear arms race.

To others, meanwhile, Dresden seemed perfectly suited to counter Allied efforts at passing judgment on the crimes committed by Germany in postwar courtrooms. Others saw it as a way of relativizing German guilt for the Holocaust. The firestorm could be cited to show that the victors of World War II were no better than the losers. In 1964, the influential German weekly Die Zeit wrote that the attack on Dresden was "probably the largest mass murder in the history of humanity".

A Monument to the Future

DER SPIEGEL also jumped into the Dresden debate and in 1963, promoted the ideas of historical revisionist David Irving, who was later revealed to be a Holocaust denier. He called the bombing of Dresden a "senseless act of terror" and DER SPIEGEL also printed the inaccurate numbers he provided. Such absurd statistics found their way into the newsmagazine on several occasions, with the victim total of 200,000 still being printed as late as 2003. Other media outlets did the same.

By 2004, the mayor of Dresden, Ingolf Roßberg, had had enough of the debate over the victim numbers and the way the right-wing was increasingly using the uncertainty for its own purposes. He put together a commission of historians under the leadership of Rolf-Dieter Müller, with the groups final report being issued six years later. The academics had followed every possible lead in their effort to find the truth and had even tracked down the names of most of the victims. Their verdict: Up to 25,000 people had died in the Dresden air raids from Feb. 13-15, 1945. It is that number that the AfD politician Chrupalla contests.

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Originally posted by Hound Dog:

Well, the Nagasaki bomb was the last atomic bomb on Tinian, ready to drop. Another would have been available later in the month. Then, more and more as production increased...

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Originally posted by parabellum:
Ah, yes. Dresden. I always think of Bomber Harris and Kurt Vonnegut when Dresden is mentioned.

No, the uneducated people whining about Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem never to mention Dresden, or even the firebombing of Tokyo. No, that would require a knowledge of historical events and a reasonable, objective perspective of the major events of WWII. All they know is "atomic bomb bad, America bad."

IIRC, the raids on Dresden were- after WWII- deemed by some as strategically unnecessary, and I happen to agree. Nothing was gained by roasting all those German civilians that late in the war. Whereas the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was demonstrably absolutely necessary to force Japan to surrender.