Dresden Survives as Potent World War II Symbol

When the air raid sirens sounded in Dresden on Feb. 13, 1945, Rudi Warnatsch’s family went wearily to the basement, hoping it was just another false alarm.

After all, their beautiful city on the Elbe River, known for art and delicate china rather than for heavy industry, had survived more than five years of war with little damage.

That was about to end with the Allied bombing, 60 years ago Sunday, that killed Warnatsch’s mother, brother and sister, and tens of thousands more.

“We could hear a droning noise in the air that we had never heard before, and it sounded very ominous,” said Warnatsch, who was 13.

The sound, just after 10 p.m., was from hundreds of British heavy bombers in the night sky. In a few minutes they unloaded tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the city, on its people, its baroque churches, famous opera house and art museums.

The bombing ignited a deadly firestorm -- and a controversy that has yet to burn itself out. Was it a necessary action to speed World War II toward its end -- or an act of terror and revenge against civilians?

This Sunday, clergy from Coventry Cathedral in England -- gutted by German bombing in 1940 -- will present a cross to Dresden’s Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady. The Frauenkirche was left in ruins for decades by East Germany’s communist government as a war memorial. With Germany reunified, only now is the church’s reconstruction nearly complete.

More ceremonies are to be held at the Heidefriedhof cemetery, where thousands of the dead are buried.

The official commemoration emphasizes reconciliation, but remembering the Dresden bombing is no simple matter. In addition to controversy over its military necessity and even how many died, it has been seized on by neo-Nazi and far-right politicians for propaganda.

They call it mass murder and compare it to the Holocaust, in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime killed 6 million Jews.

Twelve members of the far-right the Holocaust walked out of the regional legislature in Dresden rather than observe a minute’s silence for those who died at the Auschwitz concentration camp, with one saying that Britain and the United States committed a “bombing Holocaust.” Far-right activists plan a march in Dresden on the anniversary.

A historical commission has been appointed to come up with an official death toll, one of the most controversial aspects. Some estimates have run to 135,000 or more, but British historian Frederick Taylor, author of a recent book on the bombing, argues the real toll was lower: between 25,000 and 40,000.

Taylor argues that Dresden was a more appropriate military target than many have suggested. Instead of being an “open city,” not to be bombed as some still believe, it had war-related industries and remained a rail hub for German reinforcements heading east to fight approaching Soviet forces.

Still, German historian and documentary producer Guido Knopp called the attack militarily senseless. “The war was already decided,” he said.

Within weeks of the attack, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was distancing himself from the work of Air Marshal Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command. “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed,” Churchill wrote in a March 28, 1945, memo, less than two months before the war ended in Europe.

Whatever the justification, the bombing made the city a symbol of the horrors of total war.

Nazi authorities failed to provide adequate air raid shelters for the city, which was crowded with refugees. That left people cowering in basements where many suffocated or were buried by collapsing buildings. The town’s antiaircraft guns had been removed for use against the approaching Soviets, letting the bomber crews take undisturbed and deadly aim.

The fire made superheated air rise rapidly, creating a vacuum at ground level that produced winds strong enough to uproot trees and suck people into the flames. Some who managed to get through the blinding sparks and fiery debris staggered into the Grosser Garden park, where many were killed by a second bomber wave at 1:30 a.m. on Feb. 14, Ash Wednesday.

A third wave -- this time of U.S. bombers -- came just after noon. Thirteen square miles were turned into smoking rubble. For days afterward, cleanup workers burned bodies in heaps on the Altmarkt square.

Rudi Warnatsch recalls how the building above the cellar where the family was hiding began to shake, “but we couldn’t get out of the door because of the firestorm.”

They climbed through a window but the flames in the narrow streets hindered their escape.

“The firestorm blocked everything,” he said. “Suddenly, an entire building collapsed. I hoped that my mother had managed to make it past.”

He crawled into a cellar and collapsed. Hours later, rescuers pulled him out of the rubble.

Warnatsch’s mother’s body was found two weeks afterward. His 12-year-old sister’s body was never found though his mother “never let go of her hand,” said Warnatsch. His brother, 16, was killed as he went to report for duty at an air-raid warning station. His father was spared because he was out of town.

Now 73, married with children and grandchildren, Rudi Warnatsch has seen Dresden survive Nazism and 40 years of communist rule to become one of Germany’s most popular tourist attractions.

He still grieves for the family he lost, yet understands that Germany started the war and had to bear its consequences.

“Toward the Americans and the English,” he says, “I have no bitterness.”