Dan Snow's History Hit - Dresden. 75 years on.

Episode Date: February 9, 2020

75 years ago this week Dresden, in Saxony, known as the ‘jewel box’ because of its stunning architecture was obliterated by British and American bombers. The flames reached almost a mile high. Around 25,000 people were thought to have been killed. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut was there. It was he who wrote that the smouldering landscape was like walking on the surface of the moon. Even in the immediate aftermath it was controversial. Churchill instantly appeared to regret it. The Nazi government dramatically inflated the death toll to cast themselves as much the victims of monstrous violence as the Jews, Slavs, Poles, Romany and other groups they had murdered on an industrial scale. In this podcast Dan talks to Sinclair McKay about his new book about Dresden. They met in Coventry. A city also infamous for destruction from above during the Second World War. Today the two cities are twinned, united by the shock of firestorms delivered from above. Was it a war crime? Was it necessary? Why did it happen? Dan asks Sinclair about one of the Second World War's most controversial moments. 

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. 75 years ago this week, British and then American bombers unleashed a gigantic aerial onslaught upon the town of the city of Dresden in Saxony in southeast Germany. It was known as the Florence of the Elbe, the Jewel Box. It was a stunning Baroque city built with magnificent particularly 18th century architecture the firestorm has become infamous the flames apparently reaching nearly a mile high and the heat could be felt even through the aluminium skins of the bombers flying high above something like 25,000 people were killed the nazis inflated that number instantly they tried to create a narrative in

which they were the victims of appalling barbarity, blurring the lines between that slaughter and the ones that the Nazi regime carried out against people it did not like. Poles, Jews, homosexuals, Slavs, political dissidents, Soviets, and other groups. However, the raid was bloody. It was unimaginably destructive. where the raid was bloody it was unimaginably destructive the raid was even without the nazi regime's inflation propaganda the raid was hugely bloody oh here's my daughter what do you want i want to go swimming okay we're gonna go swimming let me just finish this the raid was hugely bloody where was i yes even without without the German government, the Nazi government's propaganda, the raid was bloody and instantly controversial, as you'll hear in this podcast.

It was from the few hours after it was carried out, there were doubts in the minds of senior British and American policymakers. I went to Coventry, another city largely destroyed from above in the Second World War. Coventry, 80 years ago this November, was almost obliterated by a German raid. And now the two cities are twinned. They have a shared experience. And I went to Coventry to talk to Sinclair Mackay, who's just published a new book on Dresden. You can watch this podcast, you can watch this interview in Coventry Cathedral, the magnificent space of Coventry Cathedral, on History Hit TV, the digital history channel. If you use the code POD6, P-O-D-6, you get six weeks for free.

You can watch it all for free of charge. And while you're there, we've got a whole bunch of programs in Dresden because I went to Dresden two years ago with Victor Gregg, who was a prisoner of war there and survived the firebombing. And I took my kids. It was one of the most memorable trips I've ever been on. He met a fellow survivor, a German lady who survived the bombing as well. So that will be all available on History at TV. This is the ambition.

We're trying to build the world's best history channel, and it's really exciting when we can create little seasons of programs like this. Now we are ever-increasing back catalog. So thank you for all your support. The pod six will get you a free viewing of that site for six weeks. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy this interview with the remarkable Sinclair Mackay about Dresden. Sinclair, thanks very much for joining us here in Coventry.

The day after, or the days after the raid on Dresden, the press in the Allied world crowed that they'd smashed the city to atoms. The mood was quite triumphalist. It was, yes, it was quite triumphalist and quite kind of fascinating. The Daily Telegraph employed a special air commandant or analyst who said, yes, what we've seen in Dresden is basically

the Allies carrying out Stalin's request to have the city pulverized. And we've done this barely before the ink was dry. They went out and did the job. The Daily Mail said that here was a city left in ashes. The Daily Telegraph here was a city left in ashes. The Daily Telegraph's Peterborough column,

which has always been light-hearted and jokey, decided to essay a little joke on the subject, which was Dresden, new version of bull in China shop. Not the sort of joke I don't think... Not even today's Peterborough would make that joke, I don't think. But then there came an American news report by a reporter called Howard Cowan who used the phrase terror bombing. He said, at last the Allies seem to have moved

to the technique of terror bombing. Now, curiously, I don't think this reporter was using the phrase in a pejorative sense. I think he was quite gung-ho. You know, at last, we're giving them what they deserve. But the moral recoil was instant. Among the American authorities, who absolutely wanted no part of this, for various geopolitical reasons as well. This is a continent which they had to face in the years after

the war. But there was a moment of moral recoil for Winston Churchill as well. It was an extraordinary moment where it was almost as if he had woken from some kind of fever dream. Winston Churchill as well. It was an extraordinary moment where it was almost as if he had woken from some kind of fever dream. Winston Churchill had been among those calling for the bombing of eastern cities like Dresden, but in the days afterwards, he suddenly snapped, and he wrote a memo to Arthur Harris

and others in Bomber Command saying, why are we now reduced to mere acts of terror? Now, he rescinded that memo a couple of days later, but the wound went into Arthur Harris. Arthur Harris didn't forgive this. And it's fascinating to see Churchill suddenly blinking. Churchill asked someone else, are we beasts? And that's the question that I think remains, doesn't it? Right from the outset of the bombing on the night of February the 13th, 1945, and then the Americans going in the following day on February the 14th,

that initial kind of reported reaction, Dresden bomb to atoms, there's no hint of any moral recoil in that, is there? It's simply the stirring martial music, Dresden bomb to atoms, and it was very similar in the national newspapers in Britain the day after. I think the Daily Mail reported very simply, Dresden is now a city of ashes.

And the Daily Telegraph very, very similarly. But then it was just a matter of 24 hours after that when suddenly there was this moment of moral recoil. And that's what makes the story of the annih story of Dresden, the annihilation of Dresden, not only a byword for the horrors of total war,

but also draws us into this extraordinary kind of moral labyrinth. Take us back 75 years ago this month. What was going on? Where were the Allies? And why was Dresden struck with such force? Why was Dresden struck with such force? So here we are at this point in the early days

of February 1945, the Allies were pushing through, finally pushing through from the west. The Soviets were, and the Red Army, were within about 60 miles of Dresden. The Nazis were pushing troops through Dresden and through to the east, armaments, men, materiel. Dresden was marked out as a target because, first of all, it was a very busy transport hub. There was a vast railway junction, which was being used, obviously, for a huge amount of military activity. Huge railway marshalling yards too.

And on top of that, the city had a huge number of factories, not in the historic Old Town, but just outside the historic Old Towns of Ringinghead. Zeiss Icon and various other big firms that in peacetime had been producing everything from fantastic cameras to sewing machines and bicycles but in wartime had been turned completely to the purposes of material and ordnance and staffed by slave labor. So these were the military targets that had been specified and it was Stalin who had specifically requested that the Allies target Dresden in order to hamper those German movements in the east. However, there is a darker element to this too. The other reason, Dresden, which is deep in the east of Germany,

very, very deep in the east of Germany, it's very close to the Polish border, very close to the Czech border, and it's only about 100 miles away from Prague, deep in the valley of the Elbe. The other reason it was picked out as a target 100 miles away from Prague, deep in the valley of the Elbe. The other reason it was picked out as a target is because there were enormous numbers of rural refugees moving through the city at that time. These were farmers and their families who were fleeing the oncoming Red Army and all the terrors that the Red Army were bringing.

So Dresden, in the early days of February 1945, was very, very busy. It was very busy with soldiers, German soldiers going in one direction, but rural refugees coming in off the trains, coming in on horses and carts, going in another direction, fleeing towards the west. And the Allies quite deliberately, and Bombe Kapaan quite deliberately, well, they knew that this was the case of refugees and they knew that a bombing attack would cause, as they put it, chaos and confusion.

There was always this rather delicate use of language in Bomber Command. And what about the scale? Obviously these raids were getting bigger and bigger through 1943, 1944. Can you put the force that attacked Dresden in context for us? I think one of the other remarkable things about Dresden is, for instance, a couple of years previously to that,

we had the bombing of Hamburg, which took place over the course of a few nights and caused some 43,000 fatalities, which is a figure too great to begin to compute or to imagine. And Hamburg was left in molten ruins. Corpses were left mummified. It was said that rats became obese. They were the new lords of the city. And those who had survived wandered out of the city in fugue states still in their pajamas and was transported across the country so there had been enormous bombing raids

before I think what the single Dresden out particularly in terms of the shock that it caused almost immediately afterwards was the the scale of this thing happening on a single night. That on a single night, 796 bombers flew over, unleashed thousands upon thousands upon thousands of high explosives and incendiaries, particularly incendiaries, because Arthur Harris, the commander-in-chief of bomber command, was always desperately keen to start fires. It was, let's say, the scale of this, 25,000 people being killed in the space of a single night. Again, it's a number beyond

imagination. But what you do see, the images that you are immediately confronted with, are also the horror of the temporary shelters that these people were in, the temporaries of bomb shelters. Because unlike a lot of other German cities, it was felt by the authorities in Dresden that there was no need for specially constructed bomb shelters because they were too far away from it and it simply wasn't going to happen to Dresden.

The only person in Dresden who did have a specially constructed bunker was the Gauleiter, Martin Mutschmann. The Nazi, the Nazi commander. So the fact that we're in Coventry today is so important to bunker was the Gauleiter, Martin Mutschmann. The Nazi, the Nazi commander. So the fact that we're in Coventry today is so important because four and a half years previous, before Dresden, German bombers

had appeared above these cities. They'd dropped a mix of incendiaries and high explosives in a particular cocktail designed to shatter the infrastructure and then burn the city as first responders were overwhelmed. This was, what happens at Dresden, if you like, is a process that reaches a climax that in some ways begins here in Coventry.

Yes, that's absolutely right. Because Coventry, when it happened, the horror of that night in Coventry, the made headlines around the world. There were newspapers in New York describing the ruins of Coventry, what the Nazis had done. The molten stone, the gutters running in molten streams to the ground, as well as so many

hundreds of people dead and so much beautiful priceless architecture destroyed. So it's not only a question of the horrific death rate and the horrific woundings and casualties and the horror of digging bodies out, it was also the fact of history being stamped out in a sense. This was a deliberate assault

on culture and memory that seemed to give it an extra twist of cruelty and made Coventry an instant byword for the horrors of total war. And yes, it was one of the first steps on the road that led to Dresden and then thence forward

to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was just the infliction without any kind of conscience or moral questioning or anything of bombing raids on civilians. So at Dresden, we should mention, people who don't know, it was known as the Jewel Box, a particularly beautiful city,

capital of Saxony, wealthy, cosmopolitan part of Germany. The architecture, like here at Coventry, was that a factor? Were the same things at play in the minds of Allied commanders that were at play in the minds of Allied commanders that were at play in the German commanders here in 1940? I think by February 1945 there were so many hundreds of decisions

being made every single day by people some of whom I don't think were quite in their right minds anymore. And I'm not sure the aesthetics did play a part. I'm not sure that Sir Arthur Harris would have known a Baroque church if one actually fell on his head. So I don't think that was a consideration of a part. I'm not sure that Sir Arthur Harris would have known a Baroque church if one actually fell on his head. So I don't think that was a good situation on his part. However,

in his unyielding and total hostility to all things German, I think Arthur Harris probably would have had an awareness of Dresden's cultural reputation and I think it is quite clear that Harris underneath it all wanted to crush German culture because I think it is quite clear that Harris, underneath it all, wanted to crush German culture,

because I think he saw Nazism as having emerged from German culture. That was his view. That was the view of, obviously, a man who had lived through the First World War and who had seen history before that. And it's not a view that I think anyone sensible then would have particularly gone with, and certainly not now. But that was a factor. A lot of bomber crews, too.

The young men in those aeroplanes, those thousands of young men who flew out on mission after mission deep into the darkness, knowing that there was every chance they were not coming back, knowing there was every chance they would be consumed in molten explosions. Some of them, the night before the Dresden raid and on the day when it was revealed to them, knew that it was a lovely city.

They knew that it was this cultural jewel box. But the whole process was kind of ineluctable. This was their mission. This was the job they were going to do. I'm just going to turn this light on, make you look even more handsome than you do. Hold on a second. Here we go. Oh, there we go.

Lovely. Is that okay? Yes, absolutely. Turn that light out. There we go. There was a lovely line that I read. In the dark story of the bombing of Coventry, incidentally, there were flashes of dark humour afterwards, which I particularly

enjoyed. And just several days afterwards, there was an old man at dusk going through the ruins of his house with a torch and an air raid warden came up to him and said, put that light out. And the old man said, the buggers have already been. That's the spirit man said, the buggers have already been. That's the spirit.

You mentioned the Allied airmen. Was it, it was famously bomber command suffered the worst per capita casualties of any arm of the British armed forces during the Second World War. Was it by 1945 still as dangerous flying these big lumbering bombers over the Third Reich as it had been the year before. The Luftwaffe had really been neutered by that stage. It wasn't quite as dangerous, but these things are so relative, aren't they? Because when you consider that if you were a member of Bomber Command, if you were in

a bomber crew, there was a 4 in 10 chance that you would either be killed or hideously wounded or captured. The prospects of you coming home happy and safe were very, very remote. And then the prospects of coming home happy, even if you hadn't been wounded or hit by flak, you would still be suffering unimaginable trauma. You would be waking your roommates with your nightmare screams. No one came back

from those raids unscathed. But another dark aspect to the story of Dresden was that this was a city, even though Bomber Command didn't know it, this was a city now without defences by February the 13th, 1945. The anti-aircraft guns that had been placed on the hills around the city had been moved to the eastern front as part of the effort against the Red Army. These guns had been operated by teenage boys and now these teenage boys and the youth were basically guiding refugees through the city. There was no meaningful defence. I think there were a few Messerschmitts up at the airfield some five miles out of the city, 10 or 15. There's nothing that they could have done against two waves of 796 Lancaster bombers. So in a curious way, the Dresden mission was actually quite straightforward for bombers,

but one of the more straightforward ones that they did. And the other really curious thing about the story is that you read now in memoirs and diaries of, as I say, these intelligent, sensitive young men. They reflect on their war. They reflect on what's been happening. And these are diaries written at the time. And they remember flying out to Dresden.

They remember seeing the streets thousands of feet beneath them almost like a latticework of gold. And the gold is pure flame. And those flames are rising ever higher. And those flames are joining with other flames and becoming a firestorm and there are airmen, bomb aimers looking down into this

with a sort of mesmerised wonder at the terrible spectacle of it because of course thousands of feet up is quite abstract. It's impossible to imagine living individuals in that cauldron of hell beneath you. But then a few nights after that,

these same young men are getting ready to fly out again. Further raids, Chemnitz, Magdeburg, other cities. Dresden, for them, is already forgotten. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

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because he dropped his flares right in the main square and you see he had to dodge the tower or the spire of the churches as he was pulling out of his dive. So they're kind of lighter, faster aircraft. Lighter, faster aircraft and also flying very much lower. So a lot of them are flying at around the height of what would now be the height of a skyscraper. Obviously, there were no skyscrapers then.

But yes, they're coming in low and they have specific targets to aim for. There are different coloured marker flares. There are white magnesium flares that they drop down so that the bombers coming behind them have something to aim for in what would otherwise be complete darkness below. Then other targets are marked out with red flares.

There were green flares. Sometimes there were all sorts of different colors. There were sometimes blue flares and orange flares as well. From above, again, you have this extraordinary spectacle of these flares being thrown down and throwing the architecture and the streets of the city into this extraordinary, kind of lurid relief. But then think about it from the point of view of those on the ground,

those in the city. Think of it through the eyes of the children who were watching that night, children who were in the suburbs around the city, not actually in the historical city itself, who were watching these extraordinarily bright marker flares falling from the sky and calling them Christmas trees because that's what they looked like.

Red, green, white. These were the colors they associated with Christmas and these were magical lights falling from the sky. Even the older children who knew the darkness and the danger that was coming still couldn't take their eyes off these things. But yes, the Pathfinders go in first, then behind them comes this extraordinary aerial ballet

of hundreds upon hundreds of Lancaster bombers on their fixed paths, and they're able to see the city beneath them. This is obviously an age before any meaningful technology, no matter what the American Air Force claimed about their precision bombing. You know, this is an era when technology is a grey screen with a green blip on it. The bomb aimer would lie on

his stomach looking at the city below. That is as far as it went with precision. And then, in that case, how precise were they? I mean, did they drop their bombs near the targets? Were any efforts made to target, for example, the railway marshalling yards

that some of these factories are talking about, or was it at this stage of the war a matter of destroying cities? It's just that the scale of it meant that no matter how daintily the marker flares might have been put down, and some landed directly in the centre of the sports stadium, which is where they were exactly supposed to aim for.

No matter how careful you can be with those things, how then can you... It's impossible. You've got 796 Lancaster loaded with so many thousands upon thousands of tonnes of high explosives and incendiaries that certainly you will

hit the factories, certainly you will hit the factories, certainly you will hit the railway marshalling yards. It's impossible that you won't hit everything else as well. And also, it has to be said that the atmospheric conditions that night, it's quite difficult, as Arthur Harris noted to his own sociopathic frustration, to raise a deliberate firestorm. He had tried in Lubeck in 1942, and he had succeeded.

Lubeck was a kind of laboratory for this terrible new kind of warfare. It wasn't just enough to bomb. You had to create a fire that itself became a phenomenon of physics, much like we've seen in Australia recently with the bushfires. A lot of the same physical forces are going on in there. You create what is in essence a fire tornado, or what he called a fire typhoon. So with Dresden, the sheer weight of the bombing firepower that they've

aimed at it, together with these unusual atmospheric conditions, a very still night, a very clear night, very little breeze, meant that when the fire started, no power on earth could have stopped them. And one of the curious things about the story is that you find firefighters volunteering to come from all sorts of different places, not just within Dresden, but from neighboring towns, in the hope of trying to put out the blazes that start with the first wave of bombers that went in over around 10 o'clock. By midnight, the firestorm was out of control. This was a firestorm that basically

bended the laws of physics. It turned the air inside out. If you were near this thing, you would just find yourself pulled helplessly high into the air, burning as you did so. Yeah, I mean, it's at risk of being macabre. It's worth just exploring that because that is literally true.

People were lifted off the ground. If you were close enough to the exploring that because that is literally true. People were lifted off the ground. If you were close enough to the eye of this thing, you would just be literally lifted off the ground. Think of it as an incredibly dark version of the Wizard of Oz, that house going up in a tornado. Then think of that happening for real, but just with a pure wall of fire spinning and spinning. And outside of that, you have incredibly strong winds,

which themselves carry huge numbers of burning embers. If you weren't wearing goggles that night, you were in essence going to be blinded. And so many of the refugees, so many people who had left the cellars after the first wave of bombers thinking that the worst was over, so many people caught in the streets, those who weren't just dismembered and decapitated by the shock waves of the bombs, found themselves caught up just in this inferno where just your clothes alone would just combust seemingly of their own accord.

People just burnt to death on the spot. So the numbers of people killed have been very contentious with Dresden. Yes. How confident now are we on the figure you arrive at, which is, I think, 25,000? It's about 25,000. Goebbels originally put the figure in the aftermath of the bombing

as 250,000. He inflated it by 10 times in order to, from his point of view, to show the world that the Allies were as steeped in innocent blood as the Nazis. You can see the propaganda effort there. The extremely controversial historian David Irving put the figure in 1963 as 135,000, and he had gleaned this figure from an official in Dresden

who I think himself had his own particular agenda to follow. Much more recently, I think we can say with some confidence that 25,000 is about right. It can only ever be approximate because there were so many rural refugees. You know, how can you tell? But it was a special historical commission set up in Germany to look into this and they had a special party of historians

looking into this. So I think we can say with some confidence that that is the figure now. Why do we... That is fewer people than were killed in Hamburg, in Tokyo, in other cities. Why do we look upon Dresden as uniquely destructive? I think also because there is a duality at the heart of Dresden

that makes it particularly poignant. It's not just the architectural beauty of the city. This architectural beauty, which was picked up by painters like Bellotto in the 18th century, he painted the landscape of the Elbe and the cityscape along the River Elbe, which basically you can still see today, miraculously.

It attracted artists like Caspar David Friedrich. It attracted Otto Dix in the 20th century. It's always been crackling with this kind of artistic life. In terms of music, also, Dresden has been a fantastic beacon.

The Dresden Opera, which was the home to Richard Wagner for so many years in the 19th century, dedicated anti-Semite, though he was. Many of his operas were premiered in Dresden. This rich tradition went on into the 20th century with Richard Strauss, again, who's presiding over this Dresden Opera Company.

It was an incredibly... Before the darkness of Nazism, it was an incredibly open cosmopolitan welcoming city and that was also the case for its Jewish population too. There was a Jewish population of some 6 or 7 thousand Jewish people in Dresden who had come basically from other

parts of Europe as well as being brought up in Dresden who adored the city in all of its amazing facets and its brilliant rippling intellectual life as well as its artistic life um on top of this the city was the home to all sorts of precision factories there were fantastic cameras made in dresden there was a huge amount of work for skilled workers uh on top of that it was city jammed to the room with breweries uh so there was a huge amount of

drinking going on too it was it was a very jolly city in that sense as well. It was alive. It wasn't just middle classes going to the opera. All classes thrived in this city that always seemed to be one step apart from the rest of the world, perhaps because of its geographic location. There's something slightly fairytale about its location,

deep in the heart of Saxony, so close to those rich haunted forests and those beautiful rocky plains you can see the romanticism of Dresden and that I suppose is part of the reason why almost immediately after the bombing there was this

kind of recoil and I think from that point of recoil onwards it's haunted the English imagination ever since, not just as a byword, not just because of the hideous deaths of so many people, all those civilians and those inadequate brick sellers who were either poisoned to death or simply baked or mummified,

but also to stamp on this flower of culture so mercilessly and so deliberately. And so, obviously, for the people of Dresden now, the essence is making sure that nothing like that can ever happen again. Was Dresden a legitimate military target? There are those who would argue now that it wasn't. The novelist Christopher Priest, for instance, says that no, it had no legitimacy as a military target at all, that this was just an act of pure barbaric, almost sadism on the part of Arthur Bommer Harris. I don't think that's quite true. It was a military target and it did have some legitimacy. some legitimacy. As has been mentioned, it was a very busy transport junction. It was being used as a transport nexus. There was a huge amount of war work going on in the factories around. And it also has to be remembered that February the 13th and 14th wasn't the last time that Dresden

was bombed. The Americans came back and they bombed it again in March and they bombed it again in April 1945. That was just three weeks before the end of the war. So clearly for them, it did have some military value. The Americans weren't launching these raids just out of sadism. They were among the first to recoil from the phrase terror bombing, which had been used by an American reporter when he was writing up the event a couple of days after the Dresden bombings. And how did you deal in this book with the issue of people talking about war crimes? Is it a war crime?

Why do people talk about Dresden being a war crime as distinct from, as we've talked about, Pforzheim, the German city that was obliterated, or Hamburg? Yes. Hamburg, Cologne, Essen, Hanover,zheim, the German city that was obliterated, or Hamburg. Yes. Hamburg, Cologne, Essen, Hanover, Mannheim, Lubeck. All proportionally more destroyed. Or aimed at deliberately with the aim of, as Lord Charwell, Winston Churchill's scientific advisor, so charmingly put it, de-housing the population. It's a charming technocratic term, de-housing.

Walker, it'shousing the population. It's a charming technocratic term, de-housing. Walker, it's one of those things, it's curious, the minute you bring up Dresden in any kind of company, there is amongst a number of people an instant very angry response. A lot of people still feel very passionate that it was a war crime and it should be labelled

as such. And, on top of that, that figures such as Sir Arthur Harris should have stood trial, and perhaps even Winston Churchill should have stood trial. Now, the term war crime always makes me hesitate, in this particular instance. First of all, because it's a legal term with a very specific legal definition.

It's not a moral term. What happened to Dresden was unquestionably an atrocity. We could go further and say it was a barbaric atrocity. But if you were to say that Dresden was a war crime, you would then, as you say, have to go back over all the previous bombing raids launched by Bomber Command over the entire course of the war, I think. And you'd have to look at those cases too and you'd have to point and you'd have to say,

were they all war crimes as well? Was the bombing of Essen a war crime? Was the bombing of the Opera House and the historic centre of Mannheim a war crime? It's a term that we have to use with care. And I think also, as the Dresden authorities might remind us now, it's a term that also has to to use with care. And I think also, as the Dresden authorities might remind us now, it's a term that also has to be used with care

because there are those on the far right in Germany and elsewhere who are very keen for the bombing of Dresden to be seen as a war crime because for them it enables them to equate the Allies' war with the Nazis' war.

And it enables them to say, in essence, that German civilians suffered every bit as atrociously as the Jewish people in the Holocaust. That's what the far right are trying to do in Germany, and, as I say, elsewhere. It is literally hijacking history. And the use of the word war crime, I think, makes it slightly easier for the far right to do so.

And that just makes me tremendously uneasy, that road. How do the people of Dresden today remember or try and forget the bombing of February 1945? It's incredibly moving. I know you've been for the anniversary. Every year there are anniversary commemorations. I know you've been a couple of years ago. I was there last year for the anniversary commemorations. On the evening of February the 13th, what the people of Dresden do,

first of all, they gather around the historic old city, which has been beautifully reconstructed with incredible sensitivity, and in the case of the Farnkirche, with just miraculous attention to detail. They gather around the old city and they form a human chain. First of all, this is to symbolise solidarity. Second of all, it's to tell the far right and all the various nutty extremists that they are not going to pass. This is not their place.

They will not hijack this memory. Then there are, for instance, last year, I went to a performance of the specially composed Dresden Requiem which was composed the year after by the city's leading composer Rudolf Mausberger it's an extraordinarily

moving piece of music performed by the Dresden Kreuzchor it leaves you more or less in tears at the end and when I was sitting there in the Kreuzkirche there was an old lady sitting next to me who by the end had somehow divined that I was English

I don't know how but at the end of the performance this old lady turned to me and she said this is for Coventry too and I found that almost unbearably moving that here was a lady who was there to

remember the bombing of Dresden but her thoughts instantly went out to Coventry too. It was that spirit of reconciliation as well as remembrance I think is so important. Then at around 9.40 if you go to the old market square or the new market square

you find hundreds of people starting to gather in the crisp February darkness. And then the bells start ringing. The church bells start ringing. It's not a pleasant noise. They ring with real clamour and urgency and anger. It's a terrifying, chaotic

noise. And the church bells are there to symbolise the moment when the air raid sirens started wailing in Dresden. And so you get this extraordinary cacophony of the church bells. It goes on for about 20 minutes, and then they stop. Very suddenly, they stop, and then there's silence. And you have hundreds of people standing in these squares, lighting candles, all of whom are in silence, just in contemplation and prayer. As I say, it's overwhelmingly moving and tremendously dignified.

And in its own strange way, there's an odd word to use, beautiful. Well, Sinclair, thank you. It's been beautiful hearing your words tonight in the heart of Coventry. Well, thank you very much. I might just say one final thing, actually. We were talking about artists, and I want to mention that with us tonight, we have an acclaimed artist called Monica Petzl,

whose family lived in Dresden, came from Dresden. They were forced to leave Dresden in the 1930s. She's a brilliant artist, and she has a new exhibition opening up in Leicester next week, inspired not just by

remembrance of Dresden, but also lots of other themes too. If you get a chance to go and see it, I implore you to do so. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. Thank you.