Dan Snow's History Hit - The Bombing of Dresden

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

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 [e-mail].

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 are 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 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 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 Gregg 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 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 to Berlin story, 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. The sirens sounded in that eastern German city around 10pm local time on the 13th of February 1945. Minutes later, Pathfinder aircraft dropped flares and very, very shortly after the Pathfinders had lit up the target, well, the might of Bomber Command's heavy bomber force arrived to smash the city, to pulverise it.

A city that had been known as the Jewel Box or the Florence on the Elm. The next hours saw that city annihilated. Thousands were killed, asphyxiated, even boiled. It's become a symbol of the bombing campaign against Germany in the Second World War. 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 Mackay, a best-selling 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. 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. No, thank you very much for asking me. Very nice of you. 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? 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 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. 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? 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 de-housing populations, raising firestorms from 1942 onwards, the bombing of Hamburg, etc, 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 fairytale quality. It seemed so far away from the stream of the 20th century, let alone anything else. But Dresden, despite its Baroque beauty, the fantastic beauty of its 18th century architecture, the immense civilization 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 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 that 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 the desperate swinging of sledgehammers rather than anything finally calculated. 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 armada, 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? That might have been the thought that, yes, I mean, 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 kind of crumple and fall 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 Baideke raids, as it were. And this was aimed at a at a spiritual blow at England, as well as the bombing raids 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 an 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 have not only traveled to Dresden, but a number of British and American people had lived there in the earlier parts of the century. So it was a familiar city from that point of view. The Dresden Opera had come to London and had received all sorts of rave reviews and 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. Arthur Harris's view was that German culture itself was a problem, but that was not shared by a number of other people. German culture itself was the problem, but that was not shared by a number of other 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's of hitting city after city after city all over the country from Frankfurt to Hamburg to Cologne, Magdeburg, Mannheim, Frankfurt to Hamburg to Cologne, Magdeburg, Mannheim, no city was spared. And yes, by February 1945, you just have the gravity of war in the sense that they just simply have to now. They have to pound all their strength, all the weak points that they can find, 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 macabrely high. And the crews who flew to Dresden must have known that the chances of that happening increased enormously. 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? These planes are assembling in airfields in England. The target has been revealed. The way 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 an airfield 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. And Dresden itself, the old city, is honeycombed with these brick cellars, these brick basements. They weren't especially built as 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 gowliter of Dresden, Martin Murchin. 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 a 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 who survived those who came back they 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 lattice work as one said they could see the destruction that they were bringing but at that kind of height it gave 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 defences. 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. 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 his job was to drop flares so that the rest of the bomber force could a much smaller Mosquito. And 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 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. 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, they're 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 incendiary flares as so there'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 around 9.30 at night. They've heard the distant bass hum of the approaching bombers the alerts have gone off in the city there's much like our own bomb alerts here and people have been taken to their shelters but there was also just an element of wonder for those on the edge of the city because the city is

based around some 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 just white, but red and green and blue, the different colors, incidentally,

denoting different kinds of targets. The red being the more military target. So from the point of view of the first wave bombers, there they are throwing these marker flares down. But then there are 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 so. And then a matter of minutes after that, the horror begins. before they do so.

And then a matter of minutes after that, the horror begins. 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? 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 houses. But there were a huge number of incendiaries too, because the aim really was not just to pulverise 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 1942 onwards. The idea of raising a firestorm, we 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, so much so the flames then rise higher and higher and higher. That was the aim.

Now, that night of February the 13th, 1945, as the people of Dresden have taken to those musty brick cellars and to the crypt of the Fraunkoch, the city's amazing 18th century Baroque cathedral, the first of the bombs started falling and they were felt as many called the footsteps of a giant. But then, almost instantly, the fires started too. And so we just say, 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 or 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. 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 at each terrible boom, but there are those more on the 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. 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 fires start to take hold in that first wave from 9.45pm 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, 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 13th. 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,

yards in the factories, but they also, obviously, they hit hospitals, they hit churches, they hit some private houses. You cannot have precision bombing at all in those circumstances. 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? How long would that first wave have gone on for? We've got something approaching 800 heavy bombers. Well, I think in the first wave, it would have been about, I think, 250 in the first wave. And it would have been a matter of minutes, possibly not that much more than half an hour, 9.45 to, I think, 10.15pm. And then after that, if you can imagine,

those who are sitting in these extraordinarily claustrophobic cellars and crypts, aware that the bombers have gone, that there's a sign, 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 an absolute horror and kind of panic but then the all-clear sound that they were able to get out again with a semblance 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 nightmarishly glowing city that no longer looks like the city you once knew because so much of it has already been pulverized. The Kreuzkirche roof absolutely smashed in. The old market, 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 walk. Genuinely, it is the circumstance of a nightmare. 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. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about

the bombing of Dresden. We're coming up. we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. 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'd refused to abide by the rules, he'd attempted to escape, and he'd 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 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 Craig's hand. And while we were 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 of which we could still see on her skin, all of those years later.

I think the bombing of Dresden profoundly changed Victor Craig. And as you're about to hear, he's 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. Dresden made me completely, turned me completely berserk. I used to hear the screams. You can't talk to people about it. You had these people who was jumping in this water.

They had about three of these big water things, made of cement, what they built in the middle of Dresden. And they were filled up with water. That was in case it got bombed. So when it was getting hot, people were jumping in the water to get away from the heat.

And then eventually the water boiled because of the heat and they couldn't get out, they couldn't climb up the sides of these things and they were being boiled alive. When you hear people screaming and you can't get anywhere near there because it's too hot, that's what turns you into a psychopath. And there's no way out of it.

I could go for weeks as a normal person and somebody would say something. And I met a few blokes who were like that. I met a chap who was in the bar room when it got sun. And he said he used to wake up in the night and he could hear the bl boats banging on the waterproof doors. They couldn't get out as the boat was sinking. No, no, no, it turned me completely, completely, completely antisocial. Completely.

You've got the good side of you who wants to live a life of peace. 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 and going to make somebody pay for it. And one side doesn't recognise the other. And that's what my life's been like. I think that this trauma trauma which they discovered later, I think what I suffered from, I think it was caused through a guilt by association.

I felt that I was guilty for it because I was British. The British had done this and it was terrible, it was terrible. It's the two women, the two German women really, the one at Coventry Cathedral and the one that you introduced me to. She was holding my hand all the way through that interview and she was holding me like that and then she was crying at the end, as you know. And she wouldn't let me go. And that was in Dresden when we went back? Dresden.

And that's when I felt that I was forgiven. Because she really made me feel that it wasn't my fault. That she was forgiving. I can't say she was forgiving me or not, I don't know. But I felt entirely different after that Christian visit. Well, those are the words of Victor, Greg, 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, 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 too dangerous to get in them and try and cool down. Yes, the water bubbling and hissing and boiling. What are some of the stories that

you can share with us that have stuck with you? 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 just extraordinary nightmare of destruction. And also the contrast with the day they just had.

It had been a day of carnival for the children, February the 13th, 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, that 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 kind of colourful costumes. 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 kind of cities. But also the other thing that struck me, particularly in a number of the accounts, was the way that the civic realm could have held together. No thanks, obviously, to the Nazi Gauleit and Martin Mutschmann and any members of the Nazi party. It had 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 an extraordinary account from him where in the way of the first bombing, he knew he had to make his way to the hospital. That was his first instinct, 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 try to keep it functioning. extraordinarily, they still try to keep it functioning. Then there's the story of Victor Klemperer, 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 the 13th, Victor Klemperer and his wife had received their own notice that they too were going to be deported. That night, they didn't take 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 in 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. You've got people trying to go to hospital, civic society, trying to meet this appalling challenge. What happens next, though? The next, among some of the the accounts you read now in the city archives again so 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 is boiling and hissing. Electricity in 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 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 hills. 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 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 over the city and drop yet more enormous,

cookie-cutter, 1,000-pound bombs intended, once again, just to pulverize really as much as they can. There are factories quite close to the historic old center of the city, which they are aiming for. But these are bombs which hit the 18th century Fraunkocher, 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. When seen from that height, I mean, obviously,

you can't see any individual people or bodies. The airman Miles Tripp described the peculiar 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 were people describing how in houses, the shock waves of the blasts made doors open 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 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 being replaced with carbon monoxide. They were getting sleepier and sleepier. Some were getting chest pains, but they 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 realize and then started to panic. It's impossible to envisage the horror of being one of those cellars trying to get out,

the push of people trying to get out when they realized what was going on but couldn't, and realizing 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. 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 are almost being blown off their feet. 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. tornado. Such things have been witnessed before in the bombing of Japan. And it happened in Dresden. What starts as a strong wind becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. There were people who were outside who found themselves being lifted off feet. There was one man who was literally lifted off his feet

and sucked up into the air. And it's not just being sucked up into tornadoes, it's being 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 where the tarmac now has melted and where the tarmac is now bubbling. People who fall into 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 the people are just being burnt left, right and centre, 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. Listen to Dan Snow's history. More bombing of Dresden after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

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And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And yet the torment obviously wasn't over and it was not over either from the hands of the Allies. The Americans arrived the next day. The Americans arrived the next day. The Americans arrived the next morning. I mean, this is 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 defense 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 onto each other's shoulders. And they were walking out of this orange mist, like zombies, like the living dead. How do you even begin to coordinate? In 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. 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, 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 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 the decades afterwards. That final American bombing, as well as the brutality of British bombing. What was the military effect of this bombing? 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.

heading east but heading east towards the red army who were rushing in at a rate of knots it was february 13th by that stage as i say they were cleaving through so many rotten german defenses by that stage in terms of westwards again it's just impossible to really to quantify what kind of military effect uh the bombing would have had all we can really say with any uncertainty is that 25 000 civilians or, or 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 stage? It's difficult to see that it could have made really any huge difference. And the survivor didn't rise up to throw off the Nazi regime? 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'd all vanished into their specially constructed 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 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 color 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 of not just the mass murder, but also the sense of violation too. So 90% of the city, the jewel box was destroyed. As you say, 25,000 or so people killed in a night. as you say, 25,000 or so people killed in a night. Tell me about the debates that really sparked instantly. People might think it's sort of wokest 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.

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? 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 at the time. There is kind of a sense of shock. I think it was only the Daily Telegraph and its Peaceboro column

that said, oh, a new version of bull in a China Shop, because Dresden was famous for its mice in China. Other newspapers 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 sort of 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 yes, this last 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. And he, first of all, he inflated the numbers of the dead to 100,000. 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 Pforzheim, I think, in the west of the 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? Was the purpose of the war to destroy Hitler and the Nazis? Or was it to cauterize German culture itself? 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 had 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 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 got recalled with horror and realized 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. 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 it's still reverberating now, actually.

The electric power of history. If you go to Dresden now, I, and it's 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 in British delegations have been welcome in the city again. There was a time when they weren't. It's interesting that the United States Strategic Bombing Survey said that Dresden 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. It's kind of atavistic, I think. That's

when war really does reduce everyone, even the most civilized people, to actually the most primitive, instinctive level. You see that particularly in Dresden. It's this awful gravitational whirlpool of destruction where both sides have to offer at the end of such a war. All these sides exhausted. It's just death and more death. You see it in the destruction of the Fraunkerker. 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 and done itself. And that, 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 Vonnegut, 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 abattoir 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. 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 what it had been for, what had been the point of this. But there were, as I say, even before the bombing of Dresden, there had been in Parliament and elsewhere, 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 well's horrifying, it's nihilistic. Nihilism doesn't give any kind of hope for any kind of future. And those voices then started to prevail immediately after the war, so much so that Arthur Harris felt personally very hard on by it

because Churchill then began to elide the bombing campaign. Churchill, ever the master of history, ever the master of seeking to control how history saw him and all the rest of it. The bombing of Dresden was, I suppose you would say, what would be the phrase now? Memory hold.

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. I think Eric Katzner, the author of Emil and the Detectives, who himself had been on the run from the Nazis. The Nazis hated him.

This is a 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. It was this extraordinary lunar landscape of just absolutely pulverized stone 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's 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 the 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. 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's an old lady who said to me at a performance at 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. But among the older people, it took a long, long time

for this loathing of the British to subside, understandably. Well, Sinclair Mackay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all of your knowledge on this anniversary. Thank you very much. Thank you. you you