1945年2月13日——盟军对德累斯顿的轰炸，约2.5万人死亡

They had heard the “whump a whump” of distant aerial bombings many times before. But on February 13, 1945, the American prisoners of war heard Dresden’s fire sirens howl right above their heads. German guards moved them two stories down into a meat locker. When they came back to the surface, “the city was gone,” remembered writer and social critic Kurt Vonnegut—one of the American POWs who witnessed the bombing of Dresden. Quote [source](https://www.history.com/news/dresden-bombing-wwii-allies)

The civilians that escaped to the only communal bomb shelter in town were slowly cooked alive from the sheer heat emitting from the surface. when the rescue detail arrived at the bomb shelter 5 days later, all they found were bones floating in some kind of brown goop that turned out to be Human flesh that had melted; they had basically been slow cooked to death. Have a nice day.

I am from there and I can you tell you this anecdote: The days after the bombing, they gathered the dead bodies on the Altmarkt (a big square in the historical center of Dresden), piled them up and then burned them. The heat of the emitted by the burning flesh was so intensive that it split the cobblestones of the ground, which you can still see today because they left the middle of the place unchanged. So those old cobblestones are like a memorial that reminds me of the past every time when I walk across this square.

Germany demanded Total War. And total war it got. London, Coventry,Rotterdam, Warschau all beautiful cities in their own right bombed by my country. With thousand and thousand of dead. They never had any problem with targeting children, civilians and the like. At the end 60 Million were dead. 25 Million russian alone. A third of Belarus. Half of Ukraine. A quarter of the polish people. Let alone 6 millions jews, hundreds of thousands of roma and sinti. and so many more that were considered "unworthy life". It is debatable if my people, the germans, were incapable or unwilling to rid itself of the nazi-regime. Ultimately it is a question with meaningless distinction. As the moral duty remain to facilitate its destruction with the necessary means. for that eternal gratitude is owed to the allies. To reiterate: "die Deutschen hatten den totalen Krieg verkündet. Und haben letztlich bekommen wonach sie verlangten". \[The german people had declared total war. and ultimately got what the demanded.\] This quote was said by none other than my grandfather, who fled with nothing but his own clothes from silesia. I close with this: "Never again" is not an empty phrase. It is the eternal duty of our people. So lets try our best to make sure that acts like the bombing of dresden may never become a necessity again.

Context is always important. One can only debate the merits of something when they know the reason. 'As a major center for Nazi Germany’s rail and road network, Dresden’s destruction was intended to overwhelm German authorities and services and clog all transportation routes with throngs of refugees. The Allied assault came a less than a month after some 19,000 U.S. troops were killed in Germany's last-ditch offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, and three weeks after the grim discovery of the atrocities committed by Nazi forces at Auschwitz. In an effort to force a surrender, the Dresden bombing was intended to terrorize the civilian population locally and nationwide. It certainly had that effect.' https://www.history.com/news/dresden-bombing-wwii-allies

I’d probably stick an NSFW on this OP considering the ground is littered with corpses.

war is bad guys

My Grandfather went through Dresden a week or so after the Allies went past it. He told my father about it, one of the very few stories he shared. He said he got to the city before dawn, and there was nothing there but rubble and the smell of burnt things. He couldn't imagine anyone had survived. But as the sun rose, tin sheets and corrugated iron panels tilted up and the people of the city emerged. People were literally surviving in the rubble in holes.

One correction to the OP, there were 1,250 planes and 3.9k tons of ordnance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

My grandmother was leading a horse drawn trek of refugees from Prussia to her home in Bavaria. She was worried about finding fodder and water for the horses in the city itself, so they decided to encamp on a hill overlooking the city. She only spoke to me about it once, but I don't think she ever forgot the image of the city burning beneath her.

For those who don’t know, a fire storm of this size consumes so much oxygen that it starts to pull air towards it, fueling it. Winds can become so strong that children can be swept away into the fire, which did happen.

Holy fuck I just sorted through controversial and its a shitshow of spiteful comments

And like they do every year idiots are gathering here in Dresden and try to use all this to blame all the war crimes on the allies and relativize what the Nazis did. It’s sad

The 1942 Dresden Yearbook boasted: >"Anyone who knows Dresden only as a cultural city...would be rightly surprised to be made aware of the extensive and versatile industrial activity, with all its varied ramifications, that make Dresden...one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich." https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9l0v99/how_did_propaganda_claims_about_the_bombing_of/e73i9pq/

[So it goes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five).

Dresden looks lovely now. You'd almost never know.

On February 13th 1945, Warsaw, London, Rotterdam and hundreds of other cities sent their regards to the Germans in Dresden.

My polish grandmother survived this. They had her held in a bank forced to work and even during the bombings had them working on machines while the German staff were a floor below them. Basically my grandmother and the others were used as some sort of meat shield. A bomb actually did hit the bank but did not go off. She said chemicals were leaking out of it and later on when the allies came their Dr said it gave her some sort of UTI. She mentioned how the heat burned away her hair and how even with a blanket on to protect her skin she felt like the very air was on fire.

Daniel Buckvich wrote a haunting symphony that is supposed to replicate the bombing of dresden. When you hear it, it can send you to tears. I heard it played by high schoolers and some of them were bawling while playing it.

My grandfather joined the RAF at 17 in 1941, his first job was to remove dead bodies from returning aircraft. He eventually became a pilot and partook in the bombings over Germany for 2 years. He considered himself one of the lucky ones as he didn't have to witness the horrors of war first hand. I think the toll the war took on generations of people is still being felt to this day. The undiagnosed mental trauma passed on to our parents. My grandfather was by all accounts a horrible person, but how can you not be when you let teenagers go inflict this and have things like this inflicted upon them. Anyone who wishes for any war is a moron.

My best friend's family is from the outskirts of Dresden. Her aunt went to find her fiancé after the bombing. She didn't return, so they went to look for her. They finally found her, days later, aimlessly wandering the streets, mute, with empty eyes. She stayed like that for the rest of her life.

Visited in 2006. They had rebuilt the entire city exactly as it was before. Some building only had a few of the original granite blocks that still had scorch marks on them. Was pretty interesting

The people in this comment section are cringy af. 100 million people died as a result of German and Japanese aggression. I see people cursing america. It’s war, you ever wonder how you would feel if the country you found out had death camps is still resisting in futility? I knew a man through a church that liberated Dachau. What a horrible story. End it. I’d call the same

It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

This is horrifying of course, but I think it's important to note that the reason the bombing of Dresden is so well known in the west is because of Nazi propaganda. There are many, many worse horrors that happened in WW2 (the obvious one, the Nazi war crimes in Russia, the rape of Nanjing, the Rape of Manila, the fire bombing of Tokyo, etc.). Until recently the story was that 200-500 thousand were killed in Dresden, but the number is actually around 25,000. It was Goebbels himself that spread the rumor that it was so high. And it worked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing\_of\_Dresden\_in\_World\_War\_II Any loss of life is horrifying, but I just think it's messed up that the Nazis used Dresden to make the allies look bad. And it worked. Propaganda is scary effective.