The first wave of Lancasters, British four-engined heavy bombers, appeared over Dresden on the night of Tuesday, February 13, 1945, around 10 p.m. After five hours of flight these 240 Royal Air Force (RAF) planes encountered practically no opposition in the skies and no anti-aircraft fire from below. They began an infamous aerial onslaught which devastated the Saxon city.
“Florence on the Elbe,” as Dresden was popularly known, was a strikingly beautiful place. Before World War II people had flocked there to see the 18th-century church, the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady). The Zwinger, the impressive palace complex commissioned by Augustus the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, pulled in thousands. Lovers of art could devote days to collections of Renaissance and Baroque paintings in the Semper Gallery, including works by Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck. During the 19th century the presence of composers Carl Maria von Weber and Richard Wagner established Dresden as a force in the Romantic movement.
Until the attack, Dresden, Germany's seventh largest city with 600,000 inhabitants, had largely escaped the mass destruction inflicted on other urban centers. The United States Army Air Force had bombed it twice—once in early October 1944 and again three months later. The second attack, targeting Dresden’s marshaling yards, had killed scores of workers. Nonetheless, most of Dresden's antiaircraft guns and the crews manning them were relocated elsewhere in the Reich. Although its historic center still stood intact, the city did not escape the impact of the ongoing collapse of the German war effort on the Eastern Front in January and February 1945. About 300,000 men, women, and children desperately fled to Dresden as the Red Army advanced into Silesia. These refugees packed the train stations, terrified of what lay ahead.
On February 15, a fourth raid hit Dresden. More than 200 B-17s, originally sent to destroy an oil plant close to nearby Leipzig, switched targets due to poor weather. The marshaling yards were not hit. The same could not be said about residential areas. Even that did not end Dresden’s torment. The Eighth Air Force returned on March 2 and April 17, again going after the rail yards and industrial districts.
Dresden remained ablaze for weeks. Bergander recalled how unceremoniously the dead were treated. Fear of disease led the Germans to pile the corpses on top of iron grates, soak them with benzene, and cremate them. SS personnel played a key role in creating these makeshift funeral pyres. The smell permeated everything. Allied prisoners of war were forced to help extract bodies from the rubble. We know of at least one case where an American POW was executed, purportedly for looting. Mass graves became the final resting places for thousands. A widely accepted estimate is 35,000 killed during the 37 hours of terror. Rival claims go far higher. The German government, however, proposes 25,000 as a defensible guess. Since so many victims were immolated after the attacks, we will likely never know the precise number.
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2276944/I-destroyed-Dresden-Bomber-Harris-unrepentant-German-city-raids-30-years-end-World-War-Two.html
i_hate_sodomites 0 points 4 years ago
I lost half of my extended family both in the war and at Dresden. Literally half. By this time, most of the men folk were dead, but the women and children of my family had fled to Dresden (as stated) to be with their kin since they were terrified of the advancing enemy forces.
No one ever heard from any of them again. Some of the American branch of my family spent decades trying to track down survivors and found none. All the women and children were concentrated in Dresden when it was bombed, and they apparently all died. A huge chunk of my family tree just vanished overnight.