For decades it has been assumed that the Allied bombing of Dresden -- a cultured city famous for its china, chocolate, and fine watches -- was militarily unjustifiable, an act of retribution for Germany's ceaseless bombing of London and other parts of England.

Now, Frederick Taylor's groundbreaking research offers a completely new examination of the facts and reveals that Dresden was a highly militarized city actively involved in the production of military armaments and communications. Incorporating first-hand accounts, contemporaneous press material and memoirs, and never-before-seen government records, Taylor proves unequivocally the very real military threat Dresden posed -- and how a legacy of propaganda shrouded the truth for sixty years.

The bombing began shortly after 10:00 P.M. on February 13, 1945. In the fifteen hours that followed, 1,100 American and British heavy bombers dropped more than 4,500 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices, leaving the ancient city of Dresden -- "the Florence of the Elbe" -- in flaming ruins and claiming the lives of thousands of its citizens. Twelve weeks later the German surrender was in hand, signaling the end of World War II.

Yet today the bombing of Dresden is embedded in our collective consciousness not as the toppling blow to Nazi Germany but as one of history's cruelest wartime atrocities, a vicious and militarily unjustifiable act of vengeful retribution against a peaceful, beautiful, defenseless city somehow removed from the war-making machinery that had otherwise consumed all of Germany.

What really happened at Dresden -- both the facts of the events themselves and the reasons behind the remarkable legacy of propaganda that has left us in the dark about those events for nearly sixty years -- is the subject of Frederick Taylor's ground breaking study. After careful research into British, American, and German archives (including recently discovered documents, now available after decades of communist censorship) and interviews with both bombers and survivors, Taylor -- a bilingual scholar, translator, and writer -- has created the most complete portrait ever assembled of the city, its people, and those involved in its fate. Many of his findings require a revelatory shift in how we understand these events. For instance, he demonstrates that

• the numbers of dead -- frequently cited in excess of 100,000 -- were greatly exaggerated, for propaganda purposes, by Josef Goebbels (Taylor estimates the actual death toll at between 25,000 and 40,000)

• charges that Allied pilots overhead shot down German civilians as they fled toward safety were patently false

• contrary to popular belief, Dresden was a city of considerable military importance, both as a transportation hub and a major producer of armaments and military provisions.

Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 is the first truly informed and fair-minded history of the bombing that lives in infamy. Frederick Taylor's book, a responsible and long-overdue corrective to a sixty-year-long legacy of misinformation masquerading as fact, will be remembered for generations both as a work of enduring scholarship and as a moving, compassionate narrative of a human tragedy of historic significance.

Frederick Taylor studied history and modern languages at Oxford University and Sussex University. A Volkswagen Studentship award enabled him to research and travel widely in both parts of divided Germany at the height of the Cold War. Taylor is the author of Dresden and has edited and translated a number of works from German, including The Goebbels Diaries, 1939-1941. He is married with three children and lives in Cornwall, England.

Dresden

Perennial

Chapter One

Blood and Treasure

"The English were treasured. I think it was only after the raid thatthere was a hatred of the English in Dresden, not before."

Pastor Karl-Ludwig Hoch, Lutheran man of God, architecturalhistorian, and community leader, is in his early seventies now. A profoundlyspiritual man, he is saved from otherworldliness by a wry,almost cynical sense of humor. His patrician features are folded in asad smile as he describes his fellow citizens' lost love affair withEngland.

"People just knew that the British and the Americans lovedDresden so much ... St. John's was the English church on the WienerPlatz, and the American church was All Saints."

In the garden of the Hoch family's suburban waterside villa is astone monument, from which it is possible to look downriver and viewthe skyline of Dresden two or three miles distant. It was built by somelong-ago Francophile to commemorate the afternoon when Napoleon,on headlong retreat from Moscow and considering where to make astand, was led to that same height, at that same spot, so that he toocould examine Dresden from a distance. The year was 1813. Saxonywas one of the few allies Napoleon had left. The French emperor wasthinking of having a battle on its territory. In the event, he liked theidea so much, he had several. The Saxons, as the pastor often pointsout, have never been especially clever in their choice of friends.

In 1945 Pastor Hoch's family were spared the total destructionvisited upon the inner city. Isolated stray bombs scarred their leafyneighborhood, but the Hochs and their lodgers and neighbors justtook refuge in the shelter in the garden until the raid was over. Then -- when the roar of aircraft engines had faded -- they emerged, to be presentedwith a grandstand view of their native city, two miles or so distant,being devoured by flame. A woman who lived up the hill, a ferventNazi, spotted them out on their balcony and called out, "So, FrauHoch! Was Goebbels right or not? Are the English criminals or not?"

Josef Goebbels. In many ways, the legend of the destruction ofDresden was the dark, agile Nazi propaganda minister's last andgrimmest creation. For Goebbels the city's near-annihilation was botha genuinely felt horror and a cynical opportunity.

Most Germans had realized at the time of the fall of Stalingrad thattalk of victory was hollow. By the winter of 1944?45, even Nazi fanaticsrealized that to all practical intents the war was lost. Ever resourceful,Goebbels now made a characteristically bold and cunning decision:Instead of putting a positive gloss on the German position, hewould hammer home the horrors in store if the Third Reich wasdefeated. The Bolshevik hordes pressing from the east, raping andlooting as they advanced into the neat, untouched towns of EastPrussia and Silesia; the treacherous, hypocritical Anglo-Americanswith their pitiless bomber fleets and their cosmopolitan (read Jewish)contempt for Germany's unique cultural heritage. These were thethreats to German -- and European -- civilization.

The only answer was to nobly resist these enemies, totally and tothe end -- and wait for the miracle that might come any day from thenew wonder weapons that Germany's scientists and engineers wouldsoon bring to devastating application, or from the growing cracks inthe impossible, artificial alliance between communism and capitalism.Meanwhile, the worse the crimes that could be laid at the door of theReich's enemies, the more powerful the spell this twilight masterpieceof Goebbels's black art would cast. Failing the élan of everlasting victory,Germany must summon up the courage of temporary despair.

Therefore no attempts were made to minimize the atrocities beingcommitted by the advancing Russians. On the contrary, unsparingaccounts of the horrors that German forces had discovered during briefreoccupations of East Prussian towns during the ebb and flow of battlewere broadcast and rebroadcast on the radio. Refugees still in shockwere interviewed, and horrifying atrocity articles appeared in the thinnewssheets that had now replaced the Reich's once-voluminous press.The newsreels showed devastation and ruin -- and the brave determination of those still eager to resist the enemy. It was a grim route tofinal victory, Endsieg, but (so the propaganda implied) that routeremained open despite all the setbacks.

So, in the early days of 1945, Dresden waited; but for most of thecity's people, the arrival they feared was not that of Allied air forces,but of the Soviet Red Army. A hundred and more miles to the east, thecapital of the neighboring province of Silesia, Breslau, had been all butencircled by the Russians. From the air base at Klotzsche just north ofDresden the Luftwaffe was running an airborne supply shuttle to thebeleaguered Silesian metropolis. The eastern defenses of the Reichwere threatening to crack, and after Breslau the next major Germancity in their path was Dresden.

Camera in hand, on February 13, 1945, Karl-Ludwig Hoch methis brother, and together they took a number 11 tram to Postplatz, inthe heart of the Altstadt, the old town. Their plan was to snap photographsof the proud city of Dresden to remember it by. This wasbecause their mother had said that, as an aristocratic family, theymight soon have to flee the Communist advance, and so might neversee Dresden again. The weather was wintry-mild under slight cloud.The brothers wandered through familiar streets and alleys, passinglandmarks they had seen most days of their lives. They returned totheir suburban home late that same afternoon, as the twilight creptover the valley of the Elbe, not knowing that they had just seenDresden for the last time in its historic form ...