Hello, Skip. The first plane is just going down.
If your intention is to kill civilians,
how would you define the atrocity?
Steady.
Bombs down.
Dresden was the raid that went horribly right.
Super-hot air spreading the fire underground.
People in terror trying to escape,
separated by buildings that were exploding.
We just don't know how long the Germans will fight
and possibly have to kill everyone, because they were not stopping.
He is the most controversial British officer of the Second World War.
He is a fanatic.
Was it justified morally or not?
That really is the million-dollar question.
The bombing of Dresden is one of the most controversial events
of World War II.
Now rare footage from around the world, expertly restored in full color,
tells the story as you've never seen it before.
The morning of the 15th of February 1945,
the eastern German City of Dresden lies in ruins.
Further evidence of the Allies' total dominance of the skies.
But within days, the Dresden story is turned on its head.
A hidden source inside Germany feeds shocking pictures to the press.
And a previously unreported level of civilian suffering and destruction
is revealed to the world.
All of a sudden people in the United Kingdom
and the United States were saying, "How on Earth, in our name,
are our planes actually producing terror against civilians?
It's completely unacceptable."
It's reported that Dresden was a city of culture,
with no military value.
And allegedly, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children
have been killed.
The Allies, seen for so long to be fighting evil,
look to have perpetrated an atrocity.
It's a totally different situation in the Second World War.
All the rules have been torn up and kicked into touch.
So how did Britain and the United States come to this?
What is the truth about Dresden?
Six years earlier, Nazi Germany sweeps through Europe,
powered by an era of mechanized warfare,
both on the ground and in the air.
The French, Belgians, and Dutch are overwhelmed.
And the British Expeditionary Force is chased off the beaches of Dunkirk.
By the summer of 1940, Britain stands alone
and under attack by the Luftwaffe.
But Britain's new prime minister refuses to surrender.
You ask, what is our policy?
I will say: It is to wage war by sea, land, and air,
with all our might.
To wage war against a monstrous tyranny, that is our policy.
To try and win favor with the British public,
Hitler tells the Luftwaffe not to attack Central London.
But that August, a sortie mistakenly hits Oxford Street.
Winston Churchill strikes back with a small shock raid of his own
on Berlin.
The attack prompts a fearsome response from Hitler.
And if the Royal Air Force
throws 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000 kg bombs on us,
then we will throw 150,000, 180,000 230,000, 300,000 kgs in one night.
The time will come when one of us will break,
and it will not be Germany!
The Luftwaffe launch an unprecedented bombing campaign
designed to break Britain's morale.
Mass raids drop incendiary bombs,
loaded with flammable material,
like thermite, on dozens of British cities.
There are major fire attacks on Liverpool, Birmingham, and Coventry.
And London is hit by a blitz for over 50 consecutive days.
The campaign against London is a 24-hour campaign
almost from the beginning.
They see and hear the air battle going on as it comes towards them,
so it makes Londoners very much feel that they are now a part of the battle.
The German air raids in Britain kill over 40,000 people.
Angered and fighting for her very existence,
there is now an appetite in Britain to strike back,
and make mass bombing a major part of its own war strategy.
Churchill's stance over area bombing
during the Second World War seems to move.
In the early stages, he voices quite a lot of reservations
that actually, it doesn't do the job.
It's not going to break the enemy morale, in fact, it could stiffen it.
On the other hand, it was an opportunity to strike back at the Germans
at a time when the Germans seemed to be victorious
in pretty much every other theater of war.
If you had asked British people, particularly following the Blitz,
going into 1941, if they could fight with as much force as possible,
the answer would have been an overwhelming "yes" from almost everybody.
The RAF's own bomber division, known as Bomber Command,
has been launching targeted raids against Nazi Germany since 1939.
Initially they fly day sorties, aiming for precision targets
like airfields and oil refineries.
But flying in the broad daylight
leaves the bombers horribly exposed to attacks by the Luftwaffe.
Within a year, the RAF is forced to switch most of the fleet
to bombing at night.
Night timers are safer, you have the cover of the darkness.
The only real problem with bombing, there's no way attacking at night
at high altitude you could hope to hit anything, you know,
of a small nature on the ground.
The bombers' rudimentary targeting technology
is hopelessly ill-equipped for the challenge
of night-time precision bombing.
In the summer of 1941 there is a notorious report,
and they discover that hardly anyone's even getting within five miles
of hitting their target, let alone a few hundred yards.
In the first two years of operations,
Bomber Command makes little impact on the Nazi war machine.
The campaign comes at a huge cost.
Germany's bristling air defenses
are slaughtering RAF air crew.
These young sons, boys, were killed in tens of thousands
by German night fighters and flak.
I mean, they had a huge death toll.
Where is he, rear gunner, can you see him?
Jerry planes are behind us.
Just keep weaving, there's some flak coming at me.
Down!
About 55% of the men who served in Bomber Command died.
There was enormous fear that they tried to keep under control
by various coping strategies, including often very heavy drinking,
because the mathematics were simply overwhelming
that a large proportion of them would not survive their tours.
By 1942, morale inside Bomber Command is rock bottom.
That February, a new commander in chief is appointed,
with a remit to turn things round.
His name is Arthur Harris,
he soon becomes known as "Bomber" Harris.
He was stubborn, opinionated, to the point of rudeness.
Believed passionately in air power.
He was an attack dog, basically, hired by the British government
to do what they felt was now a key job.
If you individually succeed, you will have delivered
the most devastating blow against the very vitals of the enemy.
Let him have it, right on the chin.
He is a fanatic.
He is someone who, once he gets an idea in his head,
finds it impossible to change it.
On the other hand, he would have been brilliant to serve under.
He looked after his men extraordinarily well,
provided them with the best equipment possible,
and gave them as much support as possible.
Arthur Harris spearheads an entirely new approach
at Bomber Command.
Night raids that no longer rely on precision targeting,
Harris targets entire German cities.
What they can do is hit a city-sized target.
You don't have to be accurate, you have to hit something
the size of Hamburg, you know, one of the biggest cities in Germany.
It really comes to a cold calculation of war.
Arthur Harris is adamant that in his hands,
city bombing can force Germany to surrender.
Because he plans to up the ante
and carpet bomb not just industry and infrastructure,
but also civilian housing.
Harris believes the new approach,
coldly titled "Worker Dehousing",
will deprive the Nazis of the manpower they need for their war economy
and cripple German manufacturing.
The concept was, there is no difference
between combatants and non-combatants.
Because the civilians, by their sheer existence,
they're producing something and they have a value for the war.
No civilized country, like Germany, can wage the war without its cities.
If we destroy their cities,
if we burn down their cities,
then we have won.
There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war.
Well, my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet.
Germany will make a most interesting initial experiment,
and we shall see.
Harris has a potent new weapon to execute his strategy,
the RAF's rapidly expanding fleet of heavy bombers.
The famous bomber, the Lancaster,
one of the most famous bombers of the Second World War,
is a brilliant night-time bomber.
It can fly high, it's a very stable platform,
and it can carry a heavy bombing load.
There was no way Britain could fight a land war against Germany,
we didn't have the manpower.
What it did have were resources, technology, and a huge pool of volunteers
to call on for building a large air force.
The heavy Lancaster bombers are also developing new technology
like ground-scanning radar and radio navigation.
Harris trains and organizes his new fleet.
When in 1942 the United States joins the war in Europe,
they base hundreds of their own B-17 Flying Fortresses in Britain.
The Allied air fleet is now too big to be stopped.
They served the wind and now,
they are going to reap the whirlwind.
In the entire Blitz of London, from September to May 1940,
the Germans only dropped 18,000 tons of bombs on London.
In 1944 the RAF is dropping on Germany over half a million tons.
Off the radar in terms of increased scale.
It was absolutely huge.
If you have a hammer, you're going to go around
looking for nails.
And in the RAF we had a very big, very expensive hammer.
It acquired a momentum of its own.
On the 24th of July 1943,
Hamburg, Germany's second largest city,
is hit in a joint Allied raid called Operation Gomorrah.
A fire storm grips the city.
Sixty percent of the residential area is destroyed…
and over 43,000 people are killed.
The devastation wrought on western Germany
is a shock even to Winston Churchill.
Churchill is shown film of a Ruhr City being bombed
and he almost wept and said, "Are we beasts to be doing this?"
So one has this strange duality in Churchill running a war
and this actually proved to be the case with the bombing campaign too.
That year, with the Allied bombing campaign escalating,
Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, calls on every German civilian
to join the war effort in what he calls total war.
Do you want total war?
But the grizzly aftermath of the bombing raids
is played down in the German press.
The Allies monitor and sanitize their news reports as well.
The public are told the city bombing campaign
is focused on military targets.
One of the greatest serial stories of the war,
the battering of Hamburg.
The cargoes of our bombers shattered military objectives in the city
and started hundreds of fires.
The general population seems happy enough with the policy.
The British people had been attacked in their cities from 1940 onwards.
Some think the Germans almost deserve it.
Harris's bombing campaign is relentless.
As the German war machine begins to falter,
dozens of her industrial cities, including Karlsruhe,
Bremen, and Stuttgart
are smashed by Allied raids.
We propose to entirely emasculate every enemy center
where production is necessary.
We are well on the way now to that end.
War is a race.
And the prize is victory.
But whilst the destructive city raids drain the Nazi's resources,
still they refuse to surrender.
That level of destruction usually does the trick,
but it doesn't in the Nazi state because of that iron grip of the Nazis,
because of this black and white world view that Hitler has
of either the Thousand-Year Reich or Armageddon.
Then in the summer of 1944,
the whole focus of the Allied war effort changes with D-Day.
The largest land invasion force in history storms the Normandy beaches
and pushes into occupied France.
Harris' deputy dismisses the operation
as an unnecessary boating expedition.
But to most observers, it's now the surest route to victory.
Many senior Allied generals want Bomber Command
to stop the city attacks and support the ground war.
They know the Lancaster's accurate new targeting technology
is now more than capable of hitting precision military targets.
But Harris viewed this as a complete waste of time and effort.
And same goes for repeated American requests for Bomber Command
to try and hit targets like oil fields, oil refineries, factories.
His bombers had helped drive Germany out of the war
and provided this role, so he continues wanting to devastate the cities.
And so Harris, the right man for the job,
but perhaps a bit of a liability in some ways in terms of his refusal
to contemplate how his force could be better used.
Despite Harris's reluctance, Churchill tells him to comply.
His Lancaster bombers are pressed into service as transportation.
And a new city bombing campaign against Berlin,
called Operation Thunderclap, is shelved.
It looks like area bombing has had its day.
But that winter, the Allies' ground war
grinds to a halt.
Hitler launches a surprise counter-offensive
in the Ardennes.
The Battle of the Bulge.
Ninety-thousand American troops are killed.
And the British Army is a spent force.
The British perspective was, we just don't know
how long the Germans will fight, and possibly have to kill everyone
because they were not stopping.
They were not stopping, they were not giving up.
We have to end this damned war.
The only Allied advance is on the Eastern Front.
The Soviet Red Army is pushing on from their decisive victory at Stalingrad.
The offensive is brutal
and it's costing the Soviet Union millions of men.
That February, the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin,
asks President Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill
to Yalta in Crimea for urgent talks.
Relations between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin
were noticeably more strained at the Yalta Conference
than at previous meetings.
Joseph Stalin felt the Soviet Union had been left deliberately
to take the vast majority of the losses and the causalities of the war
against Germany.
If Churchill and Roosevelt want a quick end to the war,
they need to keep the Red Army on the move.
The Western Allies don't have the will or the means to offer manpower,
but they do have a huge air force.
Western air superiority can solve their problem.
Churchill's misgivings about the morality of area bombing
are set aside.
This is something that Churchill and Roosevelt were very, very keen
to provide because it was well within their capabilities,
as well as visually impressive.
Bomber Commands' moth-balled Operation Thunderclap
is revived and refocused for the Eastern Front.
RAF strategists believe that attacking fresh cities
in the east of Germany will cause chaos and destruction
behind enemy lines and aid the Red Army's advance.
The Germans are having to move men and material
up to the Eastern Front to fight the Russians.
And they have to go through these cities.
If those cities are attacked by bombers,
it will put greater pressure on the Germans,
it will cause confusion in those cities,
it will stress the resources that the Germans have.
Soviet strategists give their approval to the plan.
Once again, the city bombing campaign is at center stage.
Harris is given a target list of eastern German cities
and told the objective is to cause chaos and disruption.
Harris just absolutely wants to show,
as many ways it's self-vindication,
he wants to show that he's right, prove he's been right.
Nightfall on the 13th of February 1945.
A stream of RAF Lancaster bombers take off from bases in eastern England.
They make their way across the Channel into liberated France,
through Belgium and down into Nazi Germany.
By now they are on enemy radar.
The bomber formation tries to throw the Germans off the scent.
The British come up with quite ingenious inventions
to try and confuse German defenses.
One of the most famous is Window, which is to drop a huge amount of chaff,
just strips of aluminum, that they would drop into the air,
like aluminum foil and they'd fill the air
with aluminum foil and the radar would go haywire.
Which meant that the Germans essentially saw nothing
but a kind of curtain, behind which they could not see
until the bombers emerged from it.
And that kept the Germans from knowing precisely
where the bombers of Bomber Command were headed that night.
Finally at around 9:00 p.m., the Lancasters emerge
from behind the cover of their chaff.
They're heading south east across Germany.
Even under the cover of darkness, a bombing raid is fraught with danger.
Creeping across the sky in a slow, heavy bomber,
with no fighter planes for protection.
And this time, the crews are heading deeper into enemy territory
than ever before.
They're covering an enormous distance,
probably the longest raid most of them would have carried out
during the whole of the Second World War.
And of course they're vulnerable during that period,
from anti-aircraft fire and also from interception by German fighters.
You never quite know when something's going to hit you,
and it must have been quite scary.
Going this far east in particular was something that the crews dreaded.
But the thrill of, you know, being in these mighty things,
thundering across, particularly on moon-lit nights
with the kind of silvery clouds and things, you know,
a lot of them kind of had moments of elation in between sheer terror.
On this sortie, however, the German Luftwaffe
are nowhere to be seen.
Their numbers have been slashed by constant combat
and dwindling resources.
And tonight they fail to respond to the Lancaster's raid at all.
It's an unusually clear winter's night.
The pathfinder and marker planes at the lead
can see their target perfectly.
It's the eastern German city of Dresden.
The unsuspecting inhabitants below are just finishing the day
of carnival celebrations.
Dresden has told themselves nobody will want to bomb this city
because it's so beautiful.
Sadly, they were wrong.
Dresden is the capital of Saxony
and one of Germany's most historic and cultural cities,
layered with centuries-old architecture.
It was called the Florence of the Elbe.
It was a city that many westerners loved to visit during the interwar years.
It had exquisite architecture, lots of art.
And so it was a city that was very deeply appreciated
by the cultured classes, the educated classes.
It's not just the cultural center,
it played the role in the Third Reich, economy, administration,
in the world of Nazi Germany.
There were Jews hunted down, killed.
The whole dark side of Nazi Germany.
The city has been virtually untouched by bombing.
It has become a place of safe harbor for refugees
from other war-torn German territories.
And by now, the inhabitants of Dresden are sure
the city is protected by a special status.
People told themselves all kinds of stories,
they felt that their city, preserved as it was
with its beautiful palaces, would somehow be a possibility
for being the Allied capital after the war.
And there was a funny story of, circulating,
saying that Dresden will not be attacked because Churchill's aunt is living there.
Who this aunt was supposed to be, I do not know.
The local Nazi leader in Dresden is so complacent,
he makes no preparations for an air attack.
Apart from the one deep concrete bunker he has constructed for himself,
there are very few bomb shelters in the city.
So, the whole city was in the end not prepared for an air attack.
Nobody expected Dresden to be attacked.
But for RAF Bomber Command, the reality of Dresden is very different.
Germany's seventh largest city is also important to their war economy.
Harris has only spared the city because until now,
the Lancaster's fuel tanks weren't large enough to reach it.
Allied intelligence was aware of significant military production
within Dresden itself.
There were factories making machine guns, rifles,
there's a factory making tank landing ships.
Dresden is a major rail hub.
From Dresden troops are being sent to the Eastern Front,
they're being sent down to Verona, to the Italian Front a well.
It is not the fault of RAF Bomber Command that air raid shelters
have been given such scant regard.
At 10:00 p.m., RAF pathfinder planes
swoop down on the city.
They face almost no anti-aircraft fire.
The Nazi high command has moved all the guns
to the front line in the east.
The scene is set for a perfect storm.
The pathfinders drop their marker flares uncontested
and with unerring accuracy.
The target they've been given by Harris and Bomber Command
is the central stadium, right next to the marketplace,
the heart of residential Dresden.
Why isn't it the railway?
It's absolutely the glue which is keeping the German war effort together.
The markers go on the old,
the Altstadt, the old town.
Dresden was not a military target for the British,
this is quite clear.
Of course Dresden had war industry factories,
but these were more on the outskirts.
But this was not the aim of the British bombers.
The aiming point of the British bombers was the marketplace, the Altmarkt.
Whilst we were preparing some scrambled eggs
we heard the warning, which was this time the real thing.
And it was right above the city.
Okay, boys, okay.
Left, left.
Under normal conditions, the bombers would avoid anti-aircraft fire
and drop their payloads far away from the target area.
Will you put the revs up please?
But tonight it's like a training maneuver.
Hello Bombardier, okay when you are.
Bomb doors open.
Bomb doors open, Bombardier.
Steady.
Bombs gone.
Two hundred and forty-four Lancaster's drop all their bombs
in the space of just 15 minutes.
The sound of the falling bombs came closer and closer.
And I thought, "Well, when will the next come?
And will it fall onto our house?"
It was a fright which shook the knees and the teeth were chattering
and, uh, one was numb.
Huge high explosive blockbuster bombs
and 200,000 clustered incendiaries
smash into the historic center of Dresden.
The precise combination is deliberately designed
to get inside the buildings and start fires.
Large explosives, like the 4000-pound cookie,
blow the roofs off a street or a square of houses,
and then hundreds of light incendiaries fall into those open roofs
and set everything on fire.
And the combination, of course, blew buildings apart
and then lit many fires.
And once those fires got on the way,
they began to converge and converge and converge.
Dresden's tightly packed medieval streets and wooden houses
are the perfect fuel for the flames.
And tonight, a steady wind fans them across the city.
Fire fed itself and it started to pull oxygen in
from all around, a self-feeding fire.
Something that one can't even begin to imagine,
it's kind of an outer ring of Dante's Inferno.
And just a few hours later,
a second huge wave of over 500 bombers arrives.
A coldly calculated tactic Harris has picked up from the Luftwaffe.
This second raid was deliberately timed
to give the firefighters on the ground enough time to get out there
and try and put out the fires.
And then another enormous quantity of bombs rains down.
And the second raid started, it was more frightening
because we were outside.
My sister was hysterical, I had to calm her down.
By now the rare conditions have come together
to form an unstoppable high-speed inferno,
known as a firestorm.
It effectively creates a tornado on the ground.
Super-heated air that automatically sucks at very high speed,
air in from the surrounding area and creates very high winds,
strong enough to lift people, uproot trees,
move vehicles and suck them all into the flames.
The destruction of the city is much, much more effective.
As day breaks, the Americans arrive.
Their bombers are heading for Dresden's military marshaling yards
and industry.
The American Air Forces liked to state
that they only engaged in precision attacks.
But when they bombed Dresden, of course the city was covered
in a great rolling cloud of smoke from the previous night's raids.
So essentially, they engaged in another area attack.
One bomb group actually completely misidentified the target
and bombed Prague instead of Dresden.
When the Lancaster bombers land back in Britain,
RAF Bomber Command is astounded by the effectiveness of the mission.
They've lost just six planes from a sortie of 800.
The next day, the Allied press trumpet the success of the raid.
Bomber Command was using the techniques
that it used at Dresden routinely.
And it just so happened that everything at Dresden went perfectly,
it just ran like clockwork.
Just a few days later, a German backlash gathers momentum.
Rumors coming from inside Germany hint at the scale of the human tragedy.
And anger grows among the population
to the complete absence of air raid defenses.
The Nazi Elite is worried about, is there is going to be this implosion,
that everyone's going to go, "Do you know what, I've had enough of this
and I'm just going to surrender."
Party Boss, Mr. Mutschmann, fled Dresden
and was somewhere in the surrounding mountains.
He was a deserter and a pig.
People said they would kill Hitler
if they got their hands on to him.
But to everyone's surprise, the Nazi regime does little
to suppress the details of the horrific Allied raid.
With the enemy now at the gates, the Nazi's propaganda chief,
Joseph Goebbels, takes a bold new tack,
and spins the bad news.
Goebbels decided that not to minimize Dresden
but to maximize it, to go right up to the max.
What he's trying to do with Dresden, he's going,
"You know, this is the barbarity that we're dealing with,
you know, these awful people who are wanting to destroy everything
that is good about Germany, but you've got to keep going,
you've got to keep fighting because the alternative
is complete annihilation and destruction."
Goebbels unleashed something very wild after the Dresden raid.
I mean, you could almost call it like a sort of propaganda plague,
and it was infectious.
Goebbels leaks horrific photos and eye-witness testimony
from inside Dresden anonymously
through the neutral press in Sweden and Switzerland.
SWEDISH DAILY NEWS 25th FEBRUARY 1945
He tells them
Nearly 200,000 victims of the Dresden raid.
That up to 200,000 civilians have been killed.
It was useful to Goebbels
to interpret this as a terror attack,
in his attempt to win world public opinion,
and in his attempt to paint the Allies as terrorists.
And so he was very aggressive in trying to reach the neutral press
in particular, to tell the tale of this awful thing
that happened to Dresden,
to rally the German people and to shock the rest of the world.
It would have been very easy to have gotten shocking pictures
of deaths of non-combatants at Dresden.
I think for a propaganda minister that would have been easy work.
Many of the inhabitants believed the city was immune from bombing
and didn't take the air raid siren seriously at first.
The eye-witness reports and pictures reveal the merciless hell
at the Dresden firestorm.
The story of Dresden transforms
from Nazi failure into Allied cruelty.
The scene would have been one of complete havoc.
People in terror trying to escape,
trying to keep track of their children or their loved ones,
people calling out for one another,
people being separated by buildings that were exploding.
The terrible winds that children wouldn't have been able to stand up in.
I can't even imagine what it would have been like,
especially as a mother with a young child,
trying to keep a child safe in this kind of environment.
I ran through the burning streets
and my face and hair was singed.
There was some awful scenes, a number of people died
when they passed an open entrance, the suction was such
that they couldn't fight it
and were dragged into the burning building.
Those who could, ran to the park or into the reservoir.
But they were boiled alive or blasted
by the second wave of bombers.
Some took refuge in the old interconnected cellars
under their homes, as they'd been told to.
But they were cooked alive by the heat.
The super-hot air started infiltrating,
coming down through the cellars and actually shooting
through the breakthroughs, even faster in some ways
than it was spreading above ground.
So there really was no escape and this is the true horror
of the Dresden firestorm.
Bodies are being melted.
Enormous numbers of casualties on the ground actually lost their lives
as a result of suffocation or poisoning,
rather than they were actually burnt to death.
There was really no escape except to run, but then where?
People tried to tramp through melting streets
and found their shoes stripped off their feet,
and they could no longer move and died where they stood.
Whether you survived was simply a matter of luck.
Two days later, Dresden is still burning.
It takes a recovery team seven hours
to get into the city's one main air raid shelter.
Once inside, they find nothing but green, brown liquid, and bones,
all 1,000 people inside have simply melted.
Well, it was horrendous quite honestly.
My father was found only identified by his teeth.
There were a lot of German soldiers who were on their stations
in the Altstadt,
and people really got killed.
Bodies and bodies, hanging heads down and legs down.
Bombing the city centers, and by this, causing chaos,
we have to focus that it was about killing civilians.
Kill as many civilians as possible.
And the more civilians you kill, the bigger the chaos will be,
the greater will be the effect on ending, shortening the war.
But of course it was not worth it.
We have no evidence whatsoever that it achieved any effect.
The main streets were again serviceable after a couple of days.
And even the factories were not destroyed.
The factories, the airfields, all things you could use
for military purposes were not destroyed.
News of the indiscriminate targeting of civilians in Dresden
soon reaches Allied journalists.
A young American reporter sneaks the phrase "terror bombing"
past the sensors and it's published all over the United States.
The story shocks a previously insulated public.
It just sounds different from what we've heard before,
exploiting refugees in a crowded city.
And the reporters picked up on that.
There was a media storm produced in the western press,
this was the point at which questions were beginning to be asked
in the British Parliament, and you very much got
the British Government on the back foot now.
Goebbels' master plan starts to play out.
A catastrophic failure of the German air defense
evolves into a model crisis for the Allies.
And when he seeded the story in the neutral press,
Goebbels lied.
He exaggerated the death toll,
taking the true figure from the Dresden police report
and adding a zero.
The real death toll is 25,000.
Goebbels produced this huge figure for Dresden
that's one of the most successful pieces of fake news
in the history of fake news.
So, it's not the numbers which were announced by Goebbels,
so in the 200 thousands.
The town of Dresden a couple of years ago
set up an academic committee
who should definitely clear how many people were killed in Dresden.
And their maximum estimate is 25,000.
It's a huge number, but it's not ten times that number.
And when you go to concentration camps and you see the monstrous way
in which the Nazis behaved, and what they did to others,
the idea that they've got the nerve to challenge what the Allies were doing
on something like Dresden is absolutely outrageous.
The Allies take the bait nonetheless and turn on each other.
The United States blame the British
for the indiscriminate bombing at Dresden.
The Americans worked very hard to distinguish themselves
and claim that they were not doing area bombing.
They didn't want to be tarred with the same brush as Bomber Command.
With the US Air Force denying responsibility,
the actions of RAF Bomber Command come under scrutiny.
And Winston Churchill fears he might be held responsible.
By now the prime minister has no need for the bombing campaign.
The Western Front is moving again
and the Soviets are deep inside Nazi Germany.
So that March, he starts to distance himself
from the policy of city bombing.
He's always been slightly torn over the bombing of cities,
the area of bombing.
He's flip-flopped really between the two.
And I think the storm of protests that there was after Dresden
has actually made him pretty guilty about the whole thing.
He began to worry about how his own actions
might be judged by historians.
And at this point, he basically changed course
and sent a minute saying that we really shouldn't engage
in this kind of activity anymore, and we should avoid anything
that even remotely looks like terroristic bombing.
As Churchill distances himself from area bombing,
the blame for the Dresden attack shifts
to Bomber Command's ruthless leader, Arthur Harris.
Now clearly, Harris was willing to carry out the campaign,
that was his job.
But increasing attention focused on Harris as the person
who had envisioned the raid,
but in fact, Churchill himself had been critical
in spurring the Dresden Raid.
Harris is fairly incensed by it
and famously expresses the opinion
that Dresden is not worth the bones
of one British grenadier.
After Dresden,
the reputation of Bomber Command and Arthur Harris
lies in tatters.
Harris after the war becomes somebody
that no one wants to embrace.
He's not a hero.
In many ways the single largest part of the British war effort,
Bomber Command, becomes someone that no one wants to be associated with.
The final snub for Bomber Command from Churchill
is that in his VE speech, he mentions just about every branch
of the armed service and what they’ve done and where they’ve served,
apart from one and that is Bomber Command.
It takes 67 years
for the 55,000 men who served and died in RAF Bomber Command
to finally get a memorial in London,
alongside the other British Armed Forces.
And the morality of the area bombing of Dresden
is a difficult question, debated to this very day.
We have to balance our great sympathy for the Germany civilians
who were caught there and destroyed,
with the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of people
will be killed by Germans in the coming months.
So, Dresden is a legitimate target and also Germany is resisting.
It's an odd thing. It's almost like the victory of the Allies
in the Second World War was so complete that the Germans have become victims.
It's, of course, hard for a democracy
who fights against Hitler.
It's a bit like, "Definitely, good against evil."
But there was no limit.
The more civilians we kill, the better it is.
There's nobody who says, "Stop, we can't do that."
And there's a point at which you have to look at yourself
and say, "What have I become in doing this?"
and I think this is where Dresden is relevant.
It's a warning.
Re-sync & redact: BLU DUAINE blu.duaine@protonmail.com