"Dresden Bombing Is To Be Regretted Enormously"
The Feb. 13, 1945 bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Air Force has become a symbol for excessive, gratuitous violence on the part of the Allies during World War II. But with the 60th anniversary of the bombing on Sunday, a new book by British historian Frederick Taylor argues that this view may not be quite accurate. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with the author.
AP
August Schreitmueller's sandstone sculpture "The Goodness" looks over destroyed Dresden from the Town Hall Tower in 1945.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Some critics have accused you of writing a justification of the bombing of the city of Dresden. Is this accusation misplaced?
Taylor: Yes it is. Some people mistake the attempt at rational analysis of a historical event for a celebration of it. My book attempts to be distanced and rational and where possible I try to separate the myths and legends from the realities. I personally find the attack on Dresden horrific. It was overdone, it was excessive and is to be regretted enormously. But there is no reason to pretend that it was completely irrational on the part of the Allies. Dresden had war industries and was a major transportation hub. As soon as you start explaining the reasons for the attack, though, people think you are justifying it.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Was it a war crime?
"Dresden: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1945"
Frederick Taylor is the author of a new book about the Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II called "Dresden: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1945" (HarperCollins Publishers, 2004). Conventional wisdom has long had it that the bombing of the cultural pearl in eastern Germany was gratuitous violence and an inhuman attempt to kill as many civilians as possible in a city that had little in the way of an armaments industry or strategic importance. It is exactly this image of the Dresden bombing that Taylor's book goes a long way toward correcting. He shows that, in fact, Dresden hosted dozens of factories, many of them smaller but important workshops located in the old town, devoted to the war effort. His book also presents a much lower death toll (25,000 to 40,000) than previous estimates, some of which claim that hundreds of thousands died. At the same time, however, Taylor doesn't seek to minimize the horrors visited upon the city. He has sympathy for the suffering of the population and has grave misgivings about air warfare in general and the Dresden raid in particular.
Taylor studied history and modern languages at Oxford and Sussex universities in Britain and focused on the history of the extreme right in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. He traveled widely in both East and West Germany during the Cold War and has edited and translated a number of works from German. He lives in Cornwall, England with his wife and three children.
Taylor: I really don't know. From a practical point of view, rules of war are something of a gray area. It was pretty borderline stuff in terms of the extent of the raid and the amount of force used. It's comparable with other air attacks in the war such as the German attack on Belgrade or even Stalingrad before it was besieged and of course other British and American attacks as well including the big ones in Japan (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). These are examples where you get close to saying "you absolutely cannot do this," and I think bombing is the most dubious form of warfare possible. But a war crime is a very specific thing which international lawyers argue about all the time and I would not be prepared to commit myself nor do I see why I should. I'm a historian.
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