THE MYTH THAT IS DRESDEN

On the night of 13 February 1945, 796 aircraft of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command bombed Dresden. In daylight on 14 February 1945, 413 aircraft of the United States 8th Air Force bombed Dresden.

These two raids were the source of the myth, first propagated by Joseph Goebbels, the German minister of propaganda, that the raids were acts of cultural barbarism and wanton mass murder on a city that had no war industries.  Goebbels added a zero on the immediate death toll to turn an estimate of 20,204 killed into 202,040.

According to Frederick Taylor's book, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, the world owes most of the erroneous idea of the raids to the false accusations of the fascist apologist, David Irving.

Will 'a prideful city' finally confront its past, asks historian George Packer in a thoughtful article in The New Yorker. Packer points out that there was nothing exceptional about the attacks on Dresden.

Dresden was as legitimate target as any other major city. When the attacks took place it was by no means certain that the war was coming to an end. The city was an important industrial centre. Its many factories had been converted to manufacture military hardware - bombsights for the Luftwaffe, radar and electronic components, fuses for anti-aircraft shells, gas masks, engines for Junkers aircraft, optics for bomb sights, artillery sights and submarine periscopes and cockpits for Messerschmitt fighters. The Dresden Yearbook for 1942 boasts that the city was "one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich". There were eight small concentration camps with three thousand prisoners near Dresden. Furthermore, Dresden was an important transportation hub for the German troops fighting the Russians about 80 miles east of the city.

Dresden also had a history of anti-Semitism. Of the pre-war Jewish population of about 6000, a hundred and ninety-eight remained on February 13, 1945. "I will bear witness" the diaries of Victor Klemperer, describe in relentless detail how the humanistic city of his youth turned into a place of terror that ostracized, humiliated, warehoused, tortured and finally annihilated its Jews.

Dresden was ill-equipped to protect its people from air attacks. It had few anti-aircraft guns and inadequate air-raid shelters which contributed to the death toll. More people died in the Allied attack on Hamburg in July 1943, in the German bombing of Stalingrad in August 1942, in the American raids on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Yet Dresden has been made into an outrage of Anglo-American barbarism.

Soon after the raids Joseph Goebbels told reporters in neutral countries that Dresden had no war industries, that the raids were acts of cultural desecration and wanton mass murder.

The exaggerated death toll was publicised in the 1963 book, The Destruction of Dresden by discredited historian, David Irving and by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

There is a marked difference between the post-war reconstructions of Dresden and Berlin. Berliners insist on showing visitors the full array of its crime scenes - outside the Berlin Philharmonic Concert hall is a sign explaining that nearby is the location of the villa that housed the infamous Triple T4, the Nazi program for exterminating disabled people. Conversely, Dresden has gone to great lengths to hide signs of its Nazi past but a memorial bench on the Bruhl Terrace, the park above the Elbe river walk, still has a marker, "For Aryans Only" which serves as a reminder of the Nazi days. Paradoxically, it is a Jewish architect, American David Libeskind who has designed the recasting of the Military History Museum in Dresden's Albertstradt district.

Libeskind's concept concentrates on showing the effect of organised violence on individuals and society. A four minute film will show the agonizing death of a cat being tested with poison gas. Visitors will be able to hear the story, told through his diaries, of a German Jewish veteran of the first World War who was murdered by his Nazi neighbours in Munich on Kristallnacht.

In response to a suggestion that the bombing of Dresden was vengeance, David Libeskind responded that "it was not vengeance. There was a military reason - to subvert the German troops that were still fighting the Allies. The war was not over. Who knows what the consequences might have been if the bombings had not been undertaken".

George Packer concludes - "The challenge of Dresden is to acknowledge all of the war's victims without yielding to the temptation of equivalence; to see the evil of all war and also to the evil that led to this war; to remember that the firestorm that killed thousands of people, saved others."