I Must Not Burn: The Bombing of Dresden 1945
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. I'm your host, Zach Cornwell, and this is Episode 11, I Must Not Burn. In October of 1871, near the small town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, there was a fire.

No one knows exactly where it began. Some historians say that it originated with a group of railway workers who were moving some brush or timber. Others insist that dairy farmers clearing land for grazing had been the catalyst. But whatever happened, flames crackled to life deep within the woods of rural Wisconsin. And within minutes, they began to spread.

The fall of 1871 was an unseasonably dry one for the Midwest. The grass was brittle like straw, the trees were parched and bone dry, and once this little fire took hold, it fed and fed and fed off of these accelerants. But perhaps most crucially, a cold front had just come through the region, bringing with it heavy gusts of wind and chilly air that breathed life into the flames. What happened next can only be described as a fluke of nature.

a perfectly calibrated freak accident of biblical proportions. Years later, it would be described as, quote, nature's nuclear explosion. This forest fire grows and grows, sucking up all that cold air and combining with other smaller brush fires across the region to create a titanic conflagration, a literal wall of flame that raced across the prairie at 90 miles an hour.

According to historian Sinclair McKay, this fire was, quote, a mile high and five miles wide, end quote. Words can't really do justice to what this would have looked like. There's only a handful of people in a handful of time periods across human history that have witnessed this kind of horrific anomaly. But on that cold night in 1871, there were plenty of witnesses.

One man, a veteran of the Civil War, described the sound of the oncoming fire as, quote, a roar, 100 times louder than any artillery bombardment, end quote. One witness said it sounded, quote, like a freight train.

Another said, quote, End quote.

By the time the fire reached the tiny town of Peshtigo, it was burning at 2,000 degrees centigrade. It melted steel train cars like they were made of wax. Trees exploded on contact with the superheated air. And according to historian Bill Lutz, the fire, quote, turned sand into glass, end quote. The winds feeding the fires were so strong that they lifted houses 100 feet into the air.

Trees were uprooted, and the people of Peshtigo were convinced that they weren't experiencing a fluke of nature, but the literal end of the world. As journalist Greg Tasker describes, quote, One man, after watching his wife burn, slit the throats of his three children, and then himself. In the end, the fire skipped over the family. A 21-year-old man fleeing the blaze realized he couldn't outrun it and stabbed himself several times in the chest with a penknife.

The fire skipped him and he lived. The penknife had not struck deep enough. Another man hanged himself on the bucket chain of a well." When all was said and done, 1,200 people were dead, either cooked alive in their homes or burned to death out in the open. The few who managed to survive were the lucky ones who'd taken shelter in the ice-cold waters of a nearby river, but many more were left permanently disfigured and traumatized.

The ensuing firestorm had turned 1.5 million acres of land into ash. That's about double the size of Rhode Island.

What happened in Peshtigo, Wisconsin has long been overlooked in the annals of history. The Great Chicago Fire, which was happening at roughly the same time, went on to eclipse it in newspapers and textbooks. But that freak accident of nature in rural Wisconsin held a revolting fascination for scientists and researchers. It was something no one had ever seen before, and it quickly became known as the Peshtigo Paradigm.

But outside of academics and weather geeks, no one really cared about nature's nuclear explosion. Until 75 years later during the most destructive conflict the world had ever known and has known since. As World War II raged across Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, the military minds of the time pulled the observations and learnings from Peshtigo off the dusty shelf of history.

They were intrigued by this accidental firestorm that had killed hundreds upon hundreds of people with shocking speed and brutal efficiency. And they started thinking, what if you could recreate this? What if, through calculated science and modern technology, you could re-engineer the exact conditions and environmental variables that had destroyed Peshtigo in a single night?

And what if you could aim that destructive capacity with precision to level not just a small town, but an entire city? What Mother Nature had created by chance, the Allied powers would meticulously re-engineer for the express purpose of taking as much human life as possible. Today, we're going to be talking about something that has been viciously debated and endlessly argued for the better part of a century –

An infamous aerial bombing attack that is considered by many to have been a necessary evil and to others an unforgivable war crime. Today we're going to be talking about the destruction of the German city of Dresden. Now if you're a World War II buff, you are undoubtedly familiar with Dresden and all of the drama surrounding it. And if you're not, that's okay too. Because we're going to take a hard look at what happened, how it happened, and why it matters.

It's a story that demands constant retelling, because with each passing year, new information, evidence, and analysis emerge regarding the tragic fate of that beautiful city. It's also a topic that is a lightning rod for controversy and debate, which of course makes it a perfect topic for this show. In 2013, a British World War II veteran named Victor Gregg published his memoirs.

Back in 1945, he had been a prisoner of war, captured by the Nazis and held against his will in the German stronghold of Dresden. And he was there to witness the chaos and the destruction his countrymen unleashed on that city. While his fellow British soldiers were dropping bombs from 10,000 feet above, he was on the ground, watching it all unfold.

The memory of that experience scarred his conscience and rattled his moral compass for the rest of his life. In 2013, he wrote the following, quote, I am 93 years old. As I delve into my memory, flashes come and go. I wake up in the middle of the night, remembering sometimes disjointed phases of the experiences I went through.

It is the sheer horror that remains burned into my memory and like the fires themselves, impossible to extinguish. The only reason for keeping this atrocity in the public eye is to horrify people so much that they will never again allow their representatives to order such crimes. There is no excuse for the men who ordered this terrible event to be carried out.

End quote.

The starkness of those words and the raw emotion that Victor Gregg felt even in his 90s, seven decades after the fact, really speaks to the gravity and trauma of what happened. But what did happen? What could have ignited such fierce debate and left countless men and women haunted by memories for decades to come?

To fully appreciate what happened at Dresden, to experience even a fraction of the horror that caused Victor Gregg to recoil in disgust at what had been done to an enemy city, we need to understand what was actually lost that night. We need to visit Dresden in its prime, long before the air raid sirens began to wail in the night. Dresden was an old city, even by European standards.

For centuries, it had flourished along the banks of the River Elbe, which runs through eastern Germany. And as the years passed, empires rose and fell, borders shifted, and regimes changed, but Dresden always sat at the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Central Europe.

One of the most common words you'll hear associated with Dresden is beautiful. And it was beautiful. Its skyline was a tapestry of soaring Baroque architecture, Gothic towers, and gently sloping cathedrals, with a city center filled with bustling marketplaces, restaurants, and opera houses.

But Dresden wasn't just famous for its postcard-worthy aesthetics. It was more than just a pretty face. As one resident proudly said, Dresden was, quote, a jewel box, a hotbed of art, literature, technology, and cultural tourism. Another described it as, quote, the Florence of the Elba.

Beginning in the 18th century, countless artists and intellectuals flocked to Dresden to study, work, and live. As Sinclair McKay writes in his book, The Fire and the Darkness, quote,

Dresden had also acquired pleasurable notoriety for the crackling vigor of its artistic life. The wildly innovative painters, the composers, the writers, here were some of the earliest modernists. Visionary architects with new ideas for perfect communities were drawn to the city as well. And added to this, music seemed part of that chemical composition of the streets.

It still does today. In the old city in the evenings, you will hear classical buskers and the echoes of cathedral choirs. Those echoes were heard many decades before. End quote. Washington Irving, the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, once visited the city, and he called it, quote, a place of taste, intellect, and literary feeling. End quote.

But Dresden was a welcoming harbor for the left brain as well as the right, developing into a wellspring of invention and technological innovation. Porcelain, which for centuries could only be produced in China, was reproduced by German chemists in Dresden. The city was already famous, but this truly put it on the map in a big way.

Delicate porcelain china, figurines, and plates from Dresden were all the rage throughout Western Europe and beyond. But the city had even more innovation up its sleeve. The first modern women's brassiere was invented in Dresden in 1889 by Fraulein Christine Hart. The world's first mouthwash was formulated in Dresden in 1895.

It also became the first European city to manufacture squeezable toothpaste, latex condoms, coffee filters, and cigarettes. Not only that, it was an industrial epicenter for optical technology like telescopes, microscopes, and camera lenses.

You really get the sense that Dresden was one of those places that had a self-fulfilling creative prophecy. It was known as THE place to be, and so everyone went there, hit it big, feeding the legend of Dresden as THE place to be. No doubt, Dresden was blessed with an embarrassment of cultural riches. It was an allure that proved irresistible to a German man named Victor Klemperer.

Victor was an academic by trade. He'd studied romance languages at universities across Europe, in cities like Munich, Paris, Naples, and Berlin, and everything in his life seemed to be going according to plan. Until, when Victor was 33 years old, an obscure Archduke was assassinated, and the First World War erupted across Europe.

Victor may have been a bookworm, but he was also a patriot, a proud German who felt compelled to serve his country in its hour of greatest need. So he volunteers to fight in the muddy, blood-soaked trenches against the British and the French in 1915. Three long years pass, and unlike millions of his countrymen, Victor survived World War I. And he did so with honor, earning a Medal of Distinction for his efforts.

That awful conflict ended in a humiliating defeat for Germany in 1918, but Victor was anxious to start fresh, even if his country couldn't. So he packed up and moved with his wife Eva to the city of Dresden.

And in 1920, he became a professor at the Technical University in Dresden. Those were very hard years economically for Germany. The peace treaty they'd signed after the conclusion of World War I was a crushing repudiation and a body blow to their economy.

But Victor Klemperer and his wife managed to carve out a relatively happy existence in the picturesque cosmopolis of Dresden. Victor had his studies, his academic peers, and his students, and his wife Eva had a close circle of friends and her beloved pet cat. It was, by most standards, a peaceful life. But in the early 1930s, things began to change in Dresden. Throughout Germany, a new power was rising –

one that used the shame of World War I and the economic anxiety of the post-war years to propel itself into power. And before long, the brown shirts, red armbands, and black swastikas of the Nazi party had infected the Florence on the Elba. Even at this early stage, Victor despised the Nazis. He thought they were thugs, brutal zealots with no respect or capacity for the intellectual impulses that made Dresden famous in the first place.

Victor was intensely proud of his German identity, and he felt that the Nazi Party did not belong in his country. As he wrote curtly in 1935, quote, I am forever German, a German nationalist. The Nazis are un-German, end quote.

Well, the Nazis felt very much the same about Victor, because even though he was a decorated war veteran, a baptized Protestant, and a vital member of the Dresdner Literati, Victor Klemperer was ethnically Jewish. As the 1930s marched onward, Victor watched with disbelief and anger as the Nazis began to twist and disfigure the face of the Dresden he knew and loved. At first, the changes were small, if annoying,

an aggressive stare, a mumbled insult on the train, but then came the rallies and the crimson swastika banners draped over every building. Boycotts of Jewish businesses, racist caricatures slapped on every street corner. Victor loved his country, but he didn't love him anymore. As historian Frederick Taylor wrote in his book Dresden, quote, "...ancient intolerances were seething hidden beneath the city's perfect, well-cared-for skin."

End quote.

Anti-Semitism was certainly not new to Germany in general, or Dresden in particular, but the Nazis unearthed it, dusted it off, and made it modern and fashionable. Victor was insulated from some of this because he was married to what the Nazis classified as a full-blooded Aryan woman. His wife Eva was, quote, a true German in their eyes, although that didn't stop the Gestapo from regularly harassing the couple and even calling Eva, quote, a Jew's whore to her face.

Dresden was a cultural flower, and the Nazis plucked every single petal. As Adolf Hitler told a roaring crowd on May 30th, 1934, quote, Dresden is a pearl, and we will give it a new setting, end quote.

The city's vibrant, cutting-edge art scene was dubbed too avant-garde for the Führer's taste. Modernist painters had their galleries closed and were forced to paint the kitschy landscapes that Hitler considered real art. Not only that, the artists were compelled to use their gifts for the purposes of propaganda in service of the Nazi ideology. This is what they specifically called Gleichschaltung, which means coordination.

As historian Sinclair McKay writes, quote, it meant that all artistic endeavor had to conform strictly to Nazi ideals, end quote. Science wasn't safe either.

Being the birthplace of mouthwash and mass-produced toothpaste, Dresden had a very famous hygiene museum. It was a big tourist attraction featuring exhibits on anatomical science and the history of Dresden's hygiene industry. But the Nazis had a talent for transforming even the most innocuous things into something sinister. The Dresden Museum of Hygiene became the Museum of Racial Hygiene.

and the exhibits focused less on keeping bodies clean and more on keeping bloodlines pure. Dresden's music scene also fell prey to the Nazis. Fourteen Jewish musicians were unceremoniously fired from their chairs in the Dresden Opera, and when the conductor, a world-famous musician named Fritz Busch, pushed back on this, he was harassed by brownshirts and prevented from performing at all. Things got worse and worse in Dresden.

And before long, the cold-eyed gaze of Nazi bigotry settled on Victor and Eva Klemperer's world, Academia.

All of Dresden's professors, researchers, and teachers were forced to swear oaths of loyalty to Hitler in public. To Victor's horror, but probably not shock, he was dismissed from his post at the university, along with every other Jew on staff. They were banned from holding academic tenure forever. It didn't matter that Victor was a German patriot and a war hero. He was a Jew. End of discussion.

The Nazis were nothing if not spiteful, and the indignities racked up with head-spinning efficiency after that.

The Gestapo took Victor's typewriter, so he couldn't work. All Jews were forbidden from owning cars or using public transit. Victor's wife, Eva, even had to euthanize her own cat because Jews were not allowed to have household pets. To top it off, the Nazis took aim at Dresden's Jewish children, too. As Sinclair McKay writes, quote,

There seemed to be an almost childlike spite in the Dresden Decree of 1942 that Jews were now forbidden to buy either flowers or ice cream. The latter bylaw seemed aimed squarely at the few Jewish children who remained, an act of cruelty so calculated as to suggest something hotter, more lava-like than sociopathy. Around this time, Victor Klemperer started to keep a diary.

Every single day, he'd jot down notes, thoughts, and observations, and he was determined to, quote, bear witness, even as he was forced to pin a yellow star to his coat. As he wrote, quote, I am now fighting the hardest battle for my German identity. I must hold on to it. I am German. The others are not. I must hold on to it. The spirit decides, not the blood. I must hold on to it. End quote.

And he decided to, quote, observe, study, record everything that happens. Tomorrow, it'll look different. Tomorrow, it will feel different. Seize it as it happens and feels. End quote. Victor kept his diary for 10 long years living in Dresden. And thank God he did. As the New York Times put it, quote,

For its cool, lucid style and power of observation, Victor Klemperer's diary has been hailed as a document of rare authenticity, the best-written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich, not solely from the vantage point of a victim. End quote. Before the Nazis came to power, Dresden's population included about 6,000 Jewish people. By the winter of 1945, there were only 198 left.

And Victor was one of them. His marriage to his Aryan wife, Ava, had undoubtedly saved his life, but it had cost them everything else. They'd lost their home, their car, their friends, their pets, their professions, and their sense of dignity. They were cooped up and addressed in ghetto, awaiting the inevitable day when they, too, would be packed into train cars and sent east to certain extermination.

But despite all of this, Dresden was still a beautiful, rich, cosmopolitan city tucked safely away in a protected pocket of the German homeland. The people of the city believed that the flames and horrors of war could never touch them. But others knew better. Victor Klemperer wasn't the only German who despised the Nazis and saw the danger they represented.

A Dresden politician named Ernst Heinrich knew that a regime built on brutality and blind fanaticism could only end one way. As he bitterly remarked, quote, only the most stupid calves choose their own butcher, end quote. The Nazis would not butcher the population of Dresden, but they did deliver them to the slaughterhouse. Ryan Reynolds here from Intmobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down.

down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile, unlimited premium wireless. How did they get 30, 30, how did they get 30, how did they get 20, 20, 20, how did they get 20, 20, how did they get 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month? Sold! Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes each detail. In 1939, the world was at war again.

For the people of Great Britain, it represented an exhausting sense of déjà vu. For the second time in a generation, young British men and young German men were killing each other. But this time, things were different. The Germans were different. The German soldiers of Victor Klemperer's generation had fought for each other, for their families, and a vague abstract notion of national pride.

But the soldiers of Nazi Germany were fighting to establish a new world order, one built on a foundation of innocent lives, racial superiority, and casual brutality. The British knew they were facing a different kind of enemy. The Nazis were at once both primitive and modern, animated by a cultish, white-hot fanaticism and yet possessing a dispassionate pragmatism.

This was a Neanderthal lust for domination refined through the prism of cutting-edge technology and tactical ingenuity. Basically, they were f***ing scary. They were fast and organized and good at killing in a way that Europe was not prepared for. Once the panzer tanks and dive bombers of the Nazi war machine got moving, Europe fell like dominoes.

Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and France. That last one came as a shock to the world in general, and Great Britain in particular. The French and the British had fought and died together in the trenches of World War I. In that conflict, they had been equal partners, slowly but surely pushing Germany back until the spine of its economy snapped under the effort back in 1918.

In 1939, France had one of the most powerful militaries in the world. No one, it seemed, was more prepared for war with Germany. But within three weeks, the French had surrendered. Mainland Europe was overrun, and the Nazi high command were toasting champagne flutes in Paris. And if anyone in Britain thought that the English Channel could protect them from the long reach of Hitler's ambitions, they were sorely mistaken.

In the early stages of the war, one of Nazi Germany's most effective instruments of death was its air force, the Luftwaffe. In the 40 years since the airplane was first invented by a pair of American brothers in North Carolina, aerial technology had progressed leaps and bounds. Almost immediately, the militaries of the world saw the potential for this new machine, its capacity to attack from above, unhindered by roads, terrain, or environmental impediments.

In 1903, the Wright brothers' first flight in their aircraft only lasted about 12 seconds and traveled 120 feet. That's shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 737. But within decades, air forces were building steel planes that could travel hundreds of miles without refueling. Planes that had the ability to carry hundreds of people, stacks of cargo, or thousands of bombs.

With mainland Europe fully in the grip of Nazi Germany and its allies, Hitler needed a way to exert pressure on the last man standing, Great Britain. He didn't necessarily want to invade the British Isles, he just needed the British to sit quietly in their corner and let him do his thing. But the Brits were stubborn. Their gruff yet eloquent Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, knew that Hitler was not the kind of man you cut a deal with.

Making peace with Germany might alleviate some of the short-term pain, but it would only succeed in giving Hitler enough breathing room to solidify his position. And then, eventually, the Nazi war machine would be knocking on their door. As Churchill put it, quote, End quote.

It was an untenable position, and Churchill was shrewd enough to see it. So he says, no, we're not going to surrender. We're going to hold out for as long as we can. Good luck getting your armies across the English Channel, buddy. Come and get us. Hitler obliges. To put pressure on Churchill to surrender, he turns to the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, and they unleash a devastating campaign of bombing raids on British airfields and radar towers.

But the British were not defenseless. The British Royal Air Force, or RAF, manages to keep the Luftwaffe at bay for months and months. And it was at this moment, when Britain was hanging on by its fingernails, that someone made a mistake. That mistake, and the response to it, would have far-reaching consequences on the ethical trajectory of the war.

Hitler had given explicit orders to the Luftwaffe that under no circumstances were they to attack British population centers, London in particular. In other words, non-military civilian targets were off limits. This was an unspoken gentleman's agreement between the two powers. But on the night of August 24th, 1940, a group of German bombers got lost and they dropped bombs on London itself.

Churchill believed, naturally, that this had been intentional. The very next day, the RAF carried out a similar raid on Berlin in retaliation. More dead civilians, more innocent lives lost. This deliberate attack on a non-military target was the first step in a gradual loosening of moral parameters on aerial bombing raids. It didn't happen overnight, but a line had been crossed.

An enraged Hitler responds with a string of incessant aerial bombing raids on British population centers. This became known as the Blitz, and for 57 straight nights, the people of London experienced the same terrifying ritual over and over again. The ear-splitting wail of air raid sirens, the panicked rush to the underground shelters, the shaking, the explosions, and the rumbling overhead.

and then emerging from the shelters to find neighborhoods burning, houses gone, and livelihoods destroyed. All in all, the Blitz would kill 14,000 civilians and 20,000 wounded. In the aftermath of one of these raids, a British air marshal named Sir Arthur Harris was standing on a London rooftop, watching the fires burn.

Harris was a member of RAF's senior command, and he found himself mesmerized and angered by the sight of London in flames. Years later, he wrote the following in his memoirs, quote, I well remember the worst nights of the Blitz. I watched the old city in flames from the roof of the air ministry with St. Paul standing out in the midst of an ocean of fire.

An incredible sight. As I watched, I turned to the sentry on the roof and said, the last time London was burnt, if my history was right, was in 1666. And I told him he was looking at history. As we turned away from the scene, I said, well, they are sowing the wind. End quote. The second half of that colloquialism was left unsaid. But Sir Arthur Harris would go on to personally see to it that the Germans would, quote, reap the whirlwind.

According to his personal memoirs, quote, I was convinced, having watched the burning of London, that a bomber offensive of adequate weight and the right kind of bombs would, if continued for long enough, be something that no country in the world could endure, end quote.

Sir Arthur Harris would go on to become the architect of not only the attack on the city of Dresden, but a coordinated bombing offensive designed specifically to obliterate German population centers in the final years of the war. And his greatest teacher had been the German Luftwaffe itself.

The RAF had been able to observe the effects that bombs had on their cities. Best practices, missed opportunities, what worked, what didn't, and why. And they could use that accumulated knowledge to inflict more damage on German cities when the time was right. As Sir Arthur Harris said, quote, It would have taken Bomber Command much longer to learn how to attack Germany if it had not been for the lessons of the German attacks on Britain. End quote.

After the failure of his air campaign against Britain, Hitler abandoned his plans of forcing Churchill to surrender and in 1942 he turned his attentions toward Russia, breaking his agreement with its leader, Joseph Stalin, and launching an ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union.

It would prove a decisive turning point, and just the amount of breathing room that the Western Allies needed to make plans for Nazi Germany's downfall. As Sir Arthur Harris observed with no small amount of smug superiority and acid contempt, quote,

The Germans never make a small mistake, but they can always be relied upon to make all the imaginable large and catastrophic mistakes. No one but a German would have thought of attacking Russia quite needlessly before the rest of the world had been finished off. End quote. In February 1942, Harris was promoted to the head of Britain's bomber command, but his path to that position had been long, hard-fought, and unconventional.

Arthur Harris was the prototypical definition of the prodigal son. At age 16, he bailed on his middle-class English upbringing and hopped a boat to Africa. His older brothers were good English boys bound for careers in the military, but Arthur wasn't like them. He clearly wanted to get away from the cloudy skies and rigid conventionalism of England.

So he worked as a farm manager in Rhodesia for several years, and he would have been content to live out the rest of his life there. But then in 1918, when he was 22 years old, World War I broke out.

Like Professor Victor Klemperer up in Dresden, Arthur Harris felt compelled to serve his country. After briefly fighting in the infantry, he volunteered for a post in the newly created Royal Air Force. He said he was, quote, determined to find some way of going to war in a sitting posture, end quote. And he was good at it too. Arthur Harris shot down five German aircraft during World War I, which made him an ace pilot. He even earned the Air Force Cross.

In the end, the pull of familial destiny seemed too much to overcome. Arthur did not return to his farm in Africa. He stayed in England and shot up through the ranks of the Royal Air Force. By 1942, Arthur Harris was a 50-year-old career soldier, with one of the world's largest and deadliest air forces at his disposal.

His strawberry blonde hair and mustache had paled to a reddish gray, but his instincts and determination were no less sharp. He was also a notorious asshole. Like, do you know anyone at work or in your personal life who is undeniably a jerk? But in spite of being a jerk, they are very good at what they do.

Like, infuriatingly competent? Well, Sir Arthur Harris was a little bit like that. He was abrasive, rude, and transparent to the point of being obnoxious, but he was smart and effective, and everyone in the RAF knew it. So when Arthur Harris takes over Bomber Command, the thinking around the role of aerial bombing begins to change and evolve. Going forward, the RAF would not be just a defensive apparatus.

They would take the fight to the enemy, deep into the heart of the German homeland. As British propaganda said at the time, quote, Europe is a fortress, but it is a fortress without a roof, end quote. The idea was to keep the Germans fighting with one hand behind their backs because every German defending the skies against British planes in the West was a German that could not be committed to fighting the Russians in the East and vice versa.

To do this, the bomber crews of the RAF would be launching raids on the industrial and logistical infrastructure that propped up the German war machine. Places like oil refineries, supply depots, railways, munitions factories, and docks. But that was easier said than done. Flying missions over Germany was a notoriously deadly gig.

The cities and industrial centers of Germany were so well defended by anti-aircraft batteries and Luftwaffe squadrons that all attacks had to happen at night. As Arthur Harris wearily recalled, "...we could not operate by day over Germany, without completely prohibitive casualties for day fighters, and we at once began to prepare and train for bombing at night."

The men who were tasked with flying these bombing missions faced unimaginable stress, hardship, fatigue, and death. So let's talk about them for a little bit. The young people, who men like Arthur Harris sent up into the skies over Germany.

The usual bombing crew was a seven-man team. Entire flocks of bombers, hundreds at a time, would take off from airfields in Britain, fly over the English Channel, across France, and into Germany. Once they were there, they would drop their bombs and fly all the way back the way they came. This entire process could take upwards of seven to eight hours, minimum.

and those eight hours felt like years to these crews. Being crammed into the tight fuselages of these aircraft was a claustrophobic experience, and once the plane got up to the proper altitude, 30,000 feet or so, the temperature plummeted to sub-zero levels.

Air crews had to wear jumpsuits that were electrically heated to keep from freezing. They had to rub oil on their faces to prevent losing their noses to frostbite. Some even resorted to wearing ladies' silk stockings under their jumpsuits just to get a little bit warmer. And on top of all that, the jostling and the bumpiness of the flights made many airmen intensely nauseous. But the job wasn't just a physically taxing experience. It required an almost superhuman level of mental discipline.

Bombing a target wasn't as simple as flying over an X and pulling a lever. Crews had to take into account precise mathematical factors like headwinds, airspeed, and topography. They had to think quickly in the event of a mechanical failure or bad weather or unexpected conditions. The smallest error could send them hundreds of miles off course, colliding into another aircraft, or flying directly into the teeth of anti-aircraft fire.

But what got these men through it all was the bonds they formed with each other. And that's a little cliché, but it's true. It wasn't just a warm and fuzzy thing, either. Being tight with your air crew was a necessity. In order to do their job correctly, these crews had to be as close as childhood friends in a matter of weeks. They had to trust one another implicitly and become a seven-man hive mind in order to respond to the rigors and the curveballs of the missions.

But riding along with every crew, from takeoff to touchdown, was something that 21-year-old Flight Sergeant Miles Tripp called, quote, the eighth passenger, fear. To be in a bomber crew was to wake up every morning with the knowledge that you would likely die within weeks.

40% of the men who joined Bomber Command were killed, maimed, or captured. It was a numbers game very few airmen won. As historian Sinclair McKay writes, quote, they were acutely, silently aware of the mortality rate for the bomber crews and of how it was more likely than not that their lives would soon end in blinding fireballs. End quote.

McKay goes on, quote, End quote.

It was a violent job, and their lives ended violently. Crews would have to fly all the way back to England with their dead friends sitting just inches away from them. When planes returned to base, it wasn't uncommon for seats to be hosed out to clear the interior of all the blood and viscera from members of the crew who had been hit by bullets or shrapnel. And then they'd have to wake up and do it all over again a few days later. Week after week, month after month.

Naturally, that led to some unhealthy coping mechanisms. McKay continues, quote, There were airmen who developed what would now be termed obsessive-compulsive disorder, men who had to rub their faces in a certain way just before they boarded, a gunner who had a very particular order in which he had to get dressed, from the socks up, a flight engineer who had become manically attached to a certain tweed cap and who would not contemplate flying a mission without it.

End quote. When not up in the air, many tried to distract themselves with alcohol. Others went for bike rides through the English countryside. But no amount of booze or sunshine could keep the nightmares at bay. British airmen would often wake each other up in the middle of the night screaming. In the end, many of them just became numb to the job. One airman named Gordon Fenwick explained, quote, There was a today, maybe a tomorrow, and that was it. End quote.

There's an anecdote from historian Frederick Taylor's book Dresden that I think does a great job of illustrating both the terrifying grind of the job and the camaraderie of the crews. He tells a story about a bomber crew who got the news that their tours of duty had been extended.

Quote, shortly after noon, their Australian skipper, nicknamed Dig, came into their hut and woke them up with the unwelcome news. He sat on the side of a bed, lit a cigarette, and began, you're not going to like this. No one spoke. Another directive came from the group today. That order about extending a tour to 35 ops has been amended. The order is now 40, sorties over enemy or enemy occupied territory. George broke the dreadful silence.

But that'll leave us with 14 to do. We're back where we were two months ago. That's right, mate. We're not going to make it, said George. End quote.

These crews did their work bravely and methodically, but to Sir Arthur Harris and the rest of the bomber command's frustration, the raids were not having the desired effect on Germany. It wasn't working. No matter how talented or experienced his crews were, it was very difficult for them to hit specific targets with anything resembling precision. You gotta remember, this was not the age of guided missiles, drones, or satellites.

The ability to bomb a particular factory or a particular oil refinery, especially at night with almost zero visibility, was next to impossible. And even if done right, it was very probable that civilian areas would be hit and noncombatants might be killed. But Sir Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command, quickly realizes that civilian casualties were not a bug, they were a feature.

The accidental destruction of civilian areas and the killing of noncombatants, euphemistically termed spillage, could be incredibly disruptive. It was a massive drain on infrastructure, morale, and worker capacity.

If you bomb a factory, it can be repaired and back up and running in a matter of days or weeks. But if you bomb the neighborhood where those factory workers live, well, then you've made an impact. A worker who's dead or homeless isn't going to be very productive. At some point, a light bulb goes off, and Arthur Harris begins heavily advocating for what came to be known as area bombing, as opposed to precision bombing.

It was easier, deadlier, and more effective, but it also incurred heavy civilian casualties, including women and children. And that was the point. Harris believed, along with many others, that the only way to break the will of the German people to fight on was to inflict massive damage on the German population itself, to make morale a military target.

Not everyone was on board with this strategy. When Winston Churchill himself saw footage of British air raids on Western Germany and the destructive effect the bombs could have, he said, quote, Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far? End quote. A couple years earlier, when a member of the British Parliament had advocated for unrestricted bombing on German cities, Churchill had replied, quote, My dear sir, this is a military and not a civilian war.

You and others may desire to kill women and children. We desire to destroy German military objectives. End quote. But as the war ground on and the intricacies and inefficacies of targeted bombing became more apparent, it was clear that the Allies could not have one without the other. Churchill could not deny what Dr. Christopher C. Harmon later called, quote, the cold logic and the efficiency of area bombing.

To slay a monster, like Nazi Germany, a certain amount of monstrosity would be required. As Winston Churchill reluctantly acknowledged they would have to be, quote, "...no longer bound by our previously held scruples." End quote. Many British people and their leaders, weary of war, still angry and resentful about the destruction of their own cities during the Blitz, thought area bombing was a necessary evil.

And so, in the winter of 1944, Sir Arthur Harris, head of bomber command, was given the green light to unleash the full force of all his deadly resources on the cities of Germany.

His moral case was clear, if controversial. As one American political theorist named Michael Walzer put it, quote, the greater the justice of one's cause, the more rights one has in battle. End quote. Taking that idea to its logical conclusion, if an enemy is evil, then whatever you have to do to defeat that evil is morally justified. Now, that is a slippery slope if I've ever heard one.

But Sir Arthur Harris believed in this principle with ironclad conviction. He was emphatic in the need for this ruthless strategy, saying, quote,

End quote.

But many, even those in bomber command, had their doubts. One British researcher named Freeman Dyson described his slow and steady decline into moral ambivalence over the course of the conflict. Quote, "...since the beginning of the war I had been retreating step by step from one moral position to another, until at the end I had no moral position at all. At the beginning of the war I was morally opposed to all violence."

After a year of war, I retreated and said, unfortunately, nonviolent resistance against Hitler is impractical, but I am still morally opposed to bombing. A few years later, I said, unfortunately, it seems that bombing is necessary in order to win the war, and so I am willing to go to work for Bomber Command. But I am still morally opposed to bombing cities indiscriminately.

After I arrived at Bomber Command, I said, unfortunately, it turns out that we are, after all, bombing cities indiscriminately. But this is morally justified as it is helping to win the war. But in the last spring of the war, I could no longer find any excuses. End quote. For better or worse, the gloves were off. According to Sinclair McKay, the new bombing strategy would be, quote, aimed directly at the bodies and souls of the ordinary people to achieve maximum moral effect.

A hefty euphemism for fear and insecurity. McKay then quotes an internal Bomber Command memo, quote, And here's the kicker, quote, End quote.

And so, in the final winter of World War II, German civilian population centers fell into the crosshairs of the Royal Air Force. Far away to the east, tucked along the picturesque River Elbe, the people of Dresden had no idea that their death warrant had just been signed. On the morning of February 13th, 1945, the children of Dresden were putting on their costumes.

Today was the German festival of Fasching, which marked the beginning of Lent. Kids were skipping down the streets with their parents, dressed up as cowboys and devils, whatever colorful getup they could patch together for the occasion. It was, as one Dresden native described, quote, a glint in the calendar of an otherwise dreary season.

The weather was even pretty nice. February in Dresden was usually cold and miserable, but as one Dresden man remembered, that day was filled with, quote, serene sunshine and mild weather, end quote. As Dresden parents walked their costumed children up and down the streets, it would have been a welcome distraction from the reality of their situation. Germany was losing the war, badly.

And although no one would ever say it within earshot of the Gestapo, many believed that continued resistance was a lost cause. The once mighty German army had been sucked dry of its best soldiers, leaving only inexperienced recruits and wild-eyed fanatics. This was not the same Wehrmacht that had conquered France in three weeks. And it was only a matter of time before it cracked.

In early 1945, Germany found itself being squeezed between two pinchers simultaneously, the British and Americans from the West and the Soviet Union from the East. But of the two, it was the Soviet Union that scared them the most.

Over the course of the last few months, refugees had been pouring into Dresden, people who were running from the implacable advance of the Red Army. And these refugees brought with them horrifying rumors, stories of mass murder, gang rapes, and senseless brutality at the hands of drunken Soviet soldiers. And unfortunately, it was all true.

The Russians were committing atrocities left and right with complete impunity. And all the German civilians could do was run. Quick little sidebar, if you happen to enjoy really depressing stories and want to hear more about the war crimes committed by the Soviet Red Army and their capture of Berlin, check out the third episode of the show, They Saw Red.

But for the people of Dresden, all they could do was hope that the sparkling reputation of their city would save them. In fact, many Dresdeners believed with confidence that the Allies would never attack them with anything other than velvet gloves. The city was too old, too beautiful, and too culturally significant to ever experience the grim fate of other German population centers.

Also balanced against the unsettling stories from the East were more optimistic rumors from the West. It was said that with the Nazis on the cusp of defeat, the Allies would make Dresden the new capital of Germany once Berlin had been destroyed. Another popular rumor flying around at the time was that Winston Churchill himself had a favorite aunt who lived in Dresden, and he would never allow the city to be touched. Well, he didn't, and he would.

Far away to the west, in the smoke-filled rooms of Allied airfields, the bomber crews were being briefed on their next target. The internal RAF memo said, quote,

At one time well known for its China, Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do." As a matter of course, the bomber crews were never told their target until the day the attack would take place, for obvious security reasons.

When they heard they would be bombing Dresden, they were surprised. As airman Leslie Hay remembered, quote, The squadron commander draws back the curtain, and he said, It's going to be Dresden, right at the back of Germany. And my heart sank, and I thought, God, that's a long way. End quote. An airman named Miles Tripp recalled, quote, Nobody had ever heard of Dresden being raided before. End quote. And bomber pilot William Topper said years after the war, quote,

We all knew it was a lovely city. It was full of refugees. It was full of art treasures. We were told the Russians had asked for it. End quote. And Topper was right. The Russians had specifically asked RAF Bomber Command to attack Dresden. And it was a request that was not without strategic merit. Just as Hitler had promised a decade earlier, the Nazis had taken the pearl that was Dresden and given it a new setting.

Slowly but surely, Dresden had become a key center of wartime production. The cigarette factories had been converted to make bullets, the camera lens companies had been forced to make optical equipment for the military, and the city itself was a vital railway hub for German troops moving east to confront the Red Army. Consequently, the Soviets wanted Dresden wiped off the map.

Winston Churchill, Sir Arthur Harris, and Bomber Command were eager to oblige. Politically, it was a smart move. It simultaneously signaled to the Russians that they could count on the British in the final phase of the war, but it would also demonstrate the killing power the Allies could bring to bear if the Russians got a little too big for their britches. Carrot and stick all in one.

None of that political gamemanship mattered in Dresden, though. Especially not to our old friend Professor Victor Klemperer, one of the last Jews left in the city.

Over the last ten years, he'd meticulously logged his experiences under the Nazi regime in his diary. In that time, he'd send friends shipped off to concentration camps and watch the once-thriving Jewish population in Dresden wither down to almost nothing. Because of his marriage to his Aryan wife, Eva, he'd thus far managed to escape the gas chambers.

But now he was convinced his time had finally come. The Nazis were beginning the process of clearing the last remaining Jews from the city. Victor and his wife were going to be, quote, deported the very next week. Across the city, in a holding cell for Allied POWs, another man, another Victor, was facing an imminent death sentence.

It was the British soldier Victor Gregg, who, if you'll recall, was the 93-year-old man from the beginning of the episode who wrote so passionately about the bombing of Dresden. On February 13, 1945, Gregg was still a young man, but on that pleasant day in Dresden, he was absolutely convinced that he would die a young man.

Not by Allied bombs, but German bullets. He and a fellow POW had been sentenced to death for sabotaging a factory line in Dresden, and they were scheduled to be executed the very next day. But Greg had a fellow POW friend, a guy named Harry, and he was the more cheerful of the two. In the morning before the attack, Greg remembered Harry saying, quote, Don't worry. Something will turn up. End quote.

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention arguably the most famous person staying in the city of Dresden on that fateful day. Like Greg, this person was also a prisoner of war, but he was an American. Kurt Vonnegut, a man who'd go on to become one of the most respected authors in the world, was just a 23-year-old soldier on February 13th, being held with other POWs in the meat locker of a Dresden slaughterhouse.

At the time, even Vonnegut was impressed by the sheer beauty of Dresden. He later told his wife Jane that it was, quote, the first proper city he'd ever seen. What happened to him over the next 48 hours would inspire him to write one of his most famous novels, Slaughterhouse-Five. As the sun dipped below the horizon that evening, the authors of Dresden's Obliteration were beginning their mission. The British bomber crews were hopping into their winged fortresses.

254 Lancaster bombers carrying about 2,000 airmen and a combined payload of 880 tons of explosives took off just after 5 o'clock heading east towards Germany.

It was a 700-mile journey, and not as the crow flies. To keep what remained of the German Air Force guessing, the British bomber squadrons had to travel in a large, zigzagging flight path. That way, the German radar operators wouldn't know which city was being bombed until it was already too late.

Dresden was completely unprepared for what was roaring toward them across the skies of Germany. Many major German cities had a complex system of sophisticated air raid shelters, reinforced subterranean bunkers that could protect their inhabitants from bombs. Dresden did not. The senior Nazi party official responsible for Dresden had built a private bunker for himself, but he claimed he couldn't secure the funds for public shelters.

Many German cities had robust air defense systems, batteries of heavy anti-aircraft guns and spotlights that could fill the sky with flak and shrapnel. Dresden did not. All their guns had been moved to the east to fight the Red Army. All the city had to protect itself was the delusional fantasy that it would never be attacked.

The one thing Dresden did have was air raid sirens. If city officials believed that there was a credible threat, they'd hit the switch and Dresden would be filled with a high-pitched warning noise. But it wasn't a novel sound to the inhabitants of the city.

Dresden had been hit by a couple small raids before, but it didn't suffer any serious damage. Nevertheless, the jumpy Nazi officials made a practice of overusing the air raid sirens. For upwards of 150 consecutive nights, the citizens of Dresden had listened to the sirens wail throughout their streets, alleys, and neighborhoods. This had a numbing effect, and by February 13th, 1945, the warning had about as much urgency as an office fire drill.

You had to go through the motions, but none of this was actually real. Well, tonight, it was real. And at 9.40 p.m., the air raid sirens go off.

Most people obeyed the warning and filed into their basements, cellars, or shelters, but it wasn't taken seriously. One German soldier named Gunther Jackal remembered the reaction in a hospital. A man from Western Germany got scared when he heard the sirens and he, quote, immediately packed a few things together. We Saxons laughed and smiled and said, oh, we're always having warnings, end quote. Then a broadcast comes on the radio, quote,

Attention, attention. Bombers on approach to Dresden seek the air raid shelters immediately. End quote. A man named Air Frank, who was just a little boy at the time, remembers being pulled out of his bed by his mom, saying that the wail of the sirens was, quote, ghastly. His recollections are really fuzzy, but he does remember starting to cry. Quote, maybe it was just the fright of being pulled out of bed that caused the tears.

End quote. When Professor Victor Klemperer heard the sirens, he and Ava immediately took shelter with the other remaining Jews in the city. As they huddled underground, he remembered a woman next to them saying she hoped the bombers would, quote, end quote.

Twenty minutes after the sirens went off, the people of Dresden noticed something drifting down from the sky. Not falling, but slowly drifting, like snow. They were clusters of bright red and green lights. According to historian Sinclair McKay, observers thought they looked, quote, like a bunch of grapes, or a magician's bouquet, or more frequently an inverted fir tree, end quote.

The entire city was bathed in red and green light by what the Dresdeners started referring to as, quote, Christmas trees. It was beautiful, but this wasn't a light show. These Christmas trees were actually marker flares dropped by British pathfinders to illuminate the city for the bombers. It was a clear, cloudless night, and these marker flares were a glowing, neon sign that could be seen perfectly from 10,000 feet above.

After seeing the Christmas trees, many Dresdeners start to feel what they described as a hum, a deep resonance that could be felt in their chest and made their inner ears crackle. The hum, which started soft and continued to grow, was the combined roar of 254 bombers screaming over the city. Gisela Reichelt, who was just a little girl at the time, remembered, quote, Everyone in the cellar began to pray, even those who did not believe in God.

End quote. At 10.12 p.m., the Allied bombers open their bay doors. The payloads are so heavy that the pilots have to account for a jump in altitude due to the sudden lack of weight. Thousands upon thousands of bombs whistle downward towards Dresden. These were the 4,000-pound explosives, nicknamed Blockbusters, for their ability to level anything within a 200-foot radius or about the size of a city block.

They were so large you could have seen them falling through the air from the street. They were, to quote Sinclair McKay, quote, "...the size of three men standing in a huddle." End quote. Then the bombs began to detonate. In the network of cellars and basements beneath Dresden, people start to experience an intense percussive sensation. Everything rattles and shakes. Doors start to slam open and shut all by themselves.

One man remembered, quote, paint and plaster came off the walls. Up above, these high-explosive bombs are tearing apart buildings, blowing holes in roofs, and collapsing entire city blocks. There are no eyewitness accounts that can describe this process up close because if you were close enough to see it, you were already dead. According to Sinclair McKay, quote,

The bombs changed the very air itself, replacing breathable oxygen with a momentary supersonic shock that could either dismember a human body in under a second or leave its internal organs squeezed, lungs drawn almost inside out.

End quote.

Between 1014 and 1022 p.m., these bombs fall continuously on the city of Dresden. Every five seconds, a new bomber was dropping a new payload from above. But alongside the 4,000-pound blockbusters came something much smaller and much more devastating. Tens of thousands of thermite incendiaries, just four pounds each, pelted the city like rain.

As a woman named Nora Lang remembered, quote, Incendiaries fell in great masses. They would penetrate the roof and it felt as if someone directly above me was shaking out coals or potatoes onto the roof. Boom, boom, boom, end quote.

They were only about the size of a relay baton, but once these incendiaries hit a solid surface, they ignited with fierce intensity. They were blindingly bright, specifically designed to burn and burn and burn, so hot that they could burn through steel. Some were filled with a flammable jelly that would spatter across surfaces. They were almost impossible to extinguish, and they had one very specific purpose, to set everything in Dresden on fire.

Anything that could burn, would burn. This exact balance of high-explosive bombs and fire-starting incendiaries was meticulously calibrated by bomber command. Seventy-five years earlier, Mother Nature had created a firestorm that devoured the tiny town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Well, these British bombs were deliberately designed to re-engineer those same conditions and create a similar phenomenon in the heart of Dresden.

And here's how it was supposed to work. So, the big bombs would blow holes in the roofs of buildings and create large open chasms for wind and air to rush into. Then, thousands of tiny thermite incendiaries would fall and start lots of little fires. And those fires would grow and spread, eventually fusing together into a mile-high firestorm. This was the Peshtigo Paradigm, Mother Nature's nuclear bomb.

Sir Arthur Harris and the leadership of Bomber Command had actually managed to achieve the Peshtigo paradigm once before in the German city of Hamburg, and they had only perfected their fatal methodology since then. Dresden had a fire department of over 1,000 men, but the flames were burning too hot and spreading too fast to be controlled.

These men were powerless in the face of it. The Dresden fire chief, a man named Rumpf, described the hellish physics of the firestorm. Quote, Such a natural phenomenon can change the normal qualities of the atmosphere to such a degree that within it, organic life is no longer possible and is snuffed out.

End quote.

The light from the combined fires was so blinding that when Professor Victor Klemperer looked out of their basement window, he observed that the city was, quote, bright as day, end quote. At this point, the people cowering in the basements and cellars of Dresden had a choice. They could either stay holed up where they were, or they could go out and brave the inferno and try to get to the safety of the River Elba. Most people were confident that they would be safe underground.

And they had every reason to. The local Nazi-controlled newspaper had recently released an article advising best practices in the event of a bombing raid. Quote, "...the air raid shelter is the best protection. The numbers of those killed in such shelters is small, to the point of non-existence compared to those whose lives and possessions have been saved by them. Instead of fleeing thoughtlessly into the open, we should rather put all our energy into turning our cellar into a really secure refuge."

End quote. This conventional wisdom condemned thousands of people to slow, terrifying deaths. Many of the people taking shelter in their basements were now buried under several feet of stony rubble. Their houses had been destroyed and they had no way of getting out of their shelters. And to make matters worse, the air was getting hotter and hotter, turning these cellars essentially into giant brick ovens.

Many people drifted off and asphyxiated or went into cardiac arrest from the lack of oxygen. Others simply roasted alive. But there were many Dresdeners who were not trapped, and after the bombs stopped falling, they rushed to get out of their burning homes and away from the steadily growing inferno. 18-year-old Gunther Jackal remembered seeing the effects of the bombs for the first time. Quote, I went outside and the sky was on fire. It was like a nightmare. End quote.

A woman named Anita Kurtz described fleeing with her family from their burning apartment. Quote, The curtains were burning and the windows had shattered. My father wanted to go across the street to find my grandmother, but the fire was spreading. Cars were on fire where they had just been parked out on the street, and the fire was spreading. Incendiaries had hit our building. The men had tried to throw them out, but failed. My father asked me what I wanted to say from the flat, and I said my doll's pram and my school bag. End quote.

The people who were not entombed under the rubble emerged to find a vision of hell where their picturesque city had once been. The firestorm was growing in intensity, forming a swirling pillar of flame in the center of the city that generated gale force winds. It sounds sensational, but this was a literal tornado of fire. The howling winds that fed the fire were so strong that some people were sucked back into the burning buildings they were trying to escape.

A man named Otto Grebel described the chaos, quote, End quote.

As she ran for her life through the burning city, Erika Sedowitz tripped and fell onto the street and she remembered, "...the cobblestones were so hot that I burned my hands. My only thought was, even if you end up breaking your arms and legs, get up quickly." In the midst of all this chaos, people began to find each other. Friends, family, relatives, and strangers...

As a woman named Marilyn Erler recalled, "...I experienced the most reassuring thing that people can experience, being with friends who had suffered the same pain. All in all, the joy was that we still lived." Three hours had elapsed and thousands had died. But even as their city burned, it seemed like the worst was over.

The streets were filled with emergency personnel, people were helping dig one another out of the rubble, and the entire city had mobilized to help each other escape. Then, at 107 in the morning, the survivors in Dresden begin to feel a familiar, ominous hum in their chests. Then they hear a deep roar overhead. The second wave had arrived.

From his seat in a Lancaster bomber, British airman Miles Tripp could see the city of Dresden burning from 40 miles away. He was part of the fast-approaching second wave of British bombers, which consisted of 552 aircraft, more than twice the size of the original wave. Tripp was shocked at the intensity of the firestorm that was taking hold. He described what he saw from thousands of feet above, quote,

End quote. Another airman described it as, quote, End quote.

The colors were particularly arresting to the pilots up in the bombers. Beautiful shades of bright gold, blush pink, and ruby red that made the entire countryside glow. As Canadian airman Doug Hicks recalled, quote, almost daylight conditions prevailed, end quote. But Miles Tripp knew that this was anything but beautiful, and he registered with sickening clarity that the bombs he was about to drop would only focus and intensify the misery on the ground.

Dresden was so clearly far gone that he felt any continued bombing was the equivalent of beating a dead horse. So he made a decision, quote, I told Digg to turn to starboard to the south of the city. He swung the aircraft away from the heart of the inferno, and when we were just beyond the fringe of the fires, I pressed the bomb release. I hoped the load would fall in open country, end quote.

However, the majority of those 552 bombers did drop their payloads of high explosives and incendiaries into the inferno-consuming Dresden. But they didn't feel like heroes. Doug Hicks remembered the somber mood on the way home, quote, So this is trial under fire. We did it. We have almost completed our first trip. But there is no jubilation from the crew, not even a slight hurrah, end quote.

Watching Dresden burn stuck with those pilots for a long time.

They were some of the few people alive who'd ever witness anything like it again. As Sinclair McKay writes in The Fire and the Darkness, quote, "...the bomber crews were flying through an extreme phenomenon of physics, an electrically charged firestorm. It was so far beyond any human capacity to assimilate that it's little wonder that later, back in their bases in the cool gray of morning, so many airmen could not find words to describe what they had witnessed."

Below, the oxygen was being pulled into the heart of the inferno, sent skywards with the shrunken, desiccated body parts and the pulverized debris. End quote. And the second wave of bombs brought fresh horror to an already nightmarish environment. Gisela Reichelt remembered watching an incendiary dropping near her and her family. It was filled with jellied petroleum and when it burst, it drenched her grandmother in the flammable liquid.

Within milliseconds, one of the flying sparks ignited the old woman's clothes. Gisela watched her grandmother consumed in flames faster than her brain could even register what happened. She remembered years later, quote, What did a 10-year-old girl think about such terror? It's hard to imagine what was going on inside me, but like the first attack, I was thinking, how can you be so cruel? End quote. In the center of the city, the firestorm was churning with apocalyptic ferocity.

By this point, the winds were hurricane force. As Sinclair McKay writes, End quote.

This is something that is really hard for the brain to visualize because most people will never experience anything like this, thank God. But the force of these winds was so strong that people were literally lifted up into the air, higher and higher, all while burning alive. The wind itself was on fire. I mean, it sounds like something out of the Old Testament. As British POW Victor Gregg later recalled, quote,

End quote. To make matters worse, people running through the streets found themselves getting suddenly stuck, as if in quicksand.

The roads themselves were melting from the heat into pools of black bubbling tar. And it trapped hundreds of people. Their shoes melted and then their feet burned and all they could do was collapse from the pain and fall face first into the tar. I mean, how do you keep your cool during something like this? How do you keep from losing your mind? Well, the answer is you don't.

The sheer panic people were feeling really comes through in a woman named Margaret Freyer's account. Quote,

Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands and then, to my utter horror and amazement, I see how one after the other, they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. Today, I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen. They fainted and then burnt to cinders.

Some Dresdeners were surprisingly lucid during this ordeal. One wounded German soldier was laying in a bed in the basement of a cellar, calmly awaiting the death he knew was inevitable.

He used the time to write one last letter to his wife. It read, quote, My darling, darling wife. I doubt that this letter will ever reach you. These are probably the last words and thoughts I shall ever write to you. Tonight there have been two air raids, one after another. Now everything around me and above me is on fire. The hospital I'm in has been evacuated and it's empty.

Outside, I can hear a firestorm raging, just like the one in Hamburg. The whole building has been abandoned. Everybody ran off when it caught fire. I'm curious to know how many of them will survive and where they've gone to. Everything around my bed is on fire. Smoke and sparks are making breathing almost impossible, but it is peaceful here in the cellar. There is one candle giving out a little light. It is going to get very hot in here too.

At the moment, I am just lying here in the cellar, which is still cool, smoking my last rescued cigarette and thinking of all the things one ought to think about in one's last minutes alive. There's nothing I can do but wait and write these words. Perhaps you will then sense somehow, even if this letter does not reach you and you find yourself alone, that my last conscious thoughts were with you and with my mother. Yours, V."

Those who managed to escape the city could only watch as their home was consumed. A man named Ernst Heinrich watched it all burn from a nearby hill. Quote, The entire city was a sea of flame. This was the end. Glorious Dresden was burning.

End quote. End quote.

Despite the trauma of the night, the survivors immediately mobilized to search for the missing and catalog the dead. For many, it was the first time they'd been able to reflect or emotionally absorb what had just happened. As Nora Lange remembered, quote, "...a complete matter of luck. That we didn't all die was pure luck. Some houses were still standing, and there was a truck trailer there. We crept under it and just lay down. We were so exhausted."

And it was so cruel, there was this man there who had gone mad. He just stood there and bawled into the night, over and over again, saying, auto, auto, meaning car. My brother was five years old at the time, and he can't remember much of what happened that night except for that man's voice, and the auto, auto, he can never forget it, end quote.

Hans Schroeder had been separated from his family during the chaos, and he immediately started searching for them. Quote, The sight that greeted my eyes was appalling. Everywhere charred corpses. I quickly headed home, hoping to find my loved ones alive. But unfortunately, this was not so. They lay on the street in front of the house as peacefully as if they were asleep. End quote.

Now, if you're an American listening to this thinking that our hands were clean in this thing, think again. Just after noon, a wave of American bombers release even more bombs onto Dresden. It wasn't a calculated act of cruelty, just a matter of scheduling. No one could have anticipated how perfectly the firestorm would come together and US airmen found themselves bombing a charred husk of a city. The damage had already been done.

This was overkill at worst, redundancy at best. But for the people left in Dresden, the most important task at hand was twofold: to find and rescue the hundreds of people trapped under the rubble, and to bury the dead. The latter was extremely important, because if the bodies weren't buried quickly, disease could spread, making an awful situation even worse. The British POW Victor Gregg had managed to survive the night.

His friend, who cheerfully suggested something would turn up, had been right. Before long, Greg was pressed into a work crew whose job it was to dig up and catalog the bodies. Kurt Vonnegut was pressed into one of these work gangs too. It was an arduous, back-breaking process that he would famously call corpse mining. He described it in detail after the war. Quote,

Every day, we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who'd simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead.

End quote.

For the British POW Victor Gregg, going cellar by cellar, basement by basement, was a harrowing, soul-scarring experience. One he described in detail after the war, quote, Inside we found victims. In most cases, the bodies were shriveled up to half their normal size, or worse. Children under the age of three or four were impossible to identify at all. These tender human beings just melted in the heat of the oven that they were sitting in.

In the majority of cases, the victims looked as though they died peacefully through a lack of oxygen, just losing consciousness and falling asleep in the process, after which the terrible heat took over and shriveled them up. Some of the corpses were so brittle that any attempt to remove them resulted in a cloud of ash and dried flesh. It was all so gruesome that to describe what was going on with any degree of clarity is something that I for one cannot do."

One discovery he and his crew of workers made in a shelter rattled him to his core. Quote, "...it took the whole of an afternoon wielding sledgehammers trying to pry an opening. We continued the job of opening the heavy metal door, and slowly the horror inside became visible. There were no real, complete bodies, only bones and scorched articles of clothing matted together on the floor and stuck together by a sort of jelly substance."

There was no flesh visible. What had once been a congregation of people sheltering from the horror above them was now a glutinous mass of solidified fat and bones swimming around inches thick on the floor. End quote. But there was one bright moment, one that might very well have saved 22-year-old Greg from going insane. On one day of searching, they quote,

Sadly, this was a one-off event. In spite of all the back-breaking toil, this was the only time our group found people alive. End quote.

By that time, Victor Gregg had seen enough of death. In the confusion of the relief efforts, he slipped away to the east and was rescued by Russian troops. He lived the remaining 70 years of his life grappling with what he'd seen over the span of a few short days. Professor Victor Klemperer and his wife Ava also took advantage of the confusion. They ripped the yellow stars from their clothes and joined a refugee caravan heading west.

They were eventually rescued by American troops. Over the course of his life, Victor Klemperer had survived the trenches of World War I, the vicious persecution of the Nazi regime, and one of the most devastating air attacks ever unleashed by human beings. And now, he and his wife were finally safe. In the end, the damage to the city was immense. Nothing would ever be the same.

An exhaustive catalog of the destruction was made, and the final tally was ridiculous. 19 hospitals, 39 schools, 63 administrative buildings, 647 shops, 31 hotels, 18 movie theaters, 19 postal facilities, 24 banks. And the list goes on and on. But the best summary was written on a curt letter sent from a survivor to a relative in another town. Quote,

All three of us still alive. City gone. End quote. The material cost of the Allied attack was clear as day, but the human cost was yet to be discovered. It was a statistic that would hold great importance in the years to come. Before the fires in Dresden had even receded, the propaganda war was heating up.

While Victor Gregg and Kurt Vonnegut were corpse mining in Dresden, a darker project was taking shape hundreds of miles to the north in the German capital of Berlin.

Even as the British and American bombers were flying home, news had reached the Nazi high command about the destruction of Germany's most beautiful city. Adolf Hitler took the news badly. But then again, he was always taking news badly by this point. But the Third Reich's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, saw an opportunity in this horrific attack. Goebbels was a small man who knew how to tell a big story.

His thin, skeletal features could come alive when weaving racist overtures against the Jews or diatribes against the Allies. He wasn't the showman that Hitler was, but his talents were more subtle and in many ways more sinister. When Goebbels initially heard about Dresden, he was, quote, "...shaking with rage."

According to historian Frederick Taylor, he was so angry that he suggested to Hitler that they should execute thousands of allied POWs in response. But he eventually calms himself and the clockwork of his brain begins turning on how the Nazis could use this tragedy to their advantage. Goebbels recognized that the deaths of all those people in such a culturally significant city was a propaganda goldmine.

and in the deft hands of a demagogue, it could serve a purpose. The Nazis could use what happened at Dresden to bolster the argument that the Allies were every bit as bad as they were.

Sure, we may have gassed and cremated a few million Jews here and there, but look at yourselves. You're roasting women, children, and old people alive by the tens of thousands. It was the type of bad faith, bullshit equivocation that cynical men like Goebbels excel at. So, Goebbels has articles written in German publications with sensational titles like, quote, Dresden, Massacre of Refugees, and The Death of Dresden, A Beacon of Resistance.

He even leaks photos of the piles of corpses in the aftermath of the attack to Allied press outlets. But Goebbels realized that his narrative was missing a little something extra. He needed a little extra sizzle. The final death tally in Dresden is believed to be about 25,000, which is in itself a horrific number. That's almost double the number of British people who were killed by German bombs during the Blitz in 1940.

But it wasn't enough of a showstopper metric for Joseph Goebbels. So what does he do? He adds a decimal point.

The Nazis claimed that a quarter of a million people, 250,000, had been killed in a single night in Dresden. The numbers were clearly up for debate, but the international press seizes on this particular attack and runs with it, just as Goebbels hoped that they would. The Nazi propaganda minister killed himself just a few months later when Berlin fell to the Red Army, but he planted one last poison pill into the world.

As historian Frederick Taylor puts it, quote, the extent of the wide, long-lasting ripple of international outrage that followed the Dresden bombing represents at least in part Goebbels' final dark masterpiece. End quote. Initially, newspapers outside of Germany were not sure how to characterize the bombing raid. Was this a triumphant destruction of a Nazi stronghold? Or was it a deliberate attack on innocent civilians in a culturally important city?

Maybe it was both.

Three days after Dresden, an Associated Press reporter named Howard Cohen referred to the raid as a, quote, terror bombing. This simple phrase granted a huge headwind of legitimacy to Goebbels' entire case. By using the word terror, the implication was made that this was not an attack on factories, machinery, or resources, but an attack on innocent people, specifically designed to instill fear and terror.

Cohen's article went on to describe the intent of the raid in no uncertain terms. Quote,

The idea of a single phrase being able to swing the court of international opinion seems pretty quaint these days, but terror bombing ignited a frenzy of debate and controversy around Dresden. This was quickly turning into a public relations nightmare. Even journalistic attempts to throw cold water on accusations of terrorism couldn't help but make the Allies look at least a little bloodthirsty. As one Reuters dispatch read, quote,

The Dresden Raid was designed to cripple communications and prevent shuttling troops from eastern to western front and vice versa. The fact that the city was crowded with refugees at the time of the attack was coincidental and took the form of a bonus. End quote. The British and American publics expressed a fair amount of outrage over the idea that their militaries would engage in the same kind of ruthless disregard for innocent life that the Nazis had used throughout the entire war.

For the Western Allies, possession of the moral high ground was critical to maintaining support and enthusiasm for this prolonged, resource-draining war. And even politicians expressed outrage. One British official said, quote, Is terror bombing now part of our policy? If so, why were the British people not being told what was done in their name? End quote.

Privately, they were shaken too. One conservative British minister wrote in his diary, quote, End quote. But the military insisted that the raid on Dresden and attacks like it were not acts of terrorism. Quote,

End quote.

But some British civilians were absolutely fine with the idea of terror bombing. As one woman cheered on, quote, End quote.

Most angered and aggrieved by the accusations of unethical tactics was Sir Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command. By demonstrating the terrible killing power the RAF could bring to bear in such a high-profile way, the humble farmer from Africa had become known as a pitiless butcher in Europe.

But Sir Arthur Harris was angry that his critical work in helping to deal the death blow to the Nazi military machine was being characterized as a wartime atrocity. He tried to explain his perspective in one letter, quote, It is now none of those things.

"...attacks on cities, like any other act of war, are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified insofar as they tend to shorten the war and so preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. I take little delight in the work, and none whatsoever in risking my crews avoidably." End quote.

But Harris made it clear just how much value he put on the lives of German civilians, quote, I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier, end quote.

Arthur Harris believed he had done the right thing in bombing Dresden, that it had been critical in accelerating the collapse of Germany's ability to resist the Allied advances, which had in turn saved more lives in the long run. All of this tortured discourse rattled Prime Minister Winston Churchill especially.

As you recall, he'd had reservations about Bomber Command's strategy of area bombing from the get-go, but this kind of public blowback was inconvenient both for his political agenda and his moral compass.

In the darkest hours of the war, he had reluctantly agreed with Sir Arthur Harris that awful things needed to be done to stop an awful regime like the Third Reich. But in the glow of imminent victory over the Nazis, Churchill backed away from this and ultimately left Harris out in the cold.

In a late war memo, he wrote, "...it seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror should be reviewed. Otherwise, we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing." Even years after the war, the bombing of Dresden haunted Churchill.

His son Randolph remembered his father on the verge of tears one day in 1949, saying the following, quote, End quote. This political distancing from Bomber Command reached its climax shortly after VE Day, or Victory in Europe Day.

On May 13th, Winston Churchill gave a radio speech congratulating all the branches of the military, listing out their hard-fought campaigns and battles. The efforts of Bomber Command and the men who flew hundreds of deadly missions over Germany were barely mentioned at all. And furthermore, they would not be receiving a campaign medal, a distinction nearly every other branch received.

Arthur Harris was furious, not only on his own behalf, but for his men. Airmen who had, as Harris put it, quote, fought alone through black nights, mile after continuing mile by the fiercest barrages ever raised, end quote.

The British military high command tried to smooth all this over by giving Harris himself a special medal on the hush-hush, but he refused. Quote, I must tell you as dispassionately as possible that if my command are to have the defense medal and no campaign medal, then I too will have the defense medal and no other.

Nothing else whatsoever, neither decoration, award, rank, preferment, or appointment, if any such is contemplated or intended. I started this war as an air vice-marshal. That is my substantive rank now. With that and the defense medal, I shall now leave the service as soon as I can and return to my country, South Africa. I'm off."

The architects of Dresden's destruction paid political prices large and small for their decisions. But what happened to Dresden itself? Was there anything left to salvage in the Florence on the Elbe? The Soviet Red Army didn't reach Dresden until a full week after Hitler's death and the fall of the Third Reich. The Nazi officials there were rounded up and interrogated by Soviet intelligence.

The leader of the Nazi party in Dresden, a man named Martin Mutschmann, was questioned by the Soviets. And this is what I love about history. We actually have that conversation. We have the interrogation. So check this out. The interrogator says, What do you have to say about the air attacks on Dresden? Mutschmann.

It's terrible, the quantity of the valuables that were destroyed in one night. Dresden was a city infinitely rich in artistic treasures and many other things. Now almost all of that is kaput. Interrogator. So you're not at all concerned about the human victims? It seems you only think in terms of material valuables. Muchman. Oh, of course, a very great number of human beings also died, but I just meant that artistic treasures can't be replaced. End quote.

This exchange is such a perfect window into the morally tone-deaf worldview of the Nazis. And historian Frederick Taylor leaves a hefty portion of the blame for Dresden's destruction on their doorstep. Quote,

This is the authentic voice of the regime, taking responsibility for nothing, fleeing into a strident ignorance when taxed with his part in the destruction of a city and a country that deserved so much better than he and his like were willing to provide. Dresden would have been saved for all humanity in the centuries to come, but for the brutal dreams of conquest, enslavement, and genocide that Munchmann and his like harbored almost to the end.

As for the people of Dresden, they transitioned from living under one authoritarian regime to another. The Soviets would exercise an iron grip over the city until the USSR collapsed in 1989.

But Dresden was slowly, surely rebuilt over the years. Its most important landmarks were reconstructed and a sense of normalcy soon returned to the streets. But something irreplaceable had been snuffed out forever. As one Dresdener described, quote, Dresden was a wonderful city. History, art, and nature intermingled in town and valley in an incomparable accord.

And you have to take my word for it, because none of you, no matter how rich your father may be, can go there to see if I am right. For the city of Dresden is no more. In one single night and with a single movement of its hand, the Second World War wiped it off the map.

So where does that leave us? How are we supposed to feel about the attack on Dresden? Was this a war crime? An atrocity, as Kurt Vonnegut, Victor Gregg, and so many other people on the ground believed it to be? Or was it a necessary evil, as Arthur Harris insisted all his life, and even Winston Churchill believed at one point?

To them, every day that the war could be shortened was more Allied soldiers saved or concentration camp prisoners liberated. As Sir Arthur Harris wrote in his memoirs, quote, End quote. Maybe the Germans just had this coming.

The Nazis could have dragged the entire world into a dark status quo we can barely even envision. This was democracy fighting for its very right to exist. As Frederick Taylor summarizes, quote,

End quote. He even goes on to make a pretty fair point about the fact that the lives lost at Dresden seem to be held as more valuable than others just because they lived in such a famous, beautiful city. Quote, Why are there no shelves of books emotively recalling the fate of the 40,000 human beings, many of them women and children and refugees, who died in the Luftwaffe's systematic bombing of Stalingrad? End quote.

The American author Kurt Vonnegut, who had managed to survive the bombing hiding inside a meat locker, had a much different, more cynical take on it at the time of the publication of his book Slaughterhouse-Five. Quote, There's nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person in the entire planet got any benefit from it.

I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three bucks for every person killed. Some business I'm in. End quote. But I think the person who best represents my own personal feelings about it is the British POW Victor Gregg.

This was a man who saw it happen with his own eyes. He had every reason to cheer on the destruction of an enemy city, but something about it plunged a thorn of revulsion, doubt, and disillusionment deep within his conscience. Did it shorten the war? Probably. Did it mark a shameful low watermark in the ethical standards of the Allies? Undoubtedly.

At the age of 93, in 2013, Victor Gregg concluded his memories of the Dresden experience with the following passage, quote, "...as a nation, I feel that the British people still have to face up to the satanic acts that were committed in their name. Above all else, I wish to see a doctrine enforced by law that this nation will never again turn civilians into targets to create terror."

I could say that I wish to live to see that war between nations stops forever, but I am a realist and a firm believer that if an ogre like Hitler rears its head, then that head should be cut off as speedily as possible. I am not a pacifist. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option.

I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.