In the UK, people on the left generally view the firestorms that were created to wipe out whole cities in the same way that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are viewed -- slaughters which have NO justification.

Some background:  http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWdresden.htm

From the WSWS obituary of Kurt Vonnegut:

"On February 13, 1945, the British and Americans bombed Dresden, which Vonnegut later called in an interview, “a city full of museums and zoos—man at his greatest.” The bombing created a firestorm in which 135,000 people died—a major atrocity of the Second World War.

Vonnegut and his fellow POWs sheltered in a meat-storage area called Slaughterhouse Five. When he returned to the surface, he found the city had been razed to the ground. He and his fellow POWs were ordered to help dispose of the dead.

It was this event, more than any other, which conditioned his view of life. He developed a hatred of violence and inhumanity."

 http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/apr2007/vonn-a27.shtml

Well we also have some popular historical revisionism regarding the allied bombing of German civilians. They were victims for sure, as any civilian that gets bombed is. And Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin Ruhrgebiet all deserve to be officially acknowledged as war crimes in respect to the innocent victims. But that no way at all lends any support to NeoNazi revisionism either. In fact, I can't see how one war crime can ever pardon another.

Here in Britian, in popular culture those dreadful acts are nigh on celebrated by many ignorant people and like your NeoNAzis the history they tell is very selective and biased. And full of excuses. Sadly we are also living with similar excuses being used to justify murdering civillians in Iraq and Afghanistan right now.

I worked for large company in London once. The company was owned by a family company in Munich. One Christmas an employee who was notorious for her anti-German remarks was given the task of booking the Christmas party. She booked one of the RAF (britische Luftwaffe) airbases that was used to fire bomb Hamburg. I threw a fit and made my German colleagues aware of the situation in fact one of them was actually from Hamburg. About a dozen of us vocally boycotted the party. We all went to the pub and got rat arsed instead.

The anniversary of the Dresden bombing belongs to the memory of those killed and no one else. Certainly not Nazis of all people.

Mach's gut!

This article in the New Statesman is from someone who who thinks the war was justified, some extracts:

"Did America and Britain commit a war crime by bombing civilian populations in the cities of Germany and Japan during the Second World War? I examine this question in my book Among the Dead Cities, and unequivocally answer "yes". This has caused a predictable outburst of controversy among historians who believe they own the war and who, besides resenting any trespass on their terrain, are not predisposed to thinking in these terms about any aspect of our endeavours in 1939-45.

I have always accepted this was a just war for the Allied side, against dangerous and wicked aggressors. Losing it would itself have been a crime, as well as a disaster. And yet, if we did do anything questionable in the course of that war, we should have the maturity and courage to acknowledge it, and learn from it, because we are still fighting wars, and may have to fight yet more.

...

The historians also often ignore the fact that during the first three years of war the British government publicly forswore any plans to bomb civilian populations, and changed tack only in February 1942, when whole urban areas were nominated as primary targets. They ignore the Morgenthau Plan for a divided, de-industrialised, wholly rural postwar Germany. The bombing campaign served this aim by destroying the libraries, schools, universities, archives, concert halls, art galleries, studios, monuments and architectural treasures that sustained German culture. They also ignore the popular anti-bombing campaign in Britain itself, and play down Winston Churchill's own ambiguous attitude - and his eventual serious doubts - about its legitimacy.

...

Until now, discussion of the Allied bombing campaigns has focused on a few egregious events, such as the attacks on Dresden and Hiroshima. Among the Dead Cities puts the morality of the entire bombing war under scrutiny, and I bring into relief not just the forgotten great pre-war debate about bombing, and the Morgenthau Plan, but also the nature of the attacks and the weapons used in them, such as an early form of napalm and the phosphorus bombs whose use was recently condemned in Iraq.

The first ever bombing raid occurred when an Italian airman threw grenades from his biplane on to Turkish troops in North Africa in 1911. His actions were regarded as unsporting, because the Turks could not fight back. Panic set in when Germany sent its First World War Zeppelin and Gotha bombers to England, killing 1,500 people: what if thousands of bombers swarmed over a European city, dropping devastation? It seemed that the growing power of military technology threatened the end of civilisation. This was why, in the ill-fated Geneva talks, it was proposed that all flight be banned. The British and French governments, which had found that bombing tribesmen was a useful method of policing their respective empires, opposed the idea. Sir Arthur Harris, who led RAF Bomber Command for much of the Second World War, had served in Iraq, where in the 1920s he supervised the use of bombing to pacify colonial dissent.

In the early years of the Second World War, RAF Bomber Command was under strict instructions to avoid civilian casualties at all costs. Indeed, until 10 May 1940 (the day of Germany's in-vasion of the Netherlands, Belgium and France) RAF bombers were not allowed to cross the coast of the Continent for fear of inadvertently harming civilians. But on 14 February 1942 a new directive was issued to Bomber Command stating that its primary target was the morale of the enemy population. This launched the carpet bombing of Germany's civilian populations.

From then until the bombing campaign ended in April 1945 the number, size and capacity of British bombers steadily increased. In summer 1943 came the first really big-scale destructive raid: the firebombing of Hamburg, which killed 45,000 people in one night, far more than in the Dresden raid two years later. Many were asphyxiated by the heat that sucked all the oxygen from their bomb shelters. Others burned to death by phosphorus which reignited when they clambered from the canals into which they had leaped to put out the first flames.

...

The vigorous British wartime campaign against such assaults was led by the Committee for the Abolition of Night Bombing, under Vera Brittain, among others. It lobbied inside and outside parliament to get area bombing stopped, and Brittain wrote a brilliant pamphlet, Seed of Chaos, setting out the case. When published in the US in 1944 it caused an outcry.

All these factors, and the debates before and after the war, force the conclusion that Allied area bombing was a war crime. Contrast it with the tactical bombing of the invasion fleet which helped protect Britain in 1940, and with the bombing on either side of D-Day in France. Contrast it also with the US bombing in the European theatre, which strangled Germany's war effort. In fighting a just war, the Allies showed that these uses of bombing were effective. In contrast, terrorising and killing as many women, children and elderly people in their homes as possible, in the hope that the population at large would beg to surrender, was ultimately useless and morally unacceptable. It also looks horrendous.

On 29 March 1945 Churchill wrote to Sir Charles Portal, head of the RAF: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, 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." Bomber Command refused to accept this memo, because it constituted an admission, in effect, of war crimes. It was returned to Churchill with the demand that it be rephrased. He complied; but the memo was kept on file, and RAF official historians published it in their 1961 account of the air war, thereby acknowledging the disquiet that they and others felt about this aspect of our wartime endeavours.

In Iraq today the bombs and missiles are acknowledged to cause "collateral damage" - but without mention of casualty figures. However, one US squadron (the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing) indiscreetly announced in 2004 that since the invasion in spring 2003 it had dropped more than half a million tonnes of ordnance on Iraq. Can it be acceptable, after the Second World War, and the repeated efforts to reach international agreement on laws of war, that civilians should still be in the front line of conflict? Epictetus used to ask his students when he had taught them the principles of his ethics: how long will it take you to grow wise? The experience of Allied area bombing in the Second World War shows that the same question still applies.

 http://www.newstatesman.com/200602270022

I think what may be inobvious from the cultural barrier here is that in Germany the acknowledgment of what happened in places like Dresden and Hamburg isn't generally an issue for most people. It's here in Britain that people are largely ignorant of the matter. In Germany they have been busier kicking up a fuss about how "denazification" never really happened, how the State still blames van der Lubbe for the Reichstag fire, dealing with NeoNazi thugs and political parties, how mainstream politicians are cynically using the language and policies of the NeoNazis, how vulnerable foreigners are getting...

In Germany there is no great popular movement to demand apologies from the Allies (unlike some Americans with the Japanese- my grandmother lost most of her brothers at the hands of the Japanense and I never heard anyone complain that Hirohito hadn't said a few words of contrition... what would they change?) I just wonder when the American state is going to issue an apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Anyway, the word Holocaust has (sadly) a lot more resonance in German than it has in English, here it's becoming robbed of all meaning from being over used and therefore normalised. And I think this is one of Maria's points. To compare the atrocity of Dresden with immense systematic and industrialised attempt to wipe out Jews and subhumans is really an outrage which basically serves to make out the German suffered as much injustice as teh Jews, gays, communists, Slavs etc etc etc

It is also an outrage for the Nazis to try hijack the atrocity and encourage people to forget how it all started and who started it all.

...to excuse a very real wartime atrocity, the death toll figures for Dresden cited here and in the sources cited above are not particularly trustworthy. Vonnegut took his figure of 135,000 from David Irving's notoriously unreliable 'Bombing of Dresden' which included a number of documents which Irving knew were not primary sources and were subsequently proved to be forgeries ( a fact which has not, however, stopped him reiterating them) Contemporary German wartime sources actually report a figure of between 24-35,000 deaths. I do not wish to undermine this event as a wartime atrocity, but the likes of Irving has deliberately inflated the deaths at Dresden at the same time he has been seeking to minimise death toll figures from the holocaust.

Observer -- I agree, WSWS.org shouldn't have used that figure, the other site I referenced has:

"Recent research suggest that 35,000 were killed but some German sources have argued that it was over 100,000."

 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWdresden.htm

There was no war in Dresden. True, planes came over nearly every day and the sirens wailed, but the planes were always en route elsewhere. The alarms furnished a relief period in a tedious work day, a social event, a chance to gossip in the shelters. The shelters, in fact, were not much more than a gesture, casual recognition of the national emergency: wine cellars and basements with benches in them and sandbags blocking the windows, for the most part. There were a few more adequate bunkers in the centre of the city, close to the government offices, but nothing like the staunch subterranean fortress that rendered Berlin impervious to her daily pounding. Dresden had no reason to prepare for attack – and thereby hangs a beastly tale.

Dresden was surely among the world’s most lovely cities. Her streets were broad, lined with shade-trees. She was sprinkled with countless little parks and statuary. She had marvellous old churches, libraries, museums, theatres, art galleries, beer gardens, a zoo and a renowned university.

It was at one time a tourist’s paradise. They would be far better informed on the city’s delights than am I. But the impression I have is that in Dresden – in the physical city – were the symbols of the good life; pleasant, honest, intelligent. In the swastika’s shadow, those symbols of the dignity and hope of mankind stood waiting, monuments to truth. The accumulated treasure of hundreds of years, Dresden spoke eloquently of those things excellent in European civilisa-tion wherein our debt lies deep.

I was a prisoner, hungry, dirty and full of hate for our captors, but I loved that city and saw the blessed wonder of her past and the rich promise of her future.

In February 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and embers; disembowelled her with high explosives and cremated her with incendiaries.

The atom bomb may represent a fabulous advance, but it is interesting to note that primitive TNT and thermite managed to exterminate in one bloody night more people than died in the whole London blitz. Fortress Dresden fired a dozen shots at our airmen. Once back at their bases and sipping hot coffee, they probably remarked: “Flak unusually light tonight. Well, guess it’s time to turn in.” Captured British pilots from tactical fighter units (covering frontline troops) used to chide those who had flown heavy bombers on city raids with: “How on earth did you stand the stink of boiling urine and burning perambulators?”

A perfectly routine piece of news: “Last night our planes attacked Dresden. All planes returned safely.” The only good German is a dead one: over 100,000 evil men, women, and children (the able-bodied were at the fronts) forever purged of their sins against humanity. By chance, I met a bombardier who had taken part in the attack. “We hated to do it,” he told me.

The night they came over, we spent in an underground meat locker in a slaughterhouse. We were lucky, for it was the best shelter in town. Giants stalked the earth above us. First came the soft murmur of their dancing on the outskirts, then the grumbling of their plodding towards us, and finally the ear-splitting crashes of their heels upon us – and thence to the outskirts again. Back and forth they swept: saturation bombing.

“I screamed and I wept and I clawed the walls of our shelter,” an old lady told me. “I prayed to God to ‘please, please, please, dear God, stop them’. But he didn’t hear me. No power could stop them. On they came, wave after wave. There was no way we could surrender; no way to tell them we couldn’t stand it any more. There was nothing anyone could do but sit and wait for morning.” Her daughter and grandson were killed.

Our little prison was burnt to the ground. We were to be evacuated to an outlying camp occupied by South African prisoners. Our guards were a melancholy lot, aged Volkssturmers and disabled veterans. Most of them were Dresden residents and had friends and families somewhere in the holocaust. A corporal, who had lost an eye after two years on the Russian front, ascertained before we marched that his wife, his two children and both of his parents had been killed. He had one cigarette. He shared it with me.

Our march to new quarters took us to the city’s edge. It was impossible to believe that anyone had survived in its heart. Ordinarily, the day would have been cold, but occasional gusts from the colossal inferno made us sweat. And ordinarily, the day would have been clear and bright, but an opaque and towering cloud turned noon to twilight.

A grim procession clogged the outbound highways; people with blackened faces streaked with tears, some bearing wounded, some bearing dead. They gathered in the fields. No one spoke. A few with Red Cross armbands did what they could for the casualties.

Settled with the South Africans, we enjoyed a week without work. At the end of it, communications were reestablished with higher headquarters and we were ordered to hike seven miles to the area hardest hit.

Nothing in the district had escaped the fury. A city of jagged building shells, of splintered statuary and shattered trees; every vehicle stopped, gnarled and burnt, left to rust or rot in the path of the frenzied might. The only sounds other than our own were those of falling plaster and their echoes.

I cannot describe the desolation properly, but I can give an idea of how it made us feel, in the words of a delirious British soldier in a makeshift POW hospital: “It’s frightenin’, I tell you. I would walk down one of them bloody streets and feel a thousand eyes on the back of me ’ead. I would ’ear ’em whis-perin’ behind me. I would turn around to look at ’em and there wouldn’t be a bloomin’ soul in sight. You can feel ’em and you can ’ear ’em but there’s never anybody there.” We knew what he said was so.

For “salvage” work, we were divided into small crews, each under a guard. Our ghoulish mission was to search for bodies. It was rich hunting that day and the many thereafter. We started on a small scale – here a leg, there an arm, and an occasional baby – but struck a mother lode before noon.

We cut our way through a basement wall to discover a reeking hash of over 100 human beings. Flame must have swept through before the building’s collapse sealed the exits, because the flesh of those within resembled the texture of prunes. Our job, it was explained, was to wade into the shambles and bring forth the remains. Encouraged by cuffing and guttural abuse, wade in we did. We did exactly that, for the floor was covered with an unsavoury broth from burst water mains and viscera.

A number of victims, not killed outright, had attempted to escape through a narrow emergency exit. At any rate, there were several bodies packed tightly into the passageway. Their leader had made it halfway up the steps before he was buried up to his neck in falling brick and plaster. He was about 15, I think.

It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but, boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children. The shelter I have described and innumerable others like it were filled with them. We had to exhume their bodies and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks, so I know.

The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great was the toll. There was not enough labour to do it nicely, so a man with a flamethrower was sent down instead, and he cremated them where they lay. Burnt alive, suffocated, crushed – men, women, and children indiscriminately killed.

For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal, but the result was equally cruel and heartless. That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth.

When we had become used to the darkness, the odour and the carnage, we began musing as to what each of the corpses had been in life. It was a sordid game: “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief . . .” Some had fat purses and jewellery, others had precious foodstuffs. A boy had his dog still leashed to him.

Renegade Ukrainians in German uniform were in charge of our operations in the shelters proper. They were roaring drunk from adjacent wine cellars and seemed to enjoy their job hugely. It was a profitable one, for they stripped each body of valuables before we carried it to the street. Death became so commonplace that we could joke about our dismal burdens and cast them about like so much garbage.

Not so with the first of them, especially the young: we had lifted them on to the stretchers with care, laying them out with some semblance of funeral dignity in their last resting place before the pyre. But our awed and sorrowful propriety gave way, as I said, to rank callousness. At the end of a grisly day, we would smoke and survey the impressive heap of dead accumulated. One of us flipped his cigarette butt into the pile: “Hell’s bells,” he said, “I’m ready for Death any time he wants to come after me.”

A few days after the raid, the sirens screamed again. The listless and heartsick survivors were showered this time with leaflets. I lost my copy of the epic, but remember that it ran something like this: “To the people of Dresden: we were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traffic your railroad facilities have been carrying. We realise that we haven’t always hit our objectives. Destruction of anything other than military objectives was unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war.”

That explained the slaughter to everyone’s satisfaction, I am sure, but it aroused no little contempt. It is a fact that 48 hours after the last B-17 had droned west for a well-earned rest, labour battalions had swarmed over the damaged rail yards and restored them to nearly normal service. None of the rail bridges over the Elbe was knocked out of commission. Bomb-sight manufacturers should blush to know that their marvellous devices laid bombs down as much as three miles wide of what the military claimed to be aiming for.

The leaflet should have said: “We hit every blessed church, hospital, school, museum, theatre, your university, the zoo, and every apartment building in town, but we honestly weren’t trying hard to do it. C’est la guerre. So sorry. Besides, saturation bombing is all the rage these days, you know.”

There was tactical significance: stop the railroads. An excellent manoeuvre, no doubt, but the technique was horrible. The planes started kicking high explosives and incendiaries through their bomb-bays at the city limits, and for all the pattern their hits presented, they must have been briefed by a Ouija board.

Tabulate the loss against the gain. Over 100,000 noncombatants and a magnificent city destroyed by bombs dropped wide of the stated objectives: the railroads were knocked out for roughly two days. The Germans counted it the greatest loss of life suffered in any single raid. The death of Dresden was a bitter tragedy, needlessly and wilfully executed. The killing of children – “Jerry” children or “Jap” children, or whatever enemies the future may hold for us – can never be justified.

The facile reply to great groans such as mine is the most hateful of all clichés, “fortunes of war”, and another: “They asked for it. All they understand is force.”

Who asked for it? The only thing who understands is force? Believe me, it is not easy to rationalise the stamping out of vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored when gathering up babies in bushel baskets or helping a man dig where he thinks his wife may be buried.

Certainly, enemy military and industrial installations should have been blown flat, and woe unto those foolish enough to seek shelter near them. But the “Get Tough America” policy, the spirit of revenge, the approbation of all destruction and killing, have earned us a name for obscene brutality.

Our leaders had a carte blanche as to what they might or might not destroy. Their mission was to win the war as quickly as possible; and while they were admirably trained to do just that, their decisions on the fate of certain priceless world heirlooms – in one case, Dresden – were not always judicious. When, late in the war, with the Wehrmacht breaking up on all fronts, our planes were sent to destroy this last major city, I doubt if the question was asked: “How will this tragedy benefit us, and how will that benefit compare with the ill-effects in the long run?”

Dresden, a beautiful city, built in the art spirit, symbol of an admirable heritage, so antiNazi that Hitler visited it but twice during his whole reign, food and hospital centre so bitterly needed now – ploughed under and salt strewn in the furrows.