On the night of February 13, 1945, 65 years ago the city of Dresden was firebombed by the Allies.  Ray Davey was in the city that day and he describes the experience in his ‘War Diaries’.  It is estimated that between 25 and 40,000 people died.  There was nothing exceptional about the attack; the Allies had been carpet bombing German cities since 1942.

The city was as legitimate a target as any other German city.  This wasn’t a city of picture postcard innocence.  It was a city producing military equipment; it was a key communications hub.  Dresden also had a history of active anti-semitism.  One of the Jewish residents of the city, Victor Klemperer, published his diaries in the 1990s under the title ‘I Will Bear Witness’ and he describes in mundane and relentless detail how his city had turned into a place of terror that ostracised, humiliated, warehoused, tortured and finally killed its Jews.  And paradoxically the firebombing enabled Klemperer to survive.

Dresden is not a place of innocent violation.  We cannot build a story of moral equivalence, revisionism and relativism out of Dresden, no matter how immoral the bombing was.  The challenge is to acknowledge all of war’s victims without yielding to the temptation of equivalence; to see the evil of all war, and also the evil that led to this particular war and the necessity to resist it; to see ordinary decent Germans (as Ray Davey describes in his ‘War Diaries’) in a criminal regime supported by millions; and to use what happened (as Ray did) for more peaceful purposes – paradoxically only the experience of war can allow us to think about reconciliation.

David Stevens