February 13 is the 55th anniversary of the Valentine’s Day 1945 firebombing of Dresden Germany, one of the most ignominious and little-recognized moments of the Allied war effort. This was the single most destructive air raid in history, far surpassing the toll inflicted on Japan in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to come that August. At least 130,000 — some estimates place the figure as high as 300,000 — were killed when, in a three-day period, 3,400 tons of explosives & incendiaries were dropped, reducing six square miles of the city, famed for its artistic heritage and devoid of significance to the German war effort, to rubble. Many Allied officials were outraged–Germany was clearly on the verge of collapse, and the raids apppeared designed to inflict maximal civilian casualties on this city filled with refugees fleeing the advancing Soviet armies on the eastern front. It is far harder to argue in the German instance, as some do in countering antiwar revulsion about the use of the atomic bombs in Japan, that the attack was important to hastening the end of the war and may have saved lives. Kurt Vonnegut’s horror about Dresden apparently motivated the writing of Slaughterhouse-Five. On the other hand, the firebombing of Dresden has apparently become a rallying point for Holocaust deniers and other far right historical revisionists who focus on putative Allied war atrocities as “the real Holocaust of WWII”.

Today’s edition of The Daily Bleed, which I logged somewhere below, provides the above two links in its item about the Dresden anniversary. I have written to the listmaster asking him whether these links were included inadvertently or intentionally; if you’re interested, I’ll let you know how he responds.