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00:06If your intention is to kill civilians, how would you define Mithrasa 2?
00:13Steady.
00:16Bombs down.
00:18Dresden was the raid that went horribly right.
00:22Super hot air spreading the fire underground.
00:26People in terror trying to escape, separated by buildings that were exploding.
00:35We just don't know how long the Germans were fighting.
00:39Possibly we have to kill everyone because they were not stopping.
00:43He is the most controversial British officer of the Second World War.
00:47He is a fanatic.
00:48Was it justified morally or not?
00:52That really is the million dollar question.
00:55The bombing of Dresden is one of the most controversial events of World War II.
01:01Now rare footage from around the world, expertly restored in full color, tells the story as you've never seen it
01:09before.
01:17The morning of the 15th of February, 1945, the eastern German city of Dresden lies in ruins.
01:28Further evidence of the Allies total dominance of the skies.
01:34But within days, the Dresden story is turned on its head.
01:41A hidden source inside Germany feeds shocking pictures to the press.
01:48And a previously unreported level of civilian suffering and destruction is revealed to the world.
01:56All of a sudden, people in the United Kingdom and the United States were saying,
02:00How on earth, in our name, are our planes actually producing terror against civilians?
02:06It's completely unacceptable.
02:10It's reported that Dresden was a city of culture, with no military value.
02:17And allegedly, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have been killed.
02:27The Allies, seen for so long to be fighting evil, look to have perpetrated an atrocity.
02:36It's a totally different situation in the Second World War.
02:40All the rules are being torn up and kicked into touch.
02:45So how did Britain and the United States come to this?
02:49What is the truth about Dresden?
02:56Six years earlier, Nazi Germany sweeps through Europe.
03:02Powered by an era of mechanized warfare, both on the ground and in the air.
03:15The French, Belgians and Dutch are overwhelmed.
03:19And the British expeditionary force is chased off the beaches of Dunkirk.
03:27By the summer of 1940, Britain stands alone and under attack by the Luftwaffe.
03:36But Britain's new Prime Minister refuses to surrender.
03:41You ask, what is our policy?
03:44I will say, it is to wage war by sea, land and air.
03:48With all our might, to wage war against the monstrous tyranny.
03:54That is our policy.
03:57To try and win favour with the British public, Hitler tells the Luftwaffe not to attack central London.
04:06But that August, a sortie mistakenly hits Oxford Street.
04:13Winston Churchill strikes back with a small shock rate of his own on Berlin.
04:20The attack prompts a fearsome response from Hitler.
04:26And if the British Luftwaffe 2.000 or 3.000 or 4.000 kg bombs will,
04:31then we will now be in 1.850, 1.880, 230, 3.000.
04:59The Luftwaffe launched an unprecedented bombing campaign designed to break Britain's morale.
05:09Mass raids drop incendiary bombs loaded with flammable material like thermite on dozens of British cities.
05:19There are major fire attacks on Liverpool, Birmingham and Coventry.
05:27And London is hit by a blitz for over 50 consecutive days.
05:34The campaign against London is a 24-hour campaign almost from the beginning.
05:38They see and hear the air battle going on as it comes towards them.
05:42So it makes Londoners very much feel that they are now part of the battle.
05:46The German air raids in Britain killed over 40,000 people.
05:54Angered and fighting for her very existence, there is now an appetite in Britain to strike back
06:00and make mass bombing a major part of its own war strategy.
06:08Churchill's stance over area bombing during the Second World War seems to move.
06:13In the early stages, he voices quite a lot of reservations that actually it doesn't do the job.
06:18It's not going to break the enemy morale. In fact, it could stiffen it.
06:21On the other hand, it was an opportunity to strike back at the Germans
06:25at a time when the Germans seemed to be victorious in pretty much every other theatre of war.
06:30If you had asked British people, particularly following the Blitz, going into 1941,
06:36if they could fight with as much force as possible,
06:39the answer would have been an overwhelming yes from almost everybody.
06:46The RAF's own bomber division, known as Bomber Command,
06:50has been launching targeted raids against Nazi Germany since 1939.
06:58Initially, they fly day-sorties, aiming for precision targets like airfields and oil refineries.
07:08But flying in the broad daylight leaves the bombers horribly exposed to attacks by the Luftwaffe.
07:17Within a year, the RAF is forced to switch most of the fleet to bombing at night.
07:25Night-time raids are safer. You have the cover of the darkness.
07:29The only real problem with bombing, there's no way attacking at night at high altitude.
07:33You could hope to hit anything, you know, of a small nature on the ground.
07:39The bomber's rudimentary targeting technology is hopelessly ill-equipped
07:44for the challenge of night-time precision bombing.
07:48In the summer of 1941, there is a notorious report,
07:51and they discover that hardly anyone's even getting within five miles of hitting their target,
07:55let alone a few hundred yards.
07:58In the first two years of operations,
08:01Bomber Command makes little impact on the Nazi war machine.
08:06The campaign comes at a huge cost.
08:11Germany's bristling air defences are slaughtering RAF aircrew.
08:17These young sons, boys, were killed in tens of thousands by German night fighters and flak.
08:24I mean, they had a huge death toll.
08:28Where is he?
08:30Can I see you?
08:31Hey, Jimmy.
08:32Try to China.
08:33Move out the sediment.
08:36Hang on, keep waving at the black coming at me.
08:40Down us!
08:40About 55% of the men who served in Bomber Command died.
08:46There was enormous fear that they tried to keep under control by various coping strategies,
08:51including often very heavy drinking,
08:53because the mathematics simply overwhelmed that a large proportion of them would not survive their tours.
09:00By 1942, morale inside Bomber Command is rock bottom.
09:10That February, a new commander-in-chief is appointed, with a remit to turn things round.
09:17His name is Arthur Harris.
09:21He soon becomes known as Bomber Harris.
09:25He was stubborn, opinionated to the point of rudeness,
09:30believed passionately in air power.
09:34He was an attack dog, basically, hired by the British government to do what they felt was now a key
09:40job.
09:42If you individually succeed, you will have delivered the most devastating blow against the very vitals of the enemy.
09:50Let him have it right on the chin.
09:52He is a fanatic.
09:54He is someone who, once he gets an idea in his head, finds it impossible to change it.
10:00On the other hand, he would have been brilliant to serve under.
10:03He looked after his men extraordinarily well, provided them with the best equipment possible,
10:09and gave them as much support as possible.
10:12Arthur Harris spearheads an entirely new approach at Bomber Command.
10:19Night raids that no longer rely on precision targeting.
10:25Harris targets entire German cities.
10:29What they can do is hit a city-sized target.
10:32You don't have to be accurate.
10:33You have to hit something the size of Hamburg, you know, one of the biggest cities in Germany.
10:38It really comes to a cold calculation of war.
10:43Arthur Harris is adamant that, in his hands, city bombing can force Germany to surrender.
10:52Because he plans to up the ante and carpet bomb not just industry and infrastructure, but also civilian housing.
11:05Harris believes the new approach, coldly titled worker de-housing, will deprive the Nazis of the manpower they need for
11:15their war economy.
11:17And cripple German manufacturing.
11:21The concept was, there is no difference between combatants and non-combatants.
11:27Because the civilians, by their sheer existence, they are producing something and they have a value for the war.
11:35No civilized country, like Germany, can wage a war without its cities.
11:41If we destroy their cities, if we burn down their cities, then we have won.
11:49There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war.
11:55Well, my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet.
12:01Germany will make a most interesting initial experiment.
12:06And we shall see.
12:11Harris has a potent new weapon to execute his strategy.
12:15The R.A.F.'s rapidly expanding fleet of heavy bombers.
12:21The famous bomber, the Lancaster, one of the most famous bombers of the Second World War, is a brilliant night
12:27-time bomber.
12:28It can fly high, it's a very stable platform, and it can carry a heavy bombing load.
12:34There was no way Britain could fight a land war against Germany.
12:38It didn't have the manpower.
12:40What it did have were resources, technology, and a huge pool of volunteers to call on for building a large
12:47air force.
12:49The heavy Lancaster bombers are also developing new technology like ground-scanning radar and radio navigation.
13:02Harris trains and organizes his new fleet.
13:12When, in 1942, the United States joins the war in Europe, they base hundreds of their own B-17 flying
13:21fortresses in Britain.
13:26The Allied air fleet is now too big to be stopped.
13:31They showed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
13:36In the entire blitz of London, from September to May 1940, the Germans only dropped 18,000 tons of bombs
13:43on London.
13:44In 1944, the R.A.F. is dropping on Germany over half a million tons off the radar in terms
13:52of increased scale.
13:54It's absolutely huge.
13:58If you have a hammer, you're going to go around looking for nails.
14:02And in the R.A.F., we had a very big, very expensive hammer.
14:07It acquired a momentum of its own.
14:13On the 24th of July 1943, Hamburg, Germany's second largest city, is hit in a joint allied raid called Operation
14:24Gomorrah.
14:36A firestorm grips the city.
14:4060% of the residential area is destroyed.
14:44And over 43,000 people are killed.
14:50The devastation wrought on Western Germany is a shock even to Winston Churchill.
14:59Churchill, he was shown film of a Ruhr city being bombed.
15:04And he almost wept and said, are we beasts to be doing this?
15:09So, one has this strange duality in Churchill, running a war, and this actually proved to be the case with
15:17the bombing campaign, too.
15:19That year, with the Allied bombing campaign escalating, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels calls on every German civilian to join
15:30the war effort in what he calls total war.
15:40But the grisly aftermath of the bombing raids is played down in the German press.
15:48The Allies monitor and sanitize their news reports as well.
15:54The public are told the city bombing campaign is focused on military targets.
16:03One of the greatest serial stories of the war, the battering of Hamburg.
16:07The cargoes of our bombers shattered military objectives in the city and started hundreds of fires.
16:12The general population seems happy enough with the policy.
16:17The British people have been attacked in their cities from 1940 onwards.
16:21Something the Germans almost deserve it.
16:24Harris's bombing campaign is relentless.
16:27As the German war machine begins to falter, dozens of her industrial cities, including Karlsruhe, Bremen, and Stuttgart, are smashed
16:40by Allied raids.
16:45We propose to entirely emasculate every enemy center of war production if necessary.
16:52We are well on the way now to that end.
16:55War is a race, and the prize is victory.
17:00But whilst the destructive city raids drain the Nazis' resources, still they refuse to surrender.
17:09That level of destruction usually does the trick, but it doesn't in the Nazi state.
17:14Because of that iron grip of the Nazis, because of this black and white worldview that Hitler has of either
17:21the Thousand Year Reich or Armageddon.
17:29Then, in the summer of 1944, the whole focus of the Allied war effort changes.
17:36The D-Day.
17:38The largest land invasion force in history storms the Normandy beaches and pushes into occupied France.
17:52Paris's deputy dismisses the operation as an unnecessary boating expedition.
18:00But to most observers, it's now the surest route to victory.
18:07Many senior Allied generals want Bomber Command to stop the city attacks and support the ground war.
18:16They know the Lancaster's accurate new targeting technology is now more than capable of hitting precision military targets.
18:26Harris viewed this as a complete waste of time and effort.
18:30And the same goes for repeated American requests for Bomber Command to try and hit targets like oil fields or
18:36refineries, factories.
18:38His bombers have helped drive Germany out of the war and provided this role, so he continues wanting to devastate
18:44the cities.
18:45So, Harris, the right man for the job, but perhaps a bit of a liability in some ways in terms
18:51of his refusal to contemplate how his force could be better used.
18:55Despite Harris's reluctance, Churchill tells him to comply.
19:01His Lancaster bombers are pressed into service as transportation.
19:06And a new city bombing campaign against Berlin, called Operation Thunderclap, is shelved.
19:13It looks like area bombing has had its day.
19:25But that winter, the Allies' ground war grinds to a halt.
19:33Hitler launches a surprise counteroffensive in the Ardennes.
19:37With the Battle of the Bulge, 90,000 American troops are killed.
19:44And the British army is a spent force.
19:49The British perspective was, we just don't know how long the Germans will fight, and possibly we have to kill
19:54everyone, because they were not stopping.
19:57They were not stopping, they were not giving up.
20:01We have to end this damned war.
20:06The only Allied advance is on the Eastern Front.
20:11The Soviet Red Army is pushing on from their decisive victory at Stalingrad.
20:18The offensive is brutal, and it's costing the Soviet Union millions of men.
20:29That February, the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, asks President Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill to Yalta in Crimea for urgent talks.
20:43Relations between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were noticeably more strained at the Yalta conference than at previous meetings.
20:50Joseph Stalin felt the Soviet Union had been left deliberately to take the vast majority of the losses and the
20:56casualties of the war against Germany.
21:00If Churchill and Roosevelt want a quick end to the war, they need to keep the Red Army on the
21:06move.
21:09The Western Allies don't have the will or the means to offer manpower, but they do have a huge air
21:15force.
21:17Western air superiority can solve their problem.
21:22Churchill's misgivings about the morality of area bombing are set aside.
21:27This is something that Churchill and Roosevelt were very, very keen to provide, because it was well within their capabilities,
21:32as well as visually impressive.
21:37Bomber Command's mothballed Operation Thunderclap is revived and refocused for the Eastern Front.
21:46RAS strategists believe that attacking fresh cities in the east of Germany will cause chaos and destruction behind enemy lines
21:56and aid the Red Army's advance.
21:58The Germans are having to move men and materiel up to the Eastern Front to fight the Russians and they
22:05have to go through these cities.
22:07If those cities are attacked by bombers, it will put greater pressure on the Germans, it will cause confusion in
22:14those cities, it will stress the resources that the Germans have.
22:20Soviet strategists give their approval to the plan.
22:26Once again, the city bombing campaign is at center stage.
22:32Harris has given a target list of Eastern German cities and told the objective is to cause chaos and disruption.
22:42Harris just absolutely wants to show, in many ways it's self-indication, he wants to show that he's right, to
22:49prove he's been right.
22:54Nightfall on the 13th of February 1945.
23:00A stream of RAF Lancaster bombers take off from bases in Eastern England.
23:08They make their way across the Channel, into liberated France, through Belgium and down into Nazi Germany.
23:18By now they are on enemy radar.
23:21The bomber formation tries to throw the Germans off the scent.
23:26The British come up with quite ingenious inventions to try and confuse German defenses.
23:31One of the most famous is Windo, which is to drop a huge amount of chaff.
23:36Just strips of aluminum that they would drop into the air like aluminum foil.
23:40And they'd fill the air with aluminum foil and the radar would go haywire.
23:44Which meant that the Germans essentially saw nothing but a kind of curtain behind which they could not see until
23:53the bombers emerged from it.
23:55And that kept the Germans from knowing precisely where the bombers of bomber command were headed that night.
24:03Finally, at around 9pm, the Lancasters emerge from behind the cover of their chaff.
24:12They're heading southeast across Germany.
24:17Even under the cover of darkness, a bombing raid is fraught with danger.
24:22Everything under control.
24:24Creeping across the sky in a slow, heavy bomber with no fighter planes for protection.
24:31And this time, the crews are heading deeper into enemy territory than ever before.
24:39They're covering an enormous distance, probably the longest raid most of them would have carried out during the whole of
24:43the Second World War.
24:44And of course, they're vulnerable during that period from anti-aircraft fire and also from interception by German fighters.
24:51You never quite know when something's going to hit you and it must have been quite scary.
24:56Going this far east in particular was something that the crews dreaded.
25:00But the thrill of, you know, being in these mighty things thundering across, particularly on moonlit nights with the kind
25:05of silvery clouds and things, you know, a lot of them kind of had moments of elation in between sheer
25:09terror.
25:12On this sortie, however, the German Luftwaffe are nowhere to be seen.
25:17Their numbers have been slashed by constant combat and dwindling resources.
25:23And tonight, they fail to respond to the Lancaster's raid at all.
25:29It's an unusually clear winter's night.
25:34The Pathfinder and Marker planes at the lead can see their target perfectly.
25:45It's the eastern German city of Dresden.
25:51The unsuspecting inhabitants below are just finishing the day of carnival celebrations.
25:58Dresden has told themselves nobody will want to bomb the city because it's so beautiful.
26:03Sadly, they were wrong.
26:06Dresden is the capital of Saxony and one of Germany's most historic and cultural cities, layered with centuries-old architecture.
26:17It was called the Florence of the Elba.
26:20It was a city that many Westerners loved to visit during the interwar years.
26:26It had exquisite architecture, lots of art.
26:29And so it was a city that was very deeply appreciated by the cultured classes, the educated classes.
26:37It's not just a cultural center.
26:40It played a role in the Third Reich economy, administration, in the world of Nazi Germany.
26:48There were Jews hunting down, killed the whole dark sides of Nazi Germany.
26:55The city has been virtually untouched by bombing.
27:01It has become a place of safe harbor for refugees from other war-torn German territories.
27:09And by now, the inhabitants of Dresden are sure the city is protected by a special status.
27:16People told themselves all kinds of stories.
27:20They felt that their city, preserved as it was with its beautiful palaces, would somehow be a possibility for being
27:29the Allied capital after the war.
27:36And there was a funny story circulating, saying that Dresden will not be attacked because Churchill's aunt is living there.
27:47Who this aunt was supposed to be, I do not know.
27:50The local Nazi leader in Dresden is so complacent, he makes no preparations for an air attack.
27:58Apart from the one deep concrete bunker he has constructed for himself, there are very few bomb shelters in the
28:06city.
28:08So, the whole city was in the end not prepared for an air attack.
28:14Nobody expected Dresden to be attacked.
28:20OK, chaps, only 30 miles to go.
28:23But for RAF Bomber Command, the reality of Dresden is very different.
28:30Germany's seventh largest city is also important to their war economy.
28:36Harris has only spared the city because until now, the Lancaster's fuel tanks weren't large enough to reach it.
28:45Allied intelligence was aware of significant military production within Dresden itself.
28:52There were factories making machine guns, rifles, there's a factory making tank landing ships.
28:59Dresden is a major rail hub.
29:02From Dresden, troops are being sent to the Eastern Front.
29:04They're being sent down to Verona, to the Italian Front as well.
29:08It is not the fault of RAF Bomber Command that air raid shelters have been given such scant regard.
29:16At 10pm, RAF Pathfinder planes swoop down on the city.
29:24They face almost no anti-aircraft fire.
29:29The Nazi High Command has moved all the guns to the front line in the east.
29:35The scene is set for a perfect storm.
29:40The Pathfinders drop their marker flares uncontested and with unerring accuracy.
29:48The target they've been given by Harris and Bomber Command is the Central Stadium,
29:54right next to the marketplace, the heart of residential Dresden.
30:01Why isn't it the railway?
30:03It's absolutely the glue that is keeping the German war effort together.
30:07The markers go on the old, the Altstadt, the old town.
30:12Dresden was not a military target for the British, this is quite clear.
30:17Of course, Dresden had war industry factories, but these were more on the outskirts.
30:22But this was not the aim of the British bombers.
30:24The aiming point of the British bombers was the marketplace, the Altmarkt.
30:31Whilst we were preparing some scrambled eggs, we heard the warning, which was this time the real thing.
30:40And it was right above the city.
30:42It was right above all.
30:44OK, boys, OK.
30:47Let's move.
30:48Under normal conditions, the bombers would avoid anti-aircraft fire and drop their payloads far away from the target area.
30:57Will you put the revs up, please?
30:59But tonight, it's like a training manoeuvre.
31:02Hello, Bombardier.
31:04OK when you are.
31:06Bomb doors open.
31:07Bomb doors open, Bombardier.
31:10Ready.
31:12Ready.
31:14Bomb's gone.
31:20244 Lancasters drop all their bombs in the space of just 15 minutes.
31:29The sound of the falling bombs came closer and closer, and I thought, well, when will the next come?
31:36And will it fall onto our house?
31:39It was a fright which shook the knees, and the teeth were shattering, and one was numb.
31:52Huge, high-explosive blockbuster bombs and 200,000 clustered incendiaries smash into the historic center of Dresden.
32:06The precise combination is deliberately designed to get inside buildings and start fires.
32:15Large explosives like the 4,000-pound cookie blow the roofs off a street or a square of houses, and
32:21then hundreds of light incendiaries fall into those open roofs and set everything on fire.
32:26And the combination, of course, blew buildings apart and then lit many fires.
32:33And once those fires got underway, they began to converge and converge and converge.
32:43Dresden's tightly packed medieval streets and wooden houses are the perfect fuel for the flames.
32:50And tonight, a steady wind fans them across the city.
32:58Fire fed itself, and it started to pull oxygen in from all around on a self-feeding fire.
33:06Something that one can't even begin to imagine.
33:09It's kind of an outer ring of Dante's Inferno.
33:16And just a few hours later, a second huge wave of over 500 bombers arrives.
33:25A coldly calculated tactic Harris has picked up from the Luftwaffe.
33:32This second raid was deliberately timed to give the firefighters on the ground enough time to get out there and
33:38try and put out the fires.
33:39And then another enormous quantity of bombs rains down.
33:44And the second raid started.
33:47It was more frightening because we were outside.
33:50My sister was hysterical. I had to calm her down.
33:55By now, the rare conditions have come together to form an unstoppable high-speed inferno known as a firestorm.
34:05It effectively creates a tornado on the ground.
34:09Superheater air that automatically sucks at very high speed air in from the surrounding area and creates very high winds.
34:17Strong enough to lift people, uproot trees, move vehicles and suck them all into the flames.
34:23The destruction of the city is much, much more effective.
34:33As day breaks, the Americans arrive.
34:38Air bombers are heading for Dresden's military marshalling yards and industry.
34:45The American air forces liked to state that they only engaged in precision attacks.
34:52But when they bombed Dresden, of course, the city was covered in a great rolling cloud of smoke from the
34:58previous night's raids.
35:00So, essentially, they engaged in another area attack.
35:04One bomb group actually completely misidentified the target and bombed Prague instead of Dresden.
35:13When the Lancaster bombers land back in Britain, RAF Bomber Command is astounded by the effectiveness of the mission.
35:23They've lost just six planes from a sortie of 800.
35:28The next day, the Allied press trumpet the success of the raid.
35:34Bomber Command was using the techniques that it used at Dresden routinely.
35:38And it just so happened that everything at Dresden went perfectly.
35:44It just ran like clockwork.
35:52Just a few days later, a German backlash gathers momentum.
35:59Rumours coming from inside Germany hint at the scale of the human tragedy.
36:05And anger grows among the population to the complete absence of air raid defences.
36:13The Nazi elite is worried about there is going to be this implosion.
36:16That everyone's going to go, do you know what, I've had enough of this, and I'm just going to surrender.
36:21Party boss, Mr Mutschmann, fled Dresden and was somewhere in the surrounding mountains.
36:29He was a deserter and a pig.
36:35People said they would kill Hitler if they got their hands onto him.
36:42But to everyone's surprise, the Nazi regime does little to suppress the details of the horrific Allied raid.
36:52With the enemy now at the gates, the Nazi's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels takes a bold new tack and spins
37:00the bad news.
37:06Goebbels decided that, not at all to minimise Dresden, but to maximise it, to go right up to the max.
37:14What he's trying to do with Dresden, he's going, you know, this is the barbarity that we're dealing with.
37:18You know, these awful people who are wanting to destroy everything that is good about Germany.
37:25But you've got to keep going, you've got to keep fighting, because the alternative is complete annihilation and destruction.
37:31Goebbels unleashed something very wild after the Dresden raid.
37:35I mean, you could almost call it like a sort of propaganda plague.
37:39And it was infectious.
37:41Goebbels leaks horrific photos and eyewitness testimony from inside Dresden anonymously.
37:48The Germanist's political���
37:50in Sweden and Switzerland.
37:54He tells them that up to 200,000 civilians have been killed.
38:01It was useful to Goebbels to interpret this as a terror attack
38:06in his attempt to win world public opinion
38:09and in his attempt to paint the Allies as terrorists.
38:14And so he was very aggressive in trying to reach the neutral press,
38:18in particular, to tell the tale of this awful thing
38:23that had happened to Dresden,
38:24to rally the German people and to shock the rest of the world.
38:28It would have been very easy to have gotten shocking pictures
38:32of deaths of non-combatants at Dresden.
38:37I think for a propaganda minister that would have been easy work.
38:42Many of the inhabitants believed the city was immune from bombing
38:45and didn't take the air raid sirens seriously at first.
38:51The eyewitness reports and pictures reveal the merciless hell
38:56of the Dresden firestorm.
38:58The story of Dresden transforms from Nazi failure into allied cruelty.
39:07The scene would have been one of complete havoc.
39:11People in terror trying to escape,
39:14trying to keep track of their children or their loved ones,
39:18people calling out for one another,
39:20people being separated by buildings that were exploding,
39:24the terrible winds that children wouldn't have been able to stand up in.
39:29I can't even imagine what it would have been like,
39:33especially as a mother with a young child,
39:35trying to keep a child safe in this kind of environment.
39:39I ran through the burning streets in my face and hair was singed.
39:45There were some awful scenes.
39:47A number of people died when they passed an open entrance.
39:52The suction was such that they couldn't fight it
39:55and were dragged into the burning building.
40:00Those who could ran to the park or into the reservoir,
40:04but they were boiled alive or blasted by the second wave of bombers.
40:11Some took refuge in the old interconnected cellars under their homes,
40:16as they'd been told to,
40:18but they were cooked alive by the heat.
40:22The super-hot air started infiltrating,
40:26coming down through the cells
40:27and actually shooting through the breakthroughs
40:29even faster in some ways than it was spreading above ground.
40:32So there really was no escape,
40:34and this is the true horror of the Dresden Firestorm.
40:38Bodies are being melted.
40:40Enormous numbers of casualties on the ground actually lost their lives
40:43as a result of suffocation or poisoning
40:45rather than they were actually burnt to death.
40:46There was really no escape except to run, but then where?
40:53People tried to tramp through melting streets
40:56and found their shoes stripped off their feet,
40:59and they could no longer move and died where they stood.
41:03Whether you survive was simply a matter of luck.
41:07Two days later, Dresden is still burning.
41:12It takes a recovery team seven hours
41:15to get into the city's one main air raid shelter.
41:21Once inside, they find nothing but green, brown liquid and bones.
41:27All 1,000 people inside have simply melted.
41:33Well, it was horrendous, quite honestly.
41:36My father was found only identified by his teeth.
41:42There were a lot of German soldiers
41:44who were on the stations in the Altstadt,
41:48and people really got killed.
41:51Bodies and bodies hanging heads down and legs down.
41:58Bombing the city centres and by this causing chaos,
42:02we have to focus it, it was about killing civilians.
42:06Kill as many civilians as possible,
42:08and the more civilians you kill, the bigger the chaos will be,
42:11the greater will be the effect on ending, shortening the war.
42:17But, of course, it was not worth it.
42:20We have no evidence whatsoever that it achieved any effect.
42:24The main streets were again serviceable after a couple of days.
42:29And even the factories were not destroyed.
42:31The factories, the airfields,
42:33all things you could use for military purposes were not destroyed.
42:39News of the indiscriminate targeting of civilians in Dresden
42:44soon reaches Allied journalists.
42:49A young American reporter sneaks the phrase terror bombing past the censors,
42:56and it's published all over the United States.
42:59The story shocks a previously insulated public.
43:04It just sounds different from what we've heard before,
43:09exploiting refugees in a crowded city,
43:12and the reporters picked up on that.
43:14There was a media storm produced in the Western press.
43:17This was the point at which questions were beginning to be asked in the British Parliament,
43:21and you very much got the British government on the back foot now.
43:27Goebbels' master plan starts to play out.
43:30A catastrophic failure of the German air defence evolves into a moral crisis for the Allies.
43:39And when he seeded the story in the neutral press, Goebbels lied.
43:46He exaggerated the death toll,
43:49taking the true figure from the Dresden police report and adding a zero.
43:54The real death toll is 25,000.
44:01Goebbels produced this huge figure for Dresden,
44:04that's one of the most successful pieces of fake news in the history of fake news.
44:11So it's not the numbers which were announced by Goebbels in the 200,000s.
44:19The town of Dresden, a couple of years ago, set up an academic committee
44:24who should definitely clear how many people were killed in Dresden.
44:27And their maximum estimate is 25,000.
44:33It's a huge number, but it's not ten times that number.
44:37And when you go to concentration camps and you see the monstrous way
44:42in which the Nazis behaved and what they did to others,
44:45the idea that they've got the nerve to challenge what the Allies were doing
44:49on something like Dresden is absolutely outrageous.
44:54The Allies take the bait nonetheless and turn on each other.
44:58The United States blame the British for the indiscriminate bombing at Dresden.
45:04The Americans worked very hard to distinguish themselves
45:07and claim that they were not doing area bombing.
45:12They didn't want to be tarred with the same brush as Bomber Command.
45:18With the US Air Force denying responsibility,
45:21the actions of RAF Bomber Command come under scrutiny.
45:27And Winston Churchill fears he might be held responsible.
45:33By now, the Prime Minister has no need for the bombing campaign.
45:39The Western Front is moving again,
45:41and the Soviets are deep inside Nazi Germany.
45:46So, that march, he starts to distance himself from the policy of city bombing.
45:52He's always been slightly torn over the bombing of cities, the area bombing.
45:57He's flip-flopped, really, between the two.
45:59And I think the storm of protest that there was after Dresden
46:03has actually made him pretty guilty about the whole thing.
46:06He began to worry about how his own actions might be judged by historians.
46:12And at this point, he basically changed course and sent a minute,
46:20saying that we really shouldn't engage in this kind of activity anymore,
46:24and we should avoid anything that even remotely looks like terroristic bombing.
46:31As Churchill distances himself from area bombing,
46:35the blame for the Dresden attack shifts to Bomber Command's ruthless leader, Arthur Harris.
46:43Now, clearly, Harris was willing to carry out the campaign.
46:46That was his job.
46:47But increasing attention focused on Harris as the person who had envisioned the raid,
46:54but in fact, Churchill himself had been critical in spurring the Dresden raid.
47:00Harris is fairly incensed by it,
47:02and famously expresses the opinion that Dresden is not worth the bones of one British Grenadier.
47:12After Dresden, the reputation of Bomber Command and Arthur Harris lies in tatters.
47:20Harris, after the war, becomes somebody that no one wants to embrace.
47:24He's not a hero.
47:26In many ways, the single largest part of a British war effort, Bomber Command,
47:31becomes someone that no one wants to be associated with.
47:38The final snub for Bomber Command from Churchill is that in his VE speech,
47:43he mentions just about every branch of the armed service,
47:46and what they've done and where they've served, apart from one,
47:50and that is Bomber Command.
47:53It takes 67 years for the 55,000 men who served and died in RAF Bomber Command
48:00to finally get a memorial in London alongside the other British armed forces.
48:08And the morality of the area bombing of Dresden is a difficult question debated to this very day.
48:17We have to balance our great sympathy for the German civilians who were caught there and destroyed
48:23with the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of people will be killed by Germans in the coming months.
48:31So Dresden is a legitimate target and also Germany is resisting.
48:36It's an odd thing. It's almost like the victory of the Allies in the Second World War was so complete
48:41that the Germans have become victims.
48:44It's of course hard for a democracy who fights against Hitler.
48:48It's a bit like definitely good against evil, but there was no limit.
48:55The more civilians we kill, the better it is.
48:58Nobody who says, stop, we can't do that.
49:01And there's a point at which you have to look at yourself and say,
49:05what have I become in doing this?
49:09And I think this is where Dresden is relevant.
49:13It's a warning.
49:57The end of the game in Denmark.
50:13You
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