- 2 weeks ago
The Allies' bombing of the German city of Dresden was one of the most controversial of World Wwar II. Rare archive tells the story as it's never been seen before.
德累斯顿轰炸是第二次世界大战末期由英国皇家空军和美国陆军航空队于1945年2月13日至15日对德国东部城市德累斯顿实施的大规模战略轰炸行动，造成约22700-25000名平民死亡.
德累斯顿轰炸是第二次世界大战末期由英国皇家空军和美国陆军航空队于1945年2月13日至15日对德国东部城市德累斯顿实施的大规模战略轰炸行动，造成约22700-25000名平民死亡.
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TVTranscript
00:06If your intention is to kill civilians, how would you define Mithrasa 2?
00:13Ready.
00:18Dresden was the raid that went horribly right.
00:22Super hot air spreading the fire underground.
00:26People in terror trying to escape.
00:30Separated 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.
01:47And 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.
02:11It'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.
03:06Both on the ground and in the air.
03:15The French, Belgians and Dutch are overwhelmed and 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, with all our might.
03:50To 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 raid of his own on Berlin.
04:20The attack prompts a fearsome response from Hitler.
04:26And if the British Luftwaffe has 2,000 or 3,000 or 4,000 kilograms bombs first...
04:32...we're going to hit 150,000, 180,000, 230,000...
04:39...we're going to hit 50,000, 230,000, 230,000, 230,000...
04:41The United States will come, when one of us two breaks...
04:45...and that will not be the national socialist German!
04:51The United States will be the United States!
04:59The Luftwaffe launch an unprecedented bombing campaign designed to break Britain's morale.
05:09Mass raids drop incendiary bombs loaded with flammable material like thermite...
05:16...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.
05:39They see and hear the air battle going on as it comes towards them...
05:42...so 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...
06:01...and 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...
06:25...at 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...
06:35...going into 1941, if they could fight with as much force as possible...
06:39...the answer would have been an overwhelming yes from almost everybody.
06:45The RAF's own bomber division, known as Bomber Command...
06:50...has been launching targeted raids against Nazi Germany since 1939.
06:58Initially, they fly day-sorties...
07:01...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...
07:44...for the challenge of night-time precision bombing.
07:48In the summer of 1941, there was a notorious report...
07:51...and they discovered that hardly anyone's even getting within five miles of hitting their target...
07:55...let alone a few hundred yards.
07:58In the first two years of operations, Bomber Command makes little impact...
08:03...from a Nazi war machine.
08:06And the 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...
08:22...by German night fighters and flak.
08:24I mean, they had a huge death toll.
08:28Where is he?
08:30Can I can see you?
08:31Hey, Jimmy, it's right behind us.
08:33Move out the sediment.
08:36Hang on, keep waving at the black coming at me.
08:40Down!
08:41About 55% of the men who served in Bomber Command died.
08:46There was enormous fear that they tried to keep under control...
08:50...by various coping strategies, including often very heavy drinking...
08:53...because the mathematics simply overwhelmed that...
08:56...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...
09:14...with a remit to turn things round.
09:18His 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.
09:33He was an attack dog, basically.
09:36Hired by the British government to do what they felt was now a key job.
09:42If you individually succeed, you will have delivered the most devastating blow...
09:47...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...
09:58...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...
10:06...provided them with the best equipment possible...
10:09...and 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.
10:37It 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.
10:55And carpet bomb not just industry and infrastructure, but also civilian housing.
11:05Harris believes the new approach, coldly titled worker de-housing...
11:12...will deprive the Nazis of the manpower they need for their war economy...
11:17...and 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...
12:26...is a brilliant night-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.
12:39What it did have were resources, technology, and a huge pool of volunteers to call on...
12:46...for building a large air force.
12:50The heavy Lancaster bombers are also developing new technology like ground-scanning radar...
12:56...and radio navigation.
13:02Harris trains and organises his new fleet.
13:12When, in 1942, the United States joins the war in Europe...
13:18...they base hundreds of their own B-17 flying fortresses in Britain.
13:26The Allied air fleet is now too big to be stopped.
13:31They served the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
13:37In the entire blitz of London, from September to May 1940...
13:41...the Germans only dropped 18,000 tonnes of bombs on London.
13:44In 1944, the RAF is dropping on Germany over half a million tonnes...
13:50...off the radar in terms of 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 RAF, 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...
14:20...is hit in a joint-allied raid called Operation Gomorrah.
14:36A firestorm grips the city.
14:4060% of the residential area is destroyed...
14:44...and over 43,000 people are killed.
14:51The devastation wrought on Western Germany is a shock even to Winston Churchill.
14:59Churchill, he was shown film of a Ruhr city being bombed.
15:03And he almost wept and said, are we beasts to be doing this?
15:09So, one has this strange duality in Churchill running the war...
15:14...and this actually proved to be the case with the bombing campaign, too.
15:19That year, with the Allied bombing campaign escalating...
15:24...Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels calls on every German civilian...
15:29...to join the war effort in what he calls...
15:33...Total War.
15:40The grisly aftermath of the bombing raids is played down in the German press.
15:48The Allies monitor and sanitise 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...
16:10...and started hundreds of fires.
16:12The general population seems happy enough with the policy.
16:17The British people had 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...
16:34...including Karlsruhe, Bremen and Stuttgart...
16:39...are smashed by Allied raids.
16:44We propose to entirely emasculate every enemy centre of war production if necessary.
16:52We are well on the way now to that end.
16:55War is a race.
16:57And the prize is victory.
17:00But whilst the destructive city raids drain the Nazis' resources...
17:05...still they refuse to surrender.
17:09That level of destruction usually does the trick.
17:12But it doesn't in the Nazi state.
17:15Because of that iron grip of the Nazis.
17:17Because of this black and white world view that Hitler has...
17:20...of either the 1,000-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...
17:42...storms the Normandy beaches...
17:44...and pushes into occupied France.
17:52Paris' deputy dismisses the operation as an unnecessary boating expedition.
18:00But to most observers, it's now the surest route to victory.
18:06Many senior Allied generals want Bomber Command to stop the city attacks...
18:12...and support the ground war.
18:16They know that Lancaster's accurate new targeting technology...
18:20...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...
18:34...to try and hit targets like oil fields or refineries, factories.
18:38His bombers have helped drive Germany out of the war and provided this role.
18:42So he continues wanting to devastate the cities.
18:45So, Harris, the right man for the job...
18:48...but perhaps a bit of a liability in some ways...
18:51...in terms of his refusal to contemplate how his force could be better used.
18:55Despite Harris' 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...
19:09...called Operation Thunderclap is shelved.
19:14It 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 counter-offensive in the Ardennes.
19:37With the Battle of the Bulge...
19:40...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 were fighting...
19:53...possibly we have to kill everyone, 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...
20:36...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 casualties
20:56of 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.
21:46R.E.F. strategists believe that attacking fresh cities in the east of Germany will cause chaos and destruction behind
21:55enemy lines and 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.
22:17R.E.F. strategists give their approval to the plan.
22:24R.E.F. 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.
22:42And Harris just absolutely wants to show, in many ways it's self-indication, he wants
22:48to show that he's right, to prove 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
23:15into Nazi Germany.
23:18By now they are on enemy radar.
23:22The bomber formation tries to throw the Germans off the scent.
23:26The British come up with quite ingenious inventions to try and confuse German defences.
23:31One of the most famous is Windo, which is to drop a huge amount of chaff, just strips
23:37of 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.
23:45Which meant that the Germans essentially saw nothing but a kind of curtain behind which
23:51they could not see until the bombers emerged from it.
23:54And that kept the Germans from knowing precisely where the bombers of bomber command were headed
24:00that night.
24:03Finally, at around 9pm, the Lancasters emerge from behind the cover of their chaff.
24:12They're heading south-east across Germany.
24:17Even under the cover of darkness, a bombing raid is fraught with danger.
24:23Creeping 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
24:43out during the whole of the Second World War.
24:44And of course, they're vulnerable during that period from anti-aircraft fire and also from
24:48interception 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
25:04on moonlit nights with the kind of silvery clouds and things, you know, a lot of them kind
25:07of had moments of elation in between sheer terror.
25:12On this sortie, however, the German Luftwaffe are nowhere to be seen.
25:18Their numbers have been slashed by constant combat and dwindling resources.
25:22And 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,
26:13layered with centuries-old architecture.
26:17Dresden was called the Florence of the Elba.
26:21It 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.
26:47There 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.
27:17People told themselves all kinds of stories.
27:20They felt that their city, preserved as it was with its beautiful palaces,
27:25would somehow be a possibility for being the Allied capital after the war.
27:36And there was a funny story circulating saying that Dresden will not be attacked because
27:45Churchill'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,
28:04there are very few bomb shelters in the city.
28:08So the whole city was in the end not prepared for an air attack.
28:14Nobody expected Dresden to be attacked.
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,
28:40the 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.
28:55There's a factory making tank landing ships.
28:59Dresden is a major rail hub.
29:01From 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.
29:17At 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.
29:36The scene is set for a perfect storm.
29:41The 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.
30:11Dresden 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.
30:25The 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's not a war.
30:44OK, boys, OK.
30:47Let's learn.
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?
30:58But 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.
31:14On the ground.
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.
31:34And I thought, well, when will the next come and 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.
32:21And then hundreds of light incendiaries fall into those open roofs and set everything on fire.
32:27And 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.
32:57The fire 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.
33:17And 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, it was more frightening because we were outside.
33:51My 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.
34:04It effectively creates a tornado on the ground, superheated air that automatically sucks at very high speed air in from
34:14the surrounding area and creates very high winds.
34:17It's strong 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.
34:32As day breaks, the Americans arrive.
34:39Their 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.
35:10One bomb group, one bomb group, one bomb group, one bomb group.
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.
35:43It just ran like clockwork.
35:52Just a few days later, a German backlash gathers momentum.
35:59Rumors coming from inside Germany hint at the scale of the human tragedy.
36:06And anger grows among the population to the complete absence of air raid defences.
36:13The Nazi elite is worried about is 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.
36:20The party boss, Mr. Mutschman, 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.
36:41But 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 minimize Dresden, but to maximize 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.
37:19You 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, and it was infectious.
37:41Goebbels leaks horrific photos and eyewitness testimony from inside Dresden anonymously,
37:48through the neutral press in Sweden and Switzerland.
37:54He tells them that up to 200,000 civilians have been killed.
38:02It was useful to Goebbels to interpret this as a terror attack in 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, in particular,
38:20to tell the tale of this awful thing that had happened to Dresden,
38:24to rally the German people and to shock the rest of the world.
38:27It would have been very easy to have gotten shocking pictures of 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 and didn't take the air raid sirens seriously at
38:49first.
38:51The eyewitness reports and pictures revealed the merciless hell of the Dresden firestorm.
38:59The story of Dresden transforms from Nazi failure into allied cruelty.
39:07The scene would have been one of complete havoc.
39:10People in terror trying to escape, trying to keep track of their children or their loved ones,
39:18people calling out for one another, people being separated by buildings that were exploding,
39:25the 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, trying to keep a child safe in this kind of environment.
39:38I ran through the burning streets in my face and hair was singed.
39:45There were some awful scenes. A number of people died when they passed an open entrance.
39:53The suction was such that they couldn't fight it and 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, as they'd been told to.
40:18But they were cooked alive by the heat.
40:22The super hot air started infiltrating, coming down through the stairs and actually shooting through the breakthroughs,
40:29even faster in some ways than it was spreading above ground.
40:32So there really was no escape. And 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 as a result of suffocation or poisoning,
40:45rather than they were actually burnt to death.
40:47There was really no escape except to run. But then where?
40:53People tried to tramp through melting streets and 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 to 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.
41:37My father was found only identified by his teeth.
41:42There were a lot of German soldiers who were on the stations in the Altstadt
41:48and people really got killed. Bodies and bodies hanging heads down and legs down.
41:58Bombing the city centers and by this causing chaos, we have to focus it. It was about killing civilians.
42:06Kill as many civilians as possible. And the more civilians you kill, the bigger the chaos will be,
42:11the greater will be the effect on ending, shortening the war. But of course it was not worth it.
42:20We have no evidence whatsoever that it achieved any effect. The main streets were again serviceable
42:27after a couple of days. And even the factories were not destroyed. The factories, the airfields,
42:33all things you could use for military purposes were not destroyed.
42:40News of the indiscriminate targeting of civilians in Dresden soon reaches allied journalists.
42:50A young American reporter sneaks the phrase terror bombing past the censors,
42:56and it's published all over the United States. The story shocks a previously insulated public.
43:04It just sounds different from what we've heard before, exploiting refugees in a crowded city,
43:12and the reporters picked up on that. There 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. A catastrophic failure of the German air defense
43:34evolves into a model crisis for the Allies.
43:39And when he seeded the story in the neutral press, Goebbels lied.
43:46He exaggerated the death toll, taking the true figure from the Dresden police report and adding a zero.
43:55The real death toll is 25,000.
44:01Goebbels produced this huge figure for Dresden that's one of the most successful pieces of fake news in the history
44:08of fake news.
44:12So it's not the numbers which were announced by Goebbels in the 200,000.
44:20The town of Dresden, a couple of years ago, set up an academic committee who should definitely clear
44:25how many people were killed in Dresden. And 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 in which the Nazis behaved
44:43and what they did to others, the 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 and claim that they were not doing area bombing.
45:11They didn't want to be tarred with the same brush as Bomber Command.
45:18With the US Air Force denying responsibility, the 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 and 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 has actually made him pretty guilty about the
46:05whole thing.
46:06He began to worry about how his own actions might be judged by historians.
46:13And at this point, he basically changed course and sent a minute saying that we really shouldn't engage in this
46:23kind of activity anymore.
46:24And we should avoid anything that even remotely looks like terroristic bombing.
46:31As Churchill distances himself from area bombing, the blame for the Dresden attack shifts to Bomber Command's ruthless leader, Arthur
46:42Harris.
46:43Now, clearly, Harris was willing to carry out the campaign. That 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 and famously expresses the opinion that Dresden is not worth the bones of one
47:09British 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, becomes someone that no one wants
47:33to be associated with.
47:38The final snub for Bomber Command from Churchill is that in his VE speech, he mentions just about every branch
47:45of the armed service and what they've done and where they've served, apart from one, and that is Bomber Command.
47:52It takes 67 years for the 55,000 men who served and died in RAF Bomber Command to finally get
48:02a memorial in London alongside the other British armed forces.
48:09And the morality of the area bombing of Dresden is a difficult question debated to this very day.
48:18We have to balance our great sympathy for the German civilians who were caught there and destroyed with the knowledge
48:25that 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.
48:37It's almost like the victory of the Allies in the Second World War was so complete that the Germans have
48:42become 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, what have I become in doing
49:08this?
49:09And I think this is where Dresden is relevant.
49:13It's a warning.
49:43It's a warning for this moment.
50:12Transcription by CastingWords
50:13Transcription by CastingWords