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Originally Posted by vailron  Aerial slaughter in Europe reached a climax on 13-14 February 1945 at Dresden. The briefing for air crews misrepresented Dresden as "an industrial city of first-class importance." Dresden had always been a center of art and artists, one of Europe's most magnificent cities, itself a work of art; Dresden's "heavy" industry was the manufacture of porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses. Other industries, according to Kurt Vonnegut, held as a POW near Dresden, consisted largely of hospitals and cigarette and clarinet factories. |
The myth that somehow Dresden was solely a city of peaceful culture, blessed with “special status” due to its cultural distinction—as one often hears in references to the 1945 bombing—is completely false. Through the latter half of World War II, Dresden was home to many wartime industries and served as a crucial transportation center for traffic channeling to and from Germany’s Eastern Front. In fact, according to the 1942 edition of the
Dresdner Jarhbuch (
Dresden Yearbook), “Anyone who knows Dresden only as a cultural city, with its immortal architectural monuments and unique landscape environment, would rightly be very surprised to be made aware of the extensive and versatile industrial activity, with all its varied ramifications, that make Dresden . . . one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich”
Wartime industry included radios, aircraft instrumentation, lenses and optics for use in sights, torpedo tails, ammunition casings, and a host of other specialties that fed into key military programs .