Was the Dresden Raid a war crime?

When discussing war crimes during World War II, two events usually get thrown out as indictments of the Allies: dropping atomic weapons on the Japanese and the raid of Dresden, in which 25,000 people died mostly of the raging fire that swept the German city.  Critics accuse the Allies of deliberately attacking a civilian population center with little military value as a payback for Nazi attacks on Britain.  This perception gained a lot of credence through Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, his autobiographical tale inspired by his eyewitness experience at Dresden as a POW.

Interestingly, though, Germans apparently tend to view it differently, especially since one particular group has seized on Dresden as a means of rehabilitating Hitler.  Der Spiegel interviewed historian Frederick Taylor and revealed the much more complicated role of Dresden in the war than the post-bombing spin credits, and still calls into question the Allied strategy in its bombing campaign late in the war:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Still, there was certainly more to the Dresden air raid than a desire to destroy civilian morale, wasn’t there?

Taylor: Certainly. The Dresden attack was directly linked to the conduct of the war elsewhere — in this case on the Eastern Front. In Feb. 1945, Dresden was a major transport and communication hub less than 120 miles from the advancing Russians. The aim of the bombing was quite deliberately to destroy the center of the city, thereby making the movement of German soldiers and civilians impossible.

Nor was Dresden uninvolved in war production:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The inflated casualty figures have proven quite resistant to academic research. The myth of Dresden as a victim of Allied aggression is one that refuses to go away. How innocent was Dresden really?

Taylor: Dresden was undeniably a beautiful city, a center of the arts and a symbol of all that was great about pre-Nazi German humanism. It was also quite strongly Nazi and a major industrial center. Its light industries, ranging from factories producing typewriters and cigarettes to furniture and candy, had overwhelmingly been converted to war use after 1939. Around 70,000 workers in the city are thought to have been involved in war-related work. Its regional railway directorate was heavily involved in the war effort on the eastern front and also in the transport of prisoners within the concentration camp system. The question therefore is not whether Dresden contained legitimate bombing targets, but whether the method and intensity of the February 1945 bombing was justifiable.

But in questioning the Allies’ strategy, who benefits now?

Taylor: The neo-Nazis use the anniversary in two ways. First, as a straight propaganda bludgeon against the victors of World War II, an exemple of the Allies’ allegedly criminal conduct of the war against Germany. Second, more subtly, as a tool to relativize Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust. They refer to a “bomb holocaust” of the Allies against the civilian inhabitants of German cities, wildly inflating the figures involved and, of course, underplaying the number of Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals and political prisoners, and other millions of victims of the real Holocaust. It is this two-fold advantage of the Dresden anniversary protests that is especially attractive to the neo-Nazis and their associates. Plus, many otherwise respectable people in Dresden and elsewhere, many of whom grew up with the post-war myths, continue to believe in the inflated casualty figures and in the criminality of the Allied bombing campaign.

The methodology can certainly be criticized without making it an argument for “war crimes”.  The Germans manufactured arms in Dresden, and by their own conduct of the war, made that a permissible target for Allied bombers.  The use and intensity of incendiary bombs could certainly be questioned; the resultant firestorm literally sucked the oxygen out of the city and asphyxiated thousands, which Vonnegut saw first-hand.

But the use of incendiary bombs on factories and railheads was not a war crime, nor was particularly controversial during that war, as the Germans had been dropping them on London for years by that point.  The Allies had a right to destroy the Nazi war production system, including in Dresden.  They had a limited number of options for bombing targets, and the intensity can reasonably be assigned to an accuracy that had eluded the Allies on their night bombing runs for most of the war.

And let’s not forget that at the same time as the Allies raided Dresden, the Germans were launching rocket attacks with only marginal thoughts of accuracy against the British civilian centers.  If Hitler had the ability to create a Dresden in London, he would not have hesitated to wreak it.

I give Der Spiegel credit for getting past the slogans and confronting history as it happened.  Be sure to read the entire interview.

Update: Ed Driscoll took a lengthier look at the question in 2005 while reviewing Taylor’s book on the subject.