Dresden [antikvár]

"WHEN THE FACTS bccome the legend, print the legend!" So says Button Peabody, the cynical newspaperman in the classic Western movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. As a student in the 1960s, I knew only the legend of Dresden, because it was just about all that was ever printed. Like so many others of my age, I had learned of the city's destruction principally through a work of fiction: Kurt Vonnegut's acidly surreal masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. A brilliant novel, written partly from the perspective of his own grim personal experiences as a prisoner of war who shared the city's fate—but a figment of the imagination nonetheless. For thirty years Vonnegut's bestselling work—and books by David Irving and Alexander McKee—sufficed to describe the catastrophic air raid on Dresden in February 1945, which for most readers in the Enghsh-speaking world and elsewhere came to represent not just the savage apogee of the conventional bombing war but something far worse: a senseless crime. The message these works conveyed for us, the next generation in Britain and the United States, was one of almost entirely unmitigated shame. Dresden was the unforgivable thing our fathers did in the name of freedom and humanity, taking to the air to destroy a beautiful and, above all, innocent European city. This was the great blot on the Allies' war record, the one that could not be explained away. Perhaps there were always parts of the legend that didn't ring entirely true. The vast casualty figures cited—rising into the hundreds of thousands—so much more horrifying than the consequences of any