The bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and United States Army Air Force (USAAF) between February 13 and February 15, 1945, 12 weeks before the surrender of the Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) of Nazi Germany, remains one of the most controversial Allied actions of the Second World War. The raids saw 1,300 heavy bombers drop over 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices in four raids, destroying 13 square miles (34 kmІ) of the city, the baroque capital of the German state of Saxony, and causing a firestorm that consumed the city centre.[2] Estimates of civilian casualties vary greatly, but recent publications place the figure between 24,000 and 40,000.[3]
Dresden was the seventh largest German city, and according to the RAF at the time, the largest unbombed built-up area left.[16] British historian Frederick Taylor writes that an official 1942 guide to the city described it as "one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich," and in 1944, the German Army High Command's Weapons Office listed 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops that were supplying the army with material.[17]
The U.S. Air Force Historical Division wrote a report in response to the international concern about the bombing, which was classified until December 1978.[18] This said that there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers in the city supporting the German war effort at the time of the raid.[19] According to the report, there were aircraft components factories; a poison gas factory (Chemische Fabric Goye and Company); an anti-aircraft and field gun factory (Lehman); an optical goods factory (Zeiss Ikon AG); as well as factories producing electrical and X-ray apparatus (Koch and Sterzel AG); gears and differentials (Saxoniswerke); and electric gauges (Gebruder Bassler). It also said there were barracks, and hutted camps, and a munitions storage depot.[20]
At least some of the factories relied on slave labour, including Jews from concentration camps. Michal Salomonovic, a survivor of the штуdк ghetto and Auschwitz concentration camp, told Radio Praha that he volunteered for a work detail and was sent to an SS-run cigarette factory in Dresden that was actually manufacturing dum-dum bullets. After the bombing, the SS led him on a "death march" to the West, but he was able to escape.[21]
The USAF report also states that two of Dresden's traffic routes were of military importance: north-south from Germany to Czechoslovakia, and east-west along the central European uplands.[22] The city was at the junction of the Berlin-Prague-Vienna railway line, as well as Munich-Breslau, and Hamburg-Leipzig.[22] Colonel Harold E. Cook, an American POW held in the Friedrichstadt marshaling yard the night before the attacks, later said that "I saw with my own eyes that Dresden was an armed camp: thousands of German troops, tanks and artillery and miles of freight cars loaded with supplies supporting and transporting German logistics towards the east to meet the Russians."