Bitter Conflicts emerge from Dresden's ashes

As 70th anniversary of bombing of city approaches, neo-Nazis clash with people who seek reconciliation. The city was quickly rebuilt. On February 13, 1955, the restored Church of the Holy Cross (Kreuzkirche) was packed for its reconsecration. Thirty years later, a crowd of 200,000 gathered for the inauguration of the rebuilt opera house. And, 60 years after its ruins had become a symbol of the city's destruction, in 2005, the Frauenkirche reopened.
The contrast between the blackened original stones and their fresh, white counterparts serves as a permanent memorial. "Its wounds have healed," says the Rev Sebastian Feydt, pastor of the church. "But the scars still show."

Groups such as Pegida, opposed to "Islamisation of the West", choose Dresden for protest rallies. This one was was held last month. Photo / AP
On Ursula Elsner's sideboard, Dresden survives intact. At the centre stands a model of the Church of Our Lady, the Frauenkirche, with worshippers lining up in the shadow of its dome. Above the model, an old watercolour of the city's baroque skyline hangs on the wall.
It could have been painted any day of Elsner's childhood, when she lived so close to the church, where her father was the verger, that it became a second playroom.
Any day until February 13, 1945, that is. That is the day, she says now, when her childhood ended. As 4500 tonnes of explosives fell from 800 British planes, 25,000 Dresdeners died in a raging firestorm and the heart of their historic city was obliterated.
A second wave of bombing, by the US Air Force, followed the next day. The raids were designed to create panic behind the German front line, just as Russian troops advanced.
The 14-year-old and her family survived, but half of her classmates died.

The cost of those two days of war was so great that, in the weeks and years that followed, Dresden was invoked by those who questioned the legitimacy of the RAF's strategic bombing campaign. Even Winston Churchill queried whether the bombs might have been "mere acts of terror and wanton destruction".
The city was quickly rebuilt. On February 13, 1955, the restored Church of the Holy Cross (Kreuzkirche) was packed for its reconsecration. Thirty years later, a crowd of 200,000 gathered for the inauguration of the rebuilt opera house. And, 60 years after its ruins had become a symbol of the city's destruction, in 2005, the Frauenkirche reopened.
The contrast between the blackened original stones and their fresh, white counterparts serves as a permanent memorial. "Its wounds have healed," says the Rev Sebastian Feydt, pastor of the church. "But the scars still show."
Wounded pride takes longer to heal. The flames that skipped through Dresden have long since died out, but the passions sparked that night burn on. As the city prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the raid, official talk is of reconciliation.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, will deliver a sermon in the Frauenkirche, and the Duke of Kent will be presented with a prize for his efforts to reunite the old enemies.
Away from the town hall, some Dresdeners recoil from these overtures. Where once February 13 was a day of quiet contemplation, it has now become a violent clash of historical interpretations. Thousands of neo-Nazis march across the city, hijacking the anniversary to claim moral equivalence between the bombing and the worst crimes of the Third Reich. Even larger crowds of left-wing activists throng the streets in turn, trying to blockade the fascists' advance.
"We will sit down in the street to stop them demonstrating," says Frank Kohler, a 19-year-old student who will take part in this week's blockade for the third year running. "They can't be allowed to abuse this date."
The commemorations have become so charged that editors of a local newspaper supplement charting the raids have spent days debating their choice of pictures. "Everything is political," says Oliver Reinhard, heritage correspondent of the newspaper, Sachsische Zeitung. "If we just used pictures of the bombing, some people would ask 'Why don't you show what the Nazis did, too?'."
Dresden was never intended to become such a contested chapter of World War II. Many more civilians had died during a raid on Hamburg in July 1943, and by the time Dresden was bombed, most other German cities had already been targeted.
For Harry Irons, a rear gunner who flew 60 raids, the city was "just another target".
"It was nothing out of the ordinary," says Irons, now 91, who lives in Romford. "I was used to seeing German cities going up in flames and losing my comrades night after night. What went through our minds was just to get there and to get back - we couldn't have any feelings about it."

Much of Dresden was obliterated by the still controversial bombing raids of February 1945.
Listening as I read out his comments, Elsner, who is now 84 but has never moved from Dresden, stays silent. At last, she nods. "From his perspective, of course," she says. "But for me, that was the worst night of my life. The whole city became one enormous morgue."
She and her 7-year-old brother, Dieter, had been celebrating Shrove Tuesday, and Dieter was still in fancy dress as a tomahawk-toting cowboy when the air-raid sirens began to sound. They sheltered in their cellar but when they began to be sprinkled with ash, they leaped over a burning timber to hurtle outside, Dieter still clutching his teddy bear.
In the street, sparks singed their hair and hands, but they survived: the families who remained in the cellar all succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning.
"Everywhere around me was death and destruction," says Elsner. "I most recall seeing the prams - the babies weren't moving any more."
Yet, even though she remembers that night every day, she is happy to forgive Irons and the rest of Bomber Command. "It was war," she says. "We can't talk about blame."
The British veteran plans to fly to the city for the first time since 1945 this year, and Elsner says she would happily invite him in for a cup of tea: there they might sit, with the Frauenkirche between them, the bomber and the bombed. "It's difficult to be angry," she says. "What good does it do to hold a grudge?"
Elsner is typical of many of the remaining survivors, who have reconciled themselves with their former enemy.
But their efforts to make peace with the past are being threatened by a younger generation determined to exploit the legacy of that night. The neo-Nazi march has been an annual fixture since the nineties, so that the city that was destroyed in the battle against fascism is now the epicentre of its revival.
"They're young and they don't know what fascism is really like," says Elsner. "The day is becoming more and more political. There's the right-wing here and the left-wing there: the idea of remembrance is getting lost."
Irons is also depressed by the sloganising that surrounds Dresden. The far-right's claim that the raid was a "bombing Holocaust", an Allied war crime on a par with the Final Solution, used to trouble him.
"I had second thoughts about Dresden for years," he says. "But last year I went to visit Auschwitz myself. Now I've seen it, my conscience is clear. We killed many civilians but we lost many men, too. That was war - but Auschwitz was something else."
The neo-Nazis are far from the only group seeking to exploit the sense of loss that pervades Dresden.
"I don't think this will ever become just history," says Colonel Matthias Rogg, of the Dresden Military History Museum, detailing the emotions still stirred by any reference to the raid. "The debate will never end."
One uncomfortable truth is sometimes overlooked in all the furore.
"You have to ask the question of responsibility," says Rogg, pointing to a skyline that once again resembles the landscape in Ursula Elsner's apartment. "The war started in Germany. And, that night, it came back to us."
Dresden
What: Capital of Saxony, Germany
Where: In a valley on the River Elbe
Population: 529,781
The bombing: Involved four raids between February 13 and 15, 1945, by 1250 British and US bombers which targeted the city centre and killed 25,000.