Dresden, bombing

A contemporaneous witness who remembers the difficulties encountered in the cremation of the Dresden bombing victims, for example, would surely not have fallen for the atrocity tale of children being burnt alive in open-air burning pits. Or another example anyone who had ever been on guard duty himself would certainly have wondered where Weise might have gotten the ammunition he... 

Fuchs, A., After the Dresden Bombing. Pathways of Memory, ig4 to the Present (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 

According to Stettbacher, the loss of life in Germany was not as heavy as the loss in buildings 500,000 dead, or one per 4.9 tons of bombs dropped, against 3.6 million buildings partially or completely destroyed. The heaviest loss of life in a single raid was in Dresden-100,000 people or 20% of the population It is the conviction of military authorities such as Major General A. H. Waite (Ref 9) that incendiary attacks broke the Japanese will to resist before the advent of the atomic bomb... 

This reaction of aluminium with ifon(lll) Oxide is called the thermite reaction. It is used to make molten steel for mending and welding broken railway lines the temperature reached is about 2000 °C. The thermite mixture was often used in World War II incendiary bombs, such as those which devastated London, Hamburg and Dresden. 

U-boat warfare, and the bombing of Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, and other European cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki provide further evidence that extreme aggressiveness lies... 

Dresden s number thus came up. On the cold night of February 13, 1,400 Bomber Command aircraft dropped high explosives and nearly 650,000 incendiaries on the city six planes were lost. The firestorm that ensued was visible two hundred miles away. The next day, just after noon, 1,350 American heavy bombers flew over to attack the railroad marshaling yards with high explosives but found nine-tenths cover of cloud and smoke and bombed a far larger area, encountering no flak at all. 

Stimson emphasized] the appalling lack of conscience and compassion that the war had brought about... the complacency, the indifference, and the silence with which we greeted the mass bombings in Europe and, above all, Japan. He was not exultant about the bombings of Hamburg, of Dresden, of... 

The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fur Lederforschung in Dresden was completely destroyed by bombs in 1945. It was re-established by W. Grassmann, at first as a research laboratory in Regensburg, Bavaria, then as the Max-Planck-Institut fur EiweiB- und Lederforschung in Munich and has now been incorporated as a department of peptide chemistry, directed by Erich Wiinsch, into the large Max-Planck-Institut fur Biochemie in Martinsried, near Munich. 

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