On February 13, 1945, 245 four-propeller bombers of the "Avro Lancaster" type took off from their bases in Britain. Their target was the city on the Elbe. At that time, Dresden was inhabited by 630,000 people, but there were also hundreds of thousands of refugees in it. The city had neither strategic nor economic importance for the further course of the war, which was decided in 1944 anyway, Deutsche Welle recalls.
At 9:39 p.m., the sirens began to wail. The first raid was carried out entirely by Group No. 5. In 23 minutes, British bombers dropped 3,000 high-explosive, 250 illuminating and 400,000 incendiary bombs on the city, nicknamed "Florence on the Elbe".
The city center was engulfed in a firestorm and burned to the ground. The fire was so intense that some British pilots reported seeing Dresden in flames from 320 kilometers away and an altitude of 6,700 meters. Three hours later, a second, larger raid followed. After the second air raid, the firestorm took on colossal proportions. And after the subsequent attack by the American Air Force, 15 square kilometers of the city were leveled to the ground.
Some historians see in the bombing of Dresden an element of increased military cooperation between the Western powers and the Soviet Union in the final phase of the war. In late 1944, the Allied offensive on the Western Front stalled, and the Red Army advanced rapidly from the East.
In February 1945, the Red Army under the command of Marshal Zhukov was 80 kilometers east of Dresden when British and American pilots leveled the city to the ground, thus demonstrating their alliance in the fight against Hitler's Germany. "The Soviet Army would never have committed such barbarity," Marshal Zhukov later wrote.