[6] Nazi Germany's desperate struggle to maintain resistance in the closing months of the war is widely understood today, but Allied intelligence assessments at the time painted a different picture.

[7] The Allies saw the Dresden operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which United States Air Force reports, declassified decades later, noted as a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers supporting the German war effort.

[23] A special British Joint Intelligence Subcommittee report, German Strategy and Capacity to Resist, prepared for Winston Churchill's eyes only, predicted that Germany might collapse as early as mid-April if the Soviets overran its eastern defences.

[26][30] Churchill was not satisfied with this answer and on 26 January pressed Sinclair for a plan of operations: "I asked [last night] whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in east Germany, should not now be considered especially attractive targets ... Pray, report to me tomorrow what is going to be done".

[31] In response to Churchill's inquiry, Sinclair approached Bottomley, who asked Harris to undertake attacks on Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz as soon as moonlight and weather permitted, "with the particular object of exploiting the confused conditions which are likely to exist in the above-mentioned cities during the successful Russian advance".

[31] This allowed Sinclair to inform Churchill on 27 January of the Air Staff's agreement that, "subject to the overriding claims" on other targets under the Pointblank Directive, strikes against communications in these cities to disrupt civilian evacuation from the east and troop movement from the west would be made.

[32][33] On 31 January, Bottomley sent Portal a message saying a heavy attack on Dresden and other cities "will cause great confusion in civilian evacuation from the east and hamper movement of reinforcements from other fronts".

His enquiry reflected the importance that the Soviet Union attached to an attack on the city, following intelligence reports that Germany was moving large numbers of troops towards the Breslau Front.

The high explosives were intended to rupture water mains and blow off roofs, doors, and windows to expose the interiors of the buildings and create an air flow to feed the fires caused by the incendiaries that followed.

[c][60] The 'Master Bomber' Wing Commander Maurice Smith, flying in a Mosquito, gave the order to the Lancasters: "Controller to Plate Rack Force: Come in and bomb glow of red target indicators as planned.

[64][65] The Pathfinders therefore decided to expand the target, dropping flares on either side of the firestorm, including the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, and the Großer Garten, a large park, both of which had escaped damage during the first raid.

[73] The 379th bombardment group started to bomb Dresden at 12:17, aiming at marshalling yards in the Friedrichstadt district west of the city centre, as the area was not obscured by smoke and cloud.

The Luftwaffe was largely ineffective, with planes that were unsafe to fly due to lack of parts and maintenance and a critical shortage of aviation fuel; the German radar system was also degraded, lowering the warning time to prepare for air attacks.

[60] Frederick Taylor writes that the Germans could see that a large enemy bomber formation—or what they called "ein dicker Hund" (lit: a fat dog, a "major thing")—was approaching somewhere in the east.

[85] Taylor writes the city was largely undefended; a night fighter force of ten Messerschmitt Bf 110Gs at Klotzsche airfield was scrambled, but it took them half an hour to get into an attack position.

[101] Seeking to establish a definitive casualty figure, in part to address propagandisation of the bombing by far-right groups, the Dresden city council in 2005 authorised an independent Historians' Commission (Historikerkommission) to conduct a new, thorough investigation, collecting and evaluating available sources.

[104] Goebbels is reported to have wept with rage for twenty minutes after he heard the news of the catastrophe, before launching into a bitter attack on Hermann Göring, the commander of the Luftwaffe: "If I had the power I would drag this cowardly good-for-nothing, this Reich marshal, before a court.

[107] Frederick Taylor states that "there is good reason to believe that later in March copies of—or extracts from—[an official police report] were leaked to the neutral press by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry ... doctored with an extra zero to increase [the total dead from the raid] to 202,040".

[20] On 4 March, Das Reich, a weekly newspaper founded by Goebbels, published a lengthy article emphasising the suffering and destruction of a cultural icon, without mentioning damage to the German war effort.

According to Max Hastings, by February 1945, attacks upon German cities had become largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war and the name of Dresden resonated with cultured people all over Europe—"the home of so much charm and beauty, a refuge for Trollope's heroines, a landmark of the Grand Tour."

At a press briefing held by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force two days after the raids, British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson told journalists: First of all they (Dresden and similar towns) are the centres to which evacuees are being moved.

The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.

[130] The baroque Church of Our Lady (completed in 1743) had initially appeared to survive the raids, but collapsed a few days later, and the ruins were left in place by later Communist governments as an anti-war memorial.

[14] The new Frauenkirche was reconstructed over seven years by architects using 3D computer technology to analyse old photographs and every piece of rubble that had been kept and was formally consecrated on 30 October 2005, in a service attended by some 1,800 guests, including Germany's president, Horst Köhler, previous chancellors Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, and the Duke of Kent.

[143][144][145] Irving himself grossly exaggerated the death toll in his book The Destruction of Dresden, arguing that the allied bombing killed 135,000 inhabitants; these figures were initially widely accepted, but are now considered to be wildly inflated.

The inquiry declared the elimination of the German ability to reinforce a counter-attack against Marshal Ivan Konev's extended line or, alternatively, to retreat and regroup using Dresden as a base of operations, were important military objectives.

[citation needed] Marshall's tribunal declared that no extraordinary decision was made to single out Dresden (for instance, to take advantage of a large number of refugees, or purposely terrorise the German populace), arguing that the area bombing was intended to disrupt communications and destroy industrial production.

It first tried to do so in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, but the UK and the US would not agree, since to do so would have been an admission of guilt for their systematic "area bombing" of German and Japanese civilians.Frederick Taylor told Der Spiegel, "I personally find the attack on Dresden horrific.

British historian Antony Beevor wrote that Dresden was considered relatively safe, having been spared previous RAF night attacks, and that at the time of the raids there were up to 300,000 refugees in the area seeking sanctuary from the advancing Red Army from the Eastern Front.

"[176][177] In the special introduction to the 1976 Franklin Library edition of the novel, he wrote: The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it.