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Germans urged to ‘defend democracy’ 75 years after Dresden WWII bombing

President Frank-Walter Steinmeier urged Germans to "defend democracy" on the 75th anniversary of the destruction of Dresden in World War II on Thursday, as the emboldened far right rattles the political establishment.

Published: 13 February 2020 16:34 CET
Germans urged to 'defend democracy' 75 years after Dresden WWII bombing
Photo: DPA

The anniversary has a complex legacy in Germany, where right-wing extremists have long inflated the number of people killed in the Allied air raids in a bid to play down the Nazis' crimes.

In a speech at Dresden's Palace of Culture, Steinmeier sought to strike a balance between remembering the 25,000 victims, while stressing Germany's responsibility for the war.

Steinmeier warned against the “political forces” that sought to “manipulate history and abuse it like a weapon”.

“Let's work together for a commemoration that focuses on the suffering of the victims and the bereaved, but also asks about the reasons for this suffering,” he told an audience that included Britain's Prince Edward.

Steinmeier later joined thousands of residents in forming a human chain of “peace and tolerance”.

As in past years, neo-Nazis were gathering in Dresden to hold “funeral marches” for the dead. The far-right AfD party meanwhile set up an information booth to tell the supposed “truth” about the bombings and demand a grander memorial for the victims.

READ ALSO: Germany remembers 75 years since Dresden's destruction

A candle being lit for victims of the Dresden bombing. Photo: DPA

Martyrdom

Hundreds of British and American planes pounded Dresden with conventional and incendiary explosives from February 13-15 in 1945.

Historians have calculated that the ensuing firestorm killed some 25,000 people, leaving the baroque city known as “Florence on the Elbe” in ruins, and wiping out its historic centre.

The devastation came to symbolise the horrors of war, much like the heavily bombed city of Coventry in England.

But in Germany, Dresden also became a focal point for neo-Nazis who gave the city a martyrdom status that experts say is belied by historical facts.

READ ALSO: 'Heal the wounds of history': Dresden and twin city remember 75 years since bombing

“The myth of the 'city of innocence' lives on,” the regional Sächsische Zeitung daily wrote.

This year's anniversary is especially charged as Germany reels from a political scandal that erupted in neighbouring Thuringia state last week, where an AfD-backed candidate was elected state premier for the first time.

Although he swiftly resigned, the drama marked a coup for the AfD – laying bare the struggle of mainstream parties to maintain the firewall against a party that has called for Germany to stop atoning for its Nazi past.

In a nod to the Thuringia debacle, Steinmeier warned of vigilance against politicians trying “to destroy democracy from within.

“There is a clear border between a liberal democracy,” he said, “and authoritarian, nationalist politics”.

“We must all defend this border.”

President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday. Photo: DPA

Inflated figures

Some observers have questioned whether the indiscriminate bombing of Dresden was justified so late in the war, an argument hijacked by neo-Nazis eager to shift the focus onto atrocities committed by the victors of WWII.

The Allied forces however considered Dresden a legitimate target on the eastern front because of its transport links and factories supporting the German military machine.

In the immediate aftermath, Nazi propagandists claimed over 200,000 people had lost their lives in Dresden — but historical records showed early on they had simply added a zero to their estimates.

Yet right-wing extremists continue to cite wildly elevated tolls.

AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla told Der Spiegel weekly that his grandmother and father recalled seeing “mountains of bodies” after the firebombing.

He said he believes the victims numbered “around 100,000”, prompting critics to accuse him of historical revisionism.

Founded just seven years ago, the anti-Islam, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) has risen to become the largest opposition party in the national parliament.

It is most popular in the country's former communist east. In Dresden's Saxony state, the AfD came second in regional polls last year.

Dresden bombing survivor Ursula Elsner, who was 14 when her mother dragged her to safety past burning buildings, told Spiegel she was tired of the anniversary being misused for political gain.

The 89-year-old wants the occasion to serve as a warning against war.

“This day belongs to us,” she said.

By Michelle Fitzpatrick

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WWII

How a new Berlin museum is carefully exploring Germany’s wartime suffering

A new museum dedicated to the long-silenced trauma of German civilians forced to flee eastern Europe at the end of World War II opens next week after decades of wrenching debate.

Published: 20 June 2021 12:06 CEST
How a new Berlin museum is carefully exploring Germany's wartime suffering
An exhibit at the Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation. Photo: dpa | Bernd von Jutrczenka

Perhaps reflecting what its founders call their delicate “balancing act”, the new institution in Berlin carries the unwieldy name of Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation.

Some 14 million Germans fled or were ejected from what is today’s Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Baltic states, Romania, Slovakia and the former Yugoslavia between 1944 and 1950.

Escaping the Russian army and later forced out by occupying powers and local authorities, an estimated 600,000 Germans lost their lives on the trek.

Those who fled included people who had settled in Nazi-occupied territories as well as ethnic Germans who had lived for centuries as minorities.

Seventy-six years after the conflict’s end, director Gundula Bavendamm said Germany was finally ready to talk about their suffering, while still acknowledging the unparalleled guilt of the Nazis.

“We are not the only country that needed quite some time to face up to painful and difficult chapters of its own history,” she told reporters at a preview of the museum before it opens to the public on Wednesday.

“Sometimes it takes several generations, and the right political constellations.”

‘Universal’ experience

The 65-million-euro museum takes pains to place the Germans’ plight firmly in the context of Hitler’s expansionist, genocidal policies.

It is located between the museum at the former Gestapo headquarters and the ruins of Anhalter railway station from which Jews were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Just opposite is a planned Exile Museum devoted to those who fled Nazi Germany.

Access to the second-floor space spotlighting the Germans’ exodus can only be gained through a darkened room covering the Holocaust.

The first-floor exhibition looks at the “universal” refugee experience, covering mass displacements in countries such as Vietnam, Myanmar, Lebanon and India after the 1947 partition.

“Hyper-nationalism is one of the prime causes of war and forced migration – they almost always go together,” curator Jochen Krueger said.

A folding bicycle used by a Syrian asylum seeker crossing from Russia into Norway in the spring of 2016 resonates particularly in Germany, where more than 1.2 million people arrived at the height of that refugee influx.

Dropped stitch

An estimated one-third of Germans have family ties to the mass exodus at the war’s end and the museum presents their often poignant heirlooms.

A haunting cross stitch with a rhyme about kitchen tidiness hangs unfinished, a dark thread still dangling from the cloth because the woman working on it suddenly had to run from advancing Soviet troops.

A girl’s leather pouch is marked with her address in Fraustadt, now the Polish town of Wschowa: Adolf Hitler Strasse 36, displayed in a case near a well-thumbed Hebrew dictionary.

READ MORE:

Keys from a villa in Koenigsberg — today’s Kaliningrad — that was fled in 1945 and from a house in Aleppo, Syria abandoned in 2015 symbolise the enduring hope of returning home one day.

“Everything you see displayed here is a miracle because it survived the journey,” Bavendamm said.

The around 12.5 million people who made it to what would become East and West Germany as well as Austria often faced discrimination and hostility.

Now decades on, the museum’s library offers assistance to families hoping to retrace their ancestors’ odyssey.

An audio guide provides context in English, Polish, Czech, Russian and Arabic in addition to German.

And a “Room of Stillness” allows people to sit and reflect on difficult memories.

‘Last remaining gap’

A shroud of silence and shame long covered the suffering experienced by German civilians during and after the war.

Groups representing the expelled in the post-war period sometimes had links to the far right, and occasionally agitated against government efforts to atone for Nazi aggression.

Only after the Cold War and a long process of international reconciliation did incidents such as the devastating Allied firebombing of Dresden or the 1945 sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff ship carrying German refugees gain an airing.

The far right’s claiming of such events to underline German victimhood also complicates efforts to find the right tone to broach the subject.

News magazine Der Spiegel called the museum “a statement to the left and the right wing, to Germany and abroad. It is meant to close a last remaining gap in German remembrance”.

The seed for the project was planted in 1999 by Erika Steinbach, an archconservative lawmaker who had voted against the recognition of Germany’s postwar border with Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

An infamous Polish magazine cover depicted Steinbach as a Nazi dominatrix forcing Germany’s chancellor at the time, Gerhard Schroeder, to do her bidding.

However Schroeder’s successor Angela Merkel recognised the necessity of the museum and in 2008 agreed with broad mainstream support to establish a centre dedicated to a spirit of international reconciliation.

Historians from across Europe and Jewish community representatives were enlisted as advisors.

“Understanding loss is at the heart of the project – loss of property and ownership in general but also loss of social status, of community, of loved ones,” Bavendamm said.

“But it’s also about how people manage to process loss and perhaps, after a time, begin to look toward a better future.”

SEE ALSO: ‘We just didn’t realise’ – What it was like growing up in post-Nazi Dachau

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