another lost city

Before WW2, Dresden was a lovely baroque city often called the Florence of the Elbe. Over13-15 February 1945 massive Allied fire-bombing destroyed it. After the war some key buildings in the centre were restored, but the rest were rebuilt in drab communist style. The city had no military significance and even if it had, as the Germans had demonstrated at Stalingrad, reducing a city to rubble does not remove its military obstacle. What was going on in the minds of Allied High Command is therefore hard to fathom. Another fact that is often overlooked is that for every ton of bombs the Luftwaffe dropped on the UK during the war, the Allies dropped over 100 on Germany. Some will be familiar with the book Slaughterhouse Five, turned into a film in 1972, which had the destruction of Dresden as a setting.

This book which translates as Above the Roofs of Dresden contains about 100 photos taken from the air compiled from the aerial photo archive of Walter Hahn who took them from 1919 to 1943, when the only aerial photography allowed was restricted to military purposes, and thus shows what Dresden used to look like: effectively another book for 20th century archeologists.