Rebuilding Dresden: WWIIs Phoenix City

It’s a city that—against all the odds—managed to rise from the dead.

In the last months of WWII, Dresden was one of the few major urban centers in Germany untouched by Allied bombs. A medieval town replete with stunning baroque architecture that had somehow survived the war so far unscathed.

But, in the early hours of February 14th, 1945, all that would change.

That night, a fleet of RAF bombers swept over the city, trailing Biblical destruction in their wake. Incendiary bombs landed on old timber buildings, whipping up a firestorm that would annihilate the city. 25,000 people are thought to have died.

Yet we’re not here today to tell the tale of Dresden’s destruction, but rather its resurrection. The long, tortuous process that led to this utterly ruined city becoming—once again—the “Florence on the Elbe.” A process that took place first under Soviet occupation, then under a Communist regime, and finally under the modern, reunified German state.

An engineering miracle that took the burned and broken remnants of a shattered city, and turned them into a reborn masterpiece.

Paradise Lost

Right up until Valentine’s Day, 1945, the one thing most people knew about Dresden was that it was knock-out gorgeous.

Just take a look at some of the old paintings that have survived. Founded in the Middle Ages, Dresden really began to flourish under Augustus the Strong—a guy who combined being the local Elector of Saxony with his dual role as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.

More importantly for our story, though, Augustus was also someone who was seriously into art and grandiose architecture. It was under his watch that Dresden transformed into a visual masterpiece.

This was the era in which the city amassed world-beating collections of porcelain, art, jewellery, and scientific instruments. An era in which great palaces and the stunning Frauenkirche were built.

Although Augustus would go off to the great Saxony in the sky in 1733, the building work he started survived his death.

Across the 18th and 19th Centuries, Dresden grew ever-grander. Ever-more spectacular. Ever-more important in the history of German art and architecture.

By the dawn of the 20th Century, the city had enchanted so many visitors that it was known as “Florence on the Elbe” after the legendary Italian city.

And while the comparison might have been pushing things a little, there’s no doubt that Dresden in this era really was something special. A place that could make even a legendary beauty like Prague look like an ugly stepsister in comparison.

Yet while Prague would survive the coming war more-or-less intact, Dresden more-or-less… wouldn’t.

As night fell on the 13th of February 1945, 800 RAF bombers roared to life in a dark airfield in England. Taking off, they streaked through the skies over the shattered continent, the rumble of their engines like the tolling of some great bell, signaling the end of Augustus’s hometown.

Now, this isn’t a Warographics video, so we’ll refrain from going too deep into the gory details of what happened next.

The short version is that, a little before midnight, the first explosives fell on Dresden, scattering timber and debris.

But it was what came in the early hours of February 14 that would seal the city’s fate.

In two waves, the British dropped 200,000 incendiaries onto the sleeping city. This ignited a firestorm which swept through the Florence on the Elbe, devouring people and buildings.

The flames grew so great that they sucked all the oxygen out the air, generating hurricane force winds. Over 800 km (or 500 miles) away, incoming British bombers could already see the flames on the horizon.

That night, 25,000 people lost their lives. But it was the scale of physical destruction that really shocked survivors.

From almost no damage over six years of war, Dresden had suddenly lost 78,000 buildings.

The great 19th Century Semper Opera house was gone, leaving only ashes. The main art gallery had been reduced to a mere broken shell.

Most darkly impressive of all, though, was the fate of the Frauenkirche.

Built back in the 18th Century, the Lutheran church was famous for its 12,000-ton sandstone dome supported on eight slender pillars.

So sturdy was it that the church actually survived the initial bombing. It even managed to stand for an additional two days as the firestorm engulfed the city, seemingly protected by God.

By the end of the second day, though, the constant 1,000°C heat had grown too much even for this masterpiece.

With an apocalyptic crack, the heat caused the pillars holding the dome up to explode. As they did so, the walls shattered… and then 12,000 tons of sandstone fell silently to Earth. A silence that ended half a second later with an almighty crash.

The Frauenkirche was no more. Dresden was no more.

At that moment, anyone who saw the ruins would’ve assumed that this was it. Armageddon. A final chapter from which nothing could ever return.

Certainly, that was the impression a 22-year-old American POW who witnessed the aftermath got. A GI who’d survived the firebombing only because he and his fellow prisoners had been locked in a meat storage facility far below the earth—a facility with the now-infamous name of Slaughterhouse Five.

Writing much later, Kurt Vonnegut would describe Dresden after the bombing as “look(ing) like the surface of the moon.” A place utterly devoid of life.

But while Dresden may have lain in ruins, it was far from dead.

Although it would take many decades, the city of Augustus the Strong would—miraculously, painfully—be brought back to life.

Ashes to Ashes

The slow process of rebuilding Dresden began almost immediately after the flames died away and the broken rubble grew cool enough to touch.

Work crews were sent in to remove the wreckage. To carve out paths through which humanity could move again.

After the collapse of the Nazi regime mere months later, these crews would be replaced by volunteers. In ruined Dresden, that meant almost 500 men and 600 women working to dispose of the ruins.

But the clear-up wasn’t the only thing that started after the last bomb fell. There was also the propaganda game.

In the last months of his life, Joseph Goebbels seized on the firebombing of Dresden as a war crime that made the Allies no better than the Nazis. In this, he was helped by a wildly inflated death count that pegged the number of victims at a quarter of a million—ten times the modern agreed total.

There was also a fierce debate about whether or not Dresden constituted a legitimate target.

Without getting too deep into thorny moral questions, we’ll just say here that it’s untrue that the city had no military value. It was an important transport hub and housed factories that made items helping fuel Hitler’s war machine.

On the other hand, it’s also true that—by this point in the war—Germany was clearly destined to lose no matter what happened. And there’s not much evidence incinerating Dresden helped hasten that loss.

With that tricky ethical bit out of the way, let’s get back to the narrative.

The end of the war saw the Red Army reach Dresden first, bringing the shattered city within the Soviet sphere of influence.

Within four years, that influence had been made official. Communist East Germany was proclaimed a state on 7 October 1949, leaving Dresden some 200km behind the Iron Curtain now falling across Europe.

Luckily, the new Socialist regime had big plans for reconstructing Florence on the Elbe. Less-luckily, they weren’t even close to having the means to do it.

The reconstruction plan started off with an aura of post-war euphoria. In 1946, a competition was held to redesign the destroyed center, with an emphasis on restoring what had been lost.

Within no time at all, though, that euphoria had started to ebb away. In its place came the cold realization that there simply wasn’t enough money to restore Dresden to its former glory.

So, instead of rebuilding, the authorities decided to turn this wasteland into a new, Socialist paradise.

If you’ve ever lived in a former Communist state, you’ll probably have a pretty good idea of what this “paradise” looked like. Under its new rulers, Dresden became just another identikit town of wide boulevards and six storey apartment blocks.

When Kurt Vonnegut visited in 1967, he wrote that:

“It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has.”

Which—and no offense to Dayton—should give you a fairly good idea of how little of the beautiful old town had been reconstructed.

Still, the GDR authorities weren’t totally broke. They did fund some restorations, including the art gallery and the Semper Opera House.

But most of the city center was simply swept away. And the bits that stayed were never fixed.

The blackened ruins of the Frauenkirche—for example—were allowed to remain standing. The intention was for them to be both a memorial, and an anti-war monument.

Unofficially, they were also a highly-visible boost to Communist ideology.

The GDR wanted to remind its citizens what British bombers had done to Dresden. A war crime committed by a bourgeois, imperialist country that was now an enemy.

How little any of them could have realized that this “bourgeois” nation would soon be helping them rebuild their city.

Across the Waves

Although the destruction of Dresden became infamous, it wasn’t the only city to be obliterated by firebombs in WWII.

Tokyo would be burned to a crisp in a raid that claimed over 100,000 lives. Hamburg, too, would become just so much smoke.

But it would be a city on the other side of the war’s dividing line that would—strangely—feel the closest connection to the Florence on the Elbe.

Over four years before death came to Dresden, German bombers had appeared over the British city of Coventry.

On November 14, 1940, they’d unleashed a combination of high explosives and incendiary bombs onto the medieval town center. While the fire that raged had killed far fewer people—somewhere in the region of 570—it had been equally destructive.

Most of Coventry’s famed old town had been reduced to ashes. Just like Dresden’s Frauenkirche, the city’s cathedral had been left a scorched ruin.

Remarkably though, this destruction hadn’t instilled in the cathedral’s leadership a desire for revenge… but for reconciliation.

It started almost the moment the air raid was over, when the senior priest, Richard Howard, took a soot-blackened timber from the old roof and used it scrawl the words “Father Forgive” over the damaged altar.

It continued, too, in the immediate aftermath of the war, when nails from the burned timbers were fashioned into crosses and sent to churches in war-damaged German cities like Berlin.

But the most-visible form of this forgiveness would be the twinning project.

As citizens of a city that had suffered the full horrors of war, the leaders of Coventry were determined to join forces with those who’d endured similar destruction. Their town was symbolically twinned with places like Stalingrad (today Volgograd) and Kiel.

Yet the most-impactful of all would be the twinning with Dresden.

That’s because, in 1958, that twinning would lead to the new senior priest of Coventry cathedral—Provost Williams—traveling to the GDR and witnessing the still-ruined city.

In particular, he’d be shocked by the state of the Deaconesses’ Hospital—still mostly a blasted shell. So shocked that, when he returned to Britain, the priest would begin a fundraising appeal.

With help from the BBC and the Rabbi Lionel Blue, Williams raised enough money by 1965 to fund a rebuilding of the hospital. A rebuilding 29 citizens of Coventry traveled to Dresden to take part in.

It was a small gesture. A tiny flicker of humanity set against the inferno of war.

But it also showed that collaboration was possible. That wartime enemies could work together to rebuild and help their people to heal.

It would take another thirty-odd years. But, when the time came, it would be another gesture just like this that would return Dresden’s greatest ruin from the ashes.

The Cathedral, Reborn

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989 was one of those events felt around the world—a moment that defined an era.

So it should come as no surprise that its impact in Dresden—just 165 km away—was astronomical.

As Communism collapsed and the two Germanys moved towards reunification, local Dresdeners took advantage of newfound freedoms to campaign for their city’s resurrection.

Not in the economic sense. These citizen groups wanted to mark this new era by finishing what the Communists had half-heartedly started. By turning Dresden from “Dayton on the Elbe” back into its old, pre-war self.

In 1990, the Appeal from Dresden was issued, asking for donations from the world to rebuild the Frauenkirche.

Incredibly, it would be the nations that had done the most to destroy it that would help with its reconstruction.

In Britain, word of the Appeal eventually reached Dr. Alan Russell, the man who would found the Dresden Trust.

A quiet, law-abiding man of 59, Russell had transformed in the early 1990s into a one-man protest band—so disgusted was he at London putting up a statue of Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the mastermind of the Dresden air raid.

It was through such protests that Russell became aware of the Appeal. It seemed to him the perfect way to atone for Britain’s role in the firestorm, so he founded the Dresden Trust to raise funds. Ultimately, he would scrape together over £1 million for the Frauenkirche’s reconstruction.

Nor was Dr. Russell the only one.

Up in Coventry, the local council and cathedral both led appeals to rebuild the shattered city. Over in America, the Friends of Dresden would hold huge fundraising galas.

All in all, this mid-size Saxon city would receive nearly $200m for rebuilding—half of which came in the form of donations.

And with money like that, there was no need for the reconstruction to just focus on the Frauenkirche. More of the long-lost historical center could be resurrected.

But only after a whole lotta work.

The project began in 1993, with the removal of the Frauenkirche’s ruins.

Despite the rubble pile being over 13 meters tall and containing over 22,000 cubic meters of stone, each piece had to be identified and cataloged.

That meant hundreds of engineers, architects, and art historians all working around the clock for 18 months, just to finally clear the plaza. But this wasn’t masochism on the part of the project managers.

No. The plan was to use as much of the original church as possible. To try and place as many of these burned and blackened stones back where they’d been before the bombs fell.

This was a Quixotic quest. Not so much tilting at windmills as trying to reinvent the concept of windmills from the ground up. There was no way anyone could’ve ever fit this gigantic collapsed 3D puzzle back together again.

Still, the engineers tried. Some 40 percent of the original building would ultimately make its way into the new Frauenkirche—most more-or-less in its original place.

The useable stones they couldn’t identify were assigned random places in the structure by a computer program. If you visit today, you can clearly see them: darkened blocks standing out against the bright new sandstone. A constant reminder of the church’s tragic past.

A reminder, too, of the insane effort that went into bringing this one building back to life.

The New Old Town

In the end, it would take until 2005 for the church to be rebuilt.

That’s 12 years. 12 long years, in which the face of Dresden’s center slowly transformed—shedding some of its Socialist mask, and becoming once again Florence on the Elbe.

At the same time the Frauenkirche was rising again over the city’s rooftops, other parts of the center were being brought into the project. Prime Minister of Saxony Kurt Bidenkopf had decided the town’s future lay in an architectural return to the past, and so the great sweeping Socialist plazas and boulevards would get their own makeover.

A makeover that would eventually erase the Dresden of the GDR years.

Well, part of it at least. As with the reconstruction of Warsaw’s Old Town, there were limits to the project. Only a small fraction of the very center could realistically be recreated.

But what a recreation it would be.

By 2001, the Frauenkirche had reached a height of 28m—over 90 ft. Work began on the 13,000-ton sandstone dome, using the original architectural plans from 1736.

A mere two years later, it was complete. That same year—2003—the bells were rung again in the church for the first time since 1945.

Finally, in 2005—with work almost completed—the city added the pièce de résistance. The metaphorical cherry atop this giant, church-shaped cake.

Attached to the cupola at the very top of the rebuilt Frauenkirche, the golden orb and cross was more than just a fancy decoration. It was a symbol.

Commissioned with British money, and made by a goldsmith from London, the orb and cross were intended as an icon of reconciliation. One of the craftsmen who worked on it—Alan Smith—was even the son of an RAF pilot who’d taken part in the raid on Dresden.

In fall of 2005, it was hoisted atop the church before a mixed crowd of Germans and visitors from England. At the moment it was fixed in place, it was like the Earth had exhaled. Like the ghosts of previous generations had finally been put to rest.

Today, the reconstruction work on Dresden’s historic center is still ongoing. The Royal Palace is scheduled to be finished in the next year or two. Who knows what will come after that?

To be sure, it’s not all been smooth sailing.

Since the fall of the GDR, neo-Nazis have rallied around the destruction of Dresden as a way of “proving” that Germans were the War’s real victims. As if the city’s destruction—no matter how horrific—could somehow negate the six million lives that vanished in the Holocaust.

To that end, the rebuilt old town has had a galvanizing effect. Every year, neo-Nazi groups stage marches through the city center on the anniversary of the bombing, playing Wagner and generally acting like fascist d*cks. In 2022, nearly 800 attended.

Yet, for the most part, the second life of Dresden has had a more-positive effect.

Germany’s relationship with its Nazi past remains incredibly complex. With so much guilt about the atrocities committed against Jews, Poles, Roma, Slavs, gay people and many more, it can be hard for Germans to mourn their own war dead.

In a way, Dresden’s rebuild has given a minor outlet for that. A way of acknowledging that—while Germany may have been the aggressor—we shouldn’t forget the civilians who died here. The 25,000 ordinary people who went up in smoke alongside their city.

Right in the old market square in the reconstructed old town, there’s a small plaque that perhaps sums up this dual heritage best:

“After the air attack on Dresden on February 13-14, 1945, the corpses of 6,865 people were burned on this spot.” After this comes a simple, haunting statement: “We brought the war to the world, and ultimately it came home to us.”

Key Takeaways

• Dresden was a stunning medieval city with baroque architecture, untouched by Allied bombs until February 1945.
• RAF bombers destroyed Dresden in a firestorm, killing 25,000 people and annihilating 78,000 buildings.
• The reconstruction of Dresden began under Soviet occupation, then continued under Communist rule and finally under a reunified Germany.
• The Frauenkirche, a iconic Lutheran church, was rebuilt using 40% of the original stones, symbolizing reconciliation.
• Dresden’s reconstruction has had a positive effect, acknowledging civilian deaths while navigating Germany’s complex Nazi past.

Sources

• Original MegaProjects video: Rebuilding Dresden: WWIIs Phoenix City
• https://www.seattletimes.com/life/travel/the-inspiring-rebirth-of-dresden/
• https://dresdentrust.org/dresden-renewal/
• https://www.friendsofcoventrycathedral.org.uk/events/coventry-dresden-bridging-the-miles
• https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-dec-23-tr-dresden23-story.html
• https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/04/twin-cities-coventry-stalingrad-war
• https://www.dresden.de/en/05/035/reconstruction.php
• https://birdinflight.com/en/architectura-2/20221214-postwar-dresden.html
• https://www.history.com/news/dresden-bombing-wwii-allies
• https://www.dw.com/en/dresden-neo-nazi-march-mars-remembrance-of-world-war-ii-bombing/a-60763462
• Hero image source by Vincent de Groot - http://www.videgro.net / openverse, by-sa.

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