Dresden Anniversary

Fifty-five years ago, when the world was divided into East and West, communism and capitalism, I went to the city of Dresden with a group of other young people from Britain. We were full of idealism about a peaceful world, a world where people of all countries could live in harmony with one another. We were doing our bit against chauvinism and hate – even if those thoughts were poorly formulated in our young minds at that time. We went there to help rebuild a church hospital which had been partially destroyed during the bombing raid of February 1945. It was an act of reconciliation organised by Coventry Cathedral in 1965.

Volunteers clearing rubble at the Dresden Diakonissen Hospital in 1965. The bricks in the background have been salvaged and cleaned.

Bombing raid

This month (February) saw the 75th anniversary of that Allied bombing raid on Dresden which caused a firestorm and took so many thousands of lives for so little purpose. The war was all but over. The Russians were advancing towards the city, only a few miles away. That raid has lived on as a symbol of the tragedy of war, sometimes seen as one of the first acts of state terrorism, sometimes not.

New book

This week a new book about that raid was published. The Fire and the Darkness: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 by Sinclair McKay follows on the heels of a number of books written since 1945, the first being The Destruction of Dresden by the historian David Irving, published in 1963. That was the first time the people of Britain knew about the raid.

Five years ago, on the fiftieth anniversary of our reconciliation project, I helped to produce a book about our time in Dresden. Stepping Off the Map: Memories of a Cold War Adventure is a compilation of the memories of those of us who took part, our thoughts on the world we found, hidden from most Western eyes at the time behind the Iron Curtain. It is, according to the Dean of Coventry Cathedral John Witcombe, also about ‘the hope of humanity to overcome despair and division, and to rebuild peace’.

These words have an added poignancy today as Britain drifts into a world of its own.