February 3, 1945 is the day the destruction of Dresden began. For two days, British and American Air Force heavy bombers dropped hundreds of tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the city. In the four years of the war, there have been no such massive raids. After all, the city was not a military target.…
Why was all this necessary? The Britons and the Americans demonstrated their power to the Soviet Union with these monstrous destructions, burned alive by civilians.
Dresden, the Pearl of Saxony, Northern Athens, and Florence on the Elbe were supposed to be in the Soviet occupation zone. (As agreed a few days earlier at a conference in Yalta). That was the only way to turn it into ruins. So that the Soviet victors would not get it.
Destroying Dresden by carpet bombing at the end of the war was a British idea. The author of the idea is British Air Force Minister Sir Archibald Sinclair.
Kurt Vonnegut, a captured American soldier and writer, witnessed this crime. He was locked up in a slaughterhouse during air raids, which is how his book “Slaughterhouse No. 5” appeared.
When the Soviet army entered Dresden, there was not even a hope that the collection of paintings from the Dresden Gallery had survived. But the Germans had hidden them long before in the quarries. Where already unfavorable climatic storage conditions were slowly destroying the masterpieces.
And then everything is simple…
All the paintings were found, restorers from the USSR were called in, who stopped the destruction process. Later, all the exhibits were sent to the Soviet Union. The restorers continued their work. It took 10 years to restore the paint layer on the canvases. Therefore, as before the war, the paintings were stored in not particularly favorable conditions. Everything was put in order…
And in 1955, the year of the tenth anniversary of Victory, everything was returned to Dresden. Several thousand exhibits…
Like that. Destruction and creation. Barbarism and culture. Murders and life. One city is Dresden…
@albert_Zabavsky
