title: Non-governmental organization

text: According to [[Vijay Prashad]], since the 1970s "the World Bank, under [[Robert McNamara]], championed the NGO as an alternative to the state, leaving intact global and regional relations of power and production." NGOs have been accused of preserving imperialism (sometimes operating in a [[Racialization|racialized]] manner in [[Third World]] countries), with a function similar to that of the clergy during the colonial era. Political philosopher [[Peter Hallward]] has called them an aristocratic form of politics, noting that [[ActionAid]] and [[Christian Aid]] "effectively condoned the [2004 US-backed] coup" against an elected government in Haiti and are the "humanitarian face of imperialism". Movements in the [[Global South]] (such as [[South Africa]]'s [[Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign]]) have refused to work with NGOs, concerned that doing so would compromise their autonomy. NGOs have been accused of weakening people by allowing their funders to prioritize stability over social justice.


title: Non-governmental organization

text: They have been accused of being designed by, and used as extensions of, the foreign-policy instruments of some Western countries and groups of countries. Russian president [[Vladimir Putin]] made that accusation at the 43rd [[Munich Security Conference]] in 2007, saying that NGOs "are formally independent but they are purposefully financed and therefore under control".


title: Non-governmental organization

text: According to Michael Bond, "Most large NGOs, such as Oxfam, the Red Cross, Cafod and ActionAid, are striving to make their aid provision more sustainable. But some, mostly in the US, are still exporting the ideologies of their backers."


title: Non-governmental organization

text: NGOs have been accused of using misinformation in their campaigns out of self-interest. According to Doug Parr of [[Greenpeace]], there had been "a tendency among our critics to say that science is the only decision-making tool ... but political and commercial interests are using science as a cover for getting their way." Former policy-maker for the German branch of [[Friends of the Earth]] Jens Katjek said, "If NGOs want the best for the environment, they have to learn to compromise."


title: Non-governmental organization

text: They have been questioned as "too much of a good thing". Eric Werker and Faisal Ahmed made three critiques of NGOs in developing nations. Too many NGOs in a nation (particularly one ruled by a warlord) reduces an NGO's influence, since it can easily be replaced by another NGO. Resource allocation and outsourcing to local organizations in international-development projects incurs expenses for an NGO, lessening the resources and money available to the intended beneficiaries. NGO missions tend to be paternalistic, as well as expensive.


title: Non-governmental organization

text: Legitimacy, an important asset of an NGO, is its perception as an "independent voice". Neera Chandhoke wrote in a "[[Journal of World-Systems Research]]" article, "To put the point starkly: are the citizens of countries of the South and their needs represented in global civil society, or are citizens as well as their needs constructed by practices of representation? And when we realize that INGOs hardly ever come face to face with the people whose interests and problems they represent, or that they are not accountable to the people they represent, matters become even more troublesome."


title: Non-governmental organization

text: An NGO's funding affects its legitimacy, and they have become increasingly dependent on a limited number of donors. Competition for funds has increased, in addition to the expectations of donors who may add conditions threatening an NGO's independence. Dependence on official aid may dilute "the willingness of NGOs to speak out on issues which are unpopular with governments", and changes in NGO funding sources have altered their function.


title: Non-governmental organization

text: NGOs have been challenged as not representing the needs of the developing world, diminishing the "Southern voice" and preserving the [[North–South divide in the World|North–South divide]]. The equality of relationships between northern and southern parts of an NGO, and between southern and northern NGOs working in partnership, has been questioned; the north may lead in advocacy and resource mobilization, and the south delivers services in the developing world. The needs of the developing world may not be addressed appropriately, as northern NGOs do not consult (or participate in) partnerships or assign unrepresentative priorities. NGOs have been accused of damaging the public sector in target countries, such as mismanagement resulting in the breakdown of public healthcare systems.


title: Non-governmental organization

text: The scale and variety of activities in which NGOs participate have grown rapidly since 1980, and particularly since 1990. NGOs need to balance centralization and decentralization. Centralizing NGOs, particularly at the international level, can assign a common theme or set of goals. It may also be advantageous to decentralize an NGO, increasing its chances of responding flexibly and effectively to local issues by implementing projects which are modest in scale, easily monitored, produce immediate benefits, and where all involved know that corruption would be punished.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The bombing of Dresden was a joint British and American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during World War II. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than of the city centre. An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed. Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March aimed at the city's railway marshalling yard and one smaller raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Postwar discussions of whether the attacks were justified, and the tens of thousands of civilians killed in the bombing, have led to the event becoming one of the moral "causes célèbres" of the war. Despite the current understanding of the ability of Nazi Germany to continue the war, at the time, Allied intelligence assessments gave undue emphasis to fears of the Russian advance faltering or the establishment of a Nazi redoubt in Southern Germany (see Alpine Fortress). Two United States Air Force reports, published in 1953 and again in 1954, defended the operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which they noted was a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Several researchers assert that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas which were located outside the city centre. Critics of the bombing have asserted that Dresden was a cultural landmark with little strategic significance, and that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and were not proportionate to the military gains. Some have claimed that the raid constituted a war crime. Immediate German propaganda claims following the attacks played up the death toll of the bombing and its status as mass murder, and many in the German far-right refer to it as "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: In the decades since the war, large variations in the claimed death toll have fuelled the controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. The city authorities at the time estimated up to 25,000 victims, a figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council. However, in March 1945, the German government ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids, and death tolls as high as 500,000 have been claimed. One of the main authors responsible for inflated figures being disseminated in the West was Holocaust denier David Irving, who subsequently announced that he had discovered that the documentation he had worked from had been forged, and the real figures supported the 25,000 number.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Early in 1945, the German offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge had been exhausted, as was the Luftwaffe's disastrous New Year's Day attack involving elements of 11 combat wings of its day fighter force. The Red Army had launched its Silesian Offensives into pre-war German territory. The German army was retreating on all fronts, but still resisting strongly. On 8 February 1945, the Red Army crossed the Oder River, with positions just from Berlin. A special British Joint Intelligence Subcommittee report, "German Strategy and Capacity to Resist", prepared for Winston Churchill's eyes only, predicted that Germany might collapse as early as mid-April if the Soviets overran its eastern defences. Alternatively, the report warned that the Germans might hold out until November if they could prevent the Soviets from taking Silesia. Despite the post-war assessment, in the period before the Dresden raid, there were serious doubts in Allied intelligence as to how well the war was going for them, with fears of "Nazi redoubt" being established, or of the Russian advance faltering. Hence any assistance to the Soviets on the Eastern Front could shorten the war.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: A large scale aerial attack on Berlin and other eastern cities was examined under the code name Operation Thunderclap in mid-1944, but was shelved on 16 August. This was later reexamined, and the decision made for a more limited operation. The Soviet Army continued its push towards the Reich despite severe losses, which they sought to minimize in the final phase of the war. On 5 January 1945, two North American B-25 Mitchell bombers dropped 300,000 leaflets over Dresden with the "Appeal of 50 German generals to the German army and people".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: On 22 January 1945, the RAF director of bomber operations, Air Commodore Sydney Bufton, sent Deputy Chief of the Air Staff Air Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley a minute suggesting that if Thunderclap was timed so that it appeared to be a coordinated air attack to aid the current Soviet offensive then the effect of the bombing on German morale would be increased. On 25 January, the Joint Intelligence Committee supported the idea, as it tied in with the Ultra-based intelligence that dozens of German divisions deployed in the west were moving to reinforce the Eastern Front, and that interdiction of these troop movements should be a "high priority." Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, AOC-in-C Bomber Command, nicknamed "Bomber Harris", and known as an ardent supporter of area bombing, was asked for his view, and proposed a simultaneous attack on Chemnitz, Leipzig and Dresden. That evening Churchill asked the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, what plans had been drawn up to carry out these proposals. He passed on the request to Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, who answered, "We should use available effort in one big attack on Berlin and attacks on Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz, or any other cities where a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the East, but will also hamper the movement of troops from the West." He mentioned that aircraft diverted to such raids should not be taken away from the current primary tasks of destroying oil production facilities, jet aircraft factories, and submarine yards.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Churchill was not satisfied with this answer and on 26 January pressed Sinclair for a plan of operations: "I asked [last night] whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in east Germany, should not now be considered especially attractive targets ... Pray report to me tomorrow what is going to be done".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: In response to Churchill's inquiry, Sinclair approached Bottomley, who asked Harris to undertake attacks on Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz as soon as moonlight and weather permitted, "with the particular object of exploiting the confused conditions which are likely to exist in the above mentioned cities during the successful Russian advance". This allowed Sinclair to inform Churchill on 27 January of the Air Staff's agreement that, "subject to the overriding claims" on other targets under the Pointblank Directive, strikes against communications in these cities to disrupt civilian evacuation from the east and troop movement from the west would be made.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: On 31 January, Bottomley sent Portal a message saying a heavy attack on Dresden and other cities "will cause great confusion in civilian evacuation from the east and hamper movement of reinforcements from other fronts". British historian Frederick Taylor mentions a further memo sent to the Chiefs of Staff Committee by Air Marshal Sir Douglas Evill on 1 February, in which Evill states interfering with mass civilian movements was a major, even key, factor in the decision to bomb the city centre. Attacks there, where main railway junctions, telephone systems, city administration and utilities were, would result in "chaos". Ostensibly, Britain had learned this after the Coventry Blitz, when loss of this crucial infrastructure had supposedly longer-lasting effects than attacks on war plants.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: During the Yalta Conference on 4 February, the Deputy Chief of the Soviet General Staff, General Aleksei Antonov, raised the issue of hampering the reinforcement of German troops from the western front by paralyzing the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig with aerial bombardment. In response, Portal, who was in Yalta, asked Bottomley to send him a list of objectives to discuss with the Soviets. Bottomley's list included oil plants, tank and aircraft factories and the cities of Berlin and Dresden. However according to Richard Overy, the discussion with the Soviet Chief of Staff, Aleksei Antonov, recorded in the minutes, only mentions the bombing of Berlin and Leipzig. The bombing of Dresden was a Western plan, but the Soviets were told in advance about the operation.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: According to the RAF at the time, Dresden was Germany's seventh-largest city and the largest remaining unbombed built-up area. Taylor writes that an official 1942 guide to the city described it as "one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich" and in 1944 the German Army High Command's Weapons Office listed 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops that were supplying the army with materiel. Nonetheless, according to some historians, the contribution of Dresden to the German war effort may not have been as significant as the planners thought.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The US Air Force Historical Division wrote a report in response to the international concern about the bombing that remained classified until December 1978. It said that there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers in the city supporting the German war effort at the time of the raid. According to the report, there were aircraft components factories; a poison gas factory (Chemische Fabrik Goye and Company); an anti-aircraft and field gun factory (Lehman); an optical goods factory (Zeiss Ikon AG); and factories producing electrical and X-ray apparatus ( AG); gears and differentials (Saxoniswerke); and electric gauges (Gebrüder Bassler). It also said there were barracks, hutted camps, and a munitions storage depot.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The USAF report also states that two of Dresden's traffic routes were of military importance: north-south from Germany to Czechoslovakia, and east–west along the central European uplands. The city was at the junction of the Berlin-Prague-Vienna railway line, as well as the Munich-Breslau, and Hamburg-Leipzig lines. Colonel Harold E. Cook, a US POW held in the Friedrichstadt marshaling yard the night before the attacks, later said that "I saw with my own eyes that Dresden was an armed camp: thousands of German troops, tanks and artillery and miles of freight cars loaded with supplies supporting and transporting German logistics towards the east to meet the Russians".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: In the raid, major industrial areas in the suburbs, which stretched for miles, were not targeted. According to historian Donald Miller, "the economic disruption would have been far greater had Bomber Command targeted the suburban areas where most of Dresden's manufacturing might was concentrated".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: In his biography of Attlee and Churchill, Leo McKinstry wrote: "When Churchill arrived at Yalta on 4 February 1945, the first question that Stalin put to him was: ‘Why haven’t you bombed Dresden?’ His enquiry reflected the importance that the Soviet Union attached to an attack on the city, following intelligence reports that Germany was moving large numbers of troops towards the Breslau Front. [ Siege of Breslau ] Churchill was able to assure Stalin that just such an Allied attack was imminent."


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The Dresden attack was to have begun with a USAAF Eighth Air Force bombing raid on 13 February 1945. The Eighth Air Force had already bombed the railway yards near the centre of the city twice in daytime raids: once on 7 October 1944 with 70 tons of high-explosive bombs killing more than 400, then again with 133 bombers on 16 January 1945, dropping 279 tons of high-explosives and 41 tons of incendiaries.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: On 13 February 1945, bad weather over Europe prevented any USAAF operations, and it was left to RAF Bomber Command to carry out the first raid. It had been decided that the raid would be a double strike, in which a second wave of bombers would attack three hours after the first, just as the rescue teams were trying to put out the fires. As was standard practice, other raids were carried out that night to confuse German air defences. Three hundred and sixty heavy bombers (Lancasters and Halifaxes) bombed a synthetic oil plant in Böhlen, from Dresden, while 71 de Havilland Mosquito medium bombers attacked Magdeburg with small numbers of Mosquitos carrying out nuisance raids on Bonn, Misburg near Hanover and Nuremberg.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: When Polish crews of the designated squadrons were preparing for the mission, the terms of the Yalta agreement were made known to them. There was a huge uproar, since the Yalta agreement handed parts of Poland over to the Soviet Union. There was talk of mutiny among the Polish pilots, and their British officers removed their side arms. The Polish Government ordered the pilots to follow their orders and fly their missions over Dresden, which they did.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The first of the British aircraft took off at around 17:20 hours CET for the journey. This was a group of Lancasters from Bomber Command's 83 Squadron, No. 5 Group, acting as the Pathfinders, or flare force, whose job it was to find Dresden and drop magnesium parachute flares, known to the Germans as "Christmas trees", to mark and light up Dresden for the aircraft that would mark the target itself. The next set of aircraft to leave England were twin-engined Mosquito marker planes, which would identify target areas and drop target indicators (TIs) that marked the target for the bombers to aim at. The attack was to centre on the Ostragehege sports stadium, next to the city's medieval "Altstadt" (old town), with its congested and highly combustible timbered buildings.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The main bomber force, called "Plate Rack", took off shortly after the Pathfinders. This group of 254 Lancasters carried 500 tons of high explosives and 375 tons of incendiaries ("fire bombs"). There were 200,000 incendiaries in all, with the high-explosive bombs ranging in weight from —the two-ton "cookies", also known as "blockbusters", because they could destroy an entire large building or street. The high explosives were intended to rupture water mains and blow off roofs, doors, and windows to expose the interiors of the buildings and create an air flow to feed the fires caused by the incendiaries that followed.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The Lancasters crossed into France near the Somme, then into Germany just north of Cologne. At 22:00 hours, the force heading for Böhlen split away from Plate Rack, which turned south east toward the Elbe. By this time, ten of the Lancasters were out of service, leaving 244 to continue to Dresden.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The sirens started sounding in Dresden at 21:51 (CET). the 'Master Bomber' Wing Commander Maurice Smith, flying in a Mosquito, gave the order to the Lancasters: "Controller to Plate Rack Force: Come in and bomb glow of red target indicators as planned. Bomb the glow of red TIs as planned". The first bombs were released at 22:13, the last at 22:28, the Lancasters delivering 881.1 tons of bombs, 57% high explosive, 43% incendiaries. The fan-shaped area that was bombed was long, and at its extreme about wide. The shape and total devastation of the area was created by the bombers of No. 5 Group flying over the head of the fan (Ostragehege stadium) on prearranged compass bearings and releasing their bombs at different prearranged times.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The second attack, three hours later, was by Lancaster aircraft of 1, 3, 6 and 8 Groups, 8 Group being the Pathfinders. By now, the thousands of fires from the burning city could be seen more than away on the ground, and away in the air, with smoke rising to . The Pathfinders therefore decided to expand the target, dropping flares on either side of the firestorm, including the "Hauptbahnhof", the main train station, and the "Großer Garten", a large park, both of which had escaped damage during the first raid. The German sirens sounded again at 01:05, but as there was practically no electricity, these were small hand-held sirens that were heard within only a block. Between 01:21 and 01:45, 529 Lancasters dropped more than 1,800 tons of bombs.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: On the morning of 14 February 431 United States Army Air Force bombers of the Eighth Air Force's 1st Bombardment Division were scheduled to bomb Dresden near midday, and the 457 aircraft of 3rd Bombardment Division were to follow to bomb Chemnitz, while the 375 bombers of the 2nd Bombardment Division would bomb a synthetic oil plant in Magdeburg. Another 84 bombers would attack Wesel. The bomber groups were protected by 784 North American P-51 Mustangs of the Eighth Air Force's VIII Fighter Command, 316 of which covered the Dresden attack - a total of almost 2,100 Eighth Army Air Force aircraft over Saxony during 14 February.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Primary sources disagree as to whether the aiming point was the marshalling yards near the centre of the city or the centre of the built-up urban area. The report by the 1st Bombardment Division's commander to his commander states that the targeting sequence was the centre of the built-up area in Dresden if the weather was clear. If clouds obscured Dresden but Chemnitz was clear, Chemnitz was the target. If both were obscured, they would bomb the centre of Dresden using H2X radar. The mix of bombs for the Dresden raid was about 40 per cent incendiaries—much closer to the RAF city-busting mix than the USAAF usually used in precision bombardment. Taylor compares this 40 per cent mix with the raid on Berlin on 3 February, where the ratio was 10 per cent incendiaries. This was a common mix when the USAAF anticipated cloudy conditions over the target.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: 316 B-17 Flying Fortresses bombed Dresden, dropping 771 tons of bombs. The remaining 115 bombers from the stream of 431 misidentified their targets. Sixty bombed Prague, dropping 153 tons of bombs, while others bombed Brux and Pilsen. The 379th bombardment group started to bomb Dresden at 12:17, aiming at marshalling yards in the Friedrichstadt district west of the city centre, as the area was not obscured by smoke and cloud. The 303rd group arrived over Dresden two minutes after the 379th and found their view obscured by clouds, so they bombed Dresden using H2X radar. The groups that followed the 303rd (92nd, 306th, 379th, 384th and 457th) also found Dresden obscured by clouds, and they too used H2X. H2X aiming caused the groups to bomb with a wide dispersal over the Dresden area. The last group to attack Dresden was the 306th, and they finished by 12:30.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Strafing of civilians has become a traditional part of the oral history of the raids, since a March 1945 article in the Nazi-run weekly newspaper "Das Reich" claimed this had occurred. Historian Götz Bergander, an eyewitness to the raids, found no reports on strafing for 13–15 February by any pilots or the German military and police. He asserted in "Dresden im Luftkrieg" (1977) that only a few tales of civilians being strafed were reliable in detail, and all were related to the daylight attack on 14 February. He concluded that some memory of eyewitnesses was real, but that it had misinterpreted the firing in a dogfight as deliberately aimed at people on the ground. In 2000, historian Helmut Schnatz found an explicit order to RAF pilots not to strafe civilians on the way back from Dresden. He also reconstructed timelines with the result that strafing would have been almost impossible due to lack of time and fuel. Frederick Taylor in "Dresden" (2004), basing most of his analysis on the work of Bergander and Schnatz, concludes that no strafing took place, although some stray bullets from aerial dogfights may have hit the ground and been mistaken for strafing by those in the vicinity. The official historical commission collected 103 detailed eyewitness accounts and let the local bomb disposal services search according to their assertions. They found no bullets or fragments that would have been used by planes of the Dresden raids.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: On 15 February, the 1st Bombardment Division's primary target—the Böhlen synthetic oil plant near Leipzig—was obscured by clouds, so its groups diverted to their secondary target, Dresden. Dresden was also obscured by clouds, so the groups targeted the city using H2X. The first group to arrive over the target was the 401st, but it missed the city centre and bombed Dresden's southeastern suburbs, with bombs also landing on the nearby towns of Meissen and Pirna. The other groups all bombed Dresden between 12:00 and 12:10. They failed to hit the marshalling yards in the Friedrichstadt district and, as in the previous raid, their ordnance was scattered over a wide area.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Dresden's air defences had been depleted by the need for more weaponry to fight the Red Army, and the city lost its last massive flak battery in January 1945. By this point in the war, the Luftwaffe was severely hampered by a shortage of both pilots and aircraft fuel; the German radar system was also degraded, lowering the warning time to prepare for air attacks. The RAF also had an advantage over the Germans in the field of electronic radar countermeasures.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Of 796 British bombers that participated in the raid, six were lost, three of those hit by bombs dropped by aircraft flying over them. On the following day, only a single US bomber was shot down, as the large escort force was able to prevent Luftwaffe day fighters from disrupting the attack.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The sirens started sounding in Dresden at 21:51 (CET). Frederick Taylor writes that the Germans could see that a large enemy bomber formation—or what they called ""ein dicker Hund"" (lit: a fat dog, a "major thing")—was approaching somewhere in the east. At 21:39 the Reich Air Defence Leadership issued an enemy aircraft warning for Dresden, although at that point it was thought Leipzig might be the target. At 21:59 the Local Air Raid Leadership confirmed that the bombers were in the area of Dresden-Pirna. Taylor writes the city was largely undefended; a night fighter force of ten Messerschmitt Bf 110Gs at Klotzsche airfield was scrambled, but it took them half an hour to get into an attack position. At 22:03 the Local Air Raid Leadership issued the first definitive warning: "Warning! Warning! Warning! The lead aircraft of the major enemy bomber forces have changed course and are now approaching the city area". Some 10,000 fled to the great open space of the Grosse Garten, the magnificent royal park of Dresden, nearly one and a half square miles in all. Here they were caught by the second raid, which started without an air-raid warning, at 1:22 a.m. At 11:30 a.m., the third wave of bombers, the two hundred eleven American Flying Fortresses, began their attack.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: There were few public air raid shelters. The largest, beneath the main railway station, housed 6,000 refugees. As a result, most people took shelter in cellars, but one of the air raid precautions the city had taken was to remove thick cellar walls between rows of buildings and replace them with thin partitions that could be knocked through in an emergency. The idea was that, as one building collapsed or filled with smoke, those sheltering in the basements could knock walls down and move into adjoining buildings. With the city on fire everywhere, those fleeing from one burning cellar simply ran into another, with the result that thousands of bodies were found piled up in houses at the ends of city blocks.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: A Dresden police report written shortly after the attacks reported that the old town and the inner eastern suburbs had been engulfed in a single fire that had destroyed almost 12,000 dwellings. The same report said that the raids had destroyed the Wehrmacht's main command post in the Taschenbergpalais, 63 administration buildings, the railways, 19 military hospitals, 19 ships and barges, and a number of less significant military facilities. Six hundred and forty shops, 64 warehouses, 39 schools, 31 stores, 31 large hotels, 26 public houses/bars, 26 insurance buildings, 24 banks, 19 postal facilities, 19 hospitals and private clinics including auxiliary, overflow hospitals, 18 cinemas, 11 churches and 6 chapels, 5 consulates, 4 tram facilities, 3 theatres, 2 market halls, the zoo, the waterworks, and 5 other cultural buildings were also destroyed. Almost 200 factories were damaged, 136 seriously (including several of the Zeiss Ikon precision optical engineering works), 28 with medium to serious damage, and 35 with light damage.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: An RAF assessment showed that 23 per cent of the industrial buildings and 56 per cent of the non-industrial buildings, not counting residential buildings, had been seriously damaged. Around 78,000 dwellings had been completely destroyed; 27,700 were uninhabitable, and 64,500 damaged but readily repairable.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: During his post-war interrogation, Albert Speer, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, said that Dresden's industrial recovery from the bombings was rapid.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: According to the official German report "Tagesbefehl" (Order of the Day) no. 47 ("TB47") issued on 22 March, the number of dead recovered by that date was 20,204, including 6,865 who were cremated on the "Altmarkt" square, and they expected the total number of deaths to be about 25,000. Another report on 3 April put the number of corpses recovered at 22,096. Three municipal and 17 rural cemeteries outside Dresden recorded up to 30 April 1945 a total of at least 21,895 buried bodies from the Dresden raids, including those cremated on the "Altmarkt".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Between 100,000 and 200,000 refugees fleeing westward from advancing Soviet forces were in the city at the time of the bombing. Exact figures are unknown, but reliable estimates were calculated based on train arrivals, foot traffic, and the extent to which emergency accommodation had to be organised. The city authorities did not distinguish between residents and refugees when establishing casualty numbers and "took great pains to count all the dead, identified and unidentified". This was largely achievable because most of the dead succumbed to suffocation; in only four places were recovered remains so badly burned that it was impossible to ascertain the number of victims. The uncertainty this introduced is thought to amount to no more than 100 people. 35,000 people were registered with the authorities as missing after the raids, around 10,000 of whom were later found alive.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: A further 1,858 bodies were discovered during the reconstruction of Dresden between the end of the war and 1966. Since 1989, despite extensive excavation for new buildings, no new war-related bodies have been found. Seeking to establish a definitive casualty figure, in part to address propagandisation of the bombing by far-right groups, the Dresden city council in 2005 authorised an independent Historians' Commission ("Historikerkommission") to conduct a new, thorough investigation, collecting and evaluating available sources. The results were published in 2010 and stated that between 22,700 and 25,000 people had been killed.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Development of a German political response to the raid took several turns. Initially, some of the leadership, especially Robert Ley and Joseph Goebbels, wanted to use it as a pretext for abandonment of the Geneva Conventions on the Western Front. In the end, the only political action the German government took was to exploit it for propaganda purposes. Goebbels is reported to have wept with rage for twenty minutes after he heard the news of the catastrophe, before launching into a bitter attack on Hermann Göring, the commander of the Luftwaffe: "If I had the power I would drag this cowardly good-for-nothing, this Reich marshal, before a court. ... How much guilt does this parasite not bear for all this, which we owe to his indolence and love of his own comforts...".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: On 16 February, the Propaganda Ministry issued a press release that claimed that Dresden had no war industries; it was a city of culture.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: On 25 February, a new leaflet with photographs of two burned children was released under the title "Dresden—Massacre of Refugees", stating that 200,000 had died. Since no official estimate had been developed, the numbers were speculative, but newspapers such as the Stockholm "Svenska Morgonbladet" used phrases such as "privately from Berlin," to explain where they had obtained the figures. Frederick Taylor states that "there is good reason to believe that later in March copies of—or extracts from—[an official police report] were leaked to the neutral press by Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry ... doctored with an extra zero to increase [the total dead from the raid] to 202,040". On 4 March, "Das Reich", a weekly newspaper founded by Goebbels, published a lengthy article emphasising the suffering and destruction of a cultural icon, without mentioning damage to the German war effort.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Taylor writes that this propaganda was effective, as it not only influenced attitudes in neutral countries at the time, but also reached the House of Commons, when Richard Stokes, a Labour Member of Parliament, and a long term opponent of area-bombing, quoted information from the German Press Agency (controlled by the Propaganda Ministry). It was Stokes's questions in the House of Commons that were in large part responsible for the shift in British opinion against this type of raid. Taylor suggests that, although the destruction of Dresden would have affected people's support for the Allies regardless of German propaganda, at least some of the outrage did depend on Goebbels' falsification of the casualty figures.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The destruction of the city provoked unease in intellectual circles in Britain. According to Max Hastings, by February 1945, attacks upon German cities had become largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war and the name of Dresden resonated with cultured people all over Europe—"the home of so much charm and beauty, a refuge for Trollope's heroines, a landmark of the Grand Tour." He writes that the bombing was the first time the public in Allied countries seriously questioned the military actions used to defeat the Germans.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The unease was made worse by an Associated Press story that the Allies had resorted to terror bombing. At a press briefing held by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force two days after the raids, British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson told journalists:


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: One of the journalists asked whether the principal aim of bombing Dresden would be to cause confusion among the refugees or to blast communications carrying military supplies. Grierson answered that the primary aim was to attack communications to prevent the Germans from moving military supplies, and to stop movement in all directions if possible. He then added in an offhand remark that the raid also helped destroy "what is left of German morale." Howard Cowan, an Associated Press war correspondent, subsequently filed a story claiming that the Allies had resorted to terror bombing. There were follow-up newspaper editorials on the issue and a longtime opponent of strategic bombing, Richard Stokes MP, asked questions in the House of Commons on 6 March.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Churchill subsequently re-evaluated the goals of the bombing campaigns, to focus less on strategic targets, and more toward targets of tactical significance. On 28 March, in a memo sent by telegram to General Ismay for the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff, he wrote:


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Having been given a paraphrased version of Churchill's memo by Bottomley, on 29 March, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris wrote to the Air Ministry:


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The phrase "worth the bones of one British grenadier" echoed Otto von Bismarck's: "The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier". Under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff and in response to the views expressed by Portal and Harris among others, Churchill withdrew his memo and issued a new one. This was completed on 1 April 1945:


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: John Kenneth Galbraith was among those in the Roosevelt administration who had qualms about the bombing. As one of the directors of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, formed late in the war by the American Office of Strategic Services to assess the results of the aerial bombardments of Nazi Germany, he wrote: "The incredible cruelty of the attack on Dresden when the war had already been won—and the death of children, women, and civilians—that was extremely weighty and of no avail". The Survey's majority view on the Allies' bombing of German cities, however, concluded:


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: After the war, and again after German reunification, great efforts were made to rebuild some of Dresden's former landmarks, such as the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper (the Saxony state opera house) and the Zwinger Palace (the latter two were rebuilt before reunification).


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: In 1956, Dresden entered a twin-town relationship with Coventry. As a centre of military and munitions production, Coventry suffered some of the worst attacks on any British city at the hands of the Luftwaffe during the Coventry Blitzes of 1940 and 1941, which killed over 1,200 civilians and destroyed its cathedral.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a group of prominent Dresdeners formed an international appeal known as the "Call from Dresden" to request help in rebuilding the Lutheran Frauenkirche, the destruction of which had over the years become a symbol of the bombing. The baroque Church of Our Lady (completed in 1743) had initially appeared to survive the raids, but collapsed a few days later, and the ruins were left in place by later Communist governments as an anti-war memorial.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: A British charity, the Dresden Trust, was formed in 1993 to raise funds in response to the call for help, raising £600,000 from 2,000 people and 100 companies and trusts in Britain. One of the gifts they made to the project was an eight-metre high orb and cross made in London by goldsmiths Gant MacDonald, using medieval nails recovered from the ruins of the roof of Coventry Cathedral, and crafted in part by Alan Smith, the son of a pilot who took part in the raid.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The new Frauenkirche was reconstructed over seven years by architects using 3D computer technology to analyse old photographs and every piece of rubble that had been kept and was formally consecrated on 30 October 2005, in a service attended by some 1,800 guests, including Germany's president, Horst Köhler, previous chancellors, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, and the Duke of Kent.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: A further development towards the reconstruction of Dresden's historical core came in 1999 when the Dresden Historical Neumarkt Society was founded. The society is committed to reconstructing the historic city centre as much as possible. When plans for the rebuilding of Dresden's Frauenkirche became certain, the (GHND) began calls for the reconstruction of the historic buildings that surrounded it.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: In 2003, a petition in support of reconstructing the Neumarkt area was signed by nearly 68,000 people, amounting to 15% of the entire electorate. This had ground breaking results because it demonstrated a broad support for the aims of the initiative and a widespread appreciation for historical Dresden. This led to the city councils decision to rebuild a large amount of baroque buildings in accordance to historical designs, but with modern buildings in between them.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The bombing of Dresden remains controversial and is subject to an ongoing debate by historians and scholars regarding the moral and military justifications surrounding the event. British historian Frederick Taylor wrote of the attacks: "The destruction of Dresden has an epically tragic quality to it. It was a wonderfully beautiful city and a symbol of baroque humanism and all that was best in Germany. It also contained all of the worst from Germany during the Nazi period. In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th century warfare and a symbol of destruction".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Several factors have made the bombing a unique point of contention and debate. First among these are the Nazi government's exaggerated claims immediately afterwards, which drew upon the beauty of the city, its importance as a cultural icon; the deliberate creation of a firestorm; the number of victims; the extent to which it was a necessary military target; and the fact that it was attacked toward the end of the war, raising the question of whether the bombing was needed to hasten the end.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The Hague Conventions, addressing the codes of wartime conduct on land and at sea, were adopted before the rise of air power. Despite repeated diplomatic attempts to update international humanitarian law to include aerial warfare, it was not updated before the outbreak of World War II. The absence of specific international humanitarian law does not mean that the laws of war did not cover aerial warfare, but the existing laws remained open to interpretation. Specifically, whether the attack can be considered a war crime depends on whether the city was defended and whether resistance was offered against an approaching enemy. Allied arguments centre around the existence of a local air defence system and additional ground defences the Germans were constructing in anticipation of Soviet advances.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The bombing of Dresden has been used by Holocaust deniers and pro-Nazi polemicists—most notably by British writer David Irving—in an attempt to establish a moral equivalence between the war crimes committed by the Nazi government and the killing of German civilians by Allied bombing raids. As such, "grossly inflated" casualty figures have been promulgated over the years, many based on a figure of over 200,000 deaths quoted in a forged version of the casualty report, "Tagesbefehl" No. 47, that originated with Hitler's Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: An inquiry conducted at the behest of U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, stated the raid was justified by the available intelligence. The inquiry declared the elimination of the German ability to reinforce a counter-attack against Marshal Konev's extended line or, alternatively, to retreat and regroup using Dresden as a base of operations, were important military objectives. As Dresden had been largely untouched during the war due to its location, it was one of the few remaining functional rail and communications centres. A secondary objective was to disrupt the industrial use of Dresden for munitions manufacture, which American intelligence believed was the case. The shock to military planners and to the Allied civilian populations of the German counterattack known as the Battle of the Bulge had ended speculation that the war was almost over, and may have contributed to the decision to continue with the aerial bombardment of German cities.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The inquiry concluded that by the presence of active German military units nearby, and the presence of fighters and anti-aircraft within an effective range, Dresden qualified as "defended". By this stage in the war both the British and the Germans had integrated air defences at the national level. The German national air-defence system could be used to argue—as the tribunal did—that no German city was "undefended".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Marshall's tribunal declared that no extraordinary decision was made to single out Dresden (for instance, to take advantage of a large number of refugees, or purposely terrorise the German populace). It was argued that the area bombing was intended to disrupt communications and destroy industrial production. The American inquiry established that the Soviets, under allied agreements for the United States and the United Kingdom to provide air support for the Soviet offensive toward Berlin, had requested area bombing of Dresden to prevent a counterattack through Dresden, or the use of Dresden as a regrouping point following a German strategic retreat.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: A report by the U.S. Air Force Historical Division (USAFHD) analysed the circumstances of the raid and concluded that it was militarily necessary and justified, based on the following points:


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The first point regarding the legitimacy of the raid depends on two claims: first, that the railyards subjected to American precision bombing were an important logistical target, and that the city was also an important industrial centre. Even after the main firebombing, there were two further raids on the Dresden railway yards by the USAAF. The first was on 2 March 1945, by 406 B-17s, which dropped 940 tons of high-explosive bombs and 141 tons of incendiaries. The second was on 17 April, when 580 B-17s dropped 1,554 tons of high-explosive bombs and 165 tons of incendiaries.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: As far as Dresden being a militarily significant industrial centre, an official 1942 guide described the German city as "...one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich," and in 1944, the German Army High Command's Weapons Office listed 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops that supplied materiel to the military. Dresden was the seventh largest German city, and by far the largest un-bombed built-up area left, and thus was contributing to the defence of Germany itself.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: According to the USAFHD, there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers supporting the German war effort in Dresden at the time of the raid. These factories manufactured fuses and bombsights (at Zeiss Ikon A.G.), aircraft components, anti-aircraft guns, field guns, and small arms, poison gas, gears and differentials, electrical and X-ray apparatus, electric gauges, gas masks, Junkers aircraft engines, and Messerschmitt fighter cockpit parts.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The second of the five points addresses the prohibition in the Hague Conventions, of "attack or bombardment" of "undefended" towns. The USAFHD report states that Dresden was protected by anti-aircraft defences, antiaircraft guns, and searchlights, under the Combined Dresden (Corps Area IV) and Berlin (Corps Area III) Air Service Commands.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The third and fourth points say that the size of the Dresden raid—in terms of numbers, types of bombs and the means of delivery—were commensurate with the military objective and similar to other Allied bombings. On 23 February 1945, the Allies bombed Pforzheim and caused an estimated 20,000 civilian fatalities. The most devastating raid on any city was on Tokyo on 9–10 March (the "Meetinghouse" raid) which caused over 100,000 casualties, many civilian. The tonnage and types of bombs listed in the service records of the Dresden raid were comparable to (or less than) throw weights of bombs dropped in other air attacks carried out in 1945. In the case of Dresden, as in many other similar attacks, the hour break in between the RAF raids was a deliberate ploy to attack the fire fighters, medical teams, and military units.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: In late July 1943, the city of Hamburg was bombed during Operation Gomorrah by combined RAF and USAAF strategic bomber forces. Four major raids were carried out in the span of 10 days, of which the most notable, on the night of 27–28 July, created a devastating firestorm effect similar to Dresden's, killing an estimated 18,474 people. The death toll for that night is included in the overall estimated total of 37,000 for the series of raids. Two-thirds of the remaining population reportedly fled the city after the raids.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The fifth point is that the firebombing achieved the intended effect of disabling the industry in Dresden. It was estimated that at least 23 per cent of the city's industrial buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. The damage to other infrastructure and communications was immense, which would have severely limited the potential use of Dresden to stop the Soviet advance. The report concludes with:


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The journalist Alexander McKee cast doubt on the meaningfulness of the list of targets mentioned in the 1953 USAF report, pointing out that the military barracks listed as a target were a long way out of the city and were not targeted during the raid. The "hutted camps" mentioned in the report as military targets were also not military but were camps for refugees. It is also stated that the important Autobahn bridge to the west of the city was not targeted or attacked, and that no railway stations were on the British target maps, nor any bridges, such as the railway bridge spanning the Elbe River. Commenting on this, McKee says: "The standard whitewash gambit, both British and American, is to mention that Dresden contained targets X, Y and Z, and to let the innocent reader assume that these targets were attacked, whereas in fact the bombing plan totally omitted them and thus, except for one or two mere accidents, they escaped". McKee further asserts "The bomber commanders were not really interested in any purely military or economic targets, which was just as well, for they knew very little about Dresden; the RAF even lacked proper maps of the city. What they were looking for was a big built-up area which they could burn, and that Dresden possessed in full measure."


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: According to historian Sönke Neitzel, "it is difficult to find any evidence in German documents that the destruction of Dresden had any consequences worth mentioning on the Eastern Front. The industrial plants of Dresden played no significant role in German industry at this stage in the war". Wing Commander H. R. Allen said, "The final phase of Bomber Command's operations was far and away the worst. Traditional British chivalry and the use of minimum force in war was to become a mockery and the outrages perpetrated by the bombers will be remembered a thousand years hence".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Frederick Taylor told "Der Spiegel", "I personally find the attack on Dresden horrific. It was overdone, it was excessive and is to be regretted enormously," but, "A war crime is a very specific thing which international lawyers argue about all the time and I would not be prepared to commit myself nor do I see why I should. I'm a historian." Similarly, British philosopher A. C. Grayling has described RAF area bombardment as an "immoral act" and "moral crime" because "destroying everything... contravenes every moral and humanitarian principle debated in connection with the just conduct of war", though Grayling insisted that it "is not strictly correct to describe area bombing as a 'war crime'."


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Historian Donald Bloxham states, "The bombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 was a war crime". He further argues there was a strong "prima facie" case for trying Winston Churchill among others and a theoretical case Churchill could have been found guilty. "This should be a sobering thought. If, however it is also a startling one, this is probably less the result of widespread understanding of the nuance of international law and more because in the popular mind 'war criminal', like 'paedophile' or 'terrorist', has developed into a moral rather than a legal categorisation".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: German author Günter Grass is one of several intellectuals and commentators who have also called the bombing a war crime.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Proponents of this position argue that the devastation from firebombing was greater than anything that could be justified by military necessity alone, and this establishes a "prima facie" case. The Allies were aware of the effects of firebombing, as British cities had been subject to them during the Blitz. Proponents disagree that Dresden had a military garrison and claim that most of the industry was in the outskirts and not in the targeted city centre, and that the cultural significance of the city should have precluded the Allies from bombing it.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: British historian Antony Beevor wrote that Dresden was considered relatively safe, having been spared previous RAF night attacks, and that at the time of the raids there were up to 300,000 refugees in the area seeking sanctuary from the advancing Red Army from the Eastern Front. In "Fire Sites", German historian Jörg Friedrich says that the RAF's bombing campaign against German cities in the last months of the war served no military purpose. He claims that Winston Churchill's decision to bomb a shattered Germany between January and May 1945 was a war crime. According to him, 600,000 civilians died during the allied bombing of German cities, including 72,000 children. He claimed some 45,000 people died on one night during the firestorms that engulfed Hamburg in July 1943.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Far-right politicians in Germany have sparked a great deal of controversy by promoting the term ""Bombenholocaust"" ("holocaust by bomb") to describe the raids. "Der Spiegel" writes that, for decades, the Communist government of East Germany promoted the bombing as an example of "Anglo-American terror," and now the same rhetoric is being used by the far right. An example can be found in the extremist nationalist party "Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands" (NPD). A party's representative, Jürgen Gansel, described the Dresden raids as "mass murder," and "Dresden's holocaust of bombs". This provoked an outrage in the German parliament and triggered responses from the media. Prosecutors said that it was illegal to call the bombing a holocaust. In 2010, several demonstrations by organisations opposing the far-right blocked a demonstration of far-right organisations.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Phrases like "Bomber-Harris, do it again!", "Bomber-Harris Superstar – Thanks from the red Antifa", and ""Deutsche Täter sind keine Opfer!"" ("German perpetrators are no victims!") are popular slogans among the so-called "Anti-Germans"—a small radical left-wing political movement in Germany and Austria. In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing, Anti-Germans praised the bombing on the grounds that so many of the city's civilians had supported Nazism. Similar rallies take place every year.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death" (1969) used some elements from his experiences as a prisoner of war at Dresden during the bombing. The story itself is told through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a clear stand-in for Vonnegut himself. His account relates that over 135,000 were killed during the firebombings. Vonnegut recalled "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." The Germans put him and other POWs to work gathering bodies for mass burial. "But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes".


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The firebombing of Dresden was depicted in George Roy Hill's 1972 movie adaptation of Vonnegut's novel.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Vonnegut's experiences in Dresden were also used in several of his other books and are included in his posthumously published writings in "Armageddon in Retrospect". In one of those essays, Vonnegut paraphrased leaflets dropped by the Allies in the days after the bombings as saying: To the people of Dresden: We were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traffic your railroad facilities have been carrying. We realize that we haven't always hit our objectives. Destruction of anything other than military objectives was unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war. Vonnegut notes that many of those railroad facilities were not actually bombed, and those that were hit were restored to operation within several days.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: The death toll of 135,000 given by Vonnegut was taken from "The Destruction of Dresden", a 1963 book by David Irving. In a 1965 letter to "The Guardian", Irving later adjusted his estimates even higher, "almost certainly between 100,000 and 250,000", but all these figures were shortly found to be inflated: Irving finally published a correction in "The Times" in a 1966 letter to the editor lowering it to 25,000, in line with subsequent scholarship. Despite Irving's eventual much lower numbers, and later accusations of generally poor scholarship, the figure popularised by Vonnegut remains in general circulation.


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Freeman Dyson, a British-American physicist who had worked as a young man with RAF Bomber Command from July 1943 to the end of the war, wrote in later years:


title: Bombing of Dresden in World War II

text: Dyson later goes on to say: "Since the beginning of the war I had been retreating step by step from one moral position to another, until at the end I had no moral position at all".


title: Etta James

text: Jamesetta Hawkins (January 25, 1938 – January 20, 2012), known professionally as Etta James, was an American singer who performed in various genres, including gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, and soul. Starting her career in 1954, she gained fame with hits such as "The Wallflower", "At Last", "Tell Mama", "Something's Got a Hold on Me", and "I'd Rather Go Blind". She faced a number of personal problems, including heroin addiction, severe physical abuse, and incarceration, before making a musical comeback in the late 1980s with the album "Seven Year Itch".


title: Etta James

text: James's deep and earthy voice bridged the gap between rhythm and blues and rock and roll. She won six Grammy Awards and 17 Blues Music Awards. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001. She also received a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2003. "Rolling Stone" magazine ranked James number 22 on its list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time; she was also ranked number 62 on "Rolling Stone"'s list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. "Billboard" 2015 list of "The 35 Greatest R&B Artists Of All Time" also included James, whose "gutsy, take-no-prisoner vocals colorfully interpreted everything from blues and R&B/soul to rock n’roll, jazz and gospel."


title: Etta James

text: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame called hers "one of the greatest voices of her century" and says she is "forever the matriarch of blues."


title: Etta James

text: James was born on January 25, 1938, in Los Angeles, California, to Dorothy Hawkins, who was 14 at the time. Although her father has never been identified, James speculated that she was the daughter of pool player Rudolf "Minnesota Fats" Wanderone, whom she met briefly in 1987. Her mother was frequently absent from their apartment in Watts, conducting relationships with various men, and James lived with a series of foster parents, most notably "Sarge" and "Mama" Lu. James referred to her mother as "the Mystery Lady".


title: Etta James

text: James received her first professional vocal training at the age of five from James Earle Hines, musical director of the Echoes of Eden choir at the St. Paul Baptist Church in South-Central Los Angeles. Hines abused James while she was under his tutelage; he often punched her in the chest while she sang to force her voice to come from her gut. She quickly became known for having an unusually strong voice for a child her age.


title: Etta James

text: Sarge, like the musical director for the choir, was also abusive. During drunken poker games at home, he would awaken James in the early morning hours and force her with beatings to sing for his friends. The trauma of her foster father forcing her to sing under these humiliating circumstances caused her to have difficulties with singing on demand throughout her career.


title: Etta James

text: James frequently performed in Nashville's famed R&B clubs on the so-called "Chitlin' Circuit" in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.


title: Etta James

text: In 1950, Mama Lu died, and James's biological mother took her to the Fillmore district of San Francisco. Within a couple of years, she began listening to doo-wop and was inspired to form a girl group, the Creolettes (so named for the members' light-skinned complexions).


title: Etta James

text: At the age of 14, she met musician Johnny Otis. Stories on how they met vary. In Otis's version, she came to his hotel after one of his performances in the city and persuaded him to audition her. Another story was that Otis spotted the Creolettes performing at a Los Angeles nightclub and sought for them to record his "answer song" to Hank Ballard's "Work with Me, Annie". Otis took the Creolettes under his wing and helped them sign to Modern Records, at which point they changed their name to Peaches. At this time Otis also gave James her stage name, transposing "Jamesetta" (her given first name) into "Etta James." In 1954, James recorded and was credited as co-author for "The Wallflower" (a title change to the aforementioned song, "Work with Me, Annie"), which was released in early 1955. The original title of the song was actually "Roll with Me, Henry", but it had been changed to avoid censorship at the time ("roll" implying sexual activity). In February 1955, the song reached number one on the Hot Rhythm & Blues Tracks chart. Its success also gave the Peaches an opening spot on Little Richard's national tour.


title: Etta James

text: While James was on tour with Richard, pop singer Georgia Gibbs recorded a version of her song and released it under the again-altered title "Dance With Me, Henry." It became a crossover hit, reaching number one on the "Billboard" Hot 100, which angered James.


title: Etta James

text: After leaving the Peaches, James had another R&B hit with "Good Rockin' Daddy" but struggled with follow-ups. When her contract with Modern came up for renewal in 1960, she signed a contract with Chess Records instead, with which she would go on to become one of the label's earliest stars. Around this time, she became involved in a relationship with the singer Harvey Fuqua, the founder of the doo-wop group the Moonglows.


title: Etta James

text: Musician Bobby Murray toured with James for over 20 years. He wrote that James had her first hit single when she was 15 years old and went steady with B.B. King when she was 16. James believed that King's hit single "Sweet Sixteen" was about her. In early 1955, she and an aspiring singer, the 19-year-old Elvis Presley, then recording for Sun Studios and an avid fan of King's, shared a bill in a large club just outside Memphis. In her autobiography, she noted how impressed she was with the young singer's manners. She also recalled how happy he made her many years later when she found out that it was Presley who had moved her close friend Jackie Wilson from a substandard convalescent home to a more appropriate facility and, as she put it, paid all the expenses. Presley died a year later. Wilson went on to live for another ten years in the care center Presley found for him.


title: Etta James

text: Dueting with Harvey Fuqua, James recorded for Argo Records (later renamed Cadet Records), a label established by Chess. Her first hit singles with Fuqua were "If I Can't Have You" and "Spoonful". Her first solo hit was the doo-wop–styled rhythm-and-blues song "All I Could Do Was Cry", which was a number two R&B hit. Chess Records co-founder Leonard Chess envisioned James as a classic ballad stylist who had potential to cross over to the pop charts and soon surrounded the singer with violins and other string instruments. The first string-laden ballad James recorded was "My Dearest Darling" in May 1960, which peaked in the top five of the R&B chart. James sang background vocals for her labelmate Chuck Berry on his "Back in the U.S.A."


title: Etta James

text: Her debut album, "At Last!", was released in late 1960 and was noted for its varied selection of music, from jazz standards to blues to doo-wop and rhythm and blues (R&B). The album included the future classics "I Just Want to Make Love to You" and "A Sunday Kind of Love". In early 1961, James released what was to become her signature song, "At Last", a Glenn Miller tune, which reached number two on the R&B chart and number 47 on the "Billboard" Hot 100. Though the record was not as successful as expected, her rendition has become the best-known version of the song. James followed this with "Trust in Me", which also included string instruments. Later that same year (1960), James released a second studio album, "The Second Time Around". The album took the same direction as her first, covering jazz and pop standards and with strings on many of the songs. It produced two hit singles, "Fool That I Am" and "Don't Cry Baby".


title: Etta James

text: James started adding gospel elements in her music the following year, releasing "Something's Got a Hold on Me", which peaked at number four on the R&B chart and was a Top 40 pop hit. That success was quickly followed by "Stop the Wedding", which reached number six on the R&B chart and also had gospel elements. In 1963, she had another major hit with "Pushover" and released the live album "Etta James Rocks the House", recorded at the New Era Club in Nashville, Tennessee. After a couple of years of minor hits, James's career started to suffer after 1965. After a period of isolation, she returned to recording in 1967 and reemerged with more gutsy R&B numbers thanks to her recording at the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. These sessions yielded her comeback hit "Tell Mama", co-written by Clarence Carter, which reached number ten on the R&B chart and number twenty-three for pop. An album of the same name was also released that year and included her take on Otis Redding's "Security". The B-side of "Tell Mama" was "I'd Rather Go Blind", which became a blues classic and has been recorded by many other artists. In her autobiography, "Rage to Survive", she wrote that she heard the song outlined by her friend Ellington "Fugi" Jordan when she visited him in prison. According to her account, she wrote the rest of the song with Jordan but for tax reasons gave her songwriting credit to her partner at the time, Billy Foster.


title: Etta James

text: Following this success, James became an in-demand concert performer, though she never again reached the heyday of her early to mid-1960s success. Her records continued to chart in the R&B Top 40 in the early 1970s, with singles such as "Losers Weepers" (1970) and "I Found a Love" (1972). Though James continued to record for Chess, she was devastated by the death of record executive Leonard Chess in 1969. James ventured into rock and funk with the release of her self-titled album in 1973, with production from the famed rock producer Gabriel Mekler, who had worked with Steppenwolf and Janis Joplin. Joplin had admired James and had covered "Tell Mama" in concert. James' 1973 album, exhibiting a mixture of musical styles, was nominated for a Grammy Award. The album did not produce any major hits, however, and neither did the follow-up album, "Come a Little Closer", in 1974, though, like '73's "Etta James" before it, the album was also critically acclaimed.


title: Etta James

text: James continued to record for Chess (now owned by All Platinum Records), releasing one more album in 1976, "Etta Is Betta Than Evvah!" Her 1978 album "Deep in the Night", produced by Jerry Wexler for Warner Bros., incorporated more rock-based music in her repertoire. That same year, James was the opening act for the Rolling Stones and performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Following this brief success, however, she left Chess Records and did not record for another ten years while she struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism.


title: Etta James

text: James continued to perform on occasion in the early 1980s, including two guest appearances at Grateful Dead concerts in December 1982. and was a guest on John Mayall's Blues Breakers 1982 reunion show in New Jersey.In 1984, she contacted David Wolper and asked to perform in the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics, at which she sang "When the Saints Go Marching In". In 1987, she performed "Rock and Roll Music" with Chuck Berry in the documentary film "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll".


title: Etta James

text: In 1989, she signed with Island Records and with them released the albums "Seven Year Itch" and "Stickin' to My Guns", both of which were produced by Barry Beckett and recorded at FAME Studios. Also in 1989 James was filmed in a concert at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles with Joe Walsh and Albert Collins for the film "Jazzvisions: Jump the Blues Away". Many of the backing musicians were top-flight players from Los Angeles: Rick Rosas (bass), Michael Huey (drums), Ed Sanford (Hammond B3 organ), Kip Noble (piano) and Josh Sklair, James' longtime guitar player.


title: Etta James

text: James participated with the rap singer Def Jef on the song "Droppin' Rhymes on Drums", which mixed James's jazz vocals with hip-hop. In 1992, she recorded the album "The Right Time", produced by Jerry Wexler for Elektra Records. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.


title: Etta James

text: James signed with Private Music Records in 1993 and recorded a Billie Holiday tribute album, "Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday". The album set a trend of incorporating more jazz elements in James's music. The album won James her first Grammy Award, for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female, in 1994. In 1995, her autobiography, "A Rage to Survive", co-written with David Ritz, was published. Also in 1995, she recorded the album "Time After Time". A Christmas album, "Etta James Christmas", was released in 1998.


title: Etta James

text: By the mid-1990s, James's earlier music—by now considered classic—was being used in commercials, including "I Just Wanna Make Love to You," for example. After an excerpt of that song was featured in a Diet Coke advertising campaign in the UK, the song again charted, reaching the top ten on the UK charts in 1996.


title: Etta James

text: By 1998, with the release of "Life, Love & the Blues", James had added as backing musicians her own sons, Donto and Sametto, on drums and bass, respectively. They were part of her touring band. She continued recording for Private Music, which released the blues album "Matriarch of the Blues" in 2000, on which she returned to her R&B roots.


title: Etta James

text: In 2001, she was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, the latter for her contributions to the developments of both rock and roll and rockabilly. In 2003, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. On her 2004 release, "Blue Gardenia", she returned to a jazz style. Her final album for Private Music, "Let's Roll", released in 2005, won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album.


title: Etta James

text: In 2004, "Rolling Stone" magazine ranked her number 62 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.


title: Etta James

text: James performed at the top jazz festivals in the world, such as the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1977, 1989, 1990 and 1993. She performed nine times at the legendary Monterey Jazz Festival and five times at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. She performed at the Playboy Jazz Festival in 1990, 1997, 2004, and 2007. She performed six times at the North Sea Jazz Festival, in 1978, 1982, 1989, 1990, 1991 and 1993. She performed at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2006 and 2009 (prior 2012 credit - after date of death). She also often performed at free summer arts festivals throughout the United States.


title: Etta James

text: In 2008, James was portrayed by Beyoncé Knowles in the film "Cadillac Records", a fictional account of Chess Records, James's label for 18 years, about how label founder and producer Leonard Chess helped the careers of James and others. The film included "At Last," performed by Beyonce. James would go on to publicly criticize Beyonce, who was invited to perform the song at Barack Obama's inaugural ball, but later added that her critical remarks were meant to be received as a joke and stemmed from personal hurt over not having been invited to the sing the song herself for the Obama inauguration. It was later reported that Alzheimer's disease and "drug-induced dementia" had contributed to her negative comments about Knowles.


title: Etta James

text: In April 2009, at the age of 71, James made her final television appearance, performing "At Last" on the program "Dancing with the Stars". In May 2009, she received the Soul/Blues Female Artist of the Year award from the Blues Foundation, the ninth time she won that award. She carried on touring but by 2010 had to cancel concert dates because of her gradually failing health; by this time she was suffering from dementia and leukemia. In November 2011, James released her final album, "The Dreamer", which was critically acclaimed upon its release. She announced that this would be her final album.


title: Etta James

text: James' enduring relevance was affirmed in 2011 when the late Swedish DJ Avicii achieved substantial chart success with the song "Levels", which samples her 1962 song "Something's Got a Hold on Me". The same sample was used by the east coast rapper Flo Rida in his 2011 hit single "Good Feeling". Both artists issued statements of condolence upon James's death. James' original classic music again charted after these 21st-century re-interpretations.


title: Etta James

text: James possessed the vocal range of a contralto. Her musical style changed during the course of her career. At the beginning of her recording career, in the mid-1950s, James was marketed as an R&B and doo-wop singer. After signing with Chess Records in 1960, James broke through as a traditional pop-styled singer, covering jazz and pop music standards on her debut album, "At Last!" James's voice deepened and coarsened, moving her musical style in her later years into the genres of soul and jazz.


title: Etta James

text: James was once considered one of the most overlooked blues and R&B musicians in the music history of the United States. It was not until the early 1990s, when she began receiving major industry awards from the Grammys and the Blues Foundation, that she received wide recognition. In more recent years, she has been hailed as a pioneer who helped bridge the gap between rhythm and blues and rock and roll and thereby contributed significantly to American musical history. James has influenced a wide variety of musicians, including, notably, Diana Ross, Christina Aguilera, Janis Joplin, Brandy, Bonnie Raitt, Shemekia Copeland, Beth Hart and Hayley Williams of Paramore as well as British artists The Rolling Stones, Elkie Brooks, Paloma Faith, Joss Stone, Rita Ora, Amy Winehouse, and Adele, and the Belgian singer Dani Klein.


title: Etta James

text: In particular, her song "Something's Got a Hold on Me" has been recognized in many ways. Brussels music act Vaya Con Dios covered the song on their 1990 album "Night Owls". Another version, performed by Christina Aguilera, was in the 2010 film "Burlesque". Pretty Lights sampled the song in "Finally Moving", followed by Avicii's dance hit "Levels", and again in Flo Rida's single "Good Feeling".


title: Etta James

text: James knew Malcolm X and was a member of the Nation of Islam for around 10 years, taking the name Jamesetta X.


title: Etta James

text: James had two sons, Donto James and Sametto James, born to different fathers. Both were musicians and eventually performed professionally with their mother; Donto played drums at Montreux in 1993, and Sametto played bass guitar circa 2003, among other performances and tours.


title: Etta James

text: By the mid-1960s, James was addicted to heroin. She bounced checks, forged prescriptions and stole from her friends to finance her addiction. James was arrested in 1966 for writing bad checks. She was placed on probation and ordered to pay a $500 fine. In 1969, she spent 10 days in jail for violating probation.


title: Etta James

text: James encountered a string of legal problems during the early 1970s due to her heroin addiction. She was continuously in and out of rehabilitation centers, including the Tarzana Treatment Centers, in Los Angeles, California. Her husband Artis Mills accepted responsibility when they were both arrested for heroin possession and served a 10-year prison sentence. He was released from prison in 1981.


title: Etta James

text: In 1973, James was arrested for possession of heroin. In 1974, James was sentenced to drug treatment instead of serving time in prison. During this period, she became addicted to methadone and would mix her doses with heroin. She was in the Tarzana Psychiatric Hospital for 17 months, starting at the age of 36, and went through a great struggle at the start of treatment. In her 1995 autobiography "A Rage to Survive", she said that the time she spent in the hospital changed her life. After leaving treatment, however, her substance abuse continued, particularly after she developed a relationship with a man who was also using drugs.


title: Etta James

text: James was hospitalized in January 2010 to treat an infection caused by MRSA, a bacterium resistant to many antibiotics. During her hospitalization, her son Donto revealed to the public that she had been previously diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2008.


title: Etta James

text: James was diagnosed with leukemia in early 2011. The illness became terminal, and her husband Artis Mills was appointed sole conservator of the James estate and to oversee her medical care. She died on January 20, 2012, five days before her 74th birthday, at Riverside Community Hospital in Riverside, California. Her death came three days after that of Johnny Otis, the man who had discovered her in the 1950s. Thirty-six days after her death, her sideman Red Holloway also died.


title: Etta James

text: Her funeral was presided over by the Reverend Al Sharpton and took place in Gardena, California eight days after her death. Stevie Wonder and Christina Aguilera gave musical tributes. She was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles County, California.


title: Etta James

text: Since 1989 (notably rather late in her career, after nearly thirty years of prior recording), James has received over 30 awards and recognitions from eight different organizations, including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences which organizes the Grammys.


title: Etta James

text: In 1989, the newly formed Rhythm and Blues Foundation included James in their first Pioneer Awards for artists whose "lifelong contributions have been instrumental in the development of Rhythm & Blues music". The following year, 1990, she received an NAACP Image Award, which is given for "outstanding achievements and performances of people of color in the arts;" it was an award she cherished as it "was coming from my own people". In 2020, James was inducted into the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame.


title: Etta James

text: The Grammy Awards are awarded annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. James has received six Grammy Awards. Her first was in 1995, when she was awarded Best Jazz Vocal Performance for the album "Mystery Lady", which consisted of covers of Billie Holiday songs. Two other albums have also won awards, "Let's Roll" (Best Contemporary Blues Album) in 2003, and "Blues to the Bone" (Best Traditional Blues Album) in 2004. Two of her early songs have been given Grammy Hall of Fame Awards for "qualitative or historical significance": "At Last", in 1999, and "The Wallflower (Dance with Me, Henry)" in 2008. In 2003, she was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.


title: Etta James

text: The members of the Blues Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up in Memphis, Tennessee, to foster the blues and its heritage, have nominated James for a Blues Music Award nearly every year since its founding in 1980; and she received some form of Blues Female Artist of the Year award 14 times since 1989, continuously from 1999 to 2007. Her albums "Life, Love, & the Blues" (1999), "Burnin' Down the House" (2003), and "Let's Roll" (2004) were awarded Soul/Blues Album of the Year, and in 2001 she was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Leslie Louise Van Houten (born August 23, 1949) is an American convicted murderer and former member of the Manson Family. During her time with Manson's group, she was known by various aliases such as Louella Alexandria, Leslie Marie Sankston, Linda Sue Owens and Lulu. Van Houten was arrested and charged in relation to the 1969 killings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. She was convicted and sentenced to death. However, the California Supreme Court decision on "People v. Anderson" then ruled in 1972 that the death penalty was unconstitutional, resulting in her sentence being commuted to life in prison. Her conviction was then overturned in a 1976 appellate court decision which granted her a retrial. Her second trial ended with a deadlocked jury and a mistrial. At her third trial in 1978, she was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of conspiracy and sentenced to seven years to life in prison.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Van Houten was born on August 23, 1949 in the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena to Paul Van Houten and Jane (née Edwards). She is of Irish, English, Scottish, Dutch, and German descent. She grew up in a middle-class churchgoing family along with an older brother and two adopted siblings, a brother and a sister, who were Korean. Her mother and father divorced when she was 14. She began taking LSD and Benzedrine, and smoking hashish around age 15, running away for a time, but returning to complete high school. She said that later at age 17, she became pregnant and was ordered by her mother to undergo an abortion and to bury the aborted fetus in their backyard. Van Houten stated that after this event, she felt very removed from her mother and harbored intense anger toward her. She had a period of interest in yoga and took a year-long secretarial course, but became a hippie, living at a commune. Van Houten attended Monrovia High School in Monrovia, California, where she was a Homecoming Princess in 1966.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: After a few months in a commune in Northern California, Van Houten met Catherine Share and Bobby Beausoleil and moved in with them and another woman during the summer of 1968. The four broke up after jealous arguments, and Share left to join Charles Manson's commune. Van Houten, then aged 19, followed Share. At this time, she phoned her mother to say she was dropping out and would not be making contact again. Manson decided when they would eat, sleep, and have sex, and with whom they would have sex. He also controlled the taking of LSD, giving followers larger doses than he himself took. According to Manson, "When you take LSD enough times, you reach a state of nothing, of no thought". According to Van Houten, she became "saturated in acid" and could not grasp the existence of those living a non-psychedelic reality.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: From August 1968, Manson and his followers were based at the Spahn Ranch. Manson ostensibly ran his Family based on hippie-style principles of acceptance and free love. At the remote ranch, where they were isolated from any other influences, Manson's was the only opinion heard. At every meal he would lecture repetitively. Van Houten said Manson's attitude was that she "belonged to Bobby". According to Van Houten she and other Manson followers looked to 14-year-old Family member Dianne Lake as the "empty vessel", the epitome of what women were supposed to be in the Manson system of values. When Barbara Hoyt spoke at Van Houten's parole hearing in 2013, she said that Van Houten was considered a "leader" in the Manson Family.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Manson, who denied responsibility, never explained a motive for the murders. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi suggested Manson was attempting to start a racial civil war. The racial nature of the motive for the murders Van Houten was convicted of was later adduced by a judge, increasing the gravity of her offense.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: On August 9, 1969, Van Houten, Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, Clem Grogan and Manson went to the house of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. Manson entered the house with Watson, then left with Atkins, Grogan and Kasabian. Krenwinkel, Van Houten, and Watson murdered the couple.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: He allegedly sent the others to kill an actor, but Kasabian claims she led Atkins and Grogan to an incorrect address.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Tex Watson, who had shot or stabbed all of the victims at the Tate and LaBianca murders and who inflicted most of the fatal or non-survivable injuries, was not arraigned with the others at the main 'Manson' trial, which covered both the Tate and LaBianca murders. Manson was accused of orchestrating both attacks, but the only defendants at the trial whose murder charges were for actually inflicting injuries on the LaBiancas were Van Houten and Krenwinkel. Unlike the others, Van Houten was not accused of the murders of Tate and her friends.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Manson opposed his three female co-defendants running a defense that he had asked them to commit killings. Van Houten did not appear to take the court seriously (she later claimed to have been supplied with LSD during the trial) and giggled during testimony about the victims. She took the stand and admitted committing the murders with which she was charged and denied that Manson had been involved. An often-cited example of how he seemed to exert control over Van Houten and the others was when Manson carved an X on his forehead and she and the other two women defendants copied him. In the latter stages of the trial they stopped mimicking him, Bugliosi suggested, because they realized it was making the extent of his influence over them apparent.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Van Houten dismissed three defense lawyers in succession for claiming her actions were attributable to Manson's control over her. When her lawyer was asking an expert witness about the effect of LSD on judgment, Van Houten shouted that, "This is all such a big lie, I was influenced by the war in Vietnam and TV".


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: On March 29, 1971, she was convicted of murder along with the other defendants. During the sentencing phase of the trial, in an apparent attempt to exonerate Manson, Van Houten testified that she had committed a killing in which she was not, in fact, involved. She told a psychiatrist of beating her adopted sister, leading him to characterize her as "a spoiled little princess" and a "psychologically loaded gun", and was adamant that Manson had no influence over her thought processes or behavior. Van Houten also told the psychiatrist that she would have gone to jail for manslaughter or assault with a deadly weapon without ever meeting Manson. When her lawyer, attempting to show she felt remorse, asked if she felt sorrow or shame for the death of Rosemary LaBianca, Van Houten replied "sorry is only a five-letter word" and "you can't undo something that is done". In cross-examination, Van Houten aggressively implicated herself in inflicting wounds while the victim was living, and severely wounding the victim, severing her spine, which might have been fatal by itself. She vehemently denied acting on instructions from Manson, and said a court-appointed attorney who "had a lot of different ideas on how to get me off" had told her to claim Manson ordered the killings.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Van Houten was sentenced to be executed; she was the youngest woman ever condemned to death in California. No death row for female prisoners existed, and a special unit was built. The death sentences were automatically commuted to life in prison after the California Supreme Court's "People v. Anderson" decision resulted in the invalidation of all death sentences imposed in California prior to 1972. With a first degree murder conviction she was eligible for parole once she had served seven years. In order to be released after seven years, she would have had to have been granted parole at her first parole hearing. (The Governor would not have been able to rescind that parole, since California governors did not gain that power until Proposition 89 was passed by the voters on November 8, 1988.) In his bestselling book "Helter Skelter", prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi said that "his guess" was that all three women would be released after 15–20 years.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Van Houten was granted a retrial in 1977 due to the failure to declare a mistrial when her lawyer died. Her defense argued that Van Houten's capacity for rational thought had been diminished due to LSD use and Manson's influence. The jury could not agree on a verdict. According to what the jury foreman later told reporters, they thought it was difficult on the basis of the evidence to determine whether Van Houten's judgment had been unimpaired enough for a verdict of first degree murder rather than manslaughter.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: It was reported in the news media that because of time already served, Van Houten could go free that year if she was convicted of manslaughter. By law, prosecutors are not allowed to mention the possibility of the defendant being released on parole when arguing for a murder rather than manslaughter conviction because it is considered highly prejudicial to the defendant.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: The prosecution in 1970–71 had emphasized that the motive had nothing to do with robbery and the killers ignored valuable pieces of property. At Van Houten's second re-trial, the prosecution, who were now being aided by a specialist in diminished responsibility, altered the charges by using the theft of food, clothing and a small sum of money taken from the house to add a charge of robbery, whereby the felony murder rule tended to undermine a defense of reduced capacity. She was on bond for six months before being found guilty of first degree murder. Van Houten was given a life sentence that entailed eligibility for parole, for which the prosecutor said she would one day be suitable.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: After the first trial, Van Houten and her female co-conspirators Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel were housed in a special housing unit built at the California Institution for Women. They were initially kept separate from the prison population, because they were viewed as a threat to the other inmates.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: In the early 1970s, Van Houten, Atkins and Krenwinkel worked with a social worker, Karlene Faith, who sought to help them re-establish their identities separate from the Manson Family. Faith later wrote a book about her work with the women, "The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten". In the book, Faith tells how two of the women believed that they would "grow wings and become fairies" after the expected race war had occurred. The women told Faith that they obtained this belief from Manson. Faith viewed all three of the Manson women as victims, and lobbied for their early release from prison. Faith's work with the Manson women was later portrayed in the feature film, "Charlie Says".


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Van Houten was also befriended by film director John Waters. Moreover, he campaigned for her early release from prison.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: In 1975, the Manson women were moved to the general population at the California Institution for Women.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Under California law, some life sentences are eligible for parole, and a parole board rejection of an application does not preclude a different decision in the future. Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel (who were originally convicted along with Van Houten and Manson at the main trial) had both been found guilty of the most notorious crime, the murder of five people at 10050 Cielo Drive. In addition, Krenwinkel was also convicted of the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, while Atkins was also convicted of murdering Gary Hinman.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: Only one member of the Manson Family has been convicted of murder and later released: Steve "Clem" Grogan. Grogan, convicted and given a death sentence by the jury for the torture-murder of Donald Shea with Manson, was freed in 1985. Bruce M. Davis, also an accomplice of Manson in the killing of Shea, and with a second conviction for the Gary Hinman killing, was given a parole board recommendation for release in 2010 although very few inmates with even a single conviction on a charge of murder had been able to obtain parole in California before 2011. In each case, the sitting governor ordered a review or reversed the decision. "Tex" Watson was denied parole for the 15th time on October 27, 2016.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: After receiving her 13th rejection, in which the hearing concluded she posed "an unreasonable risk of danger to society", Van Houten took legal action. Judge Bob Krug ordered the board to re-hear the application because their reasoning turned solely on the unalterable gravity of her offense and effectively gave her life without parole, "a sentence unauthorized by law". The judgment was overturned by a higher court, which said although parole hearings must consider evidence for an inmate being rehabilitated, a hearing had discretion to deny parole based solely on a review of the circumstances of the crime, if "some evidence" supported their decision.


title: Leslie Van Houten

text: In 2013, Van Houten was denied parole for the 20th time at a hearing. In announcing a decision to deny parole, the commissioner of the hearing board said that she had failed to explain how someone of her good background and intelligence could have committed such "cruel and atrocious" murders.