of the German people to fight by leveling their cities. Dresden, with its medieval wood buildings on narrow streets, gave Harris the target he was looking for to experiment with firestorms.

Just two months before the end of the war, some 244 British Lancaster bombers dropped 800 tons of bombs on central Dresden, including 10-ton mega bombs called “blockbusters.” Each of these bombs literally blew the roof off an entire block of buildings. With the roofs gone, the city had no protection when the second wave of 529 Lancasters filled the skies some hours later, dropping 1,800 hundred tons of phosphorescent “sticky” fire bombs that fell on the exposed buildings and began fires wherever they stuck.

A third wave of 311 U.S. “Flying Fortresses” came the next morning, when firecrews and survivors were on the street. This third wave of bombs created a draught that united individual fires into one huge firestorm that swept across 75 percent of Dresden, using up so much oxygen that city dwellers were suffocated, even in their underground bomb shelters.

The horror of that night was captured by American author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who was a prisoner of war in Dresden and wrote about it in his classic novel, “Slaughterhouse Five.”

When the bombing finally stopped, 25,000 civilians were dead and Dresden was an inferno – so completely, utterly destroyed that many questioned if it should, or even could, ever be rebuilt. Ironically, the railroad through the city, the alleged target justifying the bombing raid, was hardly damaged.

In the Cold War, Dresden was part