First published at 14:09 UTC on April 28th, 2024.
On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city's population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees ret…
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On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city's population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the red terror imagine that they themselves were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise.Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets shivering in the bitter cold.However, the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus played to a full house that night as thousands came to forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded about in carnival dress in an effort to bolster waning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.No one realized that in less than 24 hours many of those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill's firestorms. But of course, no one could know that then. The Soviets, to be sure, were known to be savages, but at least the British were and Americans were thought to be 'honourable'.So when those first alarms signalled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden's people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened from the air. Many would never come out alive, for that 'great democratic statesman' Winston Churchill, in collusion with that other 'great democratic statesman' Franklin D. Roosevelt, had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.
https://spearhead.co.uk/0502-em.htm
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