Germany was yesterday to mark 75 years since the destruction of Dresden in World War II, with the far-right seeking to inflate victim numbers and play down Nazi war crimes.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was to give a speech at Dresden’s Palace of Culture, walking a fine line between remembering those killed in the Allied air raids on the eastern city and stressing Germany’s responsibility for the war.
At 5:30pm, he was to join thousands of residents in forming a human chain of “peace and tolerance” as church bells rang out.
Photo: AFP / SLUB Dresden Deutsche Fotothek / Richard Peter Sr
However, as in past years, the commemoration is expected to attract neo-Nazis, while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was to run an information booth to tell the supposed “truth” about the bombings and demand a grander memorial for the victims.
Police were also bracing for a large demonstration by right-wing extremists tomorrow, which is expected to be met with counterprotests.
“The myth of the ‘city of innocence’ lives on,” the regional Saechsische Zeitung wrote, accusing the far-right of using the commemorations “to minimize German war crimes.”
In 1945, hundreds of British and US bombers pounded Dresden with conventional and incendiary explosives from Feb. 13 to 15.
The ensuing firestorm killed about 25,000 people, historians have estimated, and left the baroque city known as “Florence on the Elbe” in ruins, wiping out its historic center.
The devastation came to symbolize the horrors of war, much like the heavily bombed city of Coventry in England.
However, in Germany, Dresden also became a focal point for neo-Nazis who have held “funeral marches” for the dead and given the city a martyrdom status that experts have said is belied by historical facts.
This year’s anniversary is especially charged as Germany reels from a political scandal that erupted in neighboring Thuringia state last week, where an AfD-backed candidate was elected state premier for the first time.
Although he swiftly resigned, the drama marked a coup for the AfD — laying bare mainstream parties’ struggle to maintain the firewall against a party that has called for Germany to stop atoning for its Nazi past.
“Resurgent nationalism and right-wing populism are increasingly endangering the democratic remembrance culture,” Dresden Mayor Dirk Hilbert told local radio.
Some observers have questioned whether the indiscriminate bombing of Dresden was justified so late in the war, an argument hijacked by neo-Nazis eager to shift the focus onto atrocities committed by the victors of World War II.
However, the Allied forces saw Dresden as a legitimate target on the eastern front because of its transport links and factories supporting the German military machine.
In the immediate aftermath, Nazi propagandists claimed more than 200,000 people had lost their lives in Dresden — even though historical records showed early on that they had simply added a zero to their estimates.
Yet, right-wing extremists continue to cite wildly elevated tolls.
AfD cochairman Tino Chrupalla told Der Spiegel that his grandmother and father recalled seeing “mountains of bodies” after the firebombing.
Despite the evidence to the contrary, he said that he believes the victims numbered “around 100,000,” prompting critics to accuse him of historical revisionism.
Last year, AfD lawmaker Mario Lehmann caused uproar when he described the Dresden bombings as “a Holocaust” — a term usually reserved for the murder of 6 million Jews under Adolf Hitler.
Founded just seven years ago, the anti-Islam, anti-immigrant AfD has risen to become the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag.
It is most popular in the country’s former communist east. In Dresden’s Saxony state, the AfD came second in regional polls last year.
Dresden bombing survivor Ursula Elsner, who was 14 when her mother dragged her to safety past burning buildings, told Der Spiegel that she was tired of the anniversary being misused for political gain.
The 89-year-old wants the occasion to serve as a warning against war.
“This day belongs to us,” Elsner said.
DISPUTED WATERS: The Philippines accused China of building an artificial island on Sabina Shoal, while Beijing said Manila was trying to mislead the global community The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is committed to sustaining a presence in a disputed area of the South China Sea to ensure Beijing does not carry out reclamation activities at Sabina Shoal (Xianbin Reef), its spokesperson said yesterday. The PCG on Saturday said it had deployed a ship to Sabina Shoal, where it accused China of building an artificial island, amid an escalating maritime row, adding two other vessels were in rotational deployment in the area. Since the ship’s deployment in the middle of last month, the PCG said it had discovered piles of dead and crushed coral that had been dumped
The most powerful solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular celestial light shows from Tasmania to the UK — and threatening possible disruptions to satellites and power grids as it persists into the weekend. The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — came just after 4pm GMT, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. It was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged
Experts have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue, but a new research paper suggests it is already happening. AI systems, designed to be honest, have developed a troubling skill for deception, from tricking human players in online games of world conquest to hiring humans to solve “prove-you’re-not-a-robot” tests, a team of researchers said in the journal Patterns on Friday. While such examples might appear trivial, the underlying issues they expose could soon carry serious real-world consequences, said first author Peter Park, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in AI existential safety. “These
Using virtual-reality (VR) headsets, students at a Hong Kong university travel to a pavilion above the clouds to watch an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated Albert Einstein explain game theory. The students are part of a course at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) that is testing the use of “AI lecturers” as the AI revolution hits campuses around the world. The mass availability of tools such as ChatGPT has sparked optimism about new leaps in productivity and teaching, but also fears over cheating, plagiarism and the replacement of human instructors. Pan Hui (許彬), a professor of computer science who is leading