Dresden, Feb. 13, (dpa/GNA) - About 100 German survivors of the World War II fire-bombing of Dresden described its horrors Friday to visitors from round the globe at the start of a day of commemorations.
The Allied fire-bombing began 70 years ago and devastated the city within a couple of days, killing up to 25,000 civilians.
"What use are memories if you don't hand them on?" said Matthias Neutzner, an activist in a society devoted to remembrance of the destruction. "We must never go to war again."
War survivors from Spain, Poland, Japan and Britain were in the congregation in Dresden's Church of the Three Kings as Neutzner said Dresden's own pain mixed with that of the "millions of people in the world who suffered from the criminal war" waged by Nazi Germany.
German President Joachim Gauck was later to speak to dignitaries inside the Frauenkirche, an ornate baroque church with a soaring sandstone dome that was rebuilt from Dresden's rubble and completed in 2005.
After dusk, a crowd were to form a human chain on both banks of the Elbe river which divides the city and join hands over two bridges in a symbolic act of reconciliation. Gauck, whose political role is mainly ceremonial, was expected to join the crowd.
US and British bombers, which had lacked the range to attack Dresden early in World War II, began pounding the city on February 13, 1945 with incendiary bombs, setting the inner city and its palaces ablaze.
At every anniversary, Germany tries to maintain the balance between grief and resentment over a loss that brought the Allies little military advantage and the German nation's message that it accepts the blame for unleashing a genocidal war.
The rise in the city of the anti-Islam group Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, has raised fears among municipal leaders that Dresden could be seen globally as a place of intolerance.
Pegida is much diminished, after splitting last month in the wake of controversy surrounding its founder Lutz Bachmann, who took a selfie with a Hitler moustache and hairstyle. This week only 2,000 turned up to hear Bachmann speak, a far cry from 25,000 at the peak last month.
The rightist marches so worried the municipality that it decided not to lay wreaths this year at the cemetery where many charred bodies were buried, a ceremony that highlights pain at the bombing rather than the message of reconciliation with Germany's former enemies.
The Frauenkirche was rebuilt after an international fund-raising campaign with prominent donations from Britain, where there has also been a long-running debate about whether it was right to kill so many civilians when Nazi Germany was in the throes of defeat.
Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, 79, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, is to represent Britain at Friday's ceremony.
GNA
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