Bombing of Dresden in World War II - Reconstruction and Reconciliation

Reconstruction and Reconciliation

Further information: Dresden Frauenkirche, Semperoper, Zwinger, and Coventry Cathedral

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).

Despite its location in the Soviet occupation (the Deutsche Demokratische Republik), 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 English 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.

The Dresden synagogue, which was burned during Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, was rebuilt in 2001 and opened for worship on 9 November. The original synagogue's Star of David was installed above the entrance of the new building – Alfred Neugebauer, a local firefighter, saved it from the fire and hid it in his home until the end of the war. Dresden's Jewish population declined from 4675 in 1933, to 1265 in 1941 (the eve of the implementation of the Nazis' extermination programme), to just a handful after almost all of those who had remained were forcibly sent to Riga, Auschwitz and Theresienstadt between 1941 and 1945. On the morning of 13 February 1945, the Jews remaining in Dresden were ordered to report for deportation on 16 February. But as one of them, Victor Klemperer, recorded in his diaries: "...on the evening of this 13 February the catastrophe overtook Dresden: the bombs fell, the houses collapsed, the phosphorus flowed, the burning beams crashed on to the heads of Aryans and non-Aryans alike and Jew and Christian met death in the same firestorm; whoever of the was spared by this night was delivered, for in the general chaos he could escape the Gestapo." But in recent years the Jewish population has swelled in Dresden, as it has elsewhere in Germany. Paul Spiegel, the then head of Germany's Jewish Community, called the new synagogue a concrete expression of the Jewish community's desire to stay.

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 a symbol of British aggression.

A British charity, the Dresden Trust, was formed in 1993 to raise funds in the UK 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.

During her visit to Germany in November 2004, Queen Elizabeth II hosted a concert in Berlin to raise money for the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche. The visit was accompanied by speculation in the British and German press, fueled mostly by the tabloids, over a possible apology for the attacks, but none was forthcoming.

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