Jason Schneider
the Camera Collector
The Firebombing of Dresden: War Crime…or not? And its aftermath.
On the evening of February 13, 1945, a series of four Allied firebombing raids began against the German city of Dresden, reducing the entire central area of the “Florence of the Elbe” to rubble and flames, and killing roughly 25,000 people. Despite the horrendous scale of destruction, it arguably accomplished little strategically, since the Germans were already on the verge of surrender. In the bombing raids, a joint British and American mission, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city, destroying more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km[SUP]2[/SUP]) of the city center.
On the ground thousands of small fires merged into a powerful firestorm that created such a powerful vortex that it sucked oxygen, fuel, broken structures, and people into its flames. The scale of death and devastation seemed beyond comparison to witnesses like writer Kurt Vonnegut, then an American POW being held in Dresden. Assigned to a sanitary clean-up crew after the bombing, Vonnegut had to dig into shelters and basements which “looked like a streetcar full of people who simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting in their chairs, all dead,”—robbed of oxygen by the all-consuming firestorm.
According to the RAF at the time, Dresden was Germany's seventh-largest city and the largest remaining un-bombed built-up area and "one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich.” However, in response to the international outcry over the bombing that remained classified until December 1978, the US Air Force Historical Division concluded that there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers in the city supporting the German war effort at the time of the raids. These included aircraft components factories, a poison gas factory, an anti-aircraft and field gun factory, an optical goods factory (Zeiss-Ikon AG) and factories producing electrical and X-ray apparatus, gears and differentials and electric gauges. It also noted there were barracks, hutted camps, and a munitions storage depot.
Observers noted early on that the bombing of Dresden did not only mean the death of civilians, but the destruction of a center of European culture and Baroque splendor. Since the rule of August the Strong (1670-1733), the “German Florence” on the Elbe, was home to famous collections of art, porcelain collection, prints, scientific instruments, and jewelry. Many Germans perceived a particular injustice in the late bombing of Dresden in February in 1945—a sentiment that gained some international traction in the postwar years. Dresden was a densely crowded city in the winter of 1945, filled with refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army. For most of them, the end of the war looked near and inevitable and a full-scale attack unnecessary.
Dresden city center, circa 1930. Prior to the firebombing Dresden was a center for culture and the arts and one of the most beautiful large cities in Europe.
Allied strategists, however, claimed they were concerned about allowing the Wehrmacht to regroup within Germany’s borders if they eased on their pressure. The U.S. Army alone had suffered almost 140,000 casualties from December to January 1945 and 27,000 in the week prior to the Dresden bombing alone—the heaviest losses in the Western Allies’ war against Hitler. So, while the Dresden bombing was assuredly a terror campaign that dealt a devastating assault on civilians and cultural sites, it was also part of a war in which such tactics had been widely—and grimly—deployed. Less than three months later, and eight days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker, the German High Command signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces.
Clearly there was ample justification for an attack on Dresden, but nothing that warranted the scale of the all-out firebombing that occurred, which was mainly instigated and carried out by the British as revenge and payback for the Luftwaffe’s destruction of Coventry and the London Blitz. For many, the sadistic War Crime charge was proven by, of all things, the TIMING of the air raids. With the Allies’ total supremacy in the air, the four air raids could have been done continuously in one long huge bombing run. Instead, the four air raids had HOURS between them, plenty of time to fool those huddling in bomb shelters that it was safe to come outside – only to be burned alive in the next air raid. Accurate casualties will likely never be proven in a city full of undocumented refugees. Dresden casualty estimates have varied between 250,000 to 25,000 depending upon who made the estimates and the funding their paychecks.
Dresden after the Allied fire-bombings in 1945: Even this iconic photo can only hint at the level of devastation and human misery caused by the attacks.
Since most of the major camera factories were located on the city’s outskirts, and in the smaller towns surrounding Dresden, the city’s camera industry (notably the Zeiss-Ikon factories) experienced some damage but escaped annihilation. However, Dresden’s photographic industry may have suffered an equally cruel fate, namely winding up on the wrong side of the political railroad tracks in East Germany where it was eventually reorganized under the centralized communist enterprise known as VEB Pentacon, VEB being an abbreviation of Volkseigener Betrieb, which means ‘Publicly Owned Operation’ in English. It was the main legal form of industrial enterprise in East Germany from the late 1940s until the early 1960s, after the handing back of some 33 enterprises initially seized by the Soviet Union as war reparations in 1954. During the 41 years of the existence of the East German state (DDR) (1949-1990) nearly all photography-related companies in Dresden were merged into the state-owned Pentacon group. After 1990 that enterprise became one of the first victims of the corrupt “Treuhand,” the office tasked with selling or liquidating East German companies after the reunification of Germany. They simply shut Pentacon, down, then the largest and most influential of the East German VEB combinates.
Perhaps the best-known example of an outright seizure was Zeiss-Ikon’s Contax camera manufacturing facility, which was simply packed up, lock, stock, and barrel, and shipped off to the ancient Arsenal munitions factory in Kiev, complete with tools and dies, finished parts, and production machinery starting in late 1945. In the move, 274 German employees were forcibly relocated to start up production of cloned Contax II and II cameras affixed with Kiev nameplates. Legend has it that the very first run of Kiev cameras made in Ukraine were, in effect, Contax cameras assembled from pre-existing parts by experienced German “guest” workers. However, while early Kievs do appear to be better made and finished than later ones, I’ve never seen one quite as beautifully made and smoothly operating as an original Contax II or III, so something was clearly lost in the transition. After the expropriation in late 1945 the now state-owned company VEB-Zeiss Ikon in Dresden started producing the Contax S pentaprism SLR in 1949, a new edition of the 6x9 cm Ikonta folder dubbed the Ercona , and the Taxona, a derivative if the prewar Tenax, the latter two in 1948.
Early Kiev Contax II copy of circa 1951 with 50mm f/2 Jupiter lens, a Sonnar clone. It was nicely made, better than later Kievs, but still no Contax.
In the meantime, in June 1945, the U.S Army relocated 84 of Zeiss-Ikon’s top design engineers and the acting board of the Carl Zeiss Foundation from Jena, now in East Germany (DDR), to Heidenheim in the Western zone. In 1946 Opton Optische Werk Oberkochen GmbH was founded (a fact memorialized in the labeling of early postwar Oberkochen-made Zeiss lenses as Zeiss-Opton), and shortly afterward the name of the company was changed back to Carl Zeiss. Meanwhile Stuttgart, the site of the old Contessa factory, became the home of Zeiss Ikon AG, once again turning out cameras for the civilian market. During this time they developed the Contax IIa and IIIa, with simpler, more reliable vertical-travel metal focal plane shutters and other improvements, and in 1953 brought forth the Contaflex a hugely successful series of Compur leaf shutter 35mm SLRs that eventually sported built in selenium meters, autoexposure, and front component interchangeable lenses.
On the evening of February 13, 1945, a series of four Allied firebombing raids began against the German city of Dresden, reducing the entire central area of the “Florence of the Elbe” to rubble and flames, and killing roughly 25,000 people. Despite the horrendous scale of destruction, it arguably accomplished little strategically, since the Germans were already on the verge of surrender. In the bombing raids, a joint British and American mission, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city, destroying more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km[SUP]2[/SUP]) of the city center.
On the ground thousands of small fires merged into a powerful firestorm that created such a powerful vortex that it sucked oxygen, fuel, broken structures, and people into its flames. The scale of death and devastation seemed beyond comparison to witnesses like writer Kurt Vonnegut, then an American POW being held in Dresden. Assigned to a sanitary clean-up crew after the bombing, Vonnegut had to dig into shelters and basements which “looked like a streetcar full of people who simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting in their chairs, all dead,”—robbed of oxygen by the all-consuming firestorm.
According to the RAF at the time, Dresden was Germany's seventh-largest city and the largest remaining un-bombed built-up area and "one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich.” However, in response to the international outcry over the bombing that remained classified until December 1978, the US Air Force Historical Division concluded that there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers in the city supporting the German war effort at the time of the raids. These included aircraft components factories, a poison gas factory, an anti-aircraft and field gun factory, an optical goods factory (Zeiss-Ikon AG) and factories producing electrical and X-ray apparatus, gears and differentials and electric gauges. It also noted there were barracks, hutted camps, and a munitions storage depot.
Observers noted early on that the bombing of Dresden did not only mean the death of civilians, but the destruction of a center of European culture and Baroque splendor. Since the rule of August the Strong (1670-1733), the “German Florence” on the Elbe, was home to famous collections of art, porcelain collection, prints, scientific instruments, and jewelry. Many Germans perceived a particular injustice in the late bombing of Dresden in February in 1945—a sentiment that gained some international traction in the postwar years. Dresden was a densely crowded city in the winter of 1945, filled with refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army. For most of them, the end of the war looked near and inevitable and a full-scale attack unnecessary.
Dresden city center, circa 1930. Prior to the firebombing Dresden was a center for culture and the arts and one of the most beautiful large cities in Europe.
Allied strategists, however, claimed they were concerned about allowing the Wehrmacht to regroup within Germany’s borders if they eased on their pressure. The U.S. Army alone had suffered almost 140,000 casualties from December to January 1945 and 27,000 in the week prior to the Dresden bombing alone—the heaviest losses in the Western Allies’ war against Hitler. So, while the Dresden bombing was assuredly a terror campaign that dealt a devastating assault on civilians and cultural sites, it was also part of a war in which such tactics had been widely—and grimly—deployed. Less than three months later, and eight days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker, the German High Command signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces.
Clearly there was ample justification for an attack on Dresden, but nothing that warranted the scale of the all-out firebombing that occurred, which was mainly instigated and carried out by the British as revenge and payback for the Luftwaffe’s destruction of Coventry and the London Blitz. For many, the sadistic War Crime charge was proven by, of all things, the TIMING of the air raids. With the Allies’ total supremacy in the air, the four air raids could have been done continuously in one long huge bombing run. Instead, the four air raids had HOURS between them, plenty of time to fool those huddling in bomb shelters that it was safe to come outside – only to be burned alive in the next air raid. Accurate casualties will likely never be proven in a city full of undocumented refugees. Dresden casualty estimates have varied between 250,000 to 25,000 depending upon who made the estimates and the funding their paychecks.
Dresden after the Allied fire-bombings in 1945: Even this iconic photo can only hint at the level of devastation and human misery caused by the attacks.
Since most of the major camera factories were located on the city’s outskirts, and in the smaller towns surrounding Dresden, the city’s camera industry (notably the Zeiss-Ikon factories) experienced some damage but escaped annihilation. However, Dresden’s photographic industry may have suffered an equally cruel fate, namely winding up on the wrong side of the political railroad tracks in East Germany where it was eventually reorganized under the centralized communist enterprise known as VEB Pentacon, VEB being an abbreviation of Volkseigener Betrieb, which means ‘Publicly Owned Operation’ in English. It was the main legal form of industrial enterprise in East Germany from the late 1940s until the early 1960s, after the handing back of some 33 enterprises initially seized by the Soviet Union as war reparations in 1954. During the 41 years of the existence of the East German state (DDR) (1949-1990) nearly all photography-related companies in Dresden were merged into the state-owned Pentacon group. After 1990 that enterprise became one of the first victims of the corrupt “Treuhand,” the office tasked with selling or liquidating East German companies after the reunification of Germany. They simply shut Pentacon, down, then the largest and most influential of the East German VEB combinates.
Perhaps the best-known example of an outright seizure was Zeiss-Ikon’s Contax camera manufacturing facility, which was simply packed up, lock, stock, and barrel, and shipped off to the ancient Arsenal munitions factory in Kiev, complete with tools and dies, finished parts, and production machinery starting in late 1945. In the move, 274 German employees were forcibly relocated to start up production of cloned Contax II and II cameras affixed with Kiev nameplates. Legend has it that the very first run of Kiev cameras made in Ukraine were, in effect, Contax cameras assembled from pre-existing parts by experienced German “guest” workers. However, while early Kievs do appear to be better made and finished than later ones, I’ve never seen one quite as beautifully made and smoothly operating as an original Contax II or III, so something was clearly lost in the transition. After the expropriation in late 1945 the now state-owned company VEB-Zeiss Ikon in Dresden started producing the Contax S pentaprism SLR in 1949, a new edition of the 6x9 cm Ikonta folder dubbed the Ercona , and the Taxona, a derivative if the prewar Tenax, the latter two in 1948.
Early Kiev Contax II copy of circa 1951 with 50mm f/2 Jupiter lens, a Sonnar clone. It was nicely made, better than later Kievs, but still no Contax.
In the meantime, in June 1945, the U.S Army relocated 84 of Zeiss-Ikon’s top design engineers and the acting board of the Carl Zeiss Foundation from Jena, now in East Germany (DDR), to Heidenheim in the Western zone. In 1946 Opton Optische Werk Oberkochen GmbH was founded (a fact memorialized in the labeling of early postwar Oberkochen-made Zeiss lenses as Zeiss-Opton), and shortly afterward the name of the company was changed back to Carl Zeiss. Meanwhile Stuttgart, the site of the old Contessa factory, became the home of Zeiss Ikon AG, once again turning out cameras for the civilian market. During this time they developed the Contax IIa and IIIa, with simpler, more reliable vertical-travel metal focal plane shutters and other improvements, and in 1953 brought forth the Contaflex a hugely successful series of Compur leaf shutter 35mm SLRs that eventually sported built in selenium meters, autoexposure, and front component interchangeable lenses.
raydm6
Yay! Cameras! 🙈🙉🙊┌( ಠ_ಠ)┘ [◉"]
Thank you for these articles Jason.
Reading this with Richard Strauss' "Metamorphosen, study for 23 solo strings" playing in the background.
R. Strauss: Metamorphosen For 23 Solo Strings · Berliner Philharmoniker · Herbert von Karajan
Reading this with Richard Strauss' "Metamorphosen, study for 23 solo strings" playing in the background.
R. Strauss: Metamorphosen For 23 Solo Strings · Berliner Philharmoniker · Herbert von Karajan
Jason Schneider
the Camera Collector
Thanks for your reply. Having lived through World War II as a precocious toddler, I listened to it unfold in real time on the BBC. As a result, I lost what little remained of my childhood innocence, concluding that my species cannot be trusted. Regrettably I've had little reason to change my mind over the ensuing 78 years. On the other hand, some of the cameras made in Dresden and in Occupied Japan embody the transcendence if the human spirit in the face of adversity, factors that are at least as important as their optical and mechanical ingenuity. Love the Metamorphosen!
Kai-san
Filmwaster
There is one obvious error here; operation Treuhand was not after WWII, but from 1990 to 1994. It was established to sell off publicly owned property after the re-unification of East and West Germany. But you are correct about the corruption. One company that had no debts and was valued at 73 million DM was sold for 1 - one DM. Most companies were just shut down to remove the competition for companies in the western part, and workers were fired. Praktica suffered this fate although they were profitable and exported to many countries. Many people in the east saw this process not as a peaceful re-unification, but as a hostile takeover.
p.giannakis
Pan Giannakis
Thanks for this info. I wasn't aware.
Jason Schneider
the Camera Collector
Thanks very much for your clarification. Actually I did not state that operation Treuhand took place right after WW II, but I should have been more precise in stating that it took place starting in 1990 as a consequence if re-unification. I will modify the text when I get a chance.
Coldkennels
Barnack-toting Brit.
I travel to Germany quite a lot and have a lot of friends from both sides of the split. It's weird how much the West vs East mentality still goes on; perfectly normal and well-balanced Wessis will start ranting about how the former East Germany continues to be a drain on the economy, syphoning up the West's money, while smart and cultured Ossis complain that the second they open their mouth and an East German accent comes out, former West Germans look down their nose at them and treat them like they're lesser people.
Honestly, it's a pretty awful case study in how an otherwise friendly and beautiful country can be ruined - and the more you dig into it, neither side comes out looking good.