ABSTRACT

Travelling through the destroyed areas, you are struck by architectonic impressions of

unprecedented power: all superfluous trimmings have been purged away.

Richard Zorn, 19431

THE night of 13 February 1945 began uneventfully and cloudlessly in the Saxon capital ofDresden, one of Europe’s foremost centres of 18th-century Baroque architecture. Hitherto, owing to distance, the city had been spared the destruction visited on its west German counterparts.

That, however, was about to change. Already a major communications hub and centre of munitions

manufacture (as well as of anti-semitic persecution, with only 4 per cent of its prewar Jewish