One morning in mid-January, residents of Dresden, Germany, awoke to find that a sandstone plaque commemorating the victims of the city’s bombing in World War II was gone. For decades, it had stood in the city’s Altmarkt square to commemorate the thousands of German civilians who had died in the attack. “The horrors of the war, which had been carried from Germany all over the world, also came back to our city,” its inscription read.
One morning in mid-January, residents of Dresden, Germany, awoke to find that a sandstone plaque commemorating the victims of the city’s bombing in World War II was gone. For decades, it had stood in the city’s Altmarkt square to commemorate the thousands of German civilians who had died in the attack. “The horrors of the war, which had been carried from Germany all over the world, also came back to our city,” its inscription read.
The plaque’s removal made headlines in the city and beyond. The extreme-right German magazine Compact was incensed: Multiple articles on the publication’s website described the removal as an insult to the victims and initially suggested that left-wing activists were behind it because they didn’t respect the German lives lost. Ultimately, it turned out the city itself had removed the plaque as part of its ongoing plans to overhaul the memorial elements in the square—it had just “acted extremely poorly from a communications point of view,” Dresden Mayor Dirk Hilbert said in a statement.
The incident, which came weeks before the 79th anniversary of the bombing, illustrated how heated emotions can be this time of year in Dresden. On the evening of Feb. 13, 1945, Allied forces bombed the city, turning its historic center to rubble in a fiery night of explosions. Modern estimates put the total death toll at around 25,000. The city itself—a cultural hub along the Elbe River and the heart of the former Saxon kingdom—was destroyed.
Each February since the early 2000s, neo-Nazi groups have organized a “march of mourning” for the victims, with hundreds of participants making their way through the city. They argue that the bombing was a war crime and the clearest example that Germans were not only perpetrators during the war. This year, that march is slated to take place on Sunday. In response, Dresden residents who oppose the far right will gather for a counter-commemoration on Feb. 13, building a “human chain” around the city center as a statement against xenophobia. Both events typically see pushback from counter-protesters. The demonstrations are expected to be especially contentious this year, as the country’s populist far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has surged in popularity and a series of anti-AfD protests have gained momentum across the country.
In the English-speaking world, the bombing of Dresden has become a symbol of ambivalence about Allied forces’ actions during the war and the loss of civilian life their victory included. But the protests show that within Germany, Dresden’s legacy has been at the center of a very different debate—one about how the country should view its own losses and suffering during the war. As Claudia Jerzak, a Dresden-based sociologist, said, “Dresden has always been the primary place where the German victimhood discourse played out.”
Germany’s comprehensive approach to acknowledging its culpability in the Holocaust has made it a model for memory culture around the world. Guilt and responsibility are central tenets of the country’s modern identity: Students visit concentration camps and undergo comprehensive education about the Nazi era, monuments and plaques across the country remind passersby of Nazi crimes, and politicians regularly participate in commemorative events.
However, as a recognizable symbol of destruction and death in Germany, Dresden has been “able to build its own victim identity,” Jerzak said. In the aftermath of the 1945 bombing, Nazi propaganda claimed that up to 200,000 people had died, painting the city’s demise as proof of the Allies’ depravity. In their telling, Dresden was “an innocent art and culture city that was somehow destroyed anyway,” Jerzak said.
That narrative of victimhood continued, albeit for different reasons, under the Communist East German government. It portrayed Dresden—an East German city—as a victim of Allied warmongers who had now become the allies of West Germany. Early commemorations of the bombing featured phrases such as “Yesterday Dresden, today Korea, tomorrow the whole world.”
A visitor stands in front of a panoramic display by artist Yadegar Asisi that depicts the city in the aftermath of the 1945 Allied firebombing in Dresden, Germany, on Feb. 13, 2015. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
In the 1990s and early 2000s, as the former East Germany struggled with the rise of neo-Nazi movements after German reunification, neo-Nazis revived the Third Reich’s narratives of German victimhood and began organizing the marches of mourning to mark the anniversary of the Dresden bombings.
Debates over the number of victims in the attack became so heated that the city established a historical commission to examine the issue, which found in its 2010 report that the Nazis had inflated the death toll by around eight times. “Dresden remains unique in one way—and that is this strong propagandistic symbolic charge,” Matthias Neutzner, a member of the historical commission, told the German broadcaster MDR.
The lines are often blurred between the political far right (the AfD) and Germany’s network of extreme-right groups, several of which are under surveillance by the domestic intelligence service for anti-democratic activities. But both perpetuate similar narratives about German memory culture and point to Dresden to argue that Germany should stop unnecessarily beating itself up for its past.
Politicians from the AfD have relativized Nazi-era history for years. Former AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland once called the Nazi era a 12-year “speck of bird poop” in Germany’s otherwise illustrious history. When AfD politician Björn Höcke delivered his now-infamous 2017 speech calling for a “180-degree turn” in German memory culture, he did so in Dresden. “We Germans, our people, are the only people in the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” Höcke said, referring to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial. “And to this day, we are unable to mourn our own victims.”
In recent years, AfD leaders have repeated iterations of the same Nazi-era talking points about the number of victims in Dresden that extreme-right figures have. Ahead of the 75th anniversary of the bombings, in 2020, AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla contradicted the Dresden historical commission’s conclusions about the death toll. “I assume there were around 100,000,” he told Der Spiegel, adding that “my grandmother, my father, and other contemporary witnesses told me about full streets before the attack and piles of corpses after the night of bombing.”
For a long time, the city’s official remembrance on Feb. 13 was a silent commemoration at the ruins of the Frauenkirche as crowds gathered quietly on the square before it. The goal was to portray the commemoration as a call for peace—a framing strengthened when German Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave a major speech at the site in late 1989, describing the church’s bombed-out remains as a symbol for reunified Germany’s determination to learn from its past.
But as the neo-Nazi presence around the date has grown, mainstream political parties and civil society have increasingly put pressure on city officials to take a more active role in combating the anniversary’s misuse. That was ultimately how the current commemoration, a “human chain” surrounding the city center, came about in 2010. The idea of this gathering, which began as a grassroots form of commemoration and drew roughly 10,000 people last year, is to surround and protect the city from extreme-right misuse on the important anniversary.
This year’s commemorations on both sides could be bigger than usual, since they’re coming at a time of heightened political tensions. Last month, the German investigative news nonprofit Correctiv released a bombshell report detailing a clandestine meeting of far- and extreme-right figures near Potsdam, a city just outside Berlin. At the meeting, participants discussed radical plans for reshaping German society should the far right ever gain power, including deporting millions of people of immigrant backgrounds, even those with German passports. The report set off a firestorm of opposition among the general public, which has turned out in unprecedented numbers to protest the far right. In the weeks since, the protests have drawn more than a million participants around Germany under the slogan “Never Again Is Now.”
Although the protests are separate from the commemoration in Dresden, Jerzak believes that they both reflect a bigger debate about how to deal with Germany’s past and prevent Nazi-era horrors in the future. “We’ve seen in the last few weeks with the Correctiv report a greater focus on the idea of learning from history,” Jerzak said. The AfD’s rise in the polls and the wide-scale mobilization of its opponents across Germany in recent weeks suggest these questions about the impact of Germany’s past are far from settled—something Dresden, in its way, has experienced all along.
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